#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!