Her Father’s Daughter
Alice Pung
Black Inc Publishing 2011
ISBN: 9781863955423
$29.95
238 pp
Having just finished reading this book, I feel that I have been allowed to be an intruder in a family home. It is an autobiography written as a third person account, but it is very personal and revealing of the characters in the stories.
I took the dogs out for a walk shortly after sunset and was awed by the beauty of two bright planets in the western sky: Venus close to setting and Jupiter some thirty degrees higher up. The horizon was suffused with bands of deep orange and a strange green.
It started with an innocent nail clipper. At least I thought it was innocent, but I was not allowed to take it on the flight to Perth. As it was sternly removed from my carry-on luggage, I imagined that someone bent on violence could have wrestled it from my grasp as I trimmed my toenails in seat 23D. She could then have used it to pull out the fingernails of one of the cabin staff for serving cold coffee and stale scones.
Sometimes I read what I posted some time ago and it seems rather negative in hind-sight. This set me thinking about the difference between listing all that is wrong with the world and imagining what we can do to solve existing problems.
Writing is a secret pleasure indulged in by dreamers and visionaries, as well as those who have a burning desire to proclaim their insights and wisdom to the world. Reading is also a private pleasure, with the individual questing, searching, drinking in whatever nourishment and flavour the words may offer up.
Superfood Snacks to reignite your love affair with foods
Author: Christine Margaret
Publisher: Christine Margaret, 2011
ISBN: 9780980489385
200 pp including index
RRP $19.95 (on-line)
In my experience, this is a unique book. It is part cookbook, part dietary compendium, part nutritional encyclopaedia. It was created out of a need for Christine Margaret to find a way of ridding herself of fibromyalgia syndrome.
January 1788, around the 26th, is symbolic of a major shift in how many contemporary humans related to their world. It is symbolic at many levels.
In my last post I ruminated on the role of money in the way we value ourselves and what we do. Is community life possible without money or its equivalent? A related question is, can a family or a small community be truly independent of all others?
What are you worth? Do you answer this in terms of your monetary value? Does it make you contemplate the value of what you can do? Do you answer in terms of selling your body? The first question has many answers and all of these depend on assumptions you make, consciously or unconsciously.
All over the world people are thinking about what this new year will bring to their lives. Will the world be different? Can they (or will they) make changes in their habits this year? Will life be better? Is this the year that Homo sapiens will snuff it?