Talking about Jane Austen in Baghdad (a book review)

I don't usually write book reviews. Left to my own devices I'll happily devour a book a day. I try hard to be disciplined about doing other stuff, so might take two days for most books. I picked up this book from the library yesterday and finished it today. That counts as two days in my book (haha).

This book is the exchange of emails between Bee and May. Bee is a British journalist, married with three young daughters, juggling all the activity of a busy Western city life. May is a Iraqi English professor living in Baghdad. Bee contacts May to conduct an interview in early 2005 for the BBC World Service.

They didn't write the emails with the plan of turning them into a book - they just wrote emails to each other, developing a friendship along the way. Both women are obviously articulate and trained in language and writing, but it's probably not the greatest writing to ever be printed.

What it is is a harrowing description of living in a war zone, of living in fear of your mortal life day in, day out; juxtaposed against the normalcy and downright luxury and opulence of Western living. May talks about her depression and fear, the mental strain of living with death threats and daily dangers. Bee counters with descriptions of her daughters' birthday parties and their holidays.

Although it's unlikely to win any awards for writing, I read until after midnight last night, and aside from a brief break to make lunch, read all day today, because I was so caught up in their lives, so wanting things to change, so anxious to know that things worked out for May.

If you want to understand why people, even wealthy and educated people, are seeking asylum from Iraq, Afghanistan and other hot-spots around the world, you need to read this book. If you're one of those who say, "They should wait in line; they should follow the correct processes; they should do x, y, z; before seeking asylum" you need to read this book. Read this book and begin to understand the daily lives of ordinary, every day people caught up in horrid out-workings of political messes not of their making.

Creativity Journal - Day 5 (Collections)

No, don't go looking, there is no Day 4 entry. Day 4 requires a five minute walk. My current project is the garden - lots of digging and lugging of dirt and tools and plants. After a couple of hours of getting muddy, I'm not walking any further than the bathroom. The garden project will hopefully last until the weekend. Hope is based on the weather, pacing myself and not getting hurt. (Point 2 and 3 may or may not be related.) Therefore, I decided (my creativity, my rules) that I would "postpone" Day 4 until a more suitable time and keep on moving on. Otherwise, I'm likely to stall after just three days.

Introducing Day 5:

What do you collect? Work with a collection of objects you have in your home (or borrow a friend's if you like).

What do I collect? Nothing on purpose, lots of things in the course of just living my life. The first thing that came to my mind; however, was books. I love books. I'd love an unlimited budget (and space) to buy all the books I could imagine. Books are an obvious fit for the word theme I'm following, but what about the fabric theme? Today is one of those days I thought would happen, where I combine both themes. To create this challenge, I have used books from my craft stash. I have only two shelves of crafting, mainly sewing, books, which is quite restrained on my part, I feel.

This is View 1 of my creative challenge. As you can see from some of the covers, these are mainly sewing books.

The green book on the far right is very special.

It was given to me when I was in primary school by a family friend. It's called "The Australian girls' book of crafts, pets, sports and hobbies" by Prudence and Anthony Harvey. It's all black and white; no colour pages. It has over 80 topics and covers just about anything a girl could have been interested in in the 70s.

I credit it with being one of my earliest inspirations to be creative. Sadly, it never really inspired me to be athletic, although it covers nearly 20 sporting activities.

But, back to today's creative challenge. This is View 2:

Books are words

What do you collect? Stamps, coins, something unusual, or just dust bunnies under the bed?

Parting is such sweet sorrow

I cut off a limb on the weekend. Well, not literally, but it was almost as painful. Actually, the contemplation was almost as painful, but the reality was quite releasing.

We cleaned out our bookshelves. I love books. I love reading good books filled with real characters, whether they're fictional or not; believable plots, whether they could happen in reality or not; and delicious words. I'm not much of a writer, but I love reading. I also love books that inspire, that inform, that broaden your horizons.

My husband likes the concept of books. He rarely reads non-fiction and he talks about reading more than he actually does it.

My girl has inherited my love of a well-told story.

This is our front entrance bookcase:

What you can't see here is the bottom row of books; the shelf of gardening books to the right; the two cases in the dining room or the case at the end of the hall. What you can probably see is that we had more books than shelves.

When we moved from Perth, ten years ago, we carted most of these books across the country. Boxes and boxes and boxes of them. And since then the vast majority of them have only been touched when the shelves have been moved.

Since we're considering moving again, I figured it was a good time to cull. And cull we did. Our process was very simple. All three of us were involved in a conveyor line process. There were no recriminations or discussion about what people wanted to keep. If an individual wanted to keep something, it got kept.

I cleaned out a shelf and took a book. If I wanted it, it went back on the empty shelf. If I didn't want it, it went down the line to hubby. If he wanted it, back it went; if not, it went to the Girl. If she didn't want it, it went on the pile to give away.

We have tried this once before; a shelf at a time. See that empty shelf at the back, towards the bottom? That's as far as we got. Give hubby enough time and he can talk himself into keeping anything. This turned out to be one of those rare cases where 15 minutes at time wasn't the best method. In an hour and a half we had gone through all the books in the entrance and the case in the hallway. (The dining room books are all my craft book and that is whole other issue!)

The end result:

Look at all those empty shelves.

This case was perhaps the worst for books pushed in just so they would fit.
Now look at all that space!
In fact, we may be able to consolidate all of these out to the entrance shelves.

See the tallest stack? There's another stack behind that one.

Now comes the fun part - getting the piles out of the house and resorting the remainder.

As I said at the beginning, I expected it be a painful process. But because I knew I could keep anything I wanted I found it quite freeing and releasing. And I'm not even tempted to 'just check' the piles.