Another week begins…

It was another fairly busy week but I did have a few bookish things going on.

 One book launch, one library book, one audible book in progress and one kindle book for book club in progress.

 In life I had three gym sessions which were quite hard going after being away from the gym for almost six weeks. Monday Pilates, Wednesday training and Saturday 50 minutes of a slow jog on a treadmill at the gym. It felt good and I need to lose the couple of kgs I gained by travelling and then getting sick. Tomorrow will have me back there. It is also such a social place so I do enjoy going there.

 The book launch was in the café at Fullers Book shop and we had Danielle Wood interviewing Markus Zusak about his book Three Wild Dogs and the Truth.

 It was lots of fun as Markus has the best sense of humour and he had everyone laughing quite a bit at these crazy, big dogs he adopted from the pound. He doesn’t believe in the term “rescue”. They are simply pound dogs.

They are also awful dogs. Naughty dogs. They killed a possum, attacked his plumber, bit the piano teacher. I think there were more than a few raised eye brows in the room at his laughter at these really suspect dogs. They are big dogs too but he certainly loves them. Personally I have a problem with big aggressive dogs in households with children but I guess you’ll have to read his book to see what his own pet philosophy is. I won’t even mention what happened to the family cat.

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 The Kindle book I’m reading is Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy. It has been slow going. Good Reads describes it as:

‘”The New York Trilogy is the most astonishing work by America’s most consistently astonishing writer: three interconnected novels that exploit the riveting elements of classic detective fiction to achieve a radical new genre – a profound and unsettling existentialist enquiry in the tradition of Kafka or Borges. In each story the search for clues leads to remarkable coincidences in the universe as the simple act of trailing a man ultimately becomes a startling investigation of what it means to be human. The result is the modern novel at its finest which will shock, transfix and astound every reader.”

It should be an interesting discussion in November.

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The Audible book I’m listening to is Yellowface by Rebecca F. Kuang. Narrated by Helen Laser.

It is the story of two women writers. One is much more successful than the other and the less successful one is quite envious of the successful one.

 One day the two women are having lunch together and the successful author has finished her latest manuscript and is getting ready to send it off for publishing. It’s set to go.

 However as the lunch progresses ‘Successful author’ chokes on her lunch and dies. This is all in the first few pages. ‘Less successful’ author gets the idea to take the manuscript and turn it in as her own. She does this and the story takes off from there.

What is interesting though is the ‘successful author’ is Asian and there are a lot of Chinese references and mandarin language references. ‘Less successful’ author is not. The manuscript gets accepted however the fact checking now must begin as the publishers want to make sure they don’t publish the book with errors from the non Asian author. The book tours are being organised.

Publishers are really cracking down on those writers who write outside of their culture. This should be a roller coaster ride.

I also picked up a beautiful photography book from the library but I will do a separate post on it as this one is long enough.

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In other life news- photography has been a bit slow but I have put a few new photos up on Instagram (Here) of a couple photos from Cambodia.

 There is a photo club excursion coming up this coming week but I have a specialist appointment and cannot attend. Such a shame as it is a beautiful, private garden south of here. It looks beautiful. Maybe another time.

Peanny and Ollie are doing well. They are loving the warmer, sunny days of spring and love their runs after the postie bike from front yard to back yard and the rubbish trucks on Wednesday.  The road we live on winds past the front of our home and then around a curve and past the back of our yard. The dogs start in the front corner and run as fast as they can go to get to the back gate so they can see the motorbike and the rubbish trucks twice. It is very funny to watch. I am glad we have big, strong fences.

All the best to you for the coming week and I’ll leave you with Penguin’s look of the week.