What the Dog Saw

Borders was having 30% off. I like this book. It says that people who do well in school don’t necessarily do well outside of school. I’m not an ‘A’ student.

no one may build their happiness on another’s pain

Recently I fired up my DailyLit account again and subscribed to Many Thoughts of Many Minds and, after consulting Oprah’s Book Club’s past selections, Anna Karenina.

Everyday, a chapter of each pops up in my inbox. I was quite moved by chapter 1 of Anna Karenina and sought it out on Wikipedia:-

Anna Karenina is commonly thought to explore the themes of hypocrisy, jealousy, faith, fidelity, family, marriage, society, progress, carnal desire and passion, and the agrarian connection to land in contrast to the lifestyles of the city.

Translator Rosemary Edmonds wrote that…a key message is that “no one may build their happiness on another’s pain,” which is why things dont work out for Anna.

Now I need to get my hands on an actual hardcopy of the book.

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I haven’t actually seen a Kindle around these parts, but I don’t like the idea of it, for sure. No way can paperbacks be replaced. There’s much to be said about the musky-musty smell of books and libraries.
But perhaps Kindle would be useful for reference & research books. Definitely not something one would want to be lounging on the couch holding with a cup of tea.

stream of consciousness / gleaning of knowledge

google: 500 Days of Summer > zooey deschanel > franny & zooey > JD Salinger > Glass Family > Zachary Martin “Zooey” Glass – He is characteristically misanthropic which he attributes to Seymour and Buddy’s imposition of their college-age infatuation with Eastern mysticism on himself and Franny as children > misanthropy > *action* pulling my copies of Franny & Zooey and The Catcher In The Rye off shelf + place within easy reach for re-reading

Coincidence? w.r.t. Hermann Hesse.

I very recently read Hermann Hesse’s Siddhharta and was completely struck. Of course, I now feel the urge to read more of Hesse’s work, but hadn’t really thought about which one to read next, though I really felt Siddharta still resonating very strongly.

So this morning I was reading the Australian Financial Review’s monthly supplement magazine and therein contained an interview with a Ms Amber Long; a glimpse:-

And then in my inbox today, this was to be found:-

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Last night I suffered a strange bout of insomnia and felt the urge to start painting at 2am.

But then, I suddenly recalled, I couldn’t was I was out of white paint.

Then it came to my mind that I had come across a bunch of paints in a plastic bag in one of my lesser-opened drawers, which perhaps had been abandoned by my brother and were placed in my drawer by my mother, without my realisation.

And true enough, there was indeed. White, gold, silver, bronze, orange, green and cadmium and a few others!!

So I started painting.

Have a good weekend!

How difficult is it to paint a SHOE, OMG. Help.

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I came across this quote on Design Crush and found it to be quite touching.

I was wanting to paint an elephant, only, which I had envisioned to be in bright pops of colours. But the only ready-stretched canvas I had was really too big for just a singular elephant and I somehow decided to incorpoate bits of the quote above. Ta daa!

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I read the whole of Siddhartha within 24 hours of getting it from a friend. It’s left haunting and long-lasting impressions. I like this book, a lot. Fit current frame of mind exactly.

And now I’m onto Fear of Flying and it’s definitely one of the better reads I’ve had of late:-

“Really, I thought, sometimes I would like to have a child. A very wise and witty little girl who’d grow up to be the woman I could never be. A very independent little girl with no scars on the brain or the psyche. With no toadying servility and no ingratiating seductiveness. A little girl who said what she meant and meant what she said. A little girl who was nether bitchy not mealymouthed because she didn’t hate her mother or herself.”

“…tried to explain how dishonest I felt for always using seductiveness to get what I wanted from men.”

“Women using sex appeal to manipulate men and suppressing their rage and never being open and honest.”

“When I look back on my not yet thirty-year-old life, I see all my lovers sitting alternately back to back as if in a game of musical chairs. Each one an antidote to the one that went before. Each one a reaction, an about-face, a rebound.”

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Really. How do the Japanese churn out such style, in such voluminous treasure-troves we call magazines.

File for future reference. Mental Note for when I do start learning and playing golf!

To-read list

(1) Fear of Flying – Erica Jong (2) Long Walk to Freedom – Nelson Mandela (3) Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoevsky (4) 1984 – George Orwell

I don’t seem to be sufficiently well-read in terms of BBC’s Top 100 Books list

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Inferno – Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

I Feel Bad About My Neck

I’ve never been one to give much thought to aging or anti-aging skin care.

For a long while, eye-cream was the only anti-aging step in my skin care ‘routine’. I started with this only a few years back after a friend, while gesturing to the skin around her eyes, remarked “certain things are reversible, but once you get a wrinkle, it’s permanent.”

Recently, after hearing some other friends talk extensively about UV, pigmentation and how these really damage skin, I’ve thrown sunblock into the skin care equation.

My Mother’s always said that the clearest signs of a woman’s age are visible around the eyes, neck and hands. After recently watching the Sex & the City episode where Samantha Jones hooks up with a much younger guy and he tells then her that she has the cutest lines in her neck, I am convinced and quickly fish out a travel-sized ‘advanced anti-aging neck cream’ I just got in a Clarins gift pack. You can bet I’ve been slathering that on.

All About the Pretty says about her neck “The situation is realizing that at the moment it looks great, but the day will come when it doesn’t so I’m slathering on this product to slow down that day. I believe in preventive beauty medicine such as beginning your skincare routine before you see any signs.” Mentions this book called I Feel Bad About My Neck which I’m curious to read – it sounds like it could be a laugh.

I recently sped though both of Khaled Hosseini’s books (Kite Runner and A Thousand Splended Suns), the first of which I thought was one of the best book’s I’ve read in a long time – it had me in tears many times over.

Right now I’m reading Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. After these serious books, I think something titled “I feel bad about my neck” may be in order!

Veronika Decides to Die

I’m a big fan of Paulo Coelho’s work and am very excited about the Veronika Decides to Die movie depite being dubious about it being varnished with hollywood and starring Serah Michelle Gellar.

It’s time to fish the book from the realms of my bookshelves for another read now

When I am an old woman I shall wear purple with a red hat which doesn’t go

When I am an old woman,
I shall wear purple
With a red hat which doesn’t go,
and doesn’t suit me.
And I shall spend my pension
on brandy and summer gloves and satin sandles,
And say we’ve no money for butter.
I shall sit down on the pavement when I’m tired
and gobble up samples in shops
and press alarm bells
and run with my stick along public railings,
and make up for the sobriety of my youth.
I shall go out in my slippers in the rain
and pick flowers in other people’s gardens
and learn to spit!
You can wear terrible shirts and grow more fat
and eat three pounds of sausages at ago,
or only bread and pickles for a week,
and hoard pens and pencils
and beermats and things in boxes.
But now we must have clothes that keep us dry,
and pay our rent
and not swear in the street,
and set a good example for the children.
We must have friends to dinner
and read the papers.
But maybe I ought to practice a little now?
So people who know me
are not too shocked and surprised
when suddenly I am old,
And start to wear purple!

- – - Warming, Jenny Joseph