T2: the book #blog12daysxmas Day 5

T2 has been an amazing Melbourne success story for co-founder, Maryanne Shearer. Originally operating from a shop in Brunswick Street Fitzroy with no staff and the founders' mothers out the back packing tea, T2 is now multinational with 70+ shops in Australia, New Zealand, UK and USA, an online store and over 3000 wholesale customers.

T2 set out to create passionate tea-drinkers amongst a younger generation. Today their iconic orange tea boxes are to be found everywhere. But how did it start and what is their story? This book has the answers to those questions as well a lot of information about the history of tea, where it is grown, different processing methods and different traditions assocated with tea drinking. 

The attractively produced Lantern book (a Penguin imprint) is well worth a read if you are interested in the history of your T2.

The Mediterranean diet cookbook #blog12daysxmas Day 3

I wasn't quite sure what to think when I opened a Christmas present and saw this book offering to "prevent heart disease and diabetes, and promote sustainable weight loss". However, it soon transpired that I had been given it as a present because it was basically a Greek cookbook and my brother had bought it for me because it combined two loves of mine: Greece and cooking! I can't complain about that.

And indeed it does. Author Catherine Itsiopoulos does provide an introduction about the so-called Mediterannean diet including the dietary differences in Mediterranean countries. All of that provides an interesting context for the eighty recipes included. 

The recipes are called "Traditional Mediterranean" but as befits someone of the author's background they are mainly Greek with a few Italian interspersed. They are divided into seven chapters: Breakfast and Snacks, Dips and Mezedes, Legumes, Vegetables and Fasting Foods, Soups and Salads, Main Dishes, Fish and Seafood, Biscuits and Sweets. 

There are lots of old favourites here plus some with different twists such as deconstructed moussaka. I have been enjoying reading the book and will enjoy trying out some of her cooking ideas.

Miss Phryne Fisher #blog12daysxmas Day 2

I am a Phryne Fisher tragic and have read and reread Kerry Greenwood's great series of crime novels many times. I love the settings and costumes and had great fun earlier in the year at the costume exhibition at Ripponlea.

So how lucky was I to get as one of my Christmas presents from my niece a Miss Phryne Fisher teapot! I'll enjoy drinking tea made in it while I catch up with some crime fiction.

Christmas books! #blog12daysxmas Day 1

I have often blogged about my lifelong pleasure in receiving books as presents for Christmas. This year will be no exception as I was the fortunate recipient of four p-books as well as a bookmark!

The four books are: Deborah Levy: Things I don't want to know (Penguin), Breaking out: memories of Melbourne in the 1970s (Hale & Iremonger), Maryanne Shearer: T2 the book (Lantern), and Catherine Itsiopoulos: The Mediterranean diet cookbook (Pan Macmillan).

Stay tuned for more about these over coming days as I read them!

#blog12daysxmas Day 10 Nine coaches waiting

On the tenth day of Christmas I hunkered down at home in the second day of near 40 heat and read: my second title for 2015. Not surprisingly I continued on my binge and it was another Mary Stewart.

Reviews I read referred to this title, Nine Coaches Waiting, as a mix of Jane Eyre and Rebecca meets Georgette Heyer. How could that mixture lose? It certainly held me enthralled through a ghastly Melbourne summer's day.

Where will my binge lead me next?

#blog12daysxmas Day 9 Goodreads 2015

Serendipitously, not long today after I had posted yesterday's post in which I speculated about what reading targets I would set for 2015, almost on cue I got an email from Goodreads suggesting I might like to set a 2015 target!  So I jumped onto their site and now I am locked into 52 titles for 2015.

And this evening I completed my first title, Mary Stewart's Gabriel Hounds, which I started reading as part of my post Christmas Mary Stewart binge. It was certainly just the thing for hunkering down in our near 40c temperature today. It's still in the 30s and not getting down to the low, 28c, until the morning. So I can predict more Mary Stewart reading overnight.

Which will I choose?

#blog12daysxmas Day 8 Goodreads 2014

As it's New Year's Day, it is time to start tallying up how I went in the challenges I set myself in early 2014. For reading i.e. Goodreads I set myself the modest challenge of reading or re-reading 52 titles in 2014, as I have done since I first started using Goodreads. 

You can see from the screen dump that I easily met this challenge and my reading totalled 104 titles in 2014. That's quite an increase over the 76 I totalled in 2013. So I am pleased with that.

How did you go in your reading challenges? Were they too high or too low? Despite my regularly exceeding my target in recent years, I shall probably still keep it at 52 for 2015. I think a title a week is a fine target and reading needs to be a pleasure not a chore. 

#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.

#blog12daysxmas Day 6 Reading targets

There has been a bit of discussion during the week on Twitter about setting reading targets.  I have done that on Goodreads the last couple of years.  But I have been modest in my goals and both years I set it at 52 books, i.e. my aim was to read at least one book a week. I am gobsmacked at people who can set a target of 366 books, or a book a day.   Really my aim was to document my reading and prove to myself that I actually do still read stuff even if sometimes I have felt that I had lost the art of recreational reading amidst lots of other necessary reading.

The first year I documented my reading on Goodreads in 2010 I read 62 books (or 10 above my target) and last year 2011 I read 89 (or 37 above my target).  What will happen in 2012?  Well, despite the extra day provided by the leap year I won't be anywhere near the 89 of last year. My "read 2012" folder on Goodreads stands at 69 today BUT of these seven are books that I still have in my "currently reading" folder.  Am I really going to finish these seven books before midnight tomorrow?  I doubt it.  So stay tuned!  My total for 2012 will be at least 62, so similar to 2010. But who knows? Forbidden fruit is one of those on the list.  It's a reread but I count rereads!!

#blog12daysxmas Day 3 When we were kittens

Day 3 of Christmas brought me a parcel at the Post Office which contained:  When we were kittens!  This book, published by Clan Destine Press, is the second volume of the adventures of Dougal whose story was first to be found in Dougal's diary, also published by Clan Destine Press.  So this is the sequel we have been waiting for!

After a shaky start in life, Dougal fetched up at Lort Smith Animal Hospital with his foster-sister Shadow.  But now they both live at the Seddon Found Cats Home with Man and Woman and Miss Belladonna the Black, who as the earthly representative of Basht regally supervises operations from her jeweled throne. The story of Dougal and Shadow's initiations at Seddon were narrated in Dougal's diary.  Now Man aka David Greagg who was Dougal's amanuensis for the first book has shadow-written (yes, I know it really should be Dougal-written) a second volume with Dougal.

Dougal has his own website here where you can find out all about him, Shadow, Belladonna, Man and Woman and join Dougal's fanclub.  Dougal also has a presence on Facebook under the Gaidhlig name of Dubh Geal. So join him there if you would like to converse.

As for me, I am off to do a quick read of When we were kittens before Xena gets any ideas from it!

#blog12daysxmas Day 1 Christmas books

 

It is true to say that ever since I was very little one of the real joys for me at Christmas was the books that I got for presents. For years they were Enid Blytons or Agatha Christies or Georgette Heyers.  Fortunately the prolific outputs of these writers allowed Father Christmas and other gift-givers ample scope. In more recent years, whilst the thrill of getting new books for Christmas has never waned, it is fair to say that the number of books I have received has waxed and waned considerably.

So what was Christmas 2012 like?  Well, I can report that it was a good year!  Despite the fact that many of us have moved from giving each other physical presents and choose instead to donate to Oxfam or the like, this year I got six shiny new books! And while I was buying presents for others, I just happened to buy myself another two.  So that makes eight new books for Christmas to my way of thinking.

So what are the shiny new books that I have waiting for my summer reading?  My friend Pat gave me Victoria Hislop's The thread. The main character in this novel is Thessaloniki and the book appears to marry my loves of Greece and family history.  The foodies' guide to Melbourne and Maureen McCarthy's The convent were gifts from Penny and Mark.  The former focuses on my interests in food and cooking and eating and the latter explores the past of the Abbotsford Convent in a fictional setting but based on true stories.  This taps into my interests in the local history of Collingwood and the history of the Catholic church and its institutions in Victoria.

"This book is all about women" proclaims the back cover of Sunscreen and lipstick, a collection of short stories by Australian women that Marg and TK sent me, drawing on their knowledge of my interest in Australian women's writing. And the other two goes back to the theme of food.  Clarissa Dickson Wright's A History of English food takes me right back to the Two Fat Ladies series.  I imagine that I will never want to experiment with any of the food she talks about but I will enjoy her inimitable style. And the other one? A new Stephanie!  It's the Stephanie Alexander book in the Lantern Cookery Classics. I am not sure how many of the recipes are new and how many have appeared in her other tomes but I will enjoy reading it.

The other two books that I just happened to buy during Christmas shopping?  My interest in Robert Gibson's Gallipoli eyewitness is probably self-evident to anyone who knows my interest in family history and in my grandfather who was at Gallipoli.  I actually bought this for a couple of presents and felt I needed one myself.  And the final book just leapt out at me from the Readings Carlton window.  Artemis Cooper's biography Patrick Leigh Fermor: an adventure is Greece and Paddy Leigh Fermor.

So plenty of reading pleasure awaits me during the 12 days of Xmas!

#blog12daysxmas Day 12 Reading 2011

Today is the day I finish my #blog12daysxmas blogging challenge and will take myself back to the beginning of the blog, Hecuba Reads. Two years ago around the same time of the year, I set up this blog in an attempt to recreate reading as a joy for me, or maybe as it turned out to document the reading I already did and the enjoyment it gave me. That year, 2010, I gave myself the aim of reading 52 books in the coming year. I also wanted to document them so that I had a record of my reading for pleasure. I have posted earlier in this blog about how I explored possibilities for this documentation and finally decided upon Goodreads as my favourite site to use. Goodreads records that in 2010 I read 61 books. So I met my target.

I have just been reviewing my achievements for 2011. That involved checking through the list of titles for 2011 and taking out the ones that are still also in my "to read" or "currently reading" shelves. So what did I end up with after that? Well, in 2011 I managed to read and record the reading of 87 titles.

These titles included a mixture of fiction and non-fiction but were predominantly fiction. There were in fact only seven non-fiction titles and they were a combination of cooking, travel and biography. Within fiction there were a lot of old favourites. I always do a bit of rereading of Agatha Christie and Georgette Heyer and some of their titles, of course, appear.


Three retrospective rereads purposely undertaken are also there for 2011. I had undertaken to reread the complete works of Elizabeth Peters in 2010 and some of these titles, mainly the one-offs, spilled over to 2011. I also reread all the Dorothy L. Sayers crime titles (and few Wimsey books that others have written since her death). When Kerry Greenwood's most recent title, Cooking the books came out, I read that and then went back and reread the whole Corinna series - and the whole Phryne series. Interestingly I discovered that there were a number of the Phrynes that I had not read before. I am not sure how I missed out on them, but obviously I had. Now I am just waiting for Kerry to write and publish a few more titles and, of course, eagerly awaiting the Phryne TV series on ABC-TV this year.


This year 2012 is the first year that I have actually given myself a target on the Goodreads site and I didn't want to be too ambitious. I have just gone for 52 again. Hopefully I can meet that target again. How much is it to ask to read one book a week in 2012? And I wonder what I will read? I am happy to let my reading occur serendipitously I think. I like picking up old favorites and reading them, or coming across new items on the Hawthorn Library new books shelves, or talking to people about things they have liked. Maybe I will get some ideas this year from the National Year of Reading too.


But I am just going to keep it simple. Reading isn't a chore that needs to be done or for which I want to set commitments. Reading is just something that I do every day (or most days) for fun and enjoyment and relaxation.

#blog12daysxmas Day 7 Reflections on #2011PAD

For the last twelve months I have been participating in the Flickr group #2011PAD. We all posted a photograph every day (or some times in batches when we forgot or didn't have time). I really enjoyed myself doing it and felt I was just really getting into the swing of it. A little while ago I posted my last photo for 2011 and feel quite sad about it. However, the future is going to bring a new group Friday Photos 2012 and I am already starting to be quite excited about that.

I decided today for my reading blog to review what impact my reading had on my #2011PAD. I must confess that I was pretty amazed to discover that there were not more photos of books!



I always think that books are so integral to my life that I expected them to be an overwhelming theme. But if I leave out photos that have to do with libraries (with books on shelves in them) or things like Sisters in Crime events, how many actual photos did I take of books I was reading?




I only had ELEVEN photos out of 365 of books I was reading! I really must lead a more balanced life than I often feel I do. And what were the eleven books? Do I feel that they actually reflect my reading habits?




Non-fiction and fiction are both represented. One photo showed both: a book on Itouch and an Agatha Christie, perhaps summing up two main threads of my interest. Maybe I should have included photos of my iTouch (none in the 365 2011PAD) or my iPad representing ebooks as they should be represented.

Apart from the Agatha Christie, other fiction was all crime - Elizabeth Peters, Kerry Greenwood, Tess Gerritson, Jeffrey Siger and Elizabeth Peters again with a lone but fabulous Kate Grenville. Yes, this is probably a fair representation of my fiction reading I must say: crime with a bit of historical and Greece and Egypt thrown in for fair measure.

And the three non-fiction titles apart from the book on the iTouch? Two focus on local and family history and the other is a biography of one of my all time favourite writers who wrote primarily historical and crime fiction. Yes - I can live with that as a microcosm of my non-fiction reading.

#blog12daysxmas Day 6 Goodreads

Well, here we are at day 6 of #blog12daysxmas so I am halfway through and not behind at this point - unlike last year when I was rushing in the rear until the last minute. One of the jobs I will be doing in the early new year so as part of this challenge will be to review how many books I have read in 2011 and what they were.

A couple of years ago at this time of the year I set up this blog to try to encourage myself to read more - or maybe to document what I read as it turned out. I soon got sick of writing reviews on here of every book I read, though I do it occasionally. So I then looked at a range of online tools for documenting what I was reading. After trying out a few I finally decided on Goodreads and find it great and easy to use. It has a very comprehensive database where I have rarely been unable to find a book I wanted to add to My Books. And when this happened once I easily added the title. I can keep my books on a range of shelves and so I can easily see how many books I read in 2011 - or have read to date in 2011 as I have a few I need to finish off.

As it is a social network as well as a database I can read other people's reviews and ratings and get regular bulletins about what my friends are reading or want to read. When I was doing Frontline late this year, I found the reviews on Goodreads great for the task that used online reviews so bear that in mind if you are about to do or are doing Frontline.

There are book discussions and groups that I don't participate in much and recommendations as well, based either on genre or on books on your shelves. I could do a lot more with Goodreads but at present I am happy that it is a good way for me to document my reading, read ratings and reviews and get updates on what my friends are reading. You can set it up to automatically document your reading progress on Twitter and Facebook and embed widgets in your blogs and websites as I have done on this blog.

Do you Goodread? If you do, you can find Polyxena there.