New Years reading

One of my first reads for the new year was A Madness of Sunshine by Nalini Singh. I bought the trade paperback version, cover below.
It was gripping right from the get-go, set in a coastal tone in New Zealand where the South Island setting is perhaps

the star of the story. It is of course a murder mystery; a beautiful young local woman is murdered while out on a run. There is wild sea and dense bush, and danger in the elements. Beautiful, dangerous New Zealand.
I'm always a bit reticent about saying I like a book that deals with awful topics. I went through a Jack Reacher phase a year back, and did my dash there. And much as I'd give A Madness of Sunshine a high rating, which I do, I think I'll stick to light reading. This book is proof, though, (if we needed it) that our Nalini is one heck of an amazing writer and story teller.

In other reading, I've been taking part in a summer reading challenge for the fun of it.
Besides a graphic novel about a zombie cat (kind of gross), and watching a movie based on a book (Sense and Sensibility with beloved Alan Rickman), the classic I chose to read was Requiem for a Wren by Nevil Shute. Not 'light' reading in that it deals with WW2, though and how war keeps killing. A lot of WW2 detail as our heroine, Janet, is indeed a Wren. The story begins with Alan coming back to his parents Australian farm to find their maid has killed herself and he explores her personal papers and his own memories of her to uncover why she ended her life. So not happy.
Clearly, something funny and... cheerful, is needed right about now!

Wet weather

It is starting to get cooler, praise be. There was a heap of rain one day this week, and by the time I got to work I was damp, to put it mildly. Soaked is overstating it but uncomfortably wet. Have you ever tried to dry off your trousers with a hair dryer? I would have been there forever! If only, I thought, I had a spare anything at work, like a skirt even, but no. Nothing to change into. There was only a pair of pantyhose in case I ripped them, although I had stuffed spare socks and boots in my bag so I could have dry feet at work. It is worth noting that the very next day I went to work, I had completely forgotten that thought about spare clothes altogether and did not take spare anything for future weather events. In fact, I only remembered as I was thinking about writing this blog post. Hopeless. Given I’m trying to keep up my walking part-way to work to get in a good 40 minutes/steps, I should take along spare clothes to keep in my locker just in case. It really was uncom...

My latest obsession

I have recently been a bit obsessed with the practice of junk journalling. Junk jouraling! I love it so far. Its been around a few years and seems to have taken over a bit from from the scrapbooking of yore, but the thing I like about it is you use up all your stuff that is lying around. You can use all your rubbishy bits and pieces of paper and things. I like the tutorials of a lady called Leah with a channel called Thrifty Day , and I've had a go at it and I kind of really like doing it. Sometimes I feel a bit out of sorts (I blame hormones... or perhaps it is, rather, the lack of them!) and so I decide to cut stuff up and stick it on a page and I feel better. Therapeutic! I also think that because it is play and there are no rules and you can be as messy as you like, and start again if the page looks like utter rubbish, well, it is just so good for you. It's like being a kid and let's face it... we got to do all the cool stuff when we were kids. Why not , now we're ...

An old post

This is a blog I wrote for a now defunct pop culture site I used to contribute to, some years ago. A friend was reading some fiction I’d written the other day and after telling me what she did like about it, commented, “But you’re no Jane Austen.” The only Jane Austen I have read is “ Emma .” and it was read under duress at university. I consider myself a person of not massively low intelligence, but it took three reads to get my head around it. Interestingly, that paper was not only my first and only complete Jane Austen experience, but my first and only experience of analysing English literature. I did get an A but not without suffering a degree of depression as a result. Yes, I gained an appreciation for some things (Elizabeth Barrett Browning sonnets, oh my gosh!) but analysing Emily Dickinson was enough to sap the will to live right out of me. Fortuitously, at the end of that semester, I saw the movie Stargate on TV, and promptly un-enrolled myself fr...

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