Reading List November/December 2012

I don’t remember Anne of Avonlea being so hilarious. There are some things you just can’t appreciate as a child. 

From October to November, I re-read the second book in the Anne series by LM Montgomery for the first time since I was 10. I finished the Griffith Review #36. I read Once Upon a Time in Beirut in one go - it ended up somewhat inspiring my proposed thesis topic for my Honours Application (yes, I’ve decided to do Honours next year while working full time. Because, ya know, I’m a total effing masochist.)

But I didn’t manage to get through all of A Walk in the Woods, so it’s back on the list for the next month. 

Reading List November/December 2012

1. A Walk in the Woods, by Bill Bryson


2. Anne of the Island, by LM Montgomery


3. The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz


4. Statute of Liberty, by Geoffrey Robertson

Reading List October/November 2012

Ohmahgah! I managed to race through 3 books since my last reading list on 20 September - The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, Conditions of Faith and Anne of Green Gables - all the while on vacation in China. 

But Eating Animals is unfortunately going nowhere. Time for a new list! 

Reading List October/November 2012  

1. Anne of Avonlea, by LM Montgomery


2. Once Upon a Time in Beirut, by Catherine Taylor


3. A Walk in the Woods, by Bill Bryson


4. Griffith Review #36 - What is Australia for? 

Tossing in a quarterly in there for kicks. 

HURRAH! 

xx doots

September/October 2012 Readings

August was my most productive month yet! I raced through the Eyre Affair, dusted off Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Barbara Demick’s Nothing to Envy brought back some hazy memories of my early childhood in a communist country.

What a bizarre life that seems like now. And I’m heading back for a quick visit in a week. 

Meanwhile, I’ve given up on Alex Ross’ The Rest is Noise for now. Love his blog, love his writing, love the New Yorker, but the chapter on Schoenburg is turning out to be just as hard to get through as Schoenburg’s music.

The rest is noise indeed. 

Since I never seem to write my reading list at the start of the month, here’s one for September/October. 

Reading List September/October 2012

1. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, by Mary Ann Staffer and Annie Barrows


2. Conditions of Faith, by Alex Miller


3. Anne of Green Gables, by LM Montgomery (re-reading the entire series) 


4. Eating Animals, by Jonathan Safran Foer

For any Canberrans out there - Lifeline Canberra Bookfair and the Canberra Readers’ Festival are both on this weekend. I’m wiping my reading glasses in anticipation. 

xx doots

An Australian winter

Spring is here. I can smell it, I can feel it, I can’t fight the the pollen slowly beginning to clog up my nostrils and making my tear ducts dysfunctional. And with that, I’ve survived my first winter in Canberra. 

Life has taken on a hectic pace, with new work, all the requirements of my legal admissions, French classes, salsa classes, planning a trip to China to visit some relatives before they forget what I look like.

No time for tennis. No time to blog.

:( doots

P.S. All photos taken during the past winter in and around Crapberra. It was really a lot colder than it looks. 

Sunday.

Sunday:

1. Baking tarts. 2. Poaching pears. 3. Reading Frankie. 4. French home work. 5. I’m a terrible knitter. 6. The Eyre Affair on Kindle. 7. So many things to do for my legal admission. 8. New parcel in the mail turned out to be an old camera. 9. Canberra was cold and sunny. 

xx doots

I seemed to have had quite a few conversations recently about how these books defined my childhood. Maybe it’s time to revisit them, from the very beginning. 

August 2012 Readings

Reading List August 2012: 

1. The Eyre Affair - by Jasper Fforde


2. Lady Chatterley’s Lover - by D.H.Lawrence 


3. The Rest is Noise - by Alex Ross


4. Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea - by Barbara Demick

July had me breezing through Stasiland, which was extraordinary, heartbreaking, intimate. David Lebovitz’s autobiography/cookbook was a delicious relief from the surveillance of East Germany (and thumbs up on the lemon glazed madeleines therein). 

And then came Lady Chatterley. The book that has thwarted me time and time again - still on the agenda for August, still a book that inspires more procrastination than late night reading in bed. 

The Eyre Affair, my attempt to fullfil a book club obligation. 

Alex Ross’s ‘The Rest is Noise’, also left over from July, in keeping with the blogger-author theme for one of my favourite blogs. 

And finally, Nothing to Envy, the Samuel Johnson Award Winner for 2010, curiously these days, I get through non-fiction much faster than fiction. 

2/4 for July. Let’s go one up for August. Happy reading! 

xx doots

July 2012 Readings

Reading List July 2012: 

1. Stasiland - by Anna Funder


2. The Rest is Noise - by Alex Ross


3. Lady Chatterley’s Lover - by D.H. Lawrence


4. The Sweet Life in Paris - by David Lebovitz

One classic and three non-fictions. History, music, food and sex.  As always, I am more ambitious than I am productive. 

3 chapters by the end of the night, and on that note: bonne nuit! 

xx doots

6 months.

Stuff I’ve done in the 6 months since returning to Australia: 

• Moved to a new city 


• Graduated 


• Started full time work


• Restarted learning French 


• Took salsa classes 


• Made new friends


• Started my process to legal admission


• Cooked-and-read-and-blogged-and-shopped-and-took-photos-and-weekend-trips-to-Sydney-and-Melbourne.

Life has settled down into a cruisy, comfortable, bourgeois pattern. And I find myself wondering “is this what the-rest-of-your-life feels like”? Is this it? 

Don’t let this be “it”.

Travelogue #41: New Continent

There’s a romantic myth about traveling: that when you see the world, meet new people, experience things previous unexperienced, you end up “finding yourself”. 

And so there I was, at the end of my time in Europe, wondering if I had ever “found myself” and what that even means.  

In many ways, 5 months on from when I left Australia, I was more uncertain than ever about what I want to do in life. Do I want to practice law, in the traditional sense of that word? Do I actually want to work for the government? Do I want to move to Canberra? Do I even want to live in Australia?  

But here is what I know. I know that I want to keep writing. Not necessarily to become a novelist, a blogger, a journalist, but simply to keep writing like this, for my own sake. While I was on the road, not a day went by without me wishing I had a laptop at my disposal to tap away at. 

I know that however uncertain I am about becoming a lawyer, my structure of thinking, my values, my language and work ethics have all been shaped by this discipline, and I intend to put it to good use.  

I know that home is where the heart is. And wherever I go in the world, wherever I end up, Australia - Melbourne - continues to tug the strings of my heart in a way that makes me stuff spoonfuls of milo powder in my mouth when I am having a bad day.

I know that food and wine are important things in life. As are the ethical choices we make concerning food. The gradual realisation of this had me reconsidering my consumption of animals. But that of course, is a whole other topic.

 

So what does all this mean? Have I “found” whatever I was searching for, if anything at all? 

The last thing I know, as I left Europe on a new journey homeward, is that traveling isn’t a real life version of “Eat, Pray Love”. I wasn’t tired of the grind of everyday life when I left Australia. I didn’t have a spasm of epiphanies standing in front of the Eiffel Tower. I didn’t find eternal love. The meaning of life didn’t just suddenly dawn on me while I crossed the strait of Gibraltar. I didn’t have a Hollywood ending to show for my travels.

But I was going home with a suitcase full of shopping, a few thousand photographs, new friends, shared memories … I was going home inspired, energized, determined to make the most out of the next phase of my life, determined to do certain things differently this time. 

I was going home. 

xx

Travelogue #40: Batu Caves

Picspam of my visit to the Batu caves while in KL - easily the most fun I had there.