Author: TravellinPenguin

I know, I know….where does the time go? Can’t believe I’m looking at Christmas decorations in the shops.  (sigh). Why don’t they just leave them up all year so we get used to them and then don’t feel so stressed when we see them?

This is a catch up post and to make it easier I’ll stick to categories. That’s how I think.

First off I’ve been reading lots of your blogs out there. Probably why I neglect my own. I get wrapped up in yours.  Having heard about “three things” on Bookjotter’s post I decided to knick part of that and come up with my own headings.  I’ll work on them and hopefully have more of a template by 2019.

I always feel if you haven’t written to someone you should just write about what’s happening today.  That way if I do that I don’t feel overwhelmed by having to think of everything that’s gone on for the past month.  I like it when people write to me too and just tell me what they’re up to on that day.  It means they’ll write more often if they only have to tell me about one day and over time I stay in touch.  I might think about that too for the new year.  Okay, let’s have a go-

Reading:  I just finished more than half of Death of a River Guide by Richard Flanagan. One of his earlier works, I enjoyed the writing but not the topic. He is drowning in a river and the entire book is about his thoughts while he drowns. The majority of the book has his memories circling his mind.  I enjoyed the stories he remembers but found the drowning disturbing and claustrophobic.  I read enough and just couldn’t finish it.  The world is sad enough without my free time being taken up by a slowly drowning man. The book was chosen by the Bushwalking Book Club which meets this Sunday….

….However,

My Brain Activities:  I can’t attend as I’m enrolled in a two day writing workshop by Rosie Dub through the Tasmanian Writer’s Centre.  I lifted the description of her from the Writer’s Centre.

“Rosie has worked as an editor, a mentor and a teacher of creative writing for more than fifteen years. During this period she has edited and assessed manuscripts ranging across many genres of fiction and non-fiction. Her creative writing teaching has been conducted through the writer’s centre in Hobart, UTAS, TAFE, Adult Education and private workshops.”

The Great Outdoors Experience:  I took my Odie for a bit of a bush walk this morning. We went up the fire trails, stopped when tired, ate our breakfast banana and drank our water, then headed home.  We saw a young woman walking her gorgeous greyhound, two young fathers with toddlers and infants strapped to their bodies chatting to each other and one very energetic runner that came up from behind very quickly and startled us.  After watching so many crime series on Netflix lately I turned around and was ready to hit someone with my walking stick as I heard fast moving footsteps.  I don’t know if Odie would protect me or if I would protect him.  But all was okay.

Listening:  I am currently listening to A Gentleman in Moscow on audible. Enjoying it very much. No doubt, many of you may have read it okay. It is by the author Amor Towles.

Fuller’s Book Shop Book Club:  We discussed the inaugural novel of The Lucky Galah by Tracy Sorensen last night.  All of us, for the most part enjoyed it. The story that takes place during the time of the moon landing in 1969. It tells the story of two families living in Western Australia. Trials and tribulations with each other all narrated from the point of view of the Galah who lives in a cage.  I thought it was a great story and loved the location and the time period.  But I didn’t grow up in Australia, so much of the nostalgia talked about was lost to me.

The others in the group enjoyed that part of it very much.  We talked about those little round onions on toothpicks, dinner parties, frocks, etc. We also discussed what we were all doing on the day of the moon landing. I didn’t enjoy reading it as much because of the cruelty around the Galah’s life.  She pretty much symbolised the lives of women in that time period and how constrained/abused they were at times.  It was also linked to the novel, The Lucky Country, written 50 years ago by Donald Horne. Tracy mentioned in an interview on the ABC radio that women were mentioned in his novel only three times. This book is meant to be an answer to the lives women find themselves in from a female point of view, even if it is from a Galah.

For a first novel by a young author I thought it was very well written and look forward to more from her.  One interesting comment from another was she thought it was too similar to Cloudstreet by Tim Winton. Ms. Sorensen wrote about Western Australia very much as Tim Winton does.  The two families who are at times friends and then at times falling out was very similar to the two families who shared the house in Cloudstreet.  We also saw similarities to the film, The Dish.  If others are familiar with these two books and the film I’d love to know what you think.

Play Reading Class: We just finished The Importance of Being Ernest by Oscar Wilde. We loved it. We read it a couple of years ago but we have new members in the group that weren’t familiar with it and it really is such a laugh. We are currently finishing up the year with the play Peter Pan by JM Barrie.  Great fun to read the lines of the pirates.

Photography Group:  Getting ready to turn in our digital challenges for the November meeting coming up. The task is to have at least three layers in the photo designed on photoshop. I had great fun with this and managed to insert the Penguin into it. It made me laugh while I played around with You Tube videos trying to work out how to do it and get inspiration.  I put the Penguin in and then liked it so much kept him there. Will be interesting to see how it scores on the night.

Pets:  All are in good health only because they have such good medical care. Dogs, Odie and Molly, are on medications. (Ear medicine and heart & arthritis medication respectively). Cats Grizzy on his every other day eye drop for herpes virus in his eye. He had it when we adopted him but didn’t know it and now we’ll be caring for that for the rest of his life. Uncle Buck is on Beta Blockers for his heart twice a day. Terrible tasting liquid med I am told. Cousin Eddie is the only one that doesn’t stand in the queue each day for a dose of something.

Something to Look Forward To:   Hopefully something Fuller’s related for a birthday present coming up soon and we’re in the air again. This time flying to Sri Lanka for a couple of weeks the end of November. More on that later. Of course the Penguin will be going.

I guess that’s it for today.  Now- your comment for the day. What did you do today?  I only need to hear about today.

New Wardrobe Item:

The Penguin and I are members of two separate book groups now.  One group is a monthly meeting at Fuller’s Book Group. Today I am writing about the October meeting with Fuller’s Book Shop in Hobart. We meet the first week of each month, February through November with a Christmas get together involving all their book groups in December.  Everyone in all the groups reads the same book each month.

The October book was Priestdaddy by American author Patricia Lockwood.

Wikipedia describes her career as:  “She married at 21, has scarcely ever held a job and, by her telling, seems to have spent her adult life in a Proustian attitude, writing for hours each day from her ‘desk-bed,'” according to a profile in New York Times magazine. During that period, from 2004 to 2011, Lockwood’s poems began to appear widely in magazines including  The New Yorker, Poetry and the London Review of Books.”

Good Reads comments indicate that:   “The childhood of Patricia Lockwood, (she was born in Indiana) the poet dubbed “The Smutty-Metaphor Queen of Lawrence, Kansas” by The New York Times, was unusual in many respects. There was the location: an impoverished, nuclear waste-riddled area of the American Midwest. There was her mother, a woman who speaks almost entirely in strange koans and warnings of impending danger. Above all, there was her gun-toting, guitar-riffing, frequently semi-naked father, who underwent a religious conversion on a submarine and discovered a loophole which saw him approved for the Catholic priesthood by the future Pope Benedict XVI – despite already having a wife and children.

When the expense of a medical procedure forces the 30-year-old Patricia to move back in with her parents, husband in tow, she must learn to live again with her family’s simmering madness, and to reckon with the dark side of a childhood spent in the bosom of the Catholic Church. Told with the comic sensibility of a brasher, bluer Waugh or Wodehouse, this is at the same time a lyrical and affecting story of how, having ventured into the underworld, we can emerge with our levity and our sense of justice intact.”

First off all of the major publication reviews I read are glowing about this book. Mostly American sources, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The New Yorker all glow about her work.

However in the everyday life of our six (or seven) book club members our views were vastly different. Our book group had different views about this book. One member loved it. She laughed at the family, enjoyed the quirkiness of it. (Of course I find quirky is a description of something that you don’t know how to accurately classify).  Patricia’s father had been a Lutheran Minister. Over time he became more and more interested in Catholicism and eventually was able to exploit a loop hole and become a Catholic Priest. Although he was married with five children he seemed to live in his own world that not many others could penetrate. Being a Catholic priest with a large family is not a situation we see often, if at all.  No one in our group liked this man. He could be crude, crass and cruel.

I must note I listened to this book through Audible.com.  It was a painful listen and may very well have clouded how I felt about the whole story.

My notes:  Patricia Lockwood’s narration could be loud and brash at times. I thought it was like fingernails on a blackboard.  Her narration reeked with sarcasm which annoyed me to no end. I wish she had simply read her book. This may have affected how I reacted to the book.

I could not connect with the family no matter how hard I tried. Neither could most of the others in our book group.  It is a family we did not enjoy being involved with at all. The mother would pipe up and say the most ridiculous things at time.
The siblings didn’t seem to do much. The father walked around the house scratching himself in very old, transparent underwear no matter who was visiting. He would often start playing his guitar when things got rough. Family members would ignore him in exasperation.   When he entered a room we just wanted to leave. There were many wisecracks about him from his children but no one really talked about any emotional connections they had with him except those that were negative.

The book consisted of activity after activity as though it was a list of events. No laughter or other emotion was attached to much of it.  It was as if they were caricatures.

Now, I did not enjoy this book much but there were parts of it that did make me shake my head and laugh a bit. But not enough.   I did find the writing very good. She has a very creative mind and some passages I listened to again as they were clever and often funny.

However many critics in mostly American publications gave this book rave reviews. It could have been the narrative on Audible was so irritable it tainted my overall view. I’m sure that clouded my perspective of this book. Perhaps if I had read it in hard copy I would have appreciated it more.

I think it is a reasonable book for book clubs because it does polarise readers. There are many issues that caused discussion.  For example the church, how people should act as a Priest… or shouldn’t. What are our expectations?  Moving back home with parents after leaving home and being independent and finding yourself home again.  How we deal with family members we don’t feel connected to.  There is also mention of a rape Patricia endured a decade earlier, however that doesn’t seem to play a very big part and I almost forgot about it until someone in the book group brought it up. Not a topic I normally forget.  Maybe my reaction of it is because I am getting tired of Memoirs that seem to be in bookstores from everyone and their dog lately. I think I need to move on with my reading choices.

I would suggest if this is a book that has a subject matter you find interesting then read some of the other reviews, that are better written than my little comments. You will also find they are quite positive.

Here are some links.

The guardian:     https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/apr/27/priestdaddy-by-patricia-lockwood-review

NPR Book Review:     https://www.npr.org/2017/05/10/527629781/priestdaddy-shimmers-with-wonderful-obscene-life

The New York Times:    https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/09/books/review/priestdaddy-patricia-lockwood-memoir.html

I will talk about the other book group I belong to in my next post. It is a very unusual book club and I think people will enjoy hearing about and may even want to start one up in their own communities.  I will post the information up in the next day or two.

That’s it for now.  I would love to know if anyone else has read this book and what you thought of it. It is certainly unusual. That’s never a bad thing.