Travellin' Penguin

Kaggsy’s post recently (here) reviewed this book and serendipitously it is the first book of a second book club I have joined entitled ‘Books we’ve always meant to read’.

It gave me a good beginning point before picking this book up myself. At the same time I was cruising through some literature sites on You Tube and came across Benjamin McEvoy’s videos. He is a young, Oxford educated man in literature who has a passion for great literature. His enthusiasm is contagious and I watched several of his videos. He has more than 93,000 subscribers. He discusses the ways in which he reads the difficult books of the past in various ways so he remembers it all. He talks about having conversations with the author through the use of marginalia. I quite like that term. I have never been one to write in books. But after digressing to other you tubers who discuss marginalia and seeing the benefits they get from it I decided to try it with the Winter’s Night book. The suggestion is to have a conversation with the author as one reads about 10 pages at a time. Make comments, ask questions, note your observations about what is being observed.

It was stated repeatedly as we studied in school we would highlight lines of text in our books , then keep reading as we studied. Teachers encouraged this, but unless you went back and took additional notes from that text, who ever remembered what they had highlighted. I am not 20 pages into this book and using a pencil (I still can’t come at using ink) , I really got into it. I am finding it really fun. It is as if Calvino is sitting in the room and we are actually discussing his book. I am easily remembering what I read and as this book has a very unusual style I am still right on track. One you tuber stated he did not think writing in books should be a sacrilege. If he were an author he would be flattered the written conversations were occurring. He saw it as a tribute to the author. Now, having said that, there are books of beauty, gemerally hardcover with gorgeous photographs and illustrations and we may not want to mark those up but the humble paperback should be one of our friends who we converse with.

I have to say I am enjoying the process very much. My question to you is- do you imbibe in marginalia? Or are you one of those readers that can read the most difficult of texts and remember and understand immediately everything you read because I certainly can’t. If marking up paperback books gives me this gift I think it will become a new and common practise for me. I’d love to know your opinion on the topic of marginalia. And if you love the old classics give Benjamin McEvoy a listen. Just to be infected with his enthusiasm and love of these old books.

New Zealand – Granta Books – 2023 – 433 pages

Fullers bookshop, my home away from home in this 103 yr old shop, has about 90 members across several reading groups. Each group has 15 members but a few seem to disappear, especially during winter months.

Our facilitator Rayne is a wonderful historian, doctorate who taught at universities in America as well as Oxford university in England. She has an excellent way about her and shares her expertise with all members of the groups who all read the same book each month. I thought I would share her summaries the comprises from her notes after all the groups have met. I have in the ‘second Wed evening group’. We meet in a lounge area at the historic Hadley’s Hotel in Hobart. We can choose a drink from the hotel bar if we wish before carrying it into the lounge area, private room where we sit in old leather upholstered chairs around a large old wooden table.

This is Rayne’s summary from our most recent meetings of Birnam Wood. Let me know if you would enjoy seeing the summary review from the 90 members who have a lot to say each month. The group meets monthly from March through November.

Rayne’s summary:

Until next time….

….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.