Category: Fiction

This past week was really busy with all kinds of “catch up” appointments such as eyes, teeth, gym, events. I did manage to get a bit of reading tidied up.

What I finished reading this week:

I finished Sei Shōnagon’s The Pillow Book . It was written 1000 yrs ago from the perspective of a lady at the imperial court of Japan. It is described as a “crazy quilt of vignettes, opinions and anecdotes” of the times.

Our book group will discuss it on Wed night. It was a real eye opener to see many of the issues in that book were the same as the ones we deal with now.

There is also a lot of humour in the book. I laughed out loud at this quote:

Old fashioned people put on their gathered toursers in a very time consuming and awkward way. They pull the front panel up against the stomach and proceed first of all to tuck all the layers of robe in under it, leaving the back strings dangling till they’ve got the front completely straight and tidy, then they bend forward to reach for the back panel, gropping behind them with both hands. They look like monkeys with their arms tied behind their backs, standing there fumbling about with the strings like that. You can’t imagine how they could ever get dressed and out the door in time for any urgent appointment.

And

Infuriating things: A guest who arrives when you have something urgent to do, and stays talking for ages.

Or a very ordinary person, who beams inanely as she prattles on and on.

Or a dog that discovers a clandestine lover as he comes creeping in and barks or a baby who cries when you’re trying to hear something.

The entire books is made up of many observations of life.

Audible book finished this week.

How to End a Story: Diaries 1995 to 1998 by Helen Garner.

I enjoyed her narration of the book but she is in so much pain as she ends her third marriage and she doesn’t leave much out of this book of how she feels.  It continues how people can write about the extreme angst they might have in their life for the world to see.  It seems she’d want to keep it private but then who am I to know how others handle their grief. We’re all different. 

Bookish Event of the Week: 

My friend and I attended a book launch at Fullers this week. The book is:

Nine Lives For Our Planet:  Personal stories of nine inspiring women who cherish Earth by John Watts. It is described as “Here are nine personal stories of brave hearted women defying the greed and corruption smashing Australia’s environment, including its farmlands. 

John Watts introduced s to women who light up the darkness of the climate and extinction emergencies with their flair and stoic commonsense. Each has acted to take on the gas frackers, coal miners, native forest loggers, wildlife killers, water profiteers and their political agents.

(quote by Bob Brown, acclaimed author, photographer and life long activist).

The author was interviewed by Bob Brown and the discussion was very interesting. The women are not well known celebrities of any kind but those who work to make positive changes in their own quieter ways.

One of the women was Simone Marsh and she was also part of the three person panel.

There was a lot of head shaking and discomfort hearing what the big corporations and politicians have done to no advantage of the environment or people living on the land.

Penguin’s Choice:  Last week I announced the random draw of the week was the short story, Christmas in Stalingrad by Anthony Beevor. I began it but I just couldn’t face another story about war.  I have read and heard much about the atrocities of war in the past two years and I am over it.

I decided to pass it back to the box, maybe for another time and I spun the wheel again and a Roald Dahl book was chosen. It is A Taste of the Unexpected. I have no idea what it is about but it should be a bit cheerier than the war books.

Life as it happens

The coming week is not going to be as hectic as this past week was. A couple of weight classes at the gym, maybe a long walk, if the weather changes from cold rain to something more pleasant. I have the shared reading book Monday of the Kafka stories and Wednesday will be the book group discussing the Pillow Book.  I think there will be a big variety of opinions about this book. Thursday night there is a book launch that I’ll be attending. That should be enough to keep me socialising and exercising this week.

From the Photo Archive:

Here are two more photos of beach scenes from the south coast of NSW.  It was a lovely day to be out with a camera. Such a shame it seems like it was such a long time ago.

Stay well, until next time….keep moving, catch up with people and stretch your brains.

I have returned from a lovely trip to see friends in NSW. Almost 10 days down the south coast from Sydney in New South Wales and the northern beaches of Sydney. Then followed by meeting up with another friend for 5 more days in the city. It was great to finally get off the island we live on and see more of Australia.

By the way, the quote above is what was printed on my license plate frame on my scooter.  While I am no longer a motorbike rider I still hope to enjoy the intent of this quotation.

What I’m Reading: 

I am working my way through Sei Shōnagon’s The Pillow Book . It was written 1000 yrs ago from the perspective of a lady at the imperial court of Japan. It is described as a “crazy quilt of vignettes, opinions and anecdotes” of the times.

Our book group will discuss it in the first week of September. She discusses the many issues she encounters in her life and it is interesting so many of them are relevant today. Relationships with men and friends, communication with others in the palace, much of it through written poetry that everyone wrote back and forth and following the young Empress who over sees daily life in the palace. 

It is not a book I’d pick up and read in large chunks but I try to read 15 – 20 pages a day and that is enough. The author lived in the Heian period that translates as ‘peace and tranquility’.

The periods stretched from 794 to 1186. 

My copy is a black Penguin classic and the introduction and addendums take up as much space almost as the story itself. It is certainly different from what I usually read and I am enjoying it more than I thought I might.

Audible Book on the Go at the Moment:

How to End a Story: Diaries 1995 to 1998 by Helen Gar

ner narrated by. Helen Garner. I listened to her first two diaries and this is the final one in the trilogy. It is described as:

“The third instalment of diaries from the inimitable Helen Garner covers four eventful years in the life of one of Australia’s most treasured writers.
Helen Garner’s third volume of diaries is an account of a woman fighting to hold on to a marriage that is disintegrating around her.

Living with a great writer who is consumed by his work, and trying to find a place for her own spirit to thrive, she rails against the confines while desperate to find the truth in their relationship-and the truth of her own self.”

I can’t say it is pleasant to listen to but at times is interesting. I don’t know why so many people want to publish a ‘warts and all’ diary for anyone out there to see, but it seems to happen with regularity.

I wonder what her ex-husband thought of this publication as it certainly doesn’t shine a good light onto him. It also isn’t hard to discover who the unnamed husband in the book is either. But it is a rather short book and as I found her first two diaries interesting I wanted to see how it all ends up. 

Bookish Event of the Week:  

I attended a lovely Fullers book shop event last Sunday with a friend. Carmel Bird launched her wonderful book  Telltale with a fun interview with author Danielle Wood. There was accompaniment by a Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra member, Michael Fortescue, who played the beautiful double bass as she read aloud passages from her book. 

We really enjoyed it and I look forward to reading her book. Carmel Bird really identifies with the peacock and not only does her book have a beautiful cover featuring a peacock, she was dressed in the gorgeous colours of a peacock herself. The room was full of appreciative readers and we all went away feeling most uplifted. 

Penguin’s Choice:

The Penguin 70s bookish project begins.  Our facilitator of our book group is going off on maternity leave in October and that month will see our final discussion. We won’t meet again until March of 2023 and not only is she going to give us recommended reading for the summer, I will be attacking the books on my shelves that lie unread. I will also be getting into the 70’s anniversary Penguins from the boxed set.

Kicking off the random draw is: No. 16- Christmas at Stalingrad by Antony Beevor. More on this little book next time.

Life as it happens…..  the coming week has me getting out of travel mode and back into the regular routines. Medically, especially with the old eye, things are looking up. A bit of vision has returned, and I have been instructed by the ophthalmologist to go to the optometrist and get fit for some new lens in my glasses. Although the vision will never be great in that eye, the improvements do make it easier to read and drive. The glasses will hopefully increase the vision a bit and now we just hold steady to see what progresses in the future.  So now, the eye discussion is at a close!!! Such a boring topic. 

Back to the gym this week too and that should be a laugh as I stumble my way back to fitness with a good sense of humour. I expect to be quite sore for a few days but feeling good.  Old age is hard to face but it helps to keep oneself in as good of physical (and mental) shape as possible. So on we tread……sometimes clumsily.

From the Photo Archive:

So far I have not downloaded and edited all of my photos from NSW. I do have some interesting filters to add to Photoshop and Lightroom which I am playing with. Although a steep learning curve, I am getting a bit of success. I will share the two photos I have entered in to our club challenge. One is a open theme of which I submitted the Sydney Harbour bridge with a vintage touch. The second theme is about taking something we all know as familiar and changing the way it looks but still keeping it recognizable.  I decided to fantasize what the Sydney Opera House would look like if global warming increased to such an extent it would melt.  It was an interesting exercise. 

What the Penguin did this week:

Penguin and I were thinking about aging. He has travelled on six continents with me and he still looks as good as ever. I think I am feeling the older years more than him.

But I heard some very good advice and I try to live by it now.   1. Exercise.   2. Socialise with others. 3. Learn something new.  That should keep us going in the right direction for a while.

I guess Mark Twain didn’t follow book blogs.

What I’m Reading: 

This week I finished a fascinating book called Grandma Gatewood’s Walk by Ben Montgomery.

This is a fascinating tale of the first woman to ever walk the Appalachian trail in the 1950s from Georgia to Maine. The blurb is as follows:

“Emma Gatewood told her family she was going on a walk and left her small Ohio hometown with a change of clothes and less than twhundred dollars. The next anybody heard from her, this genteel, farm-reared, sixty-seven-year-old great-grandmother had walked 800 miles along the 2,050-mile Appalachian Trail. By September 1955 she stood atop Maine’s Mount Katahdin, sang “America, the Beautiful,” and proclaimed, “I said I’ll do it, and I’ve done it.”

Driven by a painful marriage, Grandma Gatewood not only hiked the trail alone, but she was also the first person—man or woman—to walk it twice and three times. At age seventy-one, she hiked the 2,000-mile Oregon Trail. Gatewood became a hiking celebrity and appeared on TV with Groucho Marx and Art Linkletter. The public attention she brought to the trail was unprecedented. Her vocal criticism of the lousy, difficult stretches led to bolstered maintenance, and very likely saved the trail from extinction.”

Author Ben Montgomery interviewed surviving family members and hikers Gatewood met along the trail, unearthed historic newspaper and magazine articles, and was given full access to Gatewood’s own diaries, trail journals, and correspondence. Grandma Gatewood’s Walk shines a fresh light on one of America’s most celebrated hikers. 

I found this book fascinating and would recommend it to anyone who might enjoy a different kind of travel narrative and nature. The themes are memoir, travel/walking, history, domestic violence. She also raised 11 children. Bookish Event of the Week:  

The most exciting event was seeing Geraldine Brooks launch her recent book Horse, at the Theatre Royal interviewed by Heather Rose in conjunction with Fullers Bookshop. The recently built studio theatre was a great venue. The event was sold out and she was generous to sign books in the theatre foyer after the event. I gifted her a small cloisonne black cockatoo pin in a little felt like bag for her to put somewhere in her horse stable when she gets home. She seemed to love the small Tasmanian gift.  I always think authors must get so tired of book signings and repeating themselves over and over during their tours. I did not take my book to be signed just to give her hand a rest. 

She told us about this obscure piece of American history in this book which in the end I loved. I wasn’t sure at the beginning I was going to enjoy this book but as I went along, I just kept reading and reading.  I will never forget this tale. Horse racing was built in America on the backs of slaves in the 1800s before the civil war. The book combines that history of the 1800s. It also has two other periods of time the story includes. The 1980s of the New York art worlds and the current times of the science of preserving skeletons at the Smithsonian.

The author talked at length how this book was successfully finished after the sudden death of her husband three years ago. It got her back on track as her grief was deep.

The research into the art and slavery issues were well researched. She talked about how as a Caucasian she talked to many African Americans about writing this book about their culture and history. She was encouraged to do it on all fronts, and she consulted with the African American community regularly. 

I admire the research skills she displays in the writing. She is an experienced former foreign correspondent and journalist and her writing displays that. I would recommend this book to anyone who is interested in these topics.  It finishes with a current race event of the 21^st century of America and the impact is greatly felt.

She also made mention of a little-known law in Australia that I think would surprise people. She would like to come back to Australia at some time. As she has lived in American, married to an American man since the 1980s or so, she mentioned her biological son can get dual citizenship with Australia however her legally adopted Ethiopian son cannot. She and her husband adopted him at the age of five and raised him as their own. He is an American citizen now through the family adoption. Australia really does need to get their act into gear. (My letter was the lead opinion piece in the Saturday paper.

Many are surprised by this little-known law. So, one day I wrote a letter about how discriminatory it is and sent it to the Opinion page of the Hobart Mercury, and Tasmanian Senators Jacqui Lambie and Andrew Wilkie as well as the federal minister for Immigration.  I felt better but no idea if anybody will respond or open their eyes a bit. Other families must be affected by this I’d think.

Off the Shelf: 

When I get back from my upcoming trip to New South Wales I have some new books to share with you that I am enjoying very much.

Penguin of the week:

I have also rolled the random di and have a 70^th anniversary Penguin picked out of the boxed set collection. That too will be shared later.

Life Happens: 

Life is starting to pick up. Thursday I am flying to Sydney to begin an eight day road trip of photography down the coast with a good friend. We will travel south of Sydney for some seascape days and then inland for some photos of areas I’ve not been to before.

Then I will have a ‘rest’ when another friend arrives, and we will spend 4 nights in Sydney visiting all the places we love. We are going to the Opera House one evening to see A Comedy of Errors.  This week I researched the play as this is a play by Shakespeare, I am not familiar with.  It looks like it will be fun and quite comical. We won’t forget the bookshops either.

Photo(s) of the week: 

Last Sunday our photography club went south of Hobart to the Wooden Boat centre at Franklin. We spent time photographing whatever we wanted for a couple of hours. I’ll share a couple of the photos at the end of this post.

It was a beautiful day and not as cold as it’s been. We really enjoyed the day and followed it with hot coffee in a local café afterwards.  It felt like life was normal again. 

I’ll be back here after 20 August sometime. Need to get over the two hour jet lag I’ll experience. I have not been off this island since 2019. 

What the Penguin did this week:

Outside of hasseling politicians I am packing.  I will see that our Penguin is on the road again with me as well. Long term followers will have seen him visiting other countries previously.  He is looking forward to this trip as much as I am.

Stay well everyone.