This will hurt me...

Looking back to Manarola, the path from Manarola to Corniglia, Cinque Terre National Park, April 2017. So I managed to read 112 books for 2019. Somewhat ahead of my goal of 80 , and about 110 more than TV shows that I saw. The highlights? Well, I gave five stars to the following: Jesmyn Ward's Salvage the Bones (dogfighting and Hurricane Katrina) Golden Boys by Sonya Hartnett (a wonderfully dark 1980s Aussie suburban coming of age novel) Jarett Kobek's blistering I Hate the Internet (Vonnegut for the post-ironic age) Andreï Makine's dreamlike The Archipelago of Another Life (a chase across the Siberian taiga at the tail-end of Stalin's rule);  Żanna Słoniowska's complex The House with the Stained-Glass Window (a wonderfully translated cross-cultural, multi-generational tale of the women in one particular family in Lviv);  This Is Not a Novel by Jennifer Johnston (an original novel framed around fragments of memory and the ways with which parent...

Lunch. Geilston Bay. September 2016. So, as part of the 2016 Goodreads Challenge , it turns out that I read a total of 128 books In the interest of sharing good novels, here are the best books that I read in 2016! Absent without Leave , Heinrich Böll All the Pretty Horses , Cormac McCarthy Coraline , Neil Gaiman Days Without End , Sebastian Barry Grief Is the Thing with Feathers , Max Porter How I Escaped My Certain Fate , Stewart Lee Mothering Sunday , Graham Swift Pop. 1280 , Jim Thompson Roseanna , Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö The Dig , Cynan Jones The Iron Man , Ted Hughes The Man Who Went Up in Smoke , Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö The North Water , Ian McGuire The Search Warrant , Patrick Modiano

Words on a page. Battery Point (walking to work). June 2013. The best thing about reading books while walking is reading books. And walking. The Wombat , Ogden Nash The wombat lives across the seas, Among the far Antipodes. He may exist on nuts and berries, Or then again, on missionaries; His distant habitat precludes Conclusive knowledge of his moods, But I would not engage the wombat In any form of mortal combat.

What are you doing Henry?

Wise words. State Library of Tasmania, Murray Street, Hobart. February 2012. Two contemporary European novels this week, one Norwegian and one French. Professor Andersen’s Night by Dag Solstad is an odd little existentialist novel that explores the breakdown of the titular literary academic. The once radical Professor Andersen is now divorced, middle-aged and alone. Moreover, the distinguished Ibsen scholar believes that he has witnessed a murder on Christmas Eve which sparks a crises of self and purpose. Despite the centrality of the murder and the vivid Oslo (and Trondheim) setting, this one is most definitely not a slice of Nordic noir. Long, rambling sentences of interior monologue follow the contortions of an academic mind defying rational intentions. The book is a little bit of a grind, as the central character is designed to be unlikable. The Professor’s crisis stems from the subtle realisation (and fear) of the pointlessness of his career. Indeed, underneath it all his whole e...

Not a word of a lie: Henry wrote every single letter himself.

Chucksomeletterstogetherandyougetsomewordseventually. Federation Square, Melbourne. April 2011 Words are letters.Lots of letters. Sometime not so many letters. You can't have words without letters.You can make letters from lettuce to make words, but cabbage is better. I like cabbage. Yum. Sowhatdoesitsay? Federation Square, Melbourne. April 2011

I count five Mr Men books on his lap. Care to hazard a guess as to who feature?

Sir John Franklin looks up towards a nest of bureaucrats no doubt readying the flak brigades as a State election looms. Franklin was Governor of Van Diemen's Land from 1836 to 1843. It is rather ironic that he spends his days staring at a building filled with civil servants, as they were the ones who eventually got him sacked for the ludicrous ideas of around incorporating more humane elements through reform in the penal colony. There's been a lot of talk about Franklin recently, which leads me effortlessly into Theme Thursday , and my advice of treating everything you READ with a critical eye. For instance, if you READ the inscription beneath Franklin (through the seagull poo), you'll find the fact recorded that he " discovered " the Northwest Passage. This, of course, is nonsense. He did disappear (and die eventually, of course), while attempting to chart and navigate a section of the Northwest Passage. Indeed, the entire crew of the expedition succumbed to sta...

Ez and Henry recreated the landings at Omaha Beach when we were in Burnie (from a German perspective). You can see that there is not a lot of room in that pillbox for more troops. Coincidently, I am currently reading Antony Beevor's D-Day , and it feels like the definitive work. Check it out.

Here is but one of the entries to the Battery Point Park Ezra Leo Fitzgerald McCracken Psychotropical Brain Explosion . It is here that I recline and read my post-Soviet black comedies in the (relative) peace and quiet of the lunch break. We're currently debating whether or not to attempt a second run to the Salmon Ponds this morning. Or perhaps we will stick to finding a beach and flying our kites. Decisions, decisions.

Concrete, bricks, leaves, grass, trees... We've got the makings of a town here! This photo was taken down near the blubber pots here on Salamanca Lawns. As canny readers will have already noted (see the "Currently Reading" section on the side bar), I am very much enjoying Chinua Achebe's thoroughly excellent Things Fall Apart , years later than I first intended! If you've not already, pick it up. Aside from a general Molly Meldrum-esque "do yourself a favour" [and doesn't that pinpoint me in cultural, geographical and temporal place?] I thought it would be nice to share a thought that resonated with me from the text: "No matter how prosperous a man was, if he was unable to rule his women and his children (and especially his women) he was not really a man. He was like the man in the song who had ten and one wives and not enough soup for his foo-foo ." On that score, it shames me to say that I am not much a man! It's a great read thoug...

Here is the little bloke holding firm in his stronghold despite all Henry could throw at him. We have spent the last week wargaming, roll playing the battle of Kursk - although Henry utilised a rather unique variation of Alexander's legendary feint at Gaugamela. Ez is no Darius though, and stood his ground repelling well. It ended in a stalemate and everybody celebrated with soy ice cream (not as bad as it sounds). On another note, I was stuck reading Dr Suess this evening again ( One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish ). I would just like to restate how ordinary Suess is. Mediocre - at best - art work; non-existent plot; no character arc; hell, the dude is reaching for a rhyme and feels free to make up words, yet the bugger still can't be bothered to ensure that it scans! Has he even heard of metre? No, Dr Suess is rubbish! From here on in, we'll be sticking to Henry Miller before bed.

I couldn't decide between these two pictures, so I've posted both. Henry and Ezra are already book addicts . In fact, Henry churns through no less than ten a day, usually far more . Indeed, I am starting to worry that we will run out of books to read at the State Library. I'm even trying to get Henry into the Russians, as some of those weighty tomes should slow him down long enough to allow all those authors out there to rush out more books .

I was pleasantly surprised to see this fellow stencilled outside of Rosny library yesterday. I am not the biggest fan of graffiti , but can tolerate it if it looks halfway decent. In this way, I quite like some of the complex stencilling that appears from time to time around Hobart and its environs. Even better when some of my fondest memories as a young ‘un involve the adventures of the heroic Asterix and his band of hardy Gauls. I will confess to having some Roman sympathies, and if I am truly honest, I was always more of an Obelix-man, due to my terribly unreasonable and unfair distaste for unusually short men. That said, I have read every one of Goscinny and Uderzo’s comics. I also look forward to a time when Henry and Ezra will get into them (and thus give me to unashamedly re-read them all). If you’ve not given them a go, and don’t mind some of the anti-Belgian humour, visit the local library and check them out!

As a lover of reading, and a regular user of the Tasmanian public library system , I have been fascinated by this post “ Do Pakistanis Read? (and the missing libraries of Pakistan) ” on the excellent All Things Pakistan website. It got me thinking, what is the state of public libraries in other countries? I really don’t know. Similarly, I am not really aware of the varieties of cultural attitudes to reading. So I decided to ask anyone visiting this blog to let me know, do you personally use libraries? Do you think that there is an easily defined attitude towards reading in your particular country? I would love to know.

A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army 1941–1945, Anthony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova. Soviet novelist Vasily Grossman (1905-64) worked as a journalist and kept notebooks throughout both the German invasion of Soviet territory, and the subsequent Soviet liberation and race to Berlin. Such practices were strictly forbidden (not to mention highly dangerous) under Stalin, and Grossman's jottings about the events he bore witness to thus represent a extraordinary testimony of the attitudes and conditions experienced by both the Red Army soldier and Soviet citizens more generally. Writing for Красной Звезды ( Krasnaya Zvezda , ‘The Red Star’), the Red Army's official newspaper, Grossman’s honest and frank character observations of both military and civilian life during both the disastrous retreat of 1941, the fierce battle for Stalingrad and the genocide the subsequent Soviet advances revealed. Antony Beevor – for mine the foremost writer of ‘humanist’ military histories ...