The arrivals hall at Vienna airport was so quiet that Lorna had no difficulty picking her out, even though they had never met before. It's a bit of a pity when the first book reviewed for a brand new year turns out to be one of those just okay books. I thoroughly enjoyed Middle England … Continue reading Bournville | Jonathan Coe #UKfiction
Opening Lines: Like many others, I did not see it coming. But William is a scientist, and he saw it coming; he saw it sooner than I did, is what I mean. Like many others, I did not see another Lucy book coming! But, in the end, I was glad. Lucy by the Sea brings … Continue reading Lucy by the Sea | Elizabeth Strout #USAfiction
Epigraphs (3): (1) I very rarely think either of my past or my future, but the moment that one contemplates writing an autobiography...one is forced to regard oneself as an entity carried along for a brief period in the stream of time, emerging at a particular moment from darkness and nothingness and shortly to disappear … Continue reading This Devastating Fever | Sophie Cunningham #AWWfiction
I didn't think my Christmas post would be another Covid Chronicles update. However, our planned family Christmas gathering at our holiday home in the mountains quickly went pear-shaped on Christmas Eve when B21 woke up feeling unwell. A rapid antigen test (RAT) came up positive. He went off to a private clinic to try and … Continue reading So, this is Christmas: The Covid Chronicles #15
Little did I know when I started posting these chronicles of our times back in March last year, that I would still be doing so nearly two years later. It was December 2019 when we first started hearing about a nasty flu virus in Wuhan in China (although apparently our governments had been talking about … Continue reading The Covid Chronicles #14
It has been a long winter of Covid lockdowns in Sydney and Melbourne. The regional areas of both NSW and Victoria have moved in and out of lockdown as their numbers fluctuated, but Sydney and Melbourne, and now Canberra, have borne the brunt of the Delta variant. Writing a Covid Chronicle update has been the … Continue reading The Covid Chronicles #13
It has been a very frustrating week in Sydney as we have watched the latest Covid-19 outbreak take hold. A few factors this time around seem to have caught Health and Government officials by surprise somehow. We all know there will be the occasional leak from hotel quarantine. That's another story. (Poor Queensland and NT … Continue reading The Covid Chronicles #12
Unbelievably, it is a year since our lives were changed by Covid-19. This time, last year, Mr Books and I were on a driving tour of the South Australian wineries. Covid-19 was dominating the news but very few restrictions were in place. We were being admonished to wash our hands, use sanitiser and not touch … Continue reading The Covid Chronicles #11
I started this post on the 27th January to commemorate/commiserate the one year anniversary of the first confirmed Covid-19 case in Australia. But these posts always take me longer to write than I think they will. The last Covid Chronicles was in mid December, just as the Northern Beaches cluster was starting. Over the Christmas/NY … Continue reading The Covid Chronicles #10
I had no idea that Bill Hayes was working on another scenes of New York book that would focus on the March-April Covid-19 lockdown of 2020. If I'd known, I may have experienced fewer angsty days of my own, knowing that Bill was going to somehow make it all right! It’s a little like losing … Continue reading How We Live Now: Scenes from the Pandemic | Bill Hayes #USAnonfiction
I cannot believe the last time I sat down to write a Covid Chronicle was back in July. Melbourne was at the beginning of it's second wave, while the rest of the country held it's collective breath. Would the outbreak spread? Would we all have to go into another lockdown? Numbers steadily increased around … Continue reading The Covid Chronicles #9
2020 was the year of many things. Some planned and expected, like the War and Peace chapter-a-day readalong. But many things unexpected and impossible to plan for as well. Who knew that Plague-Lit would become a thing? Or that I would waste one whole perfectly good reading month by feeling weird and distracted about a certain … Continue reading 2021 Here We Come!
This slim volume of essays grabbed my attention thanks to it's Covid-related lockdown content. Lately, I've been reading a number of fiction titles about plagues and epidemics (see below). This was the first one, however, that considered our current Covid situation. I've been meaning to read something by Zadie Smith, ever since 2000 and White Teeth, … Continue reading Intimations: Six Essays | Zadie Smith #USANonFiction
Photo by Luca Upper on UnsplashDuring a long road trip yesterday, my mind eventually wandered off into book land. One book in particular, has been on my mind a lot lately - A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles. At work, in the past month or so, I've been asked more and more for books … Continue reading Books that Delight
Nearly two months ago, I wrote my last Covid Chronicles #7. In Australia, our curve had flattened, lockdown conditions had been lifted and our only new cases of coronavirus came from international travellers. All these travellers went into a mandatory 2-week government-controlled quarantine in various hotels around Sydney and Melbourne, before being allowed back out into the … Continue reading The Covid Chronicles #8
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