Goodness, look at the date – I’m running late for my regular ‘What I’m Reading’ post. With the kids at home on holidays still, and my playing around with new video software, I’ve been preoccupied! Things will return to normal (or our version of normal!) next week when school goes back.
So – books! To start, I cracked open Station Eleven and was immediately drawn in to the story – how great an opening is Shakespeare (you’ll understand if you read it) and a global pandemic! Station Eleven is one of those books that first came to my attention through a social media mention – I can’t even remember now if it was Twitter, or Facebook, or who the person even was, but whoever you are, thank you. Even Adam knew of it – in bed the other night, he saw the cover and said, “I saw that on io9” (once it’s on io9 you know a book will come on to his radar).
Here’s the blurb:
DAY ONE – The Georgia Flu explodes over the surface of the earth like a neutron bomb. News reports put the mortality rate at over 99%.
WEEK TWO – Civilization has crumbled.
YEAR TWENTY – A band of actors and musicians called the Travelling Symphony move through their territories performing concerts and Shakespeare to the settlements that have grown up there. Twenty years after the pandemic, life feels relatively safe. But now a new danger looms, and he threatens the hopeful world every survivor has tried to rebuild.
Great blurb, isn’t it?
As I mentioned in my video with Lisa Heidke the other day, my other fiction read of the month is Carl Sagan’s Contact. I have a deep and abiding affection for the movie adaptation; I don’t know anyone personally who has read it, so I can’t ask them, but those people who have and talk about it online say that the book is better. It made it on to my 100 Books Challenge list, so it obviously ranks about the traps. What I’ve read so far is terrific – lovely fluid style. If you’re interested in the topic of possibly extraterrestrial life, or if you’ve seen the movie and want to see how much different the book is, or what Sagan thought of the screenplay – not much, in the early stages – then check it out. And it has a female protagonist. Win.
Our overseas trip is fast approaching and I’m one of those people who loves to research as much as possible in advance, so when we arrive in a foreign place I feel like I already have a basic handle on where to go and how. I love reading maps as well. Rome is one of the cities that we’ll be visiting and the language factor is another reason why I want to get oriented. I love the Eyewitness Travel books best – I like how they are broken up into sections, their maps are the best, and it even comes down to the little things like the quality of paper they’re printed on and the quality of the photographs.
There’s a little story to this Rome 2015 book – we saw it at a bookstore the other week and Adam said, “Should we get this?” and I shook my head and said, “Maybe later”. A few days ago, at the library, I found it on the shelf. BRAND NEW. The map hadn’t even been ripped off the back yet! It was very exciting to be the one to do it. So if you’re one of those people who think library books are icky because of all the handling they get by others, you can be first too!
What I also like to do is get the general guide, plus a family one too (if possible). The information is generally the same, but for those people travelling with very little kids, there is more on offer in the guides for those extra challenges that can arise, like using prams etc. Plus, my kids prefer to flick through those, too.
What are you reading this month? Can you recommend any travel guides?
Note: aff links.
