Surprise is the Greatest Gift which Life can give us. (Boris Pasternak)

Wow!  It seems the past week has gone quickly.  I’ve been looking at the books I want to focus on in the new year and throughout 2025. 

Adam’s group is reading 2666 by Bolaño and as I mentioned before I don’t know anything about it.

Well last night I listened to an hour You Tube video about it and I have decided I am not going to read it. I have read quite a bit of Book 1 of the 5 books. But it sounds like Book 3 is nothing except the rape of young women. Book 4 is about all the ways young women were killed.  I do not need this in my head so I am bowing out of Adam’s group until May when I see what book is picked them.

In the meantime the other group I was in,  but stopped in order to participate in Adam’s group is reading several Australian books and it looks very promising to fulfill wanting to read more Australian literature.

Rayne runs several groups through Fullers and they now meet in an historic hotel in the city in a separate room. It is a nice setting. I have contacted her to see if there is availability in one of those groups.

If so I’ll be reading the other doorstopper book over the summer, Praiseworthy by Alexis Wright. This book won both the 2024 Miles Franklin award and the Stella award.

Good Reads describes as:

Praiseworthy is an epic set in the north of Australia, told with the richness of language and scale of imagery for which Alexis Wright has become renowned. In a small town dominated by a haze cloud, which heralds both an ecological catastrophe and a gathering of the ancestors, a crazed visionary seeks out donkeys as the solution to the global climate crisis and the economic dependency of the Aboriginal people. His wife seeks solace from his madness in following the dance of butterflies and scouring the internet to find out how she can seek repatriation for her Aboriginal/Chinese family to China. One of their sons, called Aboriginal Sovereignty, is determined to commit suicide. The other, Tommyhawk, wishes his brother dead so that he can pursue his dream of becoming white and powerful. This is a novel which pushes allegory and language to its limits, a cry of outrage against oppression and disadvantage, and a fable for the end of days.

I’ll let you know if this goes ahead.

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Now for a bit of a palate cleanser-

I am listening to another David Sedaris book for some light relief. I do enjoy his audible books as he narrates them and having seen him twice at the Theatre Royal I can see him in my head as I listen. The current book I am enjoying is called:  Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim.  I really enjoy hearing him talk about his partner, his siblings and his parents. He does such a great job of portraying his father’s dialect. Makes me laugh. 

I have decided I quite like palate cleanser books. It is the book one reads between the more serious and thought provoking books and I plan on interspersing this through the more serious books I pick up in 2025. I usually call them a bit of a ‘fluffy’ book. Warm and comforting books or those that make me laugh.

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The other book I am reading (and this will surprise some of you. It certainly surprised me.) The book is called Arriving Late: The Lived experience of women receiving a late autism diagnosis by Jodi Lamanna.

This book is about older women learning they have autism at an advanced age. 

I debated whether to share this information or not but I might as well. It might encourage others. I have spent several hours over the past couple of months with a psychologist who specialises in adult autism. 

I now have a Support Level 1 diagnosis that didn’t surprise me as I always knew there was something there. I am not going to wave a flag about it or discuss it again on this blog. But it has explained a great deal to me around my communication with people, and interactions with others as well as closer relationships I have had and friends lost over many years. 

There is a great deal being published now about the masking women have done over the decades around autism or neuro-diversity that hides it. Usually it has been males who get the diagnosis as they present much differently to women.

I had to laugh as I now understand my obsession with collecting 3000 numbered Penguin books in six continents. Thankfully there are no second hand book stores in Antarctica. If only they’d not had numbers on their spines.

I have learned I am better at projecting expressively and not so great at listening and picking up a lot of body language of others as I merrily talk over them. Also the over the top interests in technology, photography, metal detecting, dog training, book collecting, lapidary, wildlife, fungi, insects, etc and studying almost everything known to man in every country on every planet.

There are three support levels for a diagnosis and I am no 1. Number 3 is much more severe and is often easily identified socially in our broader world. Level 1 and probably types of level 2 are better hidden.

So there you have it. Now having learned all of this I can begin to change the behaviours that give me grief and I am excited about that. Like the woman in the book states: it is just accepting who you are and understanding why you deal with life situations a bit differently.  What I am sad about is I am 75 yrs old and I wish I’d had this diagnosis 50 years ago but not much I can do about that now as not much was known about females with autism in the olden days.

I feel I am in good stead though with people like Temple Grandin, Grace Tame and Hannah Gadsby. My psychologist has suggested I read more about these women as well as other successful women who are neuro-divergent. I might but not rushing into it.

So let’s not dive any further into this. Like talking about body parts as an old lady, this could become quite boring too to others so it’s just another journey in life like the MS has been. I wish I could hit the lottery more easily as I seem to hit health issues over the years. 

I hope everyone has a good week and I, for one, am excited about 2025. 

🌻🌻🌻What can 2025 possibly bring? 🌻🌻🌻