Stories & Shout Outs #72

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What’s On My Mind:

Six weeks of Blue Mountains life…and I couldn’t be happier! We probably should have made the move a year ago, but of course, we weren’t quite ready back then. The year of weighing up options and to-ing and fro-ing has only made the reality of being here all the more satisfying.

It may now be the beginning of the cold winter months, but our home is cosy and warm and surprisingly I’m enjoying the cold more than I thought I ever would. I’ve been going for a medium to long walk every morning when it’s not raining, exploring the local streets, laneways, parks and coffee shops. I check out the gardens to see which plants grow and flower best up here. I’ve found five street libraries to date with a very eclectic mix of books. There is a great secondhand bookshop (that I have been frequenting for years), but best of all, there is a branch of a well-known Sydney bookshop up here too.

They currently have a full complement of staff, but I have a few casual days locked in with them and we hope this will turn into something more down the track.

What I’m Reading:

  • The Three Miss Kings | Ada Cambridge (a little behind with the latest CC spin book)
  • An African History of Africa | Zeinab Badawi
  • Caledonian Road | Andrew O’Hagan
  • Table For One | Yun Ko-eun (short stories)
  • Eileen: The Making of George Orwell | Sylvia Topp
  • Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity | Peter Attia (the bathroom book)
  • Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath | Heather Clark (this book has been on the back burner duing the moving process)

What I’m Listening To:

  • The Dylan Thomas BBC Radio Collection | introduced by Matthew Rhys

Read But Not Reviewed (Yet):

  • Earth | John Boyne
  • Quite Early One Morning (1945) | Dylan Thomas (read by Thomas himself)
  • A Very Secret Trade | Cassandra Pybus
  • Only the Astronauts | Ceridwen Dovey

New to the Pile:

Book Group Reads Coming Up:

  • June – In Bad Faith | Dassi Erlich with Ellen Whinnett (I didn’t want to read this one, so I didn’t)
  • July – The Coast | Eleanor Limprecht

This Blogging Life:

I’ve made some great progress this past month in wordpress-ising my old Blogger posts, reassessing tags and fixing broken URL’s in older posts.

But other than that, I have been rather distracted from many of my usual blogging habits by painting rooms, selecting new carpet and designing built-in wardrobes.

On My Radar:

Theory & Practice is the new book on the horizon for Michelle de Krester. Due to be published on the 29th October by Text Publishing. The Virginia Woolf connection ticks my boxes.

It’s 1986, and ‘beautiful, radical ideas’ are in the air. A young woman arrives in Melbourne to research the novels of Virginia Woolf. In bohemian St Kilda she meets artists, activists, students—and Kit. He claims to be in a ‘deconstructed’ relationship, and they become lovers. Meanwhile, her work on the Woolfmother falls into disarray.

Theory & Practice is a mesmerising account of desire and jealousy, truth and shame. It makes and unmakes fiction as we read, expanding our notion of what a novel can contain.

Michelle de Kretser, one of Australia’s most celebrated writers, bends fiction, essay and memoir into exhilarating new shapes to uncover what happens when life smashes through the boundaries of art.

I have this notion that Olivia Laing and I will get along very fine. With this belief in mind, I have accumulated several of her books where they have been gathering dust on my TBR shelves ever since. Her new book also sounds like something I’d love. Published in Australia on the 18th August by Picador, but already available in the UK.

You can read an extract here.

In 2020, Olivia Laing began to restore a walled garden in Suffolk, an overgrown Eden of unusual plants. The work drew her into an exhilarating investigation of paradise and its long association with gardens. Moving between real and imagined gardens, from Milton’s Paradise Lost to John Clare’s enclosure elegies, from a wartime sanctuary in Italy to a grotesque aristocratic pleasure ground funded by slavery, Laing interrogates the sometimes shocking cost of making paradise on earth.

But the story of the garden doesn’t always enact larger patterns of privilege and exclusion. It’s also a place of rebel outposts and communal dreams. From the improbable queer utopia conjured by Derek Jarman on the beach at Dungeness to the fertile vision of a common Eden propagated by William Morris, new modes of living can and have been attempted amidst the flower beds, experiments that could prove vital in the coming era of climate change.

The result is a beautiful and exacting account of the abundant pleasures and possibilities of gardens: not as a place to hide from the world but as a site of encounter and discovery, bee-loud and pollen-laden.

Shout Outs:

Until next time, stay safe and happy reading!

This post was written in the area we now call the Blue Mountains within the Ngurra [country] of the Dharug and Gundungurra peoples. This Reading Life recognises the continuous connection to Country, community and culture of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. They are the traditional custodians of the lands, seas, and skies on which we live and they are this nations first storytellers.

Published by This Reading Life

14 thoughts on “Stories & Shout Outs #72”

  1. It’s fun moving into a new place and exploring new surrounds, isn’t it. Of course, I’m living in the same city, but still, while we knew where we are now living pretty well as “visitors” from another area of Canberra, it is a different proposition when we are living here. And we are enjoying getting to know it as insiders.

    I can understand your not wanting to read that In bad faith book. I feel I’ve seen enough on the media. I don’t really need to know more. I hope you enjoy The coast though. Limprecht finds some interesting aspects of our history and tells good stories I think.

    Good on you for negotiating some hours of work with the local bookshop. How much work do you want to do?

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    1. Yes, I love exploring my new area, even though we’ve been coming and going for nearly a decade, it’s different once you know you are a proper local!

      I’m very happy with casual work right now Sue – I’m loving having time to ‘nest’ properly, rearranging cupboards and shelves, pruning a shrub here and there, I even rediscovered my old half-finished cross stitch work.

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  2. Congrats on the casual book gig! That’s great news.

    And pleased to hear you are settling in well. I still remember the excitement of moving to Freo in the dead of winter from London, not knowing a soul and trying to find my feet. It was stressful finding somewhere to live as well as a job, and trying to explain to everyone I was Australian even though I sounded like a Pom 🥴😆 But I loved exploring the streets on foot, discovering all the beautiful beaches within walking distance and venturing into Perth CBD on the train. Hard to believe it was five years ago which feels like both a lifetime and no time at all.

    BTW, To Die in Spring is an AMAZING book!

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    1. One of my reps gave me a farewell book stash of some of his favourite books – that was one of them – although I may have to cover up the cover to read it – it’s very disconcerting.

      There are not that many streets in our village, but it will still take me a while to walk them all. After that, we will take on the other villages around us 😀

      My mission is visit ALL the cafes and all the pubs (and all the bookshops) in the mountains eventually!

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  4. Having fallen in love with My Brilliant Career when I was in my teens, I would be interested in hearing how you like Her Brilliant Career. I’m also interested in how you like The Red Comet–Sylvia Plath fascinates me, like so many others.

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  5. LOL I bet you found the Dutton Literature of Australia in your secondhand bookshop or a street library. I have had my copy with the exact same cover since I was at uni. It really is an excellent reference book but also interesting to read chapter by chapter.

    Prompted by New to the Pile, I just read a review of Open Throat at the Guardian. It sounds like a wild ride, I look forward to reading your thoughts.

    I read a review of To Die in Spring too, but I’m not in the mood for brutal. ATM I’m reading Brotherless Night which just won the Women’s Prize and I’m hoping it doesn’t go on to describe the atrocities of the Sri Lankan Civil War in too much vivid detail…

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    1. Both Open Throat and To Die in Spring were gifted to me by one of my reps when I left Sydney; they were two of his favourite reads. But, yes, I think I will have to be in the right frame of mind when I decide to read them.

      And, yes, the Dutton was in one of the street libraries 🙂

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