Author: TravellinPenguin

I have spent the last two days at home deciding what to do with my reading and blogging next year. I listen to A Good Read podcast almost daily on BBC’s Books and Authors. Harriet Gilbert has hosted it for several years and is still going. Each episode consists of her and two guests with a range of backgrounds. .

Each person picks a book then the three people read all three books and the 30 minute podcast has them discussing the books for about 10 minutes each. What I like about it is the complete variety they read. Could be a selection of poetry, a children’s book, a crime thriller, a Booker prize winner and all things non fiction. Once in a while a participant puts up a text book!

They are very good at staying on task and the listener learns what three people think of three books. They have no idea what everyone will pick until they receive the book. Completely random outside their own selection. I have collected some recommendations from this show.

I have decided to really focus on my very large assortment of books I have at home.

The other thing I have embraced is the BookBuddy app. You can scan your books or manually add them. BookBuddy is free but I got BookBuddy Pro. It is $2.00 a month with a 10 day free trial. Pro lets you input more books but the best thing after easily scanning all 1000 of my books yesterday (yes, I removed all of them from shelves, cleaned shelves, scanned them all and reshelved) is it has a random selector. You hit the little icon, and it tells you what book has been picked.

I have a very eclectic assortment of books. Everything from current literature to classics to graphic to mystery to popular (airport reads) plus much more. I even scanned my cookbooks.

I need to get serious about the TBR pile so I will not be reading according to mood. I’m going to use the random selector and if a book comes up I will read it. If I decide I don’t want to read it, it leaves the house.

Once a book is read, for the most part, it will leave the house. The only books I will pick up outside of the house will be for reading group. That could either be a book or a Kindle or an audible.

I have quite a few cook books and to make it fun, if a cookbook comes up randomly I must make a recipe from it and share the results with you.☕️🥮

I also have many kindle books I have gathered over the years. I will choose them randomly too. So the plan will be:

1. Book club book must be read
2. Random selection from BookBuddy
3. Kindle
4. Repeat
5. I might do a few challenges and memes as they arise if they sound good but no commitment.

Last year I wasted a lot of time on social media. Binging on streaming services, etc. I am a terrible binger if involved with a show. My resolution is to read. I feel better mood wise when I read. I also don’t eat as much reading as I do watching tv.

So clean slate.

More rules.

1. If I pick a book of short stories I will choose one and talk about it.

2. Poetry? Will choose three poems to talk about.

3. Coffee table type book or photography book I will share photos from it and mention something about the topic.

What I want from 2025 is a healthier lifestyle for mind and body. Much more reading. Less streaming, less social media. More participation with other bloggers. I need to sharpen my brain. I need to keep my mood up. 2024 was often sad for a number of reasons and as Harris and Walz said in the American election: I’m not going back.

I will continue to share travel and photography as it happens but getting back to books more.

Now having said all of this I will randomly choose the first book for 2025 (drum roll):

This will make you laugh. This is the book that was selected randomly a minute ago:

How apt is that. Now I have to find it on my shelf and I’ll let you know how it goes.

Happy New Year everyone. I am looking forward to all the posts that go up at end of year.

I hope everyone is coping as Christmas approaches. Personally we don’t celebrate it anymore. Yes, we do a couple of Christmas activities with friends but no cards or decorations or gifts. I feel now, at an advanced age, it is more catching up with a few friends who elude us during busy times of the year. It is also a time to sit back, have some quiet times and relax from other activities. That includes a pile of unread books. Of course if one has children in their life, it is much different, but with only dogs and cats it is easy to have quieter times.

I also feel the loneliness of times gone by, childhood memories when our loved ones were living. I think of all those people whose families have gone and it isn’t the happy, gleeful time for those left, that the media portrays.

Enough of my holiday thoughts.

This week has been a fairly smooth and productive week. I have begun the book group’s February read by Alexis Wright, Praiseworthy. I am doing a read/listen version of it. I am enjoying the narration by Jacqui Katona, an Indigenous woman from Western Australia. She is better known as as a woman who along with Yvonne Margarula, another Aboriginal woman, who stopped a damaging uranium mine at Jabiluka, land traditionally owned by the Mirrar people and at the heart of Australia’s largest national park.

She has a perfect voice for this amazing book. I will admit it can be a difficult book to follow at times. There is so much in the 700+ pages. I love the writing and the characters are really interesting but I admit there are many parts of the story I can’t get my head around. The story is complex but I think once our book group really dives into it I will understand much more of it. So I persevere and find the read/listen method really helps.

The blurb-

Last night I went to St David’s cathedral with a couple of friends and listened to Christmas Carols. I’m not a huge fan of carols I have listened to for 7 decades but there were some I was not familiar with that I enjoyed. The orchestra was lovely. There were a few soloists including a young boy who was brilliant and I can never go past a good pipe organ with the acoustics of a cathedral. It was a pleasant evening.

Earlier in the week I was contacted by some photography friends who invited me to join them for an early morning shoot at the dog beach. We spent two hours with dogs and their owners getting action shots. We then posted them on google photos so the owners could access them. It was a beautiful summer morning and the dogs were bursting with energy. I will share a few photos below. A few of you may have seen them already on Instagram. I will be posting more as I edit them out of camera.

That is the week that was….so to speak. I hope all of you enjoy the holidays, no matter how you celebrate and here’s looking ahead to 2025!

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.

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

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.

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

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? 🌻🌻🌻