The lament of the book junkie...

I stole this from The History Teacher's post on Facebook....



Penguin Books do food

One of the very lovely things about books is the way that they can cover nearly every other area of interest in our lives. I posted after my annual visit to the Sydney Craft Fair with Knitting Buddy, having succumbed to the book stall (there are three garments currently under construction from two of the books). I don't have lots of knitting, sewing or craft books, per se - although I do have oodles of art, craft and design books - but I have to say it's more due to keeping my hands behind my back than because I didn't want them at the time...

Anyway, purpose of this post was a discovery in a local department store the other day in the cookbook section - those I do have in quantity... A foodie of many years, I cannot resist a good cookbook, and have just indulged in the purchase of Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi's Jerusalem - and this, for those with a taste for Middle Eastern food, is an absolute must. The photo below is the mixed bean salad (absolutely stupendous vegetable section) I made to go with our trout for last Friday night's dinner. DB came into the house salivating - he said he could smell the roasted whole spices in the warm dressing as soon as he came out of the lift!

I digressed. Food - and books - will do that to you! The department store discovery may be of particular interest to Peter over at Kyusireader...who is a mad Penguin book fan. He's just been collecting the new Penguin editions of all the John Wyndhams - while lusting after my vintage Penguin copies. And if you check out his blog, you'll find many posts that go back to his love of Penguin books, which he buys in batches when he finds them... So Peter, this is for you - as I seem to recall several enthusiastic notes about various edibles as well - Penguin Australia, in their trademark classic orange covers, have brought out a range of cookbooks by Aussie chefs...you're going to want these....!

Bookshop browsing

You know that feeling you get when you go someplace and see something and think, "Darn...that was my idea and she beat me to it!" I got that in spades this morning. Needing to do a brief errand, I got ready to head out, and then the brief errand got a bit more substantial when DB said, "If you're going to the bank, could you maybe go to the bank in Double Bay and take my shirts to the cleaners at the same time?" So, instead of walking up to the local shops, I got in the car and drove to Double Bay... Bonus was, the bookshop was open early for some reason, so of course I had to go have a browse - with my hands firmly behind my back! And in amongst all the new goodies was a new book - gorgeous little hardcover, too, with a silky dust jacket (drool...) - by Ramona Korval, By the Book: A reader's guide to life. A book about reading, about books she's read that have been important, and about how books can read us. I have been playing with an idea like this for quite some time - hence this blog... The lesson, of course, is to get beyond thinking about doing these things, and get down to actually doing them!

And, to go back to the bookshop when my next writing pay cheque comes in, and buy Korval's book...

Never enough room for books!

As my regular readers will remember, I have had three house moves in the last year, and as always, the books are a major job all on their own. DB was once memorably quoted as saying too me, "You have too many books." To which I replied it was impossible to have too many books. He qualified it by saying you can never have too many art books, but you can have too many books...!

When my mother died, I inherited her poetry collection. You can read about that a little bit in a previous post here. At the time I went to collect the books, I realised I'd need to take the bookcase as well because I knew I wouldn't have enough room for the collection on my shelves, and my father's comment was, "You're as bad as your mother."

The History Teacher posted this on Facebook yesterday, and it just sums the whole situation up perfectly...



Swallows and Amazons forever!

I have not had the week that was planned - which was to be compiling and editing copy for the work magazine to get it off to my graphic designer to assemble for final proofing next week. Instead, I've been languishing in bed with a very nasty flu virus, complicated by a number of secondary infections, and further complicated by a reaction to the antibiotics, so I have had to stop taking them and recovery is going frustratingly slowly.

The first few days are a bit blurry. The virus came with the headache from hell, so there was very little reading. As I surfaced a bit, I reached for something comforting and simple, and have been working my way through Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons books in a very disorganised fashion, having picked up Swallowdale first. I followed that with Peter Duck, then Pigeon Post and have just now finished Winter Holiday.

These are among the creme de la creme of children's classics. If you haven't ever read them, you've missed out on a rare treasure. Those of a certain generation may well find them echoes of their own childhoods - they certainly are for me. I did grow up messing about in boats once we moved to the country, living on a gulf where everyone sailed. But even before that, as a hybrid city/country child - my godmother owned a small acreage - we built rafts, that mostly sank, to navigate our way across the house dam. We had camps in the patch of rough bush in the bottom paddock where we cooked sausages to a burned crisp over smokey fires, and generally ran wild with minimal parental supervision. Later, in that small country town, we all had bikes and on weekends and holidays they took us everywhere and, again, we were out and about til all hours, getting up to goodness knows what. We built camps on the beaches in amongst the salt bush, tunneled into the bigger salt bushes to make cubby houses, waged wars against each other, and generally had similarly independent and adventurous times as Ramsome's crew of would be pirates and sailors.

The books begin with four children coming to the Lakes District in Britain with their mother and baby sister for the summer to stay at a local farm on the shores of a lake. They are given permission to sail the farm's dinghy, the Swallow, and on an early venture out into the lake, discover and land on a small island. They are surprised by two pirates, Nancy and Peggy, local children and captain and mate of the Amazon. After an initial territorial skirmish, they join forces and get permission to camp on the island for the holiday, and so begin the adventures. Nancy and Peggy are independent misses, and much less inclined to think of consequences, which leads to scrapes and some more hair-raising adventures than are comfortable for the Swallows, particularly Mate Susan, who is a young lady with a serious sense of responsibility. The addition of Captain Flint - uncle to the Amazons - who lives aboard his houseboat, gives rise to further mischief when he refuses initially to join in with their escapades as he is trying to write his book. Many adventures later, his book has been rescued in the dead of night by the Swallows, and he has be brought to realise that his proper place is in the middle of the general activity and goodwill is restored.

The books continue on in similar fashion with adventures on land, when for various reasons they can't sail, or are away from the Lakes altogether. They are true gems, and for sickbed reading, absolutely ideal!! There is also a lovely movie that I stumbled across once and have as a fairly low quality recording - which must be rectified. It is one of those rare times when the book comes to life exactly as imagined - the children have been wonderfully cast and it offers a couple of hours of pure escapism.

Very few of our children these days have holidays like these and I think we've lost something very important. Take away their ipods, mobile phones, computers and play stations, and too many of them no longer have the slightest idea of how to entertain themselves. We don't necessarily have lakes at our doorsteps, and the world has changed, but there's a lesson to be learned from these lovely books about what kids can do when provided with a certain amount of freedom to make their own fun.

Proud to be retro

Hiya! I'm back... Sadly, I've not been drowning under the weight of my books. I've been up to my eyes with work, including the annual conference of the Australasian Religious Press Association where, I'm very chuffed to say, the magazine I edit at work - Parish Connections - picked up an award in the category 'Best Review of Another Medium' for my review of The Blake Prize for Religious Art in last October's issue. So, I'm more than a little bit chuffed.

Having a work/catch up day at home as I have an assignment to get done and submitted by this afternoon, and all the usual just-back-from-being-away confusion to sort out. However, having traveled - the conference was in New Zealand - I was made aware again of peoples' reading habits and the growth of various electronic reading devices. Me, I had my books and knitting, but I was surrounded by iPads and Kindles. And this morning, posted by the History Teacher on Facebook, I found this and had to laugh...and yes, if reading actual books means I'm retro, then what the heck, I'm retro and proud!!

Book geek poster

Penguin Books Australia posted this on Facebook the other day - would make a fabulous t-shirt, methinks!