Travellin' Penguin

Doing a quick catch up here. Hoping to get out over the weekend as it’s going to be a tropical 15/16 degrees C. (60 degrees F). And the sun should shine a bit. 

BOOKS

I just finished the latest book by Elizabeth Strout, The Things We Never Say. 

The blurb: 

Artie Dam is a man with a secret. He spends his days teaching history to high schoolers, expanding their young minds, correcting their casual cruelties, and lending a kind word to those who need it most. He goes to holiday parties with his wife of three decades, makes small talk with neighbours, and, on weekends, takes his sailboat out on the beautiful Massachusetts Bay. He is, by all appearances, present and alive. But inside, Artie is plagued by feelings of isolation. He looks out at a world gone mad-at himself and the people around him-and turns a question over and over in his mind: how is it that we know so little about one another, even those closest to us?

And then, one day, Artie learns that life has been keeping a secret from him, one that threatens to upend his entire world. Once he learns it, he is forced to chart a new course, to reconsider the relationships he holds most dear-and to make peace with the mysteries at the heart of our existence.

What I thought of it:

I thought it was a good read but not as good as the Olive Kitteridge series she wrote. I thought the story was pretty good and of course I always love her realistic character development. I think she’s great with characters but the overall book I thought was a little uneven. But I would recommend it for a light read.

I’ve just started reading A Month in the Country  by J. L. Carr for book club and I am enjoying that so far. Our group meets next week to discuss that book. 

LIFE:

Sadly we lost another friend in the past couple of weeks. This month has been quite the month for sad news.  I hope we are finished with winter sadness. I am ready for spring happiness, if it ever gets here. 

PHOTOGRAPHY

Our photography group had a fun excursion last week. Ten of us went to the tip shop. A tip is a dump. A refuse centre. The tip shop is where people donate things they no longer want or want to recycle. It’s too good for landfill. It’s the last stop for useable items.

Our mission was to make photos that tell a story. We had some interesting photos. Everyone has posted their photos up on our club Facebook page and we’ll show them on the big screen at our next meeting.  On Sunday we plan on going down to the waterfront to get abstract types of photos. No doubt I’ll get distracted by scenery and landscape but I’m sure I can find some more abstract type of things. 

Next week is the big Bullock festival in Oatlands, about an hour’s drive from here. Not sure I’ll make it up there. It runs the whole weekend and the bullocks are amazing animals. The residents hold a big parade through the main road. 

Enjoy the photos and I look forward to seeing what reading you get up to. By the way, next week I will share the random Penguin book that came up this week. I need to read it first. Have a good week and weekend. 

From the tip shop-

Penguin loves a bargain.

I have now scanned all of my small Penguin anniversary classic books into the App Book Buddy. I asked it to randomly select a book and it came up with:

Gooseberries by Anton Chekov. It is one of the 80 Little Black Classics. It is only 82 pages long and I finished it in one sitting. This is not the only thing I read this week but it is what I am going to be posting this week. If I have other books or information related to books I will pause and bring you that information. But let’s get on with the Gooseberries. What is it about? 

The Penguin and I want to know why anyone would write a book about Gooseberries. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a gooseberry.  I certainly haven’t tasted one but now I would like to. I must admit when shopping we tend to buy the same fruits and veg each time. I think I need to pick up something different once in awhile but let’s get on with it. (To Do: Find when gooseberries are in season and buy a couple.)

Gooseberries is one of Anton Chekhov’s most celebrated stories so I imagine some of you have read it already. It was published in 1898. That was four years after my grandparents on my mother’s side were born. I thought you’d find that as interesting as I do. Imagine being alive when Kafka was. 

The information provided below has been researched from various reviews and online information and a bit from my own brain. After all we aren’t talking rocket science here.  Many people just have better ways of saying things than I do at times..

The story is told by the main character Ivan Ivanich who while sheltering with a friend while on a walk at another friend’s home recounts the story of his younger brother Nikolai Ivanich to the two men.

Here is the story:

Nikolai becomes obsessed with a single dream: owning a small country estate where he can live as a gentleman and grow gooseberries. Imagine being obsessed with a fruit. Especially gooseberries.

To achieve this he lives miserably for years, saves every kopek, marries a wealthy widow for her money and eventually buys an estate.

Ivan decides to visit him and see what the situation is. He is shocked. Nikolai has become pompous, self satisfied, and blind to reality. The estate is shabby, the land poor, and the gooseberries are hard and sour. Yet Nikolai eats them with tears of joy,            convinced they are delicious because they symbolise the fulfilment of his lifelong dream.

Watching his brother’s happiness’s Ivan feels deeply disturbed rather than pleased. 

So what does it all mean?

• The danger of comfortable illusions

• The selfishness of private happiness

• Moral responsibility. ( I might add he treated his wife terribly and she eventually died having been deprived of anything worthwhile.)

• The gooseberries symbolise dreams fulfilled -but also the way people romanticise what they possess. 

• The estate represents the illusion of success and social status.

• The rain at the beginning and end creates a reflective, melancholy atmosphere and reinforces the story’s contemplate mood.

                                          ******************

Such a country gentleman.

*************

Favourite quotation from the book0

When Ivan approached his brother’s house, this is what he saw:

“I went up to the house, and was met by a fat red dog that looked like a pig. It wanted to bark, but it was too lazy.  The cook, a fat, barefooted woman, came out of the kitchen, and she too looked like a pig, and said that her master was resting after dinner. I went in to see my brother. He was sitting up in bed with a quilt over his legs; he had grown older, fatter, wrinkled, his cheeks, his nose, and his mouth all stuck out- he looked as though he might begin grunting into the quilt at any moment.”

I enjoyed this story. It was a pleasant evening with a cup of tea and a cat and a dog (Pickles and Peanny) on my lap and Ollie quietly snoring in his cozy dog bed nearby as the Tasmanian gale force winds tried to blow our house away.

Now onto regular life.

I did get to a local garden store that has the best plants and trees and spent yesterday digging a hole and planting a beautiful little Japanese maple tree into the yard for my dear friend I lost a little over a week ago. It has been an extremely sad time but planting the tree made me happy and I will always remember her when I look at it. I might add I have two other big plants for two dear friends who passed away in previous years. Along side the bells hanging in our large Japanese maple tree for each pet that we have lost over the last 35 plus years our whole yard is now a peaceful place to be with beautiful memories. All plants in our yard are native except the maple trees and a birch tree. I only plant bushes, etc that attract birds and bees eventually. If they don’t attract them they don’t get to live in my yard. Tasmania seems to have a lot of English gardens with plants that our lovely native birds have not eaten from. Especially roses. Only one very old rose tree lives in our back yard and I only use that to cut a flower or two for the kitchen window. 

Today I might get the dogs over to a local beach that is 15 minutes away. Dogs are allowed on Nutgrove Beach in Tasmania during non Daylight Savings Time after 3 pm until the next morning. We’ll see if we get there.

Penguin approves of my friend’s Japanese maple tree. We had fun planting it and I know she would approve. She met the Penguin a couple of times.

Other News

*** I did go to a Fullers book award that other evening with a friend but I will write more about that later. I’m not sure many people would be interested except my Australian bookish friends. So I’ll do a short separate post on it and you can decide if it’s for you or not.

***Mr P is still overseas with family. Gets home the end of this week

*** I have my gym membership on hold so I can spend more time with my animals and my books and my journals. Lots of gentle activities.

****And _ I’ll sprinkle in a couple of photos.

Have a good week. 

We lost our old cat a couple of weeks ago and of course we were saddened. But yesterday I got news one of my best friends died suddenly. We were just laughing and chatting in a phone conversation on Wednesday and on Thursday she died suddenly after complications from a surgery. I am really heart broken. I’m so happy we had such a fun conversation and made each other laugh on Wednesday. However I am not the type of person to dwell.  I know that life is unforgiving and you must move on with it or be miserable forever. But I don’t need to rush into it just yet.

What makes me happiest besides a secure home? My dogs and cats. I know if I cry they will come to me and place a paw on my arm. I have people in my life that won’t do that. Also my room of books. People who love books will know what I mean by this. I can sit in the room with all my books and I feel peace. It gives me the same peace that being out in nature with my camera gives me. 

What do I do when upset or sad? I rearrange the books on my shelf. I revisit those books that get lost at the back of the shelf I haven’t seen lately. So I did a declutter of several shelves. That led to a new mission.  You have to love a new mission.

Remember it’s winter here. Today was sunny but quite cold and we had gale force winds. After taking the dogs out for only a 30 minute walk I couldn’t wait to get back in the house. Our winds come from the south and south west. Well, what’s south of us? Antarctica. Enough said. It blows cold. No wind? Bearable.

I have a lot of Penguin publisher sets of books. I have a set of the Penguin modern classics. I have a smaller set of Penguin journeys. I have all of the Penguin archive books in the set. I have rummaged through the shelves and put all the Penguin books together. I have the 80 Little Black classics set. Having put them all together on a couple of shelves, they look great. I have the 70s anniversary set of Great Ideas. Have I read them? Sadly not many.

So my mission is this: 

I have all of them scanned into the app BookBuddy. BookBuddy is great. You must pay a nominal charge for it but it’s worth it. Once the books are scanned they can be sorted not only by author and title but by publisher, by keyword often but best of us it will pick a book from the list randomly. 

My project for the rest of this year is to not only read my book club books but to finish the year with only Penguins from the sets. The variety is great fun and I really want to get stuck into them. They are fairly thin so I should be able to read them easily.  The font is good and with my eyesight being what it is I can read the book with a bright light, which I have.

The beginning of the year had me reading block busters. East of Eden, Pachinko and Demon Copperhead to name a few. I feel really flat right now and I don’t feel like much excitement. I’m really sad over the loss of my friend and I’m going to miss her so much.  

We met on a tour in Japan. We had the same cameras, the same lens. Even our birthdays are on the same day. We were truly two peas in a pod. We loved photography. She lived in Sydney. We did a road trip together with our cameras a few years ago along the New South Wales coast.  It was so much fun. I have flown to Sydney a couple of times to spend time with her. We just really clicked and one doesn’t get that very often.

So now I want peace to reflect. I just want to spend time with a couple of really good friends I have here. I don’t want crowds. I don’t want chaos. I want my dogs, my cat in my lap and I want the smell of books in my hands. I also want Mr. P to get home from his family trip in Canada. It will be nice to have everyone back under one roof and our routines. I know, I’m really boring at times. 

I remember as a child growing up in a small town in mid Michigan there was quite a bit of chaos in our home life. I would go to our small local library and sit there and read. It was so much fun to be left loose in a library at a young age to take home up to 12 books for two weeks. It was just a block away so I could walk there whenever I wanted.

I’d finish the books immediately and go back for more. There were old photographs to look at, magazines and those funny old things you hold up to your eyes to look through to see a cardboard photo in 3D. I just can’t remember the name of what they were. I remember sitting at a table in the quiet going through the boxes of old historical photos in 3D. So I know when chaos or sadness hits I spend time with books. 

I will let you know what the first couple of random picks of the Penguins are. Also our August book group read is a Month in the Country by J. L. Carr and although I’ve not read it I’ve always heard good things about it. All the best to you for the week. Stay tuned for the next drum roll.