Archive for February 2012
Mondayitis – Norlin
A new regular feature here will be Mondayitis, published every Tuesday, it will feature guests discussing a series of questions. People have their own view of the questions and some use them as a starting point while others actually answer them, in their own particular way.
What do you read?
Vampire Romance novels or should I say supernatural romance novels? hahaa, chick literature, oh and cook books!
Why do you read?
To kill time and also to get away from reality.
Do you read for work or for pleasure and is there any difference between the two?
More for pleasure. Reading for work just makes reading more stressful! Although I do read magazines for “work” so I guess that’s pretty nice.
Do you read to your kids or to someone else’s kids?
Not anymore. Thank goodness they can read by themselves…except for Master 6. That’s Mr.C’s job now. 
Can you do the Safety Dance while reading?
Sure! In my head I can! LOL!
Are you a rabid Discworld/Twilight/Harry Potter fan and would you attend a flash mob dressed as your favourite character?
While I am a HUGE HUGE HUGE HUGE fan of Twilight, I don’t think I’ll dress up as any of the characters unless I’m paid huge sums of money!
Norlin is the editor of Baubles, Bubbles & Bags Style File, a blog that share tips, ideas and reviews covering fashion, beauty and lifestyle topics for women with a discerning taste. For Norlin, it’s all about things that are attainable to suit your lifestyle.
Bookshops
I’ve wandered into a few bookshops recently and managed to restrain myself from buying all their stock, a challenging task made easier when I think of my overflowing bookshelves and the lack of space to put in more. I have considered putting bookshelves on the ceiling but getting up there to dust them would not be a fun job.
Looking at them all I just wondered about the atmosphere they create. The four bookshops were:
- Benn’s Books in Bentleigh
- Dymocks in Southland
- All Books 4 Less in Southland
- All Books 4 Less in Chadstone (not my choice)
I’m late…
I’m late, I’m late for a very impor…hang on, wrong book. Squid Ink is not well, he managed to do me a Squid Ink but didn’t manage to clean it up and upload it for me. I was able to scan it but I don’t know what I’m doing so I’ve spent the last hour or so cleaning it up. Finally, I’m able to unveil Squid Ink’s latest reading…thank heavens this one is in English.
Squid Ink meets Dogmatix
25 minutes…
25 minutes before the time I like to publish an article on my blog every weekday and I’m struggling for an idea. I’ve had a couple of little ideas in my head for the past hour or so as I do other things and couldn’t make them work so I came back to the computer and just checking Twitter when I found this published on The Bookshop Blog. It’s about the Malice Domestic Writers Award, a lovely award given by the fans themselves at a conference in Virginia, the award itself appears to be a teapot…mmm…I could use a teapot I’ve mislaid mine, do you think it’s a bit extreme to write a book to win a teapot? A downside, I don’t think I could write a mystery novel for any amount of money or awards so I might just have to buy another teapot. Reading through the article I noticed an entry published in the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine in June 2011 which got me thinking.
I started thinking about the number of series written by one author which have later turned out to be a pseudonym for multiple people. In the case of the Ellery Queen mysteries they were originally written by two cousins, Frederic Dannay and Manning Lee, who kept a tight rein on their writing and eventually allowed other writers to use the name as the author but not as the character. What? Ellery Queen was both the author and the character, he was much loved and many of these works were put on the radio and the television, Helene Hanff (of 84, Charing Cross Road fame) wrote some of the scripts. They started a mystery magazine in 1941 which is still being published to this day.
Other series which have one name on them but were actually written by several different authors are The Hardy Boys, Trixie Belden, Nancy Drew, but not Enid Blyton, she wrote all her own books.
Mondayitis
A new regular feature here will be Mondayitis, published every Tuesday, it will feature guests discussing a series of questions. People have their own view of the questions and some use them as a starting point while others actually answer them, in their own particular way.
The questions are as follows:
- What do you read?
- Why do you read?
- Do you read for work or for pleasure and is there any difference between the two?
- Do you read to your kids or to someone else’s kids?
- Can you do the Safety Dance while reading?
- Are you a rabid Discworld/Twilight/Harry Potter fan and would you attend a flash mob dressed as your favourite character?
- Include bio with links to one or two sites.
As Monty Python said…
I generally write about books and book related topics, just occasionally when I’ve done something totally different I share it here so you can share my journey.
I don’t make a big deal of my religion online as that’s just a small part of who I am but last Saturday saw the culmination of weeks and weeks of hard work and I chanted Torah. To many people this doesn’t sound like a big deal and to a lot of Jews it isn’t as they have good skills and they do it every week, for me, it’s a very big thing. Let me give you some more details.
Hebrew is a very old language and was, and in some places still is, used only for prayers and other ritual purposes, at one time Aramaic was the local language. As a spoken language, Hebrew was revived towards the end of the 19th century and into the 20th. It is written from right to left so is much easier for lefthanded people.
This webpage gives some good information about the language. When learning to chant Torah it’s much easier to take a photocopy of the pages from the Tikkun. This is a lovely book with two columns of Torah. The column on the right has all the consonants, vowels, punctuation and cantillation symbols (musical notation, predating the stave we currently use), the column on the left has only the consonants. The system I’ve just learned assigns colours to the most used clauses as shown by the cantillation symbols so I took my photocopy and highlighted those clauses. Then I sat down to learn the Hebrew, then the clauses before putting them both together. This bit is challenging but is nothing compared to memorising the whole lot. It’s rather like learning lines for a play or songs for a musical except you do have the consonants as a reminder.
It’s been a big challenge for me. I first learnt it about 10 years ago so it should have been easy but we’re learning a different nusach or system so the tunes sound different and I’ve been trying to forget the old one and learn the new one. I must have been hard to live with and even harder to teach as I’ve complained a lot. Finally three weeks ago a fellow classmate made a little suggestion which turned the whole thing on its head and all of a sudden it worked. I was having trouble joining two clauses, the tunes were similar and it just wouldn’t work. He suggested instead of trying to join the whole of both clauses I should take the second one, learn it well then add the last word of the first clause. It worked, all of a sudden I could do that little bit and the whole lot fell into place.
I wasn’t perfect on Saturday but I was good and if I can just get to that point a couple of weeks earlier I will be perfect on the day. It’s something very close to my heart and I do intend to do it again.
Interesting Box of Books
It’s always a lucky dip when I’m listing books. I have friends who will sort boxes of books and then list lots of similar books. If it was me I’d then have a box of Doctor Who or a box of miscellaneous science fiction titles to put on the website for people to buy. I can’t do it that way, that’s too logical. If I did it that way I’d spend all my time sorting and rarely get anything else done, I’ve tried it and it doesn’t work for me. Instead, I take a box more ore less at random, photograph each book, manipulate them and then start listing. I never know what I’m going to get next. This box seems to have some sort of trend going, lots of non-fiction and a number of review copies. I won’t detail the whole box, just a few interesting titles.
The Astonishing Hypothesis by Francis Crick. Not necessarily an interesting book but certainly an interesting author. Francis Crick collaborated with James D. Watson in the discovery of the molecular structure of DNA, they received a Nobel Prize in 1962 for this research.
Dinosaurs of Darkness by Thomas H. Rich and Patricia Vickers-Rich. This book is a review copy and looks completely unread. Rich and Vickers-Rich are very well known in the Dinosaur field, they were friends with my aunt many years ago.
The Human Brain: A Guided Tour by Susan Greenfield. Many books about the human brain are written with a lot of jargon and aimed at the professional, this one is not, it’s readable and understandable by the lay person. Professor Greenfield has been on The Science Show on a number of occasions. I also have Tomorrow’s People by the same author.
If you’ve been watching the number of chemicals used today you’ll want this book: Our Stolen Future – Theo Colborn, John Peterson Myers, Dianne Dumanosk. It talks about how man-made chemicals are threatening our fertility, intelligence and survival.
The last one for today is The Woman Who Can’t Forget by Jill Price with Bart Davis. This lady has a phenomenal memory, she can remember names, dates, events, basically everything that’s happened to her or that she’s heard of. She can go backwards and forwards through her memory as if it were a home movie. She can look at particular dates and go forward through the years just using those dates. I don’t want to have her particular memory but I am in total awe of her, to have gone so much of her life without being driven mad by not being able to forget things.
Squid Ink and Butterflies
Butterflies get involved with Squid Ink
Squid Ink knows about being different, he must, there aren’t many Squids who draw. I think he identified with the theme of being different to society. A theme Adam Hills explored in Gordon St last night. Maybe Squid Ink should get together with Kurt Fearnley and discuss differences?