November was a very full month!

After returning home from lutruwita, the rest of the month was also pretty packed with activities – we dug up our grass nature strip as part of our plans to create a native wildflower garden for wildlife (you can read all about how we did this here), and there were several fun social activities including a Swedish Christmas fika party with my local craft friends – we all baked a sweet treat from our home country or childhood to share – and then sat around chatting, drinking bubbles and getting high on sugar! My contribution was a plate of deconstructed mini pavlovas, using my favourite Nigella Lawson recipe for Rosewater & Black Pepper Pavlova, that I modified slightly to make mini single-serve sized ones rather than one large one. This month also saw the surprise 30th birthday celebration for another friend, which involved a delicious feast of Malaysian food and a fun trivia game based on how well we knew their life.

Fika feast
Mini pavlovas

Amongst all this, of course was a packed work schedule, and I somehow managed to finish a few books (below), and made a small amount of progress on some craft projects (I might share those next post). Like I said at the start, it has been a very full month. 🙂

Books finished in November:

  • “Demon Copperhead” (Fiction) by Barabra Kingsolver. This was an excellent book, although very tragic, and I felt quite tense reading it, as one unfortunately or ‘unfair’ thing after another seems to happen to the protagonist. But it is beautifully told, and as usual, Barbara Kingsolver manages to weave a captivating story that makes us understand something of importance that would otherwise be easy to dismiss without having personal experience of it yourself. In this case, the opioid crisis in North America.
  • “The Waterlily” (Memoir & Poetry) by Kate Llewellyn. I met Kate in Adelaide, when she was in her 80s, riding her bike to my seniors fitness class, wearing a pearl necklace. We became friends, and she invited me to her beautiful garden that she wrote about in her book “A fig at the gate”. I have really been enjoying sitting in my garden, reading “The Waterlily” and gaining some insight into the life of my friend in the 1980s when she was living and building a garden in the Blue Mountains.
  • “The Mushroom Tapes – Conversations on a triple murder trial” (Non Fiction) by Helen Garner, Chloe Hooper & Sarah Krasnostein. I wanted to read this not so much from obsession with the case, but because I really admire the observational and insightful writing style of Helen Garner, and Sarah Krasnostein’s ‘The Trauma Cleaner’. Rather than being sensationalist, it was like being part of the authors’ conversations and musings as they observed the court proceedings unfold, and tried to understand what happened and how things could have led to this point. I listened to this as an audiobook, and recommend this format.
  • “The Nightmare Sequence” (Poetry & Illustrations) by Omar Sakr & Safdar Ahmed. Heartbreaking poems to draw attention to and bare witness to the horror of genocide being inflicted on the people of Palestine.
  • “Memorial Days” (Memoir) by Geraldine Brooks. This is an honest and personal account by the author as she grieves and tries to come to terms with her husband’s unexpected death. Not one of my favourite books by this author, but I appreciated the openness with which she discussed her grief, as it is not something a lot of us in western countries seem to know how to do well. The more we talk about these things the better.