Monday Bookclub

 I am getting the hang of this iphone! But I have become cautious since last Friday- not very long to be cautious I know however Maria, a friend in NYC had hers snatched out of her hands on the subway. I know that is what many people would like to do with cell phones- snatch and turn off the phones that have people talking loudly as they walk along the street or those who ignore the courtesy of turning their phone off in theatres. Someone's phone did go off in the theatre on Saturday completely confused the actor in Gatz not just because it rang but in about a minute later there was a phone cue in the play. Poor guy must have really been running through what should have been going on. The audience member's phone didn't sound like the one on set but still tricky if you were standing there saying your lines and a phone went off earlier than it should. However Maria's phone was actually stolen- the guys did a snatch and bolt out of the carriage.



However I digress... I am getting the hang of using the iphone for my point and shoot camera so that I can capture that photo for the day for this blog.
I have been trying to get photos of evidence of autumn in the areas I have been working and today was no exception. This particular street has featured in a few of my seasonal photos- I should hunt them out and see what ones I have.

After a day at work what does one do? On this particular day it was book club. This time at Margie's, in our building so an easy place to get to!
The book this month was Wanting by Richard Flannagan.
"It is 1839. A young Aboriginal girl, Mathinna, is running through the long wet grass of an island at the end of the world to get help for her dying father, an Aboriginal chieftain. Twenty years later, on an island at the centre of the world, the most famous novelist of the day, Charles Dickens, realises he is about to abandon his wife, risk his name and forever after be altered because of his inability any longer to control his intense passion.

Connecting the two events are the most celebrated explorer of the age, Sir John Franklin - then governor of Van Diemen's Land - and his wife, Lady Jane, who adopt Mathinna, seen as one of the last of a dying race, as an experiment. Lady Jane believes the distance between savagery and civilisation is the learned capacity to control wanting. The experiment fails, Sir John disappears into the blue ice of the Arctic seeking the Northwest Passage, and a decade later Lady Jane enlists Dickens' aid to put an end to the scandalous suggestions that Sir John's expedition ended in cannibalism.

Dickens becomes ever more entranced in the story of men entombed in ice, recognising in its terrible image his own frozen inner life. He produces and stars in a play inspired by Franklin's fate to give story to his central belief that discipline and will can conquer desire. And yet the play will bring him to the point where he is no longer able to control his own passion and the consequences it brings.

Inspired by historical events, WANTING is a novel about art, love, and the way in which life is finally determined never by reason, but only ever by wanting."
Interesting discussion around this one!