My Husband is a Genius!

Our books have been sitting in boxes in the spare room. Not good. They're in the way in the spare room, it's very damp so mould is a worry at the moment and I like having my books around. Keith had the brilliant idea of taking the doors off one of the hall cupboards and converting it to a temporary bookshelf! So off came the doors, on with some paint and voila!

Eventually, this shelf area will be used to make the wardrobe in Alex's room bigger, to create a bit more space in that bedroom. Brilliant!

Holiday Reading Stash

Here are the other books I got from the library yesterday - that should keep me quiet for a while!

Christmas Books

Instead of the traditional post-Christmas lunch sleep, I have just finished reading Jennifer Government. Which I really enjoyed. Time for a browse through my Christmas book, Stephanie Alexander's very gorgeous Kitchen Garden Companion. I bought it a while ago but have left it until today to dip into it. Then it will be on with the list: Carpentaria, by Alexis Wright, which is set in the Gulf country of North West Queensland. I did a library run yesterday, before the library shuts until Wednesday. I had Carpentaria reserved but then also browsed the shelves for a while, up to 'F' and found 4 other books on the list. I'm all set for the rain which has been forecast for the next five days. But today is a cracker - sun's shining, it's hot and steamy out there. A perfect Christmas Day; thanks Mr Weather Man!

31 Down ....

...259 to go! Maths was never my strong point so I may have this completely wrong .... but I think I have worked out that at my current rate, I might read 48 books per year. Which means it will take me another 5.3 years to read the read the rest of the books on the list! Cool - I'm not going anywhere!!

Jennifer Government

I finished The Fern Tattoo last night. Now for a quick entree into Jennifer Government. The front cover says "It's Catch-22 by way of The Matrix".

Australian Literature Dude

Really enjoying The Fern Tattoo written by David Brooks. The writing is beautiful, althought it contains some very long, multiple-claused sentences that are a bit of a challenge! The book is about outcasts and story-telling - it describes the process of story-telling, the mixing of truths and unreliable memories, grades of truth, half-truths and downright lies. And the stories are mostly about outcast characters.

Mr Brooks is Associate Professor of Australian Literature at the University of Sydney. Quite the dude of Aussie writing, I reckon.

The Fern Tattoo

Ned Kelly was hung last night and so that's the end of his story. The acknowledgements at the end of the book tend to indicate that Carey didn't just write a total flight of fancy. So I guess I just read a very palatable and moving version of history. Loved it.

Went to the Maroochydore Library today and this is the next read. I have no idea what it's about and can't even recall the date it was published. So will launch straight in with a totally open mind!

True History

Really enjoying this History. Nearly finished it and will be sad to put it down. I was thinking about what I could say quickly about this book and can't really put it any better than the back cover blurb. "... the legendary Ned Kelly speaks for himself, scribbling his narrative on errant scraps of paper in semiliterate but magically descriptive prose as he flees from the police." The sentences run together with few full stops but magical the writing is. Every few pages is a passage that just blows me away, the sort of writing that my 3rd form English teacher Mr Cook suggested we write down in a notebook as we came across it in our reading. Like this, for example: in this passage a policeman drunkenly fires a shot through the roof in the presence of baby George, Ned Kelly and others. In that instant, the baby's eyes changed colour from blue to "a yellow brown the colour of a ginger cat. In the heat of a furnace metals change their nature in olden days they could make gold from lead. Wait to see what more there is to hear my dear daughter for in the end we poor uneducated people will all be made noble in the fire."