This will hurt me...

Late afternoon swim. Little Howrah Beach. January 2014. I think that I owe you a Q and A. How about the Summertime meme ? 1.) What first tells you that Summer is here? The girls are showing a lot more of their thighs. 2.) Name your five of your favourite distinctively Summer habits or customs. Swimming, snorkelling, evening runs, early-morning walks and fruit platters. 3.) What is your favourite smell of Summer? The beach. 4.) What is your favourite taste of Summer? Icy poles. 5.) Favourite Summer memory? Swimming during intense electoral storms. 6.) Extreme heat or extreme cold? Which would you choose and why? Hot hot hot! 7.) What books do you plan to read for the season? Good books! 8.) What is your favourite part of summer? Anything involving the water. 9.) What's your favourite quintessentially summer food? Least favourite? Fresh berries are my favourite. I don’t usually eat what I don’t like. 10.) Best beverage to beat the summer heat:...

Just two lads hanging out on an old boiler. I will have to get back to these parts more regularly.

Camp Falls, Tasman National Park, the Tasman Peninsula. October 2013. A Greyhound of a Girl , Roddy Doyle: This is the first of Roddy Dolye’s books that I’ve read that he’s written for younger readers. In many respects it is ‘typical Doyle’, but with a distinctly softer edge in terms of language and overall ambiance. That said, the narrative voice is distinctly Irish and I didn’t find the change undermined my enjoyment of the novel. Given the central themes of death, ageing and regret, the author does a great job of communicating a sense of tenderness and understanding without resorting to condescension or the hackneyed metaphors often seen in this kind of thing. Essentially a tale of love and death across four generations of women in one family, the blurb sums it up nicely: "One of them is dead, one of them is dying, one of them is driving, and one of them is just starting out". I enjoyed it, you might too. Recommended. C+.

Boat alone. The Tasman National Park, Tasmania. October 2013. We Have Always Lived in the Castle , Shirley Jackson: This is a dark little book that – like a lot of Shirley Jackson’s work – explores the idea of persecution of people who are ‘different’. It is a tricky read full of strangeness and goings on where the moral lines are not clear and the narrator clearly unreliable and quite a bit unstable. Despite a multiplying sense of unease and malevolence, the book also explores concepts of love and devotion. Immensely macabre elements are treated as unremarkable; the sense of agoraphobia is virtually unrelenting. Yet the language is deceptively simple, and the almost dreamlike ‘otherness’ both real and imagined. Together, social class and actions in the past divide the family at the centre of the book and the narrow-minded townsfolk, but just how strange and different the sisters are is beyond them. Of course, we the reader have an insight that they do not, and the type of horro...

Things are looking up. The corner of Campbell and Liverpool Streets, Hobart. September 2013. A long-delayed Q and A stolen again from Sunday Stealing. This time, Meme 325 ! Something that’s holding you back from achieving your dreams: Life! Something you think you could win an award for: Irritability. Something you fear more than anything: Caring what people think. Something you wish people would understand: That life would be much easier if they were a little nicer to each other. Something that keeps you going everyday: The promise of sleep. Something amazing that happened last Summer: Henry and I saw a foot-long weedy sea dragon while snorkelling at Opossum Bay. We were less than a metre away for a good couple of minutes. Something you hate that people say: The casual use of the word ‘bogun’ in work contexts. Something you refuse to pay money for: Friendship. Something you wish you could have told that person that you never saw again:...

Henry at work. Geilston Bay. September 2013. The Winter Queen , Boris Akunin: A story of murder, suicide, deception and disguise that hurtles through pre-revolutionary Tsarist Russia. Crafted with care, Akunin weaves some beautiful expression and a series of exotic historical settings - primarily Moscow, Saint Petersburg and a quick jaunt to the seedier side of London in the mid-1870s - together with a wonderful series of well developed characters that really does feel like Tolstoy tackling a murder mystery. I loved it. A .

The view from the top. The summit of Mount Wellington. September 2013. 100 Essential Things You Didn't Know You Didn't Know , John D. Barrow: This book explores one hundred conundrums, questions and queries through the lens of mathematics. The book runs through infinite monkeys banging out Shakespearean plays on typewriters, your odds of winning the lottery, horse races, divorce, Google, game theory, infinity and chaos; there is much to enjoy here even if Maths is something other than your strong point. While the book is (happily) not dumbed down at all, it remains jammed to the brim with equations sure to make you squirm. C+ . Life at the top. The summit of Mount Wellington. September 2013.