A beautifully illustrated graphic novel that captures the immigrant’s experience.

The most recent issue of my undergraduate alumni magazine featured an article on Shaun Tan, a West Australian artist. I loved the whimsical illustrations the article featured, and decided to see if my library had any of his books – good news: they do. Shaun describes his books as follows:

They are best described as ‘picture books for older readers’ rather than young children, as they deal with relatively complex visual styles and themes, including colonial imperialism, social apathy, the nature of memory and depression.

I’ve just finished “reading” The Red Tree, and I can’t recommend it highly enough. It’s a book about depression – very few (but very effective) words, lush, detailed illustrations, and a note of hopefulness at the very end. I’m not sure I’ve read such a concise and accurate description of depression before. Needless to say, I have every intention of looking at more of Shaun Tan’s books – The Arrival will be next.

I thought The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao was good, but not great. Still, plenty of people rave about it, and it won a Pulitzer, so there must be something to it. Maybe I would have enjoyed it more if I spoke more (any?) Spanish.

So far as I can tell, this is the same book as “Romantic Style”.

As part of my yearly physical I had my cholesterol tested towards the end of last year. The news was not good. My LDL level – which has always been on the high side, although somewhat compensated by a high HDL level – had become dangerously high. It’s time to do something serious about it!
While I was in Australia, I picked up a copy of the CSIRO Total Wellbeing Diet – I’d looked over my mother’s copies (almost everyone in Australia owns a copy of this book – it was a phenomenon when it first came out) and decided that at the very least it was a good resource to have on hand. It’s not specifically a cholesterol lowering diet – although research shows that women on this diet have generally experienced lower cholesterol – but it illustrated to me that I really hadn’t been thinking about my food intake at all. As it turns out, the CSIRO diet probably isn’t for me, but it has plenty of generally useful guidlines, and much of the diet and supporting material for it is published online. For me, it has been the first step towards really being aware of what I’m eating and the impact it has on my health.

I learned of Rosa Passos in the New Yorker, and was delighted when my friend, Chris, lent me a couple of her CDs (Rosa and Entre Amigos). Her music has a lovely ethereal sound to it, and I’ve been using it as music to wake up to. It’s a lovely way to ease yourself into the day – much better than the news on the radio or a beeping alarm clock, but probably less immediately effective.

I learned of Rosa Passos in the New Yorker, and was delighted when my friend, Chris, lent me a couple of her CDs (Rosa and Entre Amigos). Her music has a lovely ethereal sound to it, and I’ve been using it as music to wake up to. It’s a lovely way to ease yourself into the day – much better than the news on the radio or a beeping alarm clock, but probably less immediately effective.

I’ve been reading Exiting Nirvana: A Daughter’s Life with Autism. It’s a mother’s account of her autistic daughter’s emergence from autistic isolation into a more socially engaged existance. It turns out it’s a sequel (I haven’t read the first book): it follows an account of her daughter’s first 8 years, chronicled in a book called The Siege. In any case, I’ll definitely look out for The Siege as Exiting Nirvana is excellent. It’s written with such compassion, understanding, and intelligence, with insight into her daughter’s autism, and the struggle that it has been for everyone involved to help Jessy (her daughter) lead a more interactive life: learning to communicate and interact, and to reduce the distress she experiences in her interaction with people and the world.

I bought this album because I thought I might go to a Ben Lee concert this evening, and I thought I should listen to his most recent album. (There’s a lot of thinking there on my part!)

I ended up not going – caught at work late, no-one to go with, terribly jet-lagged – and I’m not entirely sorry. I haven’t listened all the way through the album yet, but even at the half-way point it was beginning to sound a bit monotonous – the songs all sort of sounded the same. Maybe it will grow on me with repeated listening?

I’m less than halfway through this book, but it is amazing. If you live in USA, and are at all interested in where your food comes from, you simply must read The Omnivore’s Dilemma. For me the most revealing has been the expose of corn. I mean, I knew that America had a surplus of corn, and I understood, vaguely, that it had something to do with subsidies, but I now really understand how we got into the situation we’re in. What I didn’t realize at all before was just how much nitrogen-based fertilizer goes into growing corn, and just how much energy is needed to make the fertilizer. It makes the idea of biofuels look laughable (for every calorie that comes from a corn kernel more than two calories of energy, mainly in the form of fossil fuels, go in). I’m not really sure how one moves away from a corn-based diet – being vegetarian would certainly help, and buying food in it’s rawest possible state has to help – you have a better grasp on what you have. Beyond that, I think you just has to ask a lot of questions about where you food has come from, and what’s gone into it.