What I am Reading - June 2015

Country – Tim Flannery

A Continent, a Scientist & a Kangaroo.

I picked this up hastily on the way out of the house yesterday heading for Amsterdam for 3 days with nothing to read. I read it 6 years ago and remembered enjoying it. I took it to a restaurant this evening and opened it up and within 2 minutes I was transported again to the outback. The colour and smell of the land, the huge history of evolution in isolation & the clumsiness of modern man are all there; but it is the ease and enthusiasm with which Flannery embarks on his journey that brings you so happily on-board for the ride.  How did the kangaroo, unique in history, learn to hop? And why do we know so little about the world in which we live? I’m hooked again, the happy fate of the reader with the memory of a goldfish.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             

A Possible Life  - Sebastian Faulks 

This month’s book-club book had me confused at first but more and more interested as time went by. How could 5 stories of separate lives make a novel? The subjects were quite different and the settings likewise. Yes, each story was terribly well told, but….

And then I think I got it. I saw each story from my own perspective. Each character lived at the extent of imagination; each lived their life in a way that made an epic of their circumstances – they survived when they had no right to or achieved something that we might only dream of. The lives were possible yes, but they were lives on the boundaries of possibility.  

I also picked up some good tips on driving the Pacific Coast Highway in California.

Cholesterol and Triglyceride Control – Ian Hamilton-Craig 2007.

This was a gift from Doctor Ian Charlton of Benseville, New South Wales (as was the Flannery book I think) some years back. We were never sure if his tongue was in his check when he gave it (it’s not exactly a page-turner) but it proved to be a mine-field of information; some rusty, some dull, some still dangerous and some surely now de-fused.  I know I need to read more on this subject and this helped a great deal. 

So much has changed in such a small space of time.