What's with today, today?

Last weekend two of my friends had babies! Two! One boy and one girl. I haven't met them yet but I have seen photos and I can report that they are both extremely cute. Also from all accounts both friends + their babies are healthy, which is even more important. So very exciting times.  During this week another friend managed to get in a car accident- rolling her car right over on a wet road. But she emerged unscathed through the back window. And most importantly, her gelato was safe. Which is good to hear. This weekend another friend is moving house. So much news, and thankfully all good. What a week! My life seems unexciting by comparison. Though I did get a haircut (it's very short!), get my marks back from my last assignments (passed with pretty good marks) and manage to buy a bunch of new books. That is eventful enough for me! Edited to add picture of new haircut (coincidentally I am also dressed as a flapper for Halloween in this photo)

Another rave from me here, I loved Housekeeping , by Marilynne Robinson, and have to read the rest of her books now. Marilynne Robinson is best known (I think) as the author of Gilead , as well as Home (winner of the 2009 Orange Prize). From what I have gleaned, her major themes are religion and domesticity. While I have heard about Gilead quite a bit I have not been tempted to read it, and only came to read Housekeeping after reading a review that described it as good-but-not-as-good-as- Gilead (as well as an encounter with it in a bookshop in a moment of weakness).  But I am so glad that I did, because this was such a gorgeous novel, beautifully written. It's a novel of liminality, with recurring imagery of water and light and the sense of memory and dream. All these things seem to infuse the writing style itself, as well as informing the plot, characters and settings. And what are they? Two sisters are left by their mother on their Grandmother's doorstep, and cared for b...

I want to write a review of 'Scott Pilgrim', having recently read the graphic novels after watching the movie, but it's hard to find something to say other than "I loved it!" But I will give it a go, because after all it is a rainy Sunday afternoon, Andrew is at work and if I finish reading my current book I will immediately want to write about it instead. Scott Pilgrim is a 23 Canadian slacker, in a band but without a job, sharing a bed with his gay flatmate, Wallace (who has a job and therefore foots most of the bills) and dating a 17-year-old high-school girl named Knives Chau, when Ramona Flowers (an American delivery girl) enters his dreams and he becomes infatuated and falls in love with her. In order to date her, he must break up with Knives and defeat Ramona's seven evil exes (hard to say which task he finds more difficult, though defeating the exes is more time consuming). It's a story about love, emotional baggage and growing up. A couple of mon...

There's an age-old debate about the importance or usefulness of art- why do we bother with it? This last week I happened across a couple of quotes that talk about that in different ways: " One remark that I remember in particular had to do with his identity as a craftsman: he wanted to make solid objects that were concretely useful to the people who knew them. As a craftsperson myself, I love this outlook on art: it's not some enervated "extra" of no real value to life, but a solid, utilitarian object, like a chair or a toilet. It's not that people "can't live without" art; people can live without chairs and toilets, too. But the presence of art has a concrete benefit; I appreciated Bergman's reminder of that." - Evening All Afternoon, on an interview with Ingmar Bergman "These, with keen edges and smooth curves, were forms in modern prose which the lichened colleges presented in old poetry. Even some of those antiques migh...

Childhood books part 3 When I was a kid, I tended to prefer happy endings, and as I said before I even liked books where nothing too bad happens to the main characters. In fact, I think I still do! But there are some exceptions to this rule. I think I have come to appreciate sad books, and there are a bunch of books I read as a child that helped me to do that. There are so many degrees of 'sad', so many different feeling books, but I think there is something of a theme: the books I found most sad and discomfitting as a child are about growing up and about death. Here are some that I loved even though they made me sad: The Little Prince -  Antoine de Saint-Exupéry When going through the 1,001 Books You Must Read Before You Die with some friends, we came across this book. Neither of them had read it. That made me realise that this is a book that I think everyone should have read. How can you not have read The Little Prince? As Vizzini would say: inconceivable! It confused...

I started writing this blog post back when I read the book, but life (read: assignments) got in the way. So it has been finished in a completely different style at the last minute. But look- a proper blog post! *** Kate Atkinson's Jackson Brodie books all seem very multi-layered- weaving together different characters and different narratives leading to the eventual denouement. In 'Started Early, Took My Dog', I found it a bit too fragmented and disconnected at first, but by the end she had once again succeeded in pulling the threads together and creating an intriguing mystery and solution (with some red herrings thrown in for good measure). The slow beginnings give way to a sense of urgency by the end of the book in a satisfying way. Jackson Brodie appears somewhat late in the book, trying to find out the background of a girl in New Zealand who wants to discover the identity of her birth mother. Meanwhile, as a kind of reaction against a horrific scene earlier in her lif...

A while ago I wrote a blog post on memorable first lines in novels, today I found out that American Book Review has compiled a list of the top 100! From a quick glance at the beginning a couple of the ones we talked about are in there, but there are many, many more.  I'll leave you with one that wasn't in that blog post, but is on the list, and well worthy of it too: "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. —Gabriel García Márquez,  One Hundred Years of Solitude  (1967; trans. Gregory Rabassa)" Check it out here .

Assignments are finished, summer is icumen in, and I can almost believe I'm on holidays... Time for some more reading, blog-updating and miscellaneous adventures. Oh, and work of course. Difficult to forget that one. So here's an October update, with links! The Unbearable Lightness of Being Hungry - a food blog about Sydney restaurants, with a great name. Something from xkcd to put this whole blogging thing in perspective...