E-Books versus Book Books

If you are a reader of those longform things called books, do you have a preference for either e-books or paper books?

I love both.  And while e-books are sooo good, what they can't do is give you a lovely tactile experience.  Well, they can, if you have, say, a fur-lined reader cover, but it's not quite the same thing.

I recently read a book that I loved, and I also enjoyed the look of it just as much as the content of its innards.  When that happens, it gives an extra dimension of richness that an e-book can't provide.

I love the colours of this cover.  The earthy browny-purple made me hungry.

That colour continued on into the edges of each page.  They looked quite beautiful.

My cousin and I used to read a lot of books together when we were young - one page each, reading out loud, often in bed at night.  It was a delightful combination of sharing something while also getting lost in the lovely solitude of another world.

Apparently I used to do this thing while I was reading with the hand that wasn't holding the book, running it along the pages and flicking them and stuff while I was reading.

I think I maybe was doing some of that a bit more than usual here.

Of course, the cliche stands firm that it's what inside that really counts.


But it doesn't hurt to have a little beauty on the outside as well, as beautiful women floating through doors closed to the rest of us could well testify.  But if you ain't got anything but fluff on the inside, where's that gonna leave you when your outside beauty has gone?

So how about you?  What are your reading habits - e-book, paper books, a combo of the two, or a sadly dwindling reading of bookery now the interwebs is on the scene?  I love getting away from the computer, and its snippets of stuff here and there and the relentless urge to click on the next thing without having fully digested what I've just been reading.  To sit or lie down with a book, in whatever form, which is the same thing over and over, is harder to do since the advent of the net ... and also better.

An Amnesty for Library Slackers

Do you still do that old-fashioned thing of actually borrowing actual books from your actual library?  I know, right?  It's so three-dimensional.  Moving your body into a public shared space to borrow books that are on paper?  Bizarre!

Though there is a growing amount of reading I am finding myself doing on my phone (must stop that stupid habit) on the e-reader and on the computer, for me they are still a shadow of the old ways.  The tactile nature of reading a book that is made from paper not plastic means that my enjoyment of book-learnin' has only grown alongside my e-reading.

I love the library, and do not take for granted living in a country that has a plethora of books available for me to borrow and read for myself, all for nothing at my local libe!

Well, nothing except for the fact that as taxpayers we actually pay for it anyway.  But nothing as in no user-pays charges.  Which is a refreshing change, I must say.

And except it doesn't even end up being nothing for me anyway, because as an avid user who struggles to maintain herself upright and responsible and adult and productive within space-time, there's often library fines on my card.

I feel bad about that.  Every time I get another fine I tell myself that that is the last time it will happen.  Next time, I will be more organised and get them back on time.  Which is sort of sad because I actually already am organised.  As soon as I borrow books I come home, make a note of when they're due, and type myself a reminder a day or two earlier to take them back.  But still, one never can tell what sort of a day one is going to have, and suddenly one can find oneself putting off the library till tomorrow, and then tomorrow forgetting about going to the library at all.

Mush-brain.

Which is why I am a little bit in love with the Eastern Regional Library Service's Xmas Food for Fines Amnesty.  Basically, it's a swap - you bring in some non-perishable food all this week, and the library will waive your fines.

Being able to contribute what constitutes a pittance in my country - like, five bucks - but knowing that it will make a diff to some of my fellow struggling folks via local charities, and in the process having the punishment for my impertinence wiped clean?  Nice.  I like that.  Very, very much.

And it ends tomorrow, so wish me luck for getting there on time. 

Australian Women Writers Challenge

I have signed up this year for the Australian Women Writers Challenge.  The challenge is to commit to reading - and preferably reviewing - a certain amount of Australian women writers over the year.  Elizabeth Luedge began the challenge last year in response to the fact that male writers are more likely to be reviewed than female writers around the world, including this country.

And so here is the mixed bag of books I am planning on reading and reviewing for the year (mostly adult fiction, but also some YA, children's, fantasy and non-fiction):

• Anna Funder - All That I Am
• Helen Garner - The Children's Bach (a reread, seeing last time I read it I was chronically fatigued and now, years later, my memory is so bad that I can't even remember it)
• Margo Lanagan - Sea Hearts
• Geraldine Brooks - People of the Book
• MJ Hyland - How the Light Gets In
• Leanne Hall - This is Shyness
• Alice Pung - Her Father's Daughter
• Chardi Christian - The Selkie and the Fisherman
• Enza Gandolfo - Swimming
• Elizabeth Harrower - The Watch Tower
• Simmone Howell - Notes from the Teenage Underground
• Kylie Ladd - After the Fall
• Favel Parrett - Past the Shallows
• Ananda Braxton-Smith - Tantony

Lists can be deceiving, can't they.  You would think by looking at mine that I'm a connoisseur of Australian women's writers.  The reality is that I don't recognise many of these writers' names, let alone would know whether they are Australian.  I certainly wouldn't know any of them if I accidentally fell over them in the street.  (Well, except for Helen Garner, of course, and I would, like, totally, like, be so embarrassed if I fell on Helen Garner in the street 'cause, like, I would squeal a lot.  And I would probably recognise Ananda Braxton-Smith, because I went to uni with her back in the late '90s.  But it was a while ago now, and I have such a bad memory that maybe I wouldn't recognise her either).

So while I'm a bit self-conscious about my measly ability to be able to name Australian women writers, I am very happy that when I consulted my ongoing and regularly updated Books to Read list that there happened to be so many Aussie women writers on there.

Making Magic

Someone posted a quote on Facebook the other day which said:

What did YOU do as a child that made the hours pass like minutes?  Herein lies the key to your earthly pursuits - Carl Jung

My response was that I read Enid Blyton books.  Which made me wonder whether that meant I should pursue reading, writing, or alcoholism.

Alcoholism ~ This has simply not been accomplishable with the state of my liver in recent years.  I did have a bourbon and coke the other night, though, I must say.  It was nice.  That was while I was at the rebadged Oakleigh-Carnegie RSL, morphed into the Caravan Music Club, where Rebecca Barnard and Billy Miller led a group of mostly middle-aged women in a singalong.  And yeah, it was a bit daggy, and yeah I had that uncomfortable feeling of not knowing where to look while I was singing, and yeah some of the stuff was excruciatingly awful, but it was fun!

So no, even with my less-toxic liver, I don't think I'm ever going to be an alcoholic, somehow.  I grew up with one of those, and it's not a particularly palatable way to spend your time or to own your shit.  However, the occasional drink or three would be really nice;  the thought of being able to hoe into a bottle of the red that the old man has stored under the house this summer is a nice one.  We'll see.

Reading ~ I snuck A.S. Byatt's Possession out of the bookcase the other day.  It's been sitting there for months, ever since I spotted it in the Carnegie Salvos store that Mum and I were floffing around in after eating dumplings a few doors down just for the hell of it one day.

(That's two mentions of Carnegie in one post, which is really strange, because I never go to Carnegie.  But I digresseth.)

I was sneaking Possession out of the bookcase and away from the prying eyes of the part of myself that gets really shitted off when I procrastinate reading the piled-up anthropology stuff that I have sitting there, and instead climb into bed and read fiction.  But she saw, unfortunately, because I have not managed to develop any real dissociative personality disorder traits so far (but you never know what may happen in the future).  And anyway, she loves reading fiction as well, and it didn't take long for her to come around and ignore for a while longer the piled-up Anthropology readings I have to do over the next month.

I really am enjoying my Anthropology subjects.  It's fascinating stuff, a lot of it, and right up my alley.  But sheesh, I'm sick of uni and can't wait till it's finished for the year and I can read the stuff I want to read.  And write the stuff I want to write.

Writing ~ I really feel like I am missing a limb when I don't get to write non-academic stuff.  I have been procrastinating working this afternoon, and instead writing this post, and turning my mind toward what I would like to have a stab at for the Australia Nature Writing Prize.  I really have no idea.  And of course, every time I turn my mind to writing something new, I always feel like I will never be able to come up with anything at all.  Indeed, in the past, that feeling has been enough in and of itself to flabbergast me into going and watching something stupid on the telly.  But these days, I'm much more okay with that empty space that opens up whenever I begin to ponder a new writing subject.  It doesn't feel like a void that I could fall into, the way it used to.  It feels an expectant pulse of possibility instead.  Even though I have not a clue about whether I'm going to be able to come up with anything.

But still, there's been enough times now where I have experienced for myself nature's abhorrence of a vacuum to realise that making space might feel a little uncomfortable, but it's making magic, and that out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing is a field.  It's a quantum field.  And Rumi is there, along with everything else.  Including a million and one possibilities, several of which will begin suggesting themselves to me over the next days and weeks, if I remember to keep an eye out for the times when they pop up, seemingly out of nowhere.

A Self-Help Blog

"All good novelists have bad memories" ~ Graham Greene

I can't really apply that quote to myself at this point in time without bookending it with this one:

"It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards" ~ Lewis Carroll

Because I do plan to have a novel finished by the time I'm 85.

Every mood I'm in, every stage of life, it always feels like I've always been this way and never any other. It's very tiring. And something that I see others ascribe to young children, and yet here I am all 41 and haggy, and I regularly succumb to this way of thinking.

Logically and rationally, I know how much things change.  I remember in some vague fashion that things are always changing.  But the fight for perspective is a difficult one, because I am like David, fighting for that perspective using a ragged, pathetically sievelike memory as my weapon. Honestly, I did not smoke that much dope in my earlier years for my memory to be so truly, monumentally fucked up.

I am feeling a little unsure and adrift (geez, what's new?)  Feeling on the verge of new ways of looking at things, hanging onto the hope of other people to think that I can do that.  And so to remind myself of how I have dealt with feeling these sorts of things in the past, I went looking at my blog to see how I felt in 2007, 2009, randomly flitting from one post to another, seeing that really and truly, nothing much really has changed - I'm still depressed in some variety, still anxious in another, still struggling to get through some of the days.

And yet at the same time it feels everything has changed. Every word I have written that is in the past has this feeling of everything being somehow easier than it is now.  Which is not true.  It's just that everything is frozen in time in every second that is not now.

The interesting part about reading the words I had carefully crafted on some day other than today, on days where maybe I was trying to keep my head above the water of whatever swell I felt was sinking me at the time, was that the rereading felt redemptive.  Even apart from bringing you clarity, hope and purpose, the act of writing about your own shit brings along with it its own comfort.  I know I felt that sense of comfort. of reframing, when I hit "publish" on those posts in 2007 or 2009.  Because it's how I feel every time I hit "publish", every time I finish writing something, anything.

The redemption comes twice over, upon rereading your own blog posts.  Discombobula has literally become a self-help blog for me :)

It's all good, as long as you can put aside the discomfort that you must be horribly self-absorbed to go reading your own stuff for help - sort of like how I imagine it would feel after cooking a beautiful meal you're proud of, only to vomit it up whole.  Looking around to see whether anyone else is looking - should you re-eat it?  But hey, you're hungry.  And what better than enjoying it once but enjoying it twice?

:)