Category: Fiction

….pulling hair. But …I am determined to get a post out today. My life theme of “It’s always something” continues to thrive. Our beautiful Rough Coated Jack Russell , Ollie injured his knee. Yes , it was on the leg he previously had rebuilt. So Thursday had him back at the vet clinic, under anaesthesia getting it repaired.

However, as he was coming out of surgery, down the street, Tas Water was accidentally pouring toxic liquid of some sort into the water system. Toxic fumes began rising up out of the vet clinic’s toilet, then the taps.

They closed up the kennel and rang the Hobart City council who didn’t want to hear it. So one of the vets called the fire department who took it very seriously. Client appointments for the rest of the day were cancelled, staff were sent home and the owner vet and head nurse began opening doors and windows to air the place out.

The emergency out of hours vet practice, not far away was called and they sent an ambulance for the two dogs just out of surgery. Ollie ended up at the out of hours clinic for the rest of the day and the night. The firefighters did a great job organising everything.

The vet, who is also a good friend of mine ended up in bed early with a headache and nausea. I’m sure her husband who is a barrister of long standing might have made some phone calls. I didn’t ask.

Ollie came home, completely exhausted on Friday and I set him up in a very comfortable bed in his large pen that he will spend the next 4 weeks in.

On a more relaxing topic I am reading Too Cold for Snow which I am really enjoying. A gentle story about a mother and adult daughter travelling through Japan in the autumn, riding trains, visiting galleries and book shops. Eating at cafes and restaurants and walking along canals in the evening light. It is a story of the gentleness between them as well as the distance they share.

Something else good that is happening. Fullers have added another reading group to their list of fun things. A book group called Books We’ve Always Meant to Read. Their blurb describe it as follows:

‘How often does it happen that we’re talking to someone – at a dinner party, over drinks at a bar, on a moor – and that book comes up? Or we wake in the middle of the night to the ship-like groaning of that listing pile by the bed? How many times do we say to ourselves, ‘I simply must get to reading that book, that author’?

Agonise no more, dear friends. Help is at hand. All the great names are here; those we’ve heard of but never quite got round to exploring, those we’ve been too scared to broach, those who, for no real reason, have simply evaded us at every turn.

Classics by the likes of Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, Baudelaire and Dostoyevsky; 20^th century wonders including Italo Calvino, Virginia Woolf, Clarise Lispector and Jose Saramago; and contemporary award winners by Han Kang, Laszlo Krasznahorkai, Michael Ondaatje and Jeanette Winterson. Books it seems that everyone has read except us. Well no longer!

Join us each month as we delve into the books we both know but don’t know, take hold of our sketchy literary past, and shore up that rickety tsundoku (aka life-threatening book stack).

Guiding us through these foggy straits is novelist and bookseller Adam Ouston. Adam has been a member of the Fullers family since 2007, has run many a book discussion group, teaches at the university, and his debut novel, Waypoints, was on many of last year’s Best Books lists as well as being listed for this year’s Miles Franklin, ALS Gold Medal and the Tasmanian Premier’s Literary Award.

Our first three books will be If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Clavino, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (the 1818 text optional), and Flights by Olga Tokarczuk. If it’s your first time tackling them, you’re in for a treat. And if you’ve read them in the past, there are few reading pleasures like the re-read.

The Books We’ve Always Meant to Read group will be held on the first Wednesday of the month at 6pm, beginning October 4.”

I enrolled immediately and am really looking forward to it.

I will leave you with a cute photo of Peanny (Peanut) who had the mass of unruly hair behind her ears trimmed and she now looks like she is starting her first day of school.

I will leave you with that smile.

Until next time.

It’s Friday here and I’m home all day after a busy week so time for a catch up chat.

I saw this bag advertised on Amazon so ordered it. it is a very soft material and I like it. Will be good for all the Fullers events I attend. They have a artist coming in weekly for 6 week two hour sessions to teach drawing. I have been looking for a drawing class for several years and not found one I like or it is filled or I find out about it when course is half way done. So I jumped on this. It begins in September.

I have closed my eBay shop for now. Ebay has changed a lot from when it was an auction site. You could list things, they would sell and be out of the house in a week. Now it is 90% Buy It Now, competing with Amazon and seller must store stuff at home until it sells so just adds clutter to a home while waiting. Spring os not far away and I will be happy to get get outdoors more with camera and metal detector. Better exercise too. Haha

I picked up a Kindle Scribe and I love it. My old Kindle was just too slow, pages turned slowly and it just wasn’t doing what I wanted it to do. It is several years old. The scribe has pop ip notes to write things as you read, has notebooks where you can journal, do bullet journaling, sketch and keep up tracking and whatever else you feel like. The surface is very nice to write on with the fountain pen tool. Just fun. Very similar to Remarkable 2. You can then send anything you write as pdf file to email and you cannot get distracted by social media apps as it does not support them.

I’m reading Greek Lesson by Han Kang for September book group. She is the author of the previous book, The Vegetarian, an International Man Booker prize winner, which I have not read.

The blurb around Greek Lessons is as follows: In a classroom in Seoul, a young woman watches her Greek language teacher at the blackboard. She tries to speak but has lost her voice. Her teacher finds himself drawn to the silent woman, for day by day he is losing his sight.

Soon they discover a deeper pain binds them. For her, in the space of just a few months, she has lost both her mother and the custody battle for her nine-year-old son. For him, it’s the pain of growing up between Korea and Germany, being torn between two cultures and languages.

Greek Lessons is a tender love letter to human connection, a novel to awaken the senses, vividly conjuring the essence of what it means to be alive.

Translated by Deborah Smith and Emily Yae Won.
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It is an interesting story so far and I find the writing quite beautiful. Our August book club meeting had us debating the virtues and disappointments of Eva Catton’s book Birnam Wood. Several liked it, several thought “blah”‘ a few were bored. Most felt it was too long. It was touted as a satire of which half said they couldn’t see it. It was also advertised as a thriller and noone thought it met that definition. i\I was happy to move on.

I have another little project going. I am randomly selecting a page out of 1001 Classical Recordings You Should Hear Before You Die. I have a notebook on my Scribe that I allow one page of notes for each recording. I then listen to the recording from Amazon music. I write short notes on the single page of the journal of composers life, period of history, date of birth and death. I include a couple of pieces of info about him or her (should a ‘her’ arise). Today random.org picked Symphony No 5 by Tchaikovsky which I am enjoying as each movement has a separate style from movement to movement. The last entry was Alessandro Scarlatti’s Cantatas which I really enjoyed. Cantatas changed so much between the 17th century of a single voice to 18th century, several voices to 19th century when they became more spiritual texts or a type of short oratorios. Now! How many of you knew that!!!

Photography going well this week. I will leave you with a couple of photos from the Oatlands Annual Bullock Festival. From cantatas to Bullocks, gosh life has a lot to offer if you look for it! Lol.

I guess I did hear a 17th century cantata from the bullocks as each of them mooed alone or drifted to 18th century when there were several voices. Does that count? Anyway, enjoy.

Oatlands is a small country town up the midlands of Tasmania. Very country but nice coffee shops , scenery and even a lake with many wetland birds. A lovely place. It is about an hour’s drive north.

Hi to my favourite bloggers and those who follow me. I am feeling a bit overwhelmed by the book world and feel bad there is not enough time to read much less comment on blog posts of those I enjoy. So I have deleted many bloggers who never interact. To those lovelies I enjoy but post often I plan on looking through your post but picking one a week upon which to comment. That narrow it down to the Australians one from England, one from Wales and one from South Africa, and my LA blogger friend and her cat. You know who you are.

I am still working my way through Eleanor Catton’s book and I went to a very interesting book launch at Fullers for Martin Flanagan’s book, the empty honour board. Amazon blurb and book blurb describe it as:

In 1966, at the age of 10, Martin Flanagan was sent to a Catholic boarding school in north-west Tasmania. Of the 12 priests on the staff, three have since gone to prison for sexual crimes committed against boys in their care. In 2018 and 2019, a series of disclosures about the school appeared on the ABC Tasmania website. Then came the Pell case. What followed was a frenzy of opinions, none of which represented Flanagan’s view.

The Empty Honour Board is part memoir, a reflection on truth and memory, and what is lost in rushing to judgement.

Flanagan’s school abounds in memorable characters. There’s a kid who escapes and gets as far as Surfers Paradise, and two boys who hold a competition during evening chapel to see who can confess more times. A wild boy receives a ‘Bradmanesque’ 234 strokes of the cane in one year.

It is a lonely and, at times, scary existence – as while the boys are victims of violence, they are also perpetrators. Drawn to neither the school nor its religion, Flanagan discovers himself through sport, later becoming known as one of Australia’s most creative sportswriters.

But his boarding days linger. In his first three years at the school, he’d faced a series of adult moral challenges. Not being an adult, he had failed – in his own estimation. This becomes of great consequence in his 20s when his wife is about to have their first child. A major reckoning with his past, however, leaves him with his ambition as a writer.

A prison diary, a story of brotherly love, a journey of redemption, Flanagan’s book goes inside an experience many have had, but few have talked about.

Three of his brothers, including Richard Flanagan were in the audience including one who was in the school with him. It took him many years of reflection before he put pen to paper. The audience had other friends and supporters and all rallied to encourage him as he delved into his subject. I could tell how difficult this launch may have been as his eye contact seldom left the floor.

I look forward to reading this book.

On a more personal side I have started back to the gym. Yesterday I did a 5 km walk on the treadmill for the first time. My tortoise speed was 58 minutes but I was happy. No 4 minute miles here.

I continue to walk and bus to op shops to thrift items for my eBay store though sales are slow. It is not a large store. 75 items at the moment and have profited enough for a few coffees and admission to the Barbie film with a friend. I enjoyed the choreography, costumes and film sets enormously. The story is the message women can be powerful and do everything. It was a bit of fun with a friend while a big storm raged outdoors with over 100 km per hour gusts of winds. Driving home across the Tasman bridge had the car pulling and shaking and I was glad to get off it. Readers who don’t know this bridge google Tasman Bridge Hobart, Tas. It is often an adventure crossing this, more so in my motorbiking days.

All the best to each if you and I’ll leave you with two of my photo club challenge photos. One category is ‘faces’ and then the other is the ‘open’ category. Faces is a Japanese woman from a 2016 trip to Japan and the other is a Tasmanian waterfall near Cradle Mountain for Open.

I hope the week is going well for you all. Read on……