2016 Reading challenge

I recently came across this 2016 reading challenge through Facebook. It came along various paths from its original creator Anne - Modern Mrs Darcy - over on her blog at Modernmrsdarcy.

It is an interesting list so I've decided to give it a go and have already earmarked a few books for my challenge.

I've already ticked off my first book recommended by my sister -  In Love and War by Liz Byrski published in Western Australia by  Fremantle Press in 2015.  Please click on the links to read more. 

  




Liz's personal memories and experiences as a young child in the final years of World War 2 in the English country town of East Grinstead, and her trip in 2007 to find the England of her youth, are interwoven with the stories and memories of "The Guineas Pigs"  and their nurses. Cronically burned airmen were brought to the East Grinstead hospital where Archibald McIndoe rebuilt their faces, hands and bodies while the nurses and townspeople helped rebuild their self-esteem and lives. In the process of walking familiar paths, interviewing airmen and nurses and writing the book Liz made peace with her memories and banished some of her own personal ghosts.





It was a fascinating read and highlighted how we harbor in the background experiences from our childhood that have a profound subconscious effect on our lives. I recently met up with an old friend who has been battling in the last few years a horrific part of her childhood that had remained buried in her subconscious until her later life. 

However this post is not about that. But this reading challenge list did take me back to my childhood and memories I have of laying on the cool lino of our passageway at home reading during the hot school summer holidays during my Primary School years. In our wood and fibro house it was the coolest spot I could find. 

 

In those days my Mum had a travelling library van come regularly to our house. In the school holidays were were allowed to borrow a book. I remember the excitement as the man opened up the back of his van and slid out the children's books. I probably then lay all afternoon in the passageway being transported to other worlds of the Far Away Tree, The Wishing Chair, the England of Milly Molly Mandy, or the latest mystery of The Secret Seven and Enid Blyton. The book would be finished in a day or two at the most, and I would have to wait another week for the library van to come again. 
Later I would spend hours looking through a particular art book that my Dad had bought through Reader's Digest - Great Painters and Great Paintings. I still have it. 

So this memory started my husband and I talking of other things we did through those childhood summers to keep cool during the 1950s and 60s..... playing under the sprinkler on the back lawn, sucking on cordial iceblocks, swimming in the river, playing in a bathtub of cold water, laying out on a calico sheet on the back lawn in the evenings. My husband said they sometimes slept on their front veranda, and I know my father said they did this too when he was a boy out in the wheatbelt. 

Sometimes as a special treat we could walk down to the shops and buy an icecream. My favourite was a strawberry push-up. It came in a cardboard cylinder; vanilla icecream at the top, and as you pushed up from the base you came to the delicious strawberry syrup at the bottom. Delicious.  My mother used to make icecream with a tin of evaporated milk, and I did this too for years during my early married life when bought icecream really was an expensive luxury to us. 

Sometimes my sister and I were allowed to fill up the bath to play in. We must have made a terrible mess as I remember sliding down the slopy end of the bath into the water. There would have been lots of shrieking and giggling no doubt and water all over the floor. 

For a few years Dad rented a cottage at Palm Beach, Rockingham or Safety Bay just south of Perth and we stayed there for two weeks or so during the summer holidays. I had my first swimming lessons in the ocean at Palm Beach and I remember being too scared to take my feet off the bottom. Later we had swimming lessons at Como in the Swan River in Perth. The Como swimming area was full of huge jelly fish. Ugh. 

My husband's family had an above-ground swimming pool at one stage so no doubt a lot of time was spent out there. Their uncle also had a beach house at Rockingham and they often went down there to stay and walked to the beach from his house. 

The top two photos below here were taken in 1958 at Palm Beach when I was 3. Below are photos taken in 1961 and 1962. I'm the little blondie. Don't you just love our shirred bathers?

 Anyway, I have gotten away from my original idea for this post, the 2016 Reading Challenge.  Here is the list again. I would like to add "a historical novel - fiction, nonfiction, memoir or biography". 
 A few books I have already earmarked to read are - Hemingway's Old Man and the Sea, Graham Greene's Travels with My Aunt, and Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange - I've never read this last book, it has sat on our shelves for over 40 years, and I think it will be a book that intimidates me. 

Do you have a favourite book? What are you reading right now? Will you take up the reading challenge with me? I hope you will. Let me know in the comments, keep a record and we can come back at the end of the year to see how we went. Happy reading! 

It's mid summer here in Western Australia, make sure you slap on some sunscreen, pop on a hat, cover up, and sit under a sun shelter if you decide to sit on the beach to read.

Thank you so much for stopping by. I value your comments and look forward to hearing from you. I will try to visit your blogs in return. Have a wonderful week. 

 Here's a little challenge I did a year or so ago, making a sentence from book titles.....
Rebecca, whatever you do don't run sinning across Spain. Eat pray love in the hands of providence under the Tuscan sun. 

I am linking up to the link-ups below. Please click on the links to see fabulous contributions from around the world - virtual touring at its best!

Mosaic Monday
Travel Photo Mondays
Lifestyle Fifty Monday Linkup 
Our World Tuesday
Through My Lens 
Image-in-ing
Wednesday Around the World at Communal Global
Worth Casing Wednesday
What's It Wednesday
Travel Photo Thursday
The Weekly Postcard

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