OCtober 2019
Last month I wrote about going to the tip and returning with a bunch of free books. Toriaz read my blog post and said she wished I’d picked up two of the books I mentioned for her. I was so heady at the prospect of free books, I guess, that I totally forgot the rest of the world!
In compensation I offered to help her with a yard clean up she’s been struggling with for some time. She doesn’t have a trailer, so getting rid of a mountain of green waste from her yard – the result of a new initiative to get things in order – is difficult for her.
I took our trailer to her place and we got everything in, then we got to the real point of the day. With green waste disposed, we headed across to the tip’s Re-use shed and Toriaz chose from the shelves: Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel and Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre (the two books she had her eyes on), The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Victorian Tales of Mystery Detection, Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy, The Tao of Pooh by Benjamin Hoff, Dracula by Bram Stoker, The Galapagos Islands by Charles Darwin (a Penguin extract from The Origin of Species), A Spy for the Redeemer by Candace Robb and Hemingway’s Chair by Michael Palin.
I was actually restrained and took no books this time!
We haven’t updated the picture carousel at the bottom of our main page since the beginning of the year when WaywardWoman went to Europe. Our intention has always been to show interesting places with the theme of reading. That is, you can find someone reading in each picture, just like a Where’s Wally (I think he’s called Waldo in America). Today we went to Bondi Beach where we started a walk along the headland to view a series of sculptures which are placed each year, known as Sculptures by the Sea. We took the opportunity to get a few new photos for our main page. Naturally, we also photographed some of the sculptures. The sculpture shown here was called 'Statue of Mad Liberty'. It was one of my favourites. I thought it was meant to be a political statement. If you look carefully, you can see it’s the Statue of Liberty. It looks like it’s being sucked down a plughole.
There are four new photos to be viewed on the automatic carousel at the bottom of our main page from today’s trip.
Occasionally we get asked about what we read or are even given suggestions about what we might read. I’ve tried to read a few suggested books since we started the Reading Project, while a couple are on the backburner with many other books slated for reading. It was suggested to me a while ago that I should read some philosophy by another site creator here on Neocities. I have no background in philosophy, but I read Alain de Botton’s The Consolations of Philosophy as a result of that recommendation.
Lately I’ve been watching The Good Place on Netflix, which features a character, Chidi Anagonye, who is a philosophy professor. The show is interesting for its exploration of ethics and philosophical concepts through its light-hearted comedy. It piqued my interest in philosophy again, which is why I started A.C.Grayling’s The History of Philosophy over the weekend. I’m about one hundred pages through what is a fairly dense book. I’m thinking that in the future, I might occasionally read some philosophers. So far, I’m interested in Epicurus and the Stoics.
I have been trying to read the Federalist Papers by James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay for some time. It’s one of our Special Reading Projects that can be accessed by clicking the image to the right. I finished my commentary on Federalist Paper No.59 this morning, and during my subsequent browsing I discovered that Federalist No.65 deals with the issue of impeachment. I’ve been trying to keep up with the impeachment hearings this last week with the limited news articles in our papers, and by trying to watch what I can via YouTube, which is a hit and miss affair, since they aren’t being screened in Australia, and it’s not always easy to decide what to watch next, or the chronology. My time is also limited. But it’s been fascinating and naturally I have formed my own opinions.
Given that my reading of the Federalist Papers has been so intermittent, I’ve decided that in this next week I will make a bigger effort and try to get to No.65, at least. It will be interesting to see what Hamilton has to say about impeachment.
