A writer only begins a book……

……a reader finishes it. (Samuel Johnson)

These lovely bookish quotes I’ve been starting my posts with are randomly picked from a little book entitled The Book lover’s treasury of quotations by Hatherleigh Press, 2016. It is a lovely little book.

I continue to stay busy with my books and photography as spring weather is definitely all over the place, as usual.

READING- Audio is the latest book by Julia Baird called Bright Shining narrated by Julia Bear.

I enjoyed her last book Phosphorescence so much I had to snap this one up as soon as I heard of its release. This one speaks of ‘grace’.

The blurb….

“Grace is both mysterious and hard to define. It can be found when we create ways to find meaning and dignity in connection with each other, building on our shared humanity, being kinder, bigger, better with each other. If, in its crudest interpretation, karma is getting what you deserve, then grace is the opposite: forgiving the unforgivable, favouring the undeserving, loving the unlovable.

But we live in an era when grace is an increasingly rare currency. The silos in which we consume information dot the media landscape like skyscrapers, and our growing distrust of the media, politicians and public figures has choked our ability to cut each other slack, to allow each other to stumble, to forgive one another.

So what does grace look like in our world, and how do we recognise it, nurture it in ourselves and express it, even in the darkest of times?

From award-winning journalist Julia Baird, author of the acclaimed national bestseller Phosphorescence, comes Bright Shining, a luminously beautiful, deeply insightful and most timely exploration of grace.”

The book I have just begun is Flights by Polish writer, Olga Tokarczuk.

The blurb-

“Flights is a series of imaginative and mesmerising meditations on travel in all its forms, not only the philosophy and meaning of travel, but also fascinating anecdotes that take us out of ourselves, and back to ourselves.

Olga Tokarczuk brilliantly connects travel with spellbinding anecdotes about anatomy, about life and death, about the very nature of humankind. Thrilling characters and stories abound: the Russian sect who escape the devil by remaining constantly in motion; the anatomist Verheyen who writes letters to his amputated leg; the story of Chopin’s heart as it makes its journey from Paris to Warsaw, stored in a tightly sealed jar beneath his sister’s skirt; the quest of a Polish woman who emigrated to New Zealand as a teen but must now return in order to poison her terminally ill high-school sweetheart…”

We will be discussing this book in our The books you wanted to read but haven’t book group in March. It is 452 pgs so thought I’d better get into it.

Other ideas…

I was just reading the latest post from Booker Talk (https://bookertalk.com) about the success of her book jar. She has found her new set up of randomly choosing three titles from her book jar, then choosing one to read within the next two months. If she finds she doesn’t want to read it then she gets rid of it.

I recently downloaded the app BookBuddy. It lets you scan your books easily, much like the Library Thing site but has more features.

I closed my Library Thing account and scanned my entire library into this app. I think I will follow Booker Talk in the new year to get fired up about reading more of my TBR stack. We’ll see how that goes. I have a few boxed sets of the Penguin anniversary sets (the 70s and 80s) and I have included them too. Might be fun.

I upgraded my camera gear recently and am having great fun learning how to remember all the settings and learning the new features. I am posting more and more of my photos on Instagram. My instagram site is called Travellin_Penguin. Feel free to follow if you wish to see kore of my photos. I am leaning more and more into photography at that site and following other photographers more and more as it is a great place to showcase photos.

I think this is now long enough so I will leave you for now. Stay well everyone and do something you enjoy whenever you can.