Never give up; for even rivers someday wash dams away.
John Lennon contained multitudes, just like anyone else. However, what an inspiration to thirst for peace and freedom
John Lennon – 44 years gone
Just been around the world – 11 cities in 7 countries on 3 continents in eight weeks – from Grasmere to Auckland via Abu Dhabi. So plenty of stream bingeing.
My show of 2024 – Sky’s Day of the Jackal – on Sky and Peacock. Brilliant writing, music, acting and directing. Eddie Redmayne reigns. Go Bianca, Rodin and The Jackal.
If you liked Succession, you’ll love the Australian Outback’s take on families / business / legacy and cattle – Territory. Gritty, authentic, Aussie modern neo-Western from Netflix.
Series Two of The Diplomat – Netflix. Brilliant plot, addictive characters – Golden Globe winner, with Rory Kinnear as the British PM making every moment on camera count. And what a cliff hanger!
Dark Winds – also on Netflix – reminiscent of Longmire. Riveting story of two Navajo police officers teaming up to solve a brutal double murder. Close to home and the reservations that border our Sonoran Desert home.
You Would Do It Too. I spend a lot of time in/around Barcelona and was drawn to this. It’s new (on Apple) and has started well.
And finally – I’m a sucker for heist movies – here’s one from Sweden (go figure!) – Helicopter Heist based (loosely I suspect) on a real story. Another example of Netflix increasing internationalism.
PS: Am so missing Kevin Costner in the latest Yellowstone Series V drop.
Cousins who were free in 1970 to travel to Czechoslovakia, but we could not travel to France
The prompt for Week 4 of Nonfiction November (18th-22nd November) is Mind Openers, hosted by Rebekah at She Seeks Nonfiction.
One of the greatest things about reading nonfiction is the way it can open your eyes to the world around you—no plane ticket required. What nonfiction book or books have impacted the way you see the world in a powerful way? Is there one book that made you rethink everything? Is there a book that, if everyone read it, you think the world would be a better place?
I’ve loved introducing this prompt to Nonfiction November—first as Worldview Changers, then as Worldview Shapers, and now as Mind Openers. However I word it, I really just want to know if any books have shifted your perspective! These are the nonfiction books you’re thinking about long after you’ve finished them, aspects of which you keep seeing everywhere. They’re books that you find yourself repeatedly telling your friends to read.
This prompt is a bit difficult because of the temptation to list social justice books that I’ve read this year, and to claim them as mind-openers. But the truth is that (apart from the LitBios which are my favourite form of NF), they haven’t shifted my perspective. Rather, I have read to confirm and amplify my own beliefs about how the world might be a better place. You can see this if you look at My 2024 Year in Nonfictionand see the books about inequality and discrimination, and you can see familiar choices over the eight years I’ve been participating in Nonfiction November. They were all terrific books but they didn’t open my mind to anything new. Like many people of my generation, I’ve had these beliefs about social justice and Indigenous issues and environmental concerns since the 1970s. The detail changes, but the big picture is the same.
At my gloomiest, I tend to think, if people haven’t got the memo by now, reading a book is not going to make any difference.
Back in 2020 after reading Judith Brett’s recent Quarterly Essay (#78) titled The Coal Curse, Resources, Climate and Australia’s Future, I remember reading with great hope, How to Talk About Climate Change, in a way that makes a difference (2020), by Rebecca Huntley. That was a book that I thought everybody should read, but here we are with a climate change denier in the White House and Australia is on track for another horror bushfire season. I posted recently about Hope in the Dark (2004, reissued 2016), by Rebecca Solnit so that we don’t cave in to despair over the prevailing political culture, but I’ve been doing some escapist reading all the same.
Truth be told, there was just one book in 2024 that I read that made me think about things differently. I’ve never really had much interest in war fiction, but Donna Coates’ survey of Australian women’s war fiction was so interesting, that I posted two comprehensive responses to the first two sections of the book:
I also set up a special page about War Fiction and have also acquired some of the books to which Coates refers. And while this may be of interest to readers of Australian literature and its history, it isn’t going to change the world.
