buter's BABY blog

I've shamelessly stolen a blog post title from jarv - because it's the internet, and I can - but luckily she doesn't have a copyright statement so I'll never get sued .... (fingers crossed) ...

Anyway in all the foofaraw and hullabaloo of the end of the year and the start of the new one, I've decided it's time for a spring (summer) clean of upstairs, you know the place, the home of memory and thought and repository of all weird electrical connections that make us who we are ...

See what I mean about needing a spring clean?

Other people might call it a new year's resolution, or revolution, or evolution, but I'm going for something that is a bit more thorough while at the same time knowing that it's going to have to be done again.

It's a focus thing. This year I'm going to focus on reading new things, rather than trying to stick to a genre with which I am already comfortable, I'm going to focus on being a calmer person, and I'm going to focus on keeping up with friends. I know I tried to do that last year, and I sort of did ok, but I'm going to try to keep it up! After all just because a new year resolution did ok in year n, doesn't mean you can't dust it off and keep going at it in year n+1 does it?

So to start off with, I've been reading a bunch of books by James Clavell. In my wild teenage years I read a whole bunch of old adventure/thriller books my dad had picked up when someone left his work - Desmond Bagley, Frederick Forsyth, that kind of stuff. I tried reading Clive Cussler when I moved in with D™, but after the first book you kind of know the formula so the second, third and etc books are a bit .. predictable. Since then (about 7 years ago) I've not picked up an adventure book let alone read a saga of them. Enter James Clavell. A dude at work suggested I read Sho-Gun, which is a tome, when I'd mentioned to him that I thoroughly enjoyed reading Musashi a while back.

I finished that over Christmas (at Lorne, the coldest wettest beach to spend an Australian summer, *ever*) and so perused the local (only) secondhand bookshop to find more. I ended up with King Rat and Whirlwind, but I'm still missing Tai-Pan, Noble House and Gai-Jin. I'll get there - these books are *good*. There's action, adventure, drama, all that, there's a whole lot of history, politics, real-world tie-ins, and they're well written into the bargain. So this weekend I'm going to another second hand bookstore to try to fill my James Clavell bookshelf.

After that I thought I might try to read Gormenghast again. I tried for the first time about 10 years ago. Maybe I have matured enough to try again. Or maybe I'll end up spending more time with friends instead. Who knows.


Edit: my horoscope today says:


Hmm.