TravellinPenguin

Simply Sunday

Posted on January 10, 2021 by TravellinPenguin

I’m not going to go into the events of the U.S. this week as we are all aware of them. But I admit it did take away from reading time as I was glued to the tv for a good couple of days and still checking. Not much is happening over the weekend but Monday over there may well pick up again. Will this presidency ever end??

I did manage to finish the book The Weekend by Charlotte Wood. I also listened to her on a podcast taped from last year’s Sydney Writer’s Festival on line where she talked about this book and a performance she saw at the Sydney Belvoir Theatre about Virginia Woolf. The Sydney Writer’s festival podcasts can be listened to on most podcast apps. I use Podbean.

I enjoyed The Weekend. A quick recap. The story is about three friends in their 70s who meet at the home of a friend, Sylvie who recently died, in order to clean out her house. Wendy who is one of the friends brings her 17 year old dog, Finn, with her which really gets up Jude’s nose. Adele is the third friend. She is mourning old age and her past life as a well known actress and her long term relationship with a married man that just doesn’t add up to what she would like.

The weekend shares the interactions between the women, their pasts, coping with aging, thinking about death all the while as they try and organise the emptying of this house. The dog, Finn, seems to be a metaphor for aging and impending death. The women’s relationship to the dog plays quite a large part of the story.

What I liked the most is the realness of the characters. They all have their strengths and their flaws. They get annoyed with each other yet they still retain their loyalty to each other when needed. At times I disliked all of them individually and other times I admired them. I liked the writing in the book most of the time. I’ve not read anything else by Charlotte Wood but I do have her previous book, The Natural Way of Things which won the 2016 Stella Prize and was long listed for the Miles Franklin award. It is on my shelf unread. I understand it is a much different book to the Weekend.

This week I will begin a library book I picked up on Friday. Ann Patchett’s The Dutch House. I listened to the podcast Divine in that featured Ann Patchett’s books. I enjoy the broadcasts about books by these two friends. They always make me laugh.

I have only ever read State of Wonder by this author and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I am looking forward to this book too.

Next, I will pull a book off my shelves in my TBR – Author Alphabet challenge. I was going to begin with the letter A and work my way to Z, one book at a time but I have decided to now randomly select an author’s initial and select my book that way.

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What else has been happening lately? As if an attempted American coup, a gutted kitchen, builders in the house, a radical surgery and recovery, Christmas and our lovely dog Molly dying wasn’t enough over the past two months…Ollie came down with a very inflamed bowel, some bleeding and a massive ear infection. He was full of beans jumping around one day and suddenly he was off his food and we couldn’t wake him up for much more than a few moments. Of course, like everything, it happened on a weekend but fortunately being Friday night, the vet did get him in Saturday morning, where he spent the day being x-rayed, poked and prodded. He had the first bad day of his lifetime.

We were worried he had swallowed a foreign object and might need surgery. So far that doesn’t seem to be the case and he seems to be responding well to antibiotics and some prescription food he is not too thrilled about. We were worried about him though. His ear is also being treated. If we could only get him to stop eating potting soil, lizard tails, snails and possum poo I think he would be better off. If anyone knows how to do that please leave your message in the comments. below.

On a brighter note I am out of my six weeks of not being able to drive and I actually did a 5 km walk the other day and feel quite good.

I’ve decided the new year for us will begin on the 21 January when the world might change a bit for the better. Now if we could only understand why the Australian Prime Minister won’t condemn what has happened in America.

No, I’ll leave that alone for now.

I hope everyone has been safe and well and doing some things that cause happiness amongst the turmoil of the world. More later….

1001 Children's You Must Read Before You Die, Animals, Australian Fiction, Australian Woman's Author, Fiction

2021 is finally underway…

Posted on January 5, 2021January 5, 2021 by TravellinPenguin

I think I have my thoughts organised around my book challenges this year enough so I can say it out loud.

First off will I say no challenges ahead of time except to read my TBR books and library copies? However, I guess my TBR is a challenge. I am going to follow blogger Book Snob and begin reading them alphabetically by author. I need to not just read the books I am always drawn to on my shelves but to get the impulse buys I thought I’d love, then lost the mood. How many of those do we own?

Right now, I’m reading Charlotte Wood’s The Weekend. Three women in their 70s gather at their friend’s place for a weekend to clean it out after she dies. Throw in a very old arthritic, incontinent dog and the dynamics should be interesting.

I know I am probably the last reader to dig into this popular Austraian book. I’ve heard so much about it. I’m not far into it but I am enjoying the writing. I have no idea how these three women and Finn the dog are going to cope in this run down house of their friend without killing each other. For friends of long standing they sure have a go at each other behind their backs. So far it is Finn, the dog I’m enjoying the most. But it is pulling me into the story and I am looking forward to seeing how they all cope.

Once finished I will begin other books. I want to have an essay or short story read of the day. So that will be one book on the go. I will either start with Chekhov’s short stories or The Bookseller’s Tale by Martin Latham. I might rotate between them as I am looking forward to both of them.

I will also get one book at a time from the library. There are so many books I discover through fellow bloggers but I don’t want to purchase those books. I have my own extensive library but I feel it is important to always support the library and even if I don’t get to all the books I place on hold, I want to contribute to their usage statistics. I don’t trust government funding for libraries. Fortunately our library seems to be well supported and in safe hands but one just never knows.

I also have photography and magazine articles to read. I regularly read Photography magazines from the library online, own a subscription to the Monthly and Australian Book Review magazines, not to mention Womankind. I can stick those in a bag and read them while waiting for appointments or the bus.

Did I mention kindle books and the audible books I listen to nightly? Or the bookish podcasts and author interviews? (sigh)

So there you have it.

My baseline goal is to read 50 pages per day from one of the above challenges. I should not call them challenges as that is the fastest way I know of to fall off the wagon, so to speak. Anyway, that’s the plan and we’ll see how we go. I won’t mention my daily journal writing and learning to draw book. I’m making myself laugh now.

Other catch up news is both good and also sad. The good news is my health is finally settling down after major surgery. I will pass the five week mark on Thursday and can start driving again soon. Feeling better but probably won’t be fully recovered until end of January or February. I can start taking longer walks and need to get Ollie to the beach again. I’m sure he misses it but you wouldn’t know it.

The sad news is we had to euthanise our old dog Molly. She would have been 16 in March. She had a bad fall and ruptured her cruciate ligament. We knew she couldn’t have surgery at her age and with her very advanced arthritis complicating matters we would not have put her through that. She had an extremely peaceful end with both of us with her and knew no anxiety. She was more than ready to go. I like to think of her running with her old mates Odie who we lost to cancer last year and Wally who died 4 years ago of old age. I will put another bell in the maple tree for her, next to Odie and Wally’s bell. Ollie hasn’t indicated he misses her but then again he is such a little narcissist it is hard to tell. Our old cat, Uncle Buck, seems to know she is gone though. They were great mates for the last 14 years.

Our lovely three friends are all together again and their bells ring gently in the wind. L-R Odie, 2019; Molly 2021; Wally 2016.

Well, enough of that and forward we move. I’m looking forward to seeing what happens politically in America the month of January then I’m going to forget all about it and concentrate on Australia!!

Stay well my friends, especially those of you in North America and the UK. I think of you daily and am saddened by what is happening in both countries. Just stay safe. Think medical and not political. Enough said.

Until next time…

Memoir, Non Fiction, Travel

My first book finished this year.

Posted on January 2, 2021 by TravellinPenguin

(Yes I did begin it the end of last year but hey! I’m done now and I’m counting it.)

Happy New Year everyone. I won’t even mention our previous year. I know how everyone feels about it. Moving forward….

I just finished listening to almost 20 hours of a travel book by Alastair Humphreys. It is described as:

At the age of 24, Alastair Humphreys set off to try to cycle round the world. By the time he arrived back home, four years later, he had ridden 46,000 miles (74.000kms). across five continents on a budget of just £7,000.

From frozen Siberia tundra to the jungles of central Africa, Alastair recounts his extraordinary adventures in two parts – Moods of Future Joys and Thunder & Sunshine – brought together in audiobook for the first time.

Alastair lives in the U.K. He had finished university, had a young woman he loved but he was restless. He didn’t want an office job though he had very lucrative offers with secure employment guaranteed. He decided to take his 7000 pounds and ride around the world. It was the summer of 2001. He had no mobile phone, gps or any of the other technology we use so readily these days. His plan was to go from the UK to Europe, eastward through Iran, Afghanistan, to Asia, Japan, Australia, South America, the United States. He planned on being away for four years.

However, after he started out 9/11 happened in the U.S.A. and once he arrived in Turkey he was advised to not go through Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan. Instead he went to northern Africa, beginning in Egypt and south to Cape Town, South Africa along the western African coast. From there he went to Patagonia in South America and rode north to Alaska. He then rode through Japan, Russia and westward back to Europe.

He lived on bread and jam and spent next to nothing. This is his story of hardship, severe loneliness (lots of tears), contrasting poverty and wealth, beauty and ugliness in the surrounding areas. He learned a lot and realised how privileged his life was. I’m glad I listened to the audible version as I find first person travel books the most enjoyable in this format.

It took me awhile to warm to him. The first couple of hours he carried on ad nauseum about his crying jags, missing his girlfriend, how out of shape he was, how he didn’t know why he was doing this. He hated it, he wanted to go home.

I almost gave up but still had about 17 hours to go. As I couldn’t sleep one night I set the timer on audible for 30 minutes hoping I would fall asleep. Once he took the focus off his emotional needs and began realising where he was and how much he was enjoying himself, in spite of his reservations it picked up.

To get from one continent to another he bummed rides on yachts and container ships. He was very tenacious and embraced the people no matter where he was. Some of the accommodation he stayed in made my hair curl. Filth, overflowing squat toilets, bedbugs. He rode across Siberia in the winter in deep snow. I don’t know how he managed it but he did. He had friends that flew in to various places and rode with him in certain places and then they would leave.

I have read a lot of travel writing and I think this must be the most arduous trip I have been on vicariously with anyone. But he did it. He finished when everyone said he wouldn’t. I won’t say anymore than that.

He was a good narrator and I really enjoyed his descriptions of the families he stayed with, the places he slept, ate and visited. Little snippets of history popped up here and there but not enough to make me yawn. I don’t read travel writing for extensive history. Instead I want to hear about the day to day logistics of what one does, eats and who they meet. This did not let me down.

It is the closest I can get at the moment of travelling myself.

Now going into 2021 I think I’ve had enough travel writing for awhile. This book wore me out and I’m looking foward to getting into some other books and activities. More on that soon.

I have been reading other books, mainly dipping in and out of several but more on that another time.

All the best for 2021 and I look forward to seeing what everyone gets up to this year with their books,challenges, lives. Stay well and maybe we’ll all get back to normal before too long.