Travellin' Penguin

……I will never finish. (Maud Casey)

Hi everyone. I had a fun bookish and theatre week again this week.

Books I’m reading now: Homework by Tassie author Helen Hayward. I went to the launch of this book Thursday night. The blurb on the back states-

When Helen Hayward had her two children in London, 25 years ago, she found looking after them easy. Loving and looking after her kids was straightforward. However loving and looking after her home was not. She had long been instructed to put her career first. So she did. Yet what to do with the mushrooming laundry by the bathroom door? And what about if she actually liked cooking? Home Work is a series of personal essays motivated by three questions. 

1. Is there an art to running a home?
2. Can it be a satisfying thing to do?
3. Has the work we do around the home ― which accounts for roughly a 1/4 of our waking hours ― something important to teach us about life itself?

It is quite a fun read and she raises some interesting questions.

Friday night saw our end of year all Fullers book group members get together at Fullers book shop with drinks and nibbles. It was also announced what books we’ll be starting the year off next year.

The Fraud by Zadie Smith kicks off February. Followed by 2023 Booker Prize winner Prophet song by Paul Lynch. The Sri Lankan tale of Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens by Shankari Chandran and Question 7 by our local Booker prize winning author, Richard Flanagan. I am looking forward to reading all of them.

I am still working my way through Olga Tokarczuk;s book Flights. There is so much in it I don’t think it is a book that can be rushed.

I am also travelling through audio with the 125cc Honda trip of the 73 yr old man, Simon Gandolphi, riding from Mexico to Tierra del Fuego at the bottom end of Chile. This is the book I listen to in the car and when I can’t sleep so it will take awhile to finish it.

To end the week Mr P and I enjoyed a 50 yr anniversary if the song, Tubular Bells at the Theatre Royal. It was a fabulous, amazing 60 minute piece of music by two musicians who are incredibly talented. I remember when Tubular Bells first came out in 1973. It was the beginning of a lot of electronic music at the time. The two musicians in one hour played six guitars, four keyboards, two sets of drums, a mandolin, a glockenspiel and a set of tall pipes with a mallet. The lighting matched the music. It was a full house and an exuberant audience. Such fun. Last night was their final performance after 15 years, 500 performances in 20+ countries. We loved it. Wonderful they ended their run in Australia’s oldest theatre, our historically beautiful Theatre Royal. (I might add Tubular Bells was played in the movie The Exorcist which I have never seen nor wanted to see)

On that note 🎶🎶🎶🎶 I will leave you for a couple of weeks. Tomorrow I fly to Sydney for the annual Girl’s week out my friend and I share every year. A week of theatre at the opera house one night (A Dictionary if Lost Words is the play), some shopping, maybe a gallery, a book shop and two, and cocktails in the evening.

I also plan one day seeing my photography mate who I went to see in June for 5 days but she had Covid and we missed each other. That trip became a bust except I did enjoy Sydney.

On Friday we do the six hour train to Port Macquarie , where my friend lives, and attend the Bangarra dance performance in their event center, The Glass House. I may be able to get to the Koala hospital there which I would find very interesting. Then home on the Tuesday. A fun packed 9 days.

As my second planned photography workshop in July fell apart with jy health, I am hoping all goes well for this third attempt. 🌻

I am also looking forward to returning home and spending a leisurely, quiet Christmas with Mr P, our dogs Ollie and Peanut and our cats Grizzy and Cousin Eddie.

Looking forward to following my blogger friends and see what you’re reading and doing this month. We all send you our best.

…is the ability to plug into the shared wisdom of mankind.

I had a very bookish week this past week. I began the book Flights by Olga Tokarczuk. It won the International Booker in 2018. As I began it I immediately became confused so had to google a few reviews. From that I learned the book is comprised of 116 vignettes if the world of travel and those who are constantly on the move in our world. Knowing this I am now sorted. I need to finish it for Feb book group so I will stroll through this book to uncover its secrets. I have not read this author’s work before but the Guardian states that she is a household name in Poland.

I attended a book launch of Ian Terry’s photographic historical trip of George Augustus Robinson at Fullers during the week. Uninnocent Landscapes.

Together with over fifty sharply observed and carefully crafted black and white tritone images, Uninnocent Landscapes features an introduction by Tasmanian art historian, curator and essayist Greg Lehman and essays by Rebecca Digney, Roderic O’Connor, Nunami Sculthorpe-Green and Ian himself. These provide an invitation for open and honest dialogue to better understand the past and current impacts of invasion and colonisation of lutruwita in general and of George Augustus Robinson’s ‘Friendly Mission’ in particular. The conversation was facilitated by Stephanie Cahalan, non-fiction writer and researcher. (Fullers event blurb)

For more than two years Ian Terry followed the route of George Augustus Robinson’s 1831 Big River Mission, which is credited with ending frontier violence in Van Diemen’s Land. Accompanied by 13 Aboriginal envoys, Robinson walked around central Van Dieman’s Land before meeting 26 survivors of the Lairmerrener and Paredarerme people. He promised them safety if they stopped fighting the colonists. They met with Governor Arthur in Hobart shortly after and were transferred to Flinders Island, where almost all died.

Ian’s project was to photograph the landscapes Robinson passed through as an act of truth-telling about colonisation and dispossession, and acknowledgement that his fortunate life in lutruwita/Tasmania comes at the expense of Aboriginal Tasmanians. (Tas Museum)

It was a very well attended, interesting evening.

I also went to Theatre Royal Thursday evening with a friend to see another bit of history from Tasmania.

Jane Franklin and the Rajah quilt, the story of ex governor Sir John Franklin and his wife Lady Jane Franklin.

Another enjoyable evening.

Other things to share below:

A bit of Hygge set up at home next to my reading chair to get me through dreary days.

And…

Photography this week was a bit limited by life being too busy and unpredictable weather. I had watched a you tuber photographer, Mark Denny talking about making photos into stories. The main photo is the overall landscape and the follow up 2 or 3 photos make up the parts. I will leave you here with the story of the reserve behind our house.

Stop and notice the tiny items in the world.

What fun thing did you do this week week? 🌲🌲🌲

……a reader finishes it. (Samuel Johnson)

These lovely bookish quotes I’ve been starting my posts with are randomly picked from a little book entitled The Book lover’s treasury of quotations by Hatherleigh Press, 2016. It is a lovely little book.

I continue to stay busy with my books and photography as spring weather is definitely all over the place, as usual.

READING- Audio is the latest book by Julia Baird called Bright Shining narrated by Julia Bear.

I enjoyed her last book Phosphorescence so much I had to snap this one up as soon as I heard of its release. This one speaks of ‘grace’.

The blurb….

“Grace is both mysterious and hard to define. It can be found when we create ways to find meaning and dignity in connection with each other, building on our shared humanity, being kinder, bigger, better with each other. If, in its crudest interpretation, karma is getting what you deserve, then grace is the opposite: forgiving the unforgivable, favouring the undeserving, loving the unlovable.

But we live in an era when grace is an increasingly rare currency. The silos in which we consume information dot the media landscape like skyscrapers, and our growing distrust of the media, politicians and public figures has choked our ability to cut each other slack, to allow each other to stumble, to forgive one another.

So what does grace look like in our world, and how do we recognise it, nurture it in ourselves and express it, even in the darkest of times?

From award-winning journalist Julia Baird, author of the acclaimed national bestseller Phosphorescence, comes Bright Shining, a luminously beautiful, deeply insightful and most timely exploration of grace.”

The book I have just begun is Flights by Polish writer, Olga Tokarczuk.

The blurb-

“Flights is a series of imaginative and mesmerising meditations on travel in all its forms, not only the philosophy and meaning of travel, but also fascinating anecdotes that take us out of ourselves, and back to ourselves.

Olga Tokarczuk brilliantly connects travel with spellbinding anecdotes about anatomy, about life and death, about the very nature of humankind. Thrilling characters and stories abound: the Russian sect who escape the devil by remaining constantly in motion; the anatomist Verheyen who writes letters to his amputated leg; the story of Chopin’s heart as it makes its journey from Paris to Warsaw, stored in a tightly sealed jar beneath his sister’s skirt; the quest of a Polish woman who emigrated to New Zealand as a teen but must now return in order to poison her terminally ill high-school sweetheart…”

We will be discussing this book in our The books you wanted to read but haven’t book group in March. It is 452 pgs so thought I’d better get into it.

Other ideas…

I was just reading the latest post from Booker Talk (https://bookertalk.com) about the success of her book jar. She has found her new set up of randomly choosing three titles from her book jar, then choosing one to read within the next two months. If she finds she doesn’t want to read it then she gets rid of it.

I recently downloaded the app BookBuddy. It lets you scan your books easily, much like the Library Thing site but has more features.

I closed my Library Thing account and scanned my entire library into this app. I think I will follow Booker Talk in the new year to get fired up about reading more of my TBR stack. We’ll see how that goes. I have a few boxed sets of the Penguin anniversary sets (the 70s and 80s) and I have included them too. Might be fun.

I upgraded my camera gear recently and am having great fun learning how to remember all the settings and learning the new features. I am posting more and more of my photos on Instagram. My instagram site is called Travellin_Penguin. Feel free to follow if you wish to see kore of my photos. I am leaning more and more into photography at that site and following other photographers more and more as it is a great place to showcase photos.

I think this is now long enough so I will leave you for now. Stay well everyone and do something you enjoy whenever you can.