My career behind the Iron Curtain - Andrew Barry

A humorous recounting of life in Hungary up to the 1956 revolution.

It's a bit like a re-hashing of jokes about life in command economies rather than a really profound 'life in' story. Fun to read though.

There's a track winding back - Phil Jarrett

Journalist retraces steps of explorers. Starts by walking from Sydney to Parramatta, goes a bunch of places, meets a guy with a dog along the way, takes his daughter fishing.

For some reason this wasn't the most engaging of retrospectives of Australian explorers. Jarrett did manage to have a fair few adventures tagging along Leichhardt's route (for example), and he does convey the bumbling along from stop to stop of olde-tyme Exploreing

The Deprivers - Steven-Elliot Altman

Imagine that if you touched someone, they would lose the use of one of their senses - sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste - or even become paralysed or uncoordinated. Pretty freaky - and depending on what sense or ability was deprived, this could have severe implications for intimate relations too.

Such is the lot of the Deprivers, the pariahs of Altman's sci-fi exploration of a world where some people are Deps amongst the majority rule of Normals.

Interesting themes of 'us and them' conflict, with characters on both sides of the Dep/Normal division who are clearly to be cheered for and those who are to be despised, hint at the allegory to common human prejudice - except this time the people really are different, and can really mess up your day by shaking your hand. Gloves all around.

Impressive too is the biological explanation how this might all work - by not thinking too hard about it, it's not implausible.

But, the book barrels along and is very engaging, until the ending... which disappointed. No spoilers here, but again it seems like the author got bored, or ran into a deadline.

Cambodia Trip 2006

Hi. I realised that poking around looking for the Cambodia pictures wouldn't be heaps of fun. So this post should keep all their links together.

Simone arrives
Rob arrives
Pink Pants
Shopping for the pants
Crossroads

Australienation: Portrait of a bi-cultural country - John Ogden

Great photos from three decades of shooting Australia, and a commentary on the Australian Aborginals vs everyone else who turned up - hence "bi" instead of "multi" cultural.

The Negative - Ansel Adams

Part two in the series, and every bit as useful as the first one. I was reading this on the train, and a guy sitting next to me couldn't contain himself when he saw it, so we ended up chatting about the book and photography in general.

Again, I marvel at how applicable the stuff in this old book is to modern (35mm and digital) photography, even when he's talking about 8x10 cameras and 22 inch lenses. The basics don't change. It's much more helpful too, than "The latest collection of everything you need to know about using digital cameras", where step one is explaining how a CMOS sensor works compared to a CCD; but not the implications for shooting. (Maybe there aren't any; afterall, Photoshop can cure all, right?)

Anyway, I don't pretend to be a purist nor a particularly good photographer, but I can appreciate Adams' skill both as an artist and craftsman, not to mention as a teacher.

Oryx and Crake - Margaret Atwood

It's been years since I've read anything by Maggie. It's not as arduous as I remember... Handmaid's Tale, Alias Grace, Wilderness Tips, Lady Oracle. Somehow, they all call to mind a sense of forcing myself to continue reading, when I really would rather have not.

Either I've grown, or Atwood's writing differently - I whizzed through O&C, and thought it was pretty alright. Basically, combine an apocalyptic world, the stories of three main characters, rampant genetic and proteonomic modification, a touch of male hubris, and Atwood's unhurried examination of human misery, stir and voila: you have the book.

An interesting cautionary tale; and rather worth reading.

The Etched City - K.J. Bishop

Another bit of sci-fi by a woman... Honestly, I don't plan these series of a type of book. I literally grab the first 7 or eight books that look interesting. Maybe the library knows this and is organising things to make it turn out this way... Now I'm worried.

Anyway. The world's gone to bits, it is a bit Mad Max-esque, but lacking internal combustion engines. An accomplished healer and an accomplished killer, colleagues and grudgingly friends during the convoluted wars of years past, meet and head off to one of the remaining cities where they might be able to settle down for a bit. Adventures ensue until they get there; he (the killer) works as a bodyguard for a local warlord type; she works in a rundown hospital in a poor part of town.

Time passes, they don't see each other a lot, and things start getting really wierd - like a lotus flower growing out of some guy's navel - and the flower can't be pulled out.

The barriers between the mundane and the fanstastic seem to become increasingly porous as the book goes on; the let down is the ending which seems to suggest that no one knows quite what happened to the main characters - 'some say that, some say this'... I suppose it's a literary trick to prolong the engagement with the fanstastic beyond the end of the book; but it could just as easily be giving up on the tale and telling the reader that it could go either way.

Interesting read, though.

Forest of the Pygmies - Isabel Allende

Wow! It's as good as City of the Beasts! (Somewhere else in this blog, searching might find it.)

Jaguar and Eagle are now fast friends, and travelling in Africa with Jaguar's grandmother. It's not long before they're escaping the clutches of a local despot who is treading all over the pygmies and Bantu in the area.

More of the same magical, lyrical writing that I fell in love with in the last book. The best part is that there is one more book in this series.

First Rider's Call - Kristen Britain

Sci-fi/fantasy, from a women's perspective. Not to shabby at all - a few more 'feelings' and 'emotions' than one might expect on the genre, but not at the cost of battles with orcs and stuff. Nifty.

Second book, but fortunately Ms Britain is considerate enough to have sufficent hints and background that the "First Rider's Call" stands pretty much on its own.

Cool.

Photography exposed - the story behind the image - Life Magazine

A whole bunch of famous pictures, with little stories next to them. Pretty, interesting, very suitable for the coffee table.

I think the descriptions are often too short, but then again, I like words as much as I do pictures.

Yay! Hafsa's gone home!

Very happy to hear that everything went well, and everyone's gone home to rest and recover.

Yay!

Chiune Sugihara

The 31st of this month is the 20th anniversary of the death of Chiune Sugihara who basically became the Japanese Schindler during WWII while posted in Lithuania. At his discretion (and against the orders his bosses in Tokyo) he authorised thousands of visas to Jews to escape the onrushing Nazis.

The only reason I know anything about this is a television special on TV a couple of weeks ago; Wikipedia has a whole story here.

The Camera - Ansel Adams

Now, this is a book on photography. Not only is Adams a pretty legendary photography, he talks about it really intelligibly (and usually intelligently, too). All the little electronic gizmos on a digital camera are pretty nifty, but I can imagine working with an 8"x10" view camera would be really cool.

#1: Composition, #2: Technical mastery of the medium to do the composition justice. Simple as that.

New Complete Sailing Manual - Steve Sleight

I'm pretty sure this is the same book I can't find back after moving to Sydney. That's a shame - it's a really good book.

It's a sailing manual. If you like sailing, (and are still learning to do it), it's fabulous. If you're not interested in sailing, it's probably pretty boring.

Digital Photographers Handbook - Tom Ang

I questioned my own judgement in picking up a book on digital photography printed in 2003. Apparently, 3.3 (and greater) megapixel cameras were in the realm of professional photographers.
Righty-o. I must be a real professional photographer then.

Conclusion: there really isn't a whack of difference between digital photography and film photography. The only thing is that if you stuff up a shot (technically), you can fiddle with it on the computer to recuperate the mistakes. Still, a fixed up boring shot is still a boring shot.

The salmon of doubt: hitchhiking the galaxy one last time - Douglas Adams

Ah, posthumous publications. Are they a last attempt to share the writer's brilliance, or a cynical cashgrab by the administrators of the estate and copyrights?

In this case, who cares. I'd forgotten why I liked Douglas Adams. He's pretty clever, and great fun to read. He reminds me (or vice versa, logical linearity isn't that important) of Terry Pratchett. Something to say, and a funny way to say it.

Yay for the guys and girls that put together the myriad jottings.

Somewhere East of life: Another European fantasia - Brian Aldiss

Criminy, did it again. Book three in a series. I suppose that's a risk of patronising the fiction section of the local library branch - they might not have everything in order.

Great vocabulary in this one; and a rather interesting twisty story. It's a good thing it ended when it did, though. The twists started getting a little routine, and the foil of the guy having his memory poached seemed to be running out of steam a bit... that is, after he'd been to backwater somethingistan trying to save a lost ikon from a mad guerilla (who he stabs in the throat), wandering almost randomly through Madrid, Budapest, and goodness knows where else.

The plot was almost like a Dali - the bits are recognisable, but the way they hang together is pretty different. Good fun.