#blog12daysxmas Day 7 Mary Stewart

As I predicted earlier in the week I was certainly starting a Mary Stewart binge. That's what Christmas is really about: long, hot days indulging in reading. I moved on to her third Greek one, This rough magic set in Corfu. I enjoyed the suspense and the Greek flavour of it. I marvel at how she can keep the feeling of suspense up even though the reader knows that there will be a cosy ending. But she is a mistress of this. 

After finishing that I was at a loss but a look at a list of Stewart's books in chronological order sent me back to her first, Thunder on the right. If I had read it before, I had no memory of the plot or the book generally and probably won't be going back to it soon. A good first effort that shows promise? A young former colleague of mine was discouraged by being told something similar on NYE about her first attempt at a novel but maybe she should take heart about my comments here about Mary Stewart in the context of Stewart's long writing career. Every writer has to start somewhere.

#blog12daysxmas Day 4 The Moonspinners

As I predicted yesterday, my Mary Stewart reading has become a binge on her novels set in Greece:). So I downloaded The Moonspinners and started reading her Cretan tale published in 1962. Again, this novel is set in the post-war era in Greece and romance and suspense are married in a story of British visitors to the Crete of that era. 

This Rough Magic may well follow and take me into Shakespeare as well as the Ionian islands.

#blog12daysxmas Day 3 My brother Michael

On the third day of Christmas I finally finished Mary Stewart's My brother Michael. I can't remember how many times I have read this title before, but I remember that this time I started reading it months and months ago when I was thinking about our trip to Delphi in May 2013. 

Whilst I had my progress recorded on Goodreads from then, I really had to start it again this time. Stewart's writing just pours out Greece to me and was obviously written by someone who knew Greece well and loved it. 

The author, Mary Stewart, who was born in 1916, died this May aged 97 when I was in fact in Athens doing a Greek course at the Athens Centre. My brother Michael was published in 1959 and the Greece she describes is very much one in the aftermath of World War II and the subsequent civil war in Greece. 

Stewart is probably best known for her Merlin books but her Greek ones are not surprisingly my favourites. I may just be starting a binge.

#blog12daysxmas Day 2 Ikaria

I have posted before about the pleasures of books for Christmas:) I love cook books and cooking and I love Greece and things Greek. So the selection of Diane Kochilas' latest book, Ikaria, as a Christmas present for me was a wise choice by my sister. 

I have a couple of Kochilas' other books which make great reading - and have great recipes too. This one is no exception and focuses on food from the island of Ikaria in the east Aegean. Kochilas was born and bred in New York City but her cultural heritage was Ikarian as her father had emigrated from there to the USA in 1937. 

I have only dipped into this book as yet but know I am going to enjoy reading about the history of the island and its food as well as enjoying the evocative photos. 

Day 2 of the 12 days of Xmas was again filled with much eating and drinking and socializing (this time for Neville's birthday), but at least I am doing a bit of blogging and reading today and hopefully will meet my target of 10k steps:) as well as making progress on several of the books I am reading. Eating, drinking, socializing, reading, walking: these are many of my favourite things.

#blog12daysxmas Day 1 My present to me

I signed up to do #blog12daysxmas again and here I am a day behind already. This year I knew it was going to be a struggle as I faced Christmas Day still having no Telstra land connections. So that means no landline phone and NO INTERNET. 

My only connection with the world and online community is via my mobile. It is now over a fortnight since I have been in this situation and it is distressing. However, I will try to do some short blogposts via the Blogger iphone app. 

That brings me to the real topic of my post, namely my Christmas present to me. All my life I have really associated Christmas with being given books. As time has gone by, I have got fewer books and that is probably a good thing for my book-filled house. However, I always get a few and they will feature in a few of my posts.

The first one I want to talk about is my own present to me. A couple of days before Christmas I was heading to Readings in Carlton to collect some books I had waiting for me for Christmas presents. On a whim I checked their online catalogue to see if they had a book that I was interested in and joy!  They had a copy at Carlton where I was headed.

The book is Adrienne Mayor's The Amazons  which was published by Princeton University Press in 2014. This is a great and wide-ranging investigation into Amazons in antiquity. I had known about the research for this book for some time as I am part of a Facebook group that Adrienne Mayor set up to crowd-source information on Amazon-related topics. This has been a fascinating group to be part of and an example of the great use that social media can be put to.

I delved into Mayor's book the day I bought it and am really enjoying it. It is the sort of book that one can either dip into or read straight through. I have been doing both and gaining great enjoyment. I am so glad that on a whim I bought it as my Christmas present to me.

#blog12daysxmas Day 10 Reading Challenge 2012

As in 2010 and in 2011, in 2012 I set myself the challenge of reading 52 books.  This challenge was set in Goodreads and monitored in their Challenge section and in my read-2012 shelf.  This was the cause of some confusion for a while as there were discrepancies.  It took me a while to realize that the reason for that was my rereads.  If I reread a title and marked it as read in the Goodreads app, it didn't go down as part of my challenge reading as the original reading date stood.  I realized that I could go into the website and manually change it but that was too much like work. Ultimately I decided to go with the items in my read-2012 shelf (once I had moved a few unfinished ones to the new read-2013 shelf).

The other bit that was decidedly like work and one of the causes for delay in posting this account was that at the end of 2012 I had outstanding three read books which were not on Goodreads and which I had to catalogue manually, download an image etc.  I finally did that this morning.  So....

DRUMROLL!

I certainly met my 2012 challenge of reading 52 books.  I documented on Goodreads a total of 70 books as having been read in 2012.  Of these 18 were non-fiction: cooking, travel, biography and history. And the remaining 62, not surprisingly were fiction, predominantly crime fiction and crime fiction written by women.  During the year as in other years I reread books, this year focusing on Ngaio Marsh (though I didn't read her complete oeuvre), and, triggered by the Miss Phryne Fisher TV series, on Kerry Greenwood whose Phryne series and Corinna series I reread.  The others were new or recent publications such as those by Carolyn Morwood and Sulari Gentill.

 

So I am happy with this. I am amazed at people who can read 366 books but I don't want to emulate that.  I read for enjoyment and, if it starts being a race, I will stop enjoying it.  I predominantly use Goodreads to document my reading through the year and know that there are times such as when blobbing through heatwaves or when I am laid low in my sickbed that I binge-read and also that there are other times when I am so busy with other stuff that little book reading gets done. So be it.

So 2013 is ahead of me and I have again set myself the challenge of 52 books for the year.  I am already up to 5 books on the 9 January 2013 and it will be 6 shortly.  January heatwave binge mode is the reason and no doubt the numbers will drop off after the weather changes.

#blog12daysxmas Day 7 Flickr Friday Photos 2012

Nine Tailors 52/53/3, a photo by Hecuba's Story on Flickr.

Well today I posted my final photo in the Flickr Friday Photos 2012 Challenge and I thought it would be interesting to look back and see how many of my photos related to books, reading and by extension libraries.

And the answer is not very many! The challenge ran for 53 weeks and we posted three photos a week on a set theme. I just posted my last one today under the final theme of "Bells" and used the image of Dorothy L Sayers' great crime fiction novel Nine tailors.  A couple of weeks back I posted an image of School Friend Annual 1964 under the theme of "Friends".

In week 41 under the theme of "Chairs" there were three photographs of chairs in Camberwell Library.  Does this count?  In week 31 under the theme of "Numbers" I posted the Jerusalem Bible open at the Book of Numbers and a Latin missal featured under the theme of "Ceremonies" in week 24. For "Rainbows" in week 16 the Coles Funny Picture Books were an obvious choice

Hai Bao, the mascot of the Shanghai Expo, was photographed with the Lonely Planet Shanghai for the theme of "Eyes" in week 8.  And the theme for week 7 was "Reading" so that focused me in a bit and the three photos were: Dave O'Neil & PD Martin at the Boroondara launch of the National Year of Reading, the Baker & Taylor bag I got at VALA2012 and Boroondara National Year of Reading t-shirt and flyers. The week before that was VALA but as the theme was "Light" I only managed to have one of the three photos on books and libraries: Peter Stansfield as a shining light amongst the luminaries of public libraries.  And that's it!

So that means that out of the159 photos I posted there were only 13  photos which had a (sometimes very loose) connection to books, writing and libraries.  I think I am quite surprised by this but I will have to ponder what it means.  I always feel that books, writing and libraries are integral to my life and they are.  But maybe one of the reasons I really like these Flickr challenges is that they take me into other worlds. With fp2012 the theme focus may have contributed, but it is hard to imagine not being able to find a book relating to each of the themes.  When I review my 366 photos for the 2012 Photo A Day Challenge which is unthemed I will be keen to see if that makes a difference.