Welcome to this week's edition of Top Ten Tuesday which is hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl. This week the theme is April Showers (Interpret this however you’d like: rainy day reads, books that make you cry, books that give you happy tears, books to wash away a bad reading experience, books set in rainy places, books with rain/raindrops/umbrellas on the cover, blue book covers, etc.). I am choosing to focus on water and rain!
Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen - I haven't thought about this book for the longest time!
The Weight of Water by Anita Shreve - I am not sure I remember anything about this book
The Seduction of Water by Carol Goodman - I read a number of Carol Goodman books back in the day!
The Water Horse by Julia Gregson - I read a few of this authors books but it's been a long time since I did so.
Fish Out of Water by Mary Janice Davidson - I only read this book because the author was coming to Australia as a guest of honour at a reader convention I was going to many, many years ago!
A Life on Pittwater by Susan Duncan - Next time I go to Sydney I wouldn't mind going out to Pittwater. It sounds like a beautiful place
Water Under the Bridge by Lily Malone - This is part of a trilogy set in a small town in Western Australia
Fresh Water for Flowers by Valerie Perrin - I read this for last year's Paris in July. I have a couple more books from her to read at some point
The Right Attitude to Rain by Alexander McCall Smith - This is part of the Isabel Dalhousie series set in Edinburgh
The Rainfall Market by You Yeong-Gwang - This is a fun Korean fantasy novel
I'm reading I finished reading The Rainfall Market by You Yeong-Gwang, and liked it. It was a book I picked up on a whim from the library having not heard anything about it. It has a really fun premise, is a bit fantastical and just that little bit different.
I started reading The Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle and Flying Club by Helen Simonson. This is the current Cook the Books selection and so I will be reviewing it later this month and finding something to cook from it as well. It's not as foodie as most of the other selections are so I am not sure what I will make yet.
I read One More Day of Us by Shari Low, which I am due to review this week. I also started The House on the River by Rachel Burton which is also due for review this week. I actually have another book that I need to squeeze in before Friday but I haven't started that yet.
A couple of weeks ago I went to an author event at my local library to see Australian author Amanda Hampson talk about her latest book, The Deadly Dispute, which is the third book in the Tea Ladies series. I just finished reading the first book in the series, called The Tea Ladies, and it was a fun tea-cosy mystery! It is set in the garment trade in 1965 so it is also a great choice for my read on a theme book club this month as the theme for that is the 60s.
On audio, I finished listening to Away with the Fairies which is the 11th book in the Phryne Fisher series by Kerry Greenwood. I hadn't actually read any of the series for many years, but it didn't take me long to get back into that world! I then started listening to Great Big Beautiful Life by Emily Henry. Is there a more perfect author/narrator combination than Emily Henry and Julia Whelan? I'm not sure there is!
I did also go to one author event last week. I drove to a small country town called Gisborne which is about 40 minutes away from me to hear Natasha Lester talk about her new book, The Madamoiselle Alliance which is based on a real person. What a woman! I was ready to drop anything and just start reading that book straight away. I will read it next week as it is one of the book club selection for the readers retreat I am going to in a couple of weeks.
I did share my April highlights on Instagram which were the books below. There are reviews for three of them up on the blog already, and a fourth will be up this weekend. These are the books I rated as 4.5 or 5 star reads with Pictures of You being the 5 star read for this month.
I'm watching
Masterchef Australia is back! Yay! This is a show that my husband and I enjoy watching together. This year it is a Back To Win series, meaning that all of the contestants have been on the show once or twice before but never won! I think I would prefer a show with new contestants but this will still be good.
I watched the first three episodes of a new show called The Secret DNA of Us. The idea is that a couple of hundred people from a town all come together and get DNA tested and then they come back together once the results are in and talk about what connects them. In some cases they find out that they might be fourth cousins, or that at some point they had an ancestor from a part of the world they had no idea about. There is also a reporter who is a researcher and she has come up with some very interesting stories to connect the DNA results with history. It's my kind of show!
I need to say thank you toErin from Still Life, with Cracker Crumband Lisa from Boondock Ramblingswho are hosting the Springtime in Paris movie event. I have been meaning to watch the French movie The Intouchables starring Omar Sy for the longest time and I never quite got around to it! It was this week's selection for the event, and I loved it!
The Intouchables is about a young unemployed man named Driss who just needs someone to sign his paper to say that he attended for a job interview and was unsuccessful so he can get his unemployment benefit. The job is to look after a man named Philippe who is a quadriplegic. No one is more surprised than Driss is when he is offered a trial period. Philippe is an aristocrat who lives in an amazing house in Paris, Driss grew up in the projects. Philippe loves classical music and expensive art. Driss grew up living off his wits and getting by however he could. What sets Driss apart from everyone else is that he doesn't see Philippe as just a quadriplegic man, he sees him as a man. A man who used to love extreme sports, a man who now has an accessible van to move around in but has a very expensive, fast car just sitting in the driveway.
The movie is a touching look at care and compassion and about seeing the best in each other, and it is even more touching given that it is based on a true story I am so pleased to have watched it now.
Here's the trailer
The last movie for the event is Charade which I hope to watch this week.
Life
I went to aqua class for the first time in forever last week. In fact, I went twice and I am going again this morning. It's a friendly enough group, who clearly have all known each other for a long time. The first class I did I was thinking that it wasn't really pushing me, until later that day when I could definitely feel it in my legs.
On Wednesday night we went to see German composer Hans Zimmer live in concert. My husband loves listening to movie soundtracks while he is working and Hans Zimmer is one of his favourites so this was his birthday present! It was a really good show, different to what I was expecting really. I wasn't familiar with everything but I still enjoyed the show. There was music from movies like Gladiator, Inception, Dune and much more. The highlight for me was music from The Lion King.
On Saturday it was our federal election. In Australia it is compulsory to vote, or should I say it is compulsory to turn up to the polling station and get your name crossed of. If you are lucky, your polling station will have a barbecue set up where you by what is known as a democracy sausage. It is a sausage in white bread, sometimes with onion, and with the sauce of your choice. Australians do get excited about the democracy sausage on election day. My polling station doesn't have a barbecue. I think we are going to have to find one that does for the next election.
Last week was the inaugural Global Book Crawl in Melbourne, so Bree from All the Books I Can Read and I couldn't resist the idea of wandering around the city visiting bookstores! The idea behind the crawl is that you have to visit between 8 and 12 bookstores around the city and collect stamps. As long as you visited the required number of stores then you could get a free book and you would go into the draw to win 50 books. If you spent $100 in a single store you should have received a Global Book Crawl tote bag.
We were somewhat thwarted by the fact that one of the stores that you had to visit was only open on certain days so we didn't get to get the free book, but we did have a fabulous day visiting some bookstores that we were familiar with, others we had never visited before. We got to talk books, life and everything in general and I did as many steps on that day as I normally do when I am holidays! The photo above was taken at the first bookstore so I still look relatively fresh!
I did get a bag from the last store that we visited but they had already run out of the specific tote bags and it was only the second day when we did it.
The stores that we visited included Books for Cooks, Hill of Content Bookshop, Kay Craddock Antiquarian Booksellers, Mary Martin Bookshop (where the pic above was taken), Paperback Bookshop, Readings Emporium and Readings at the State Library.
I can definitely see myself doing this again if they have it again next year.
Here are a couple more pics, including my haul for the day.
I'm reading
Unlike last week I actually finished more books than I started this week! I also posted 5 reviews which is a very unusual for me! I have a few I would like to post this week and then I will be almost caught up I think!
I finished reading Mysterious Bakery on Rue de Paris by Evie Woods which I thoroughly enjoyed. Last year I listened to the audio of The Lost Bookshop and was underwhelmed but this one grabbed my attention straight away and didn't let go!
I also finished The Bittersweet Bakery Cafe by Catherine Greer which was a really good read. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I will post a review of this one in a couple of weeks time.
I also read A Greek Island Gift by Mandy Baggot. I have read a few of Mandy Baggot's books now and enjoy her portrayal of Greece in the pages of her books. My review for this one will be up later this week.
I went to the library to pick up a cookbook that was on hold for me and saw The Rainfall Market by Korean author You Yeong-Gwang on the hot picks shelf and couldn't help myself. I have started reading it and so far it is good. Different from my usual reads but good.
I'm watching
We sat down this week and watched the most recent version of All Quiet on the Western Front which was an excellent film. What I didn't expect is that we would watched some of the 1979 version starring Ernest Borgnine as well. By comparing the two you can definitely see how movies have changed over the last 50 or so years. For example, the soldiers in the earlier version were very clean and tidy. The ones in the recent version with covered in mud and other things for most of the movie
However, they both don't compare to the gritty reality of war, as we saw when we watched a couple of epsides of the Ken Burns documentary about Vietnam.
We have watched a few documentaries this week. We watched a four episodes of a documentary series about the life of Winston Churchill which was very interesting. Whilst he is rightly famous for leading the British during WWII, there are some less than stellar instances in his life where he made decisions that had devestating consequences.
On a lighter note we went to the movies over the weekend to see The Penguin Lessons which stars British actor Steve Coogan. It is about a man who is a bit lost really who starts teaching at a school in Argentina right when the military coup happens. He acquires a penguin, and the movie tells the story about how his life changed as a result. It wasn't a bad movie. The word nice probably applies more than anything.
I did catch up on my Springtime in Paris movie viewing this week by watching Paris Blues and Hugo.
Paris Blues stars Paul Newman, Sidney Poitier, Joanne Woodward and Diahann Caroll, with a guest appearance by the great Louis Armstrong. The story is about two American musicians who live in Paris. They meet two American women who have come to Paris on holidays and they quickly fall in love. I hadn't heard a lot about this movie but I did enjoy it for a number of reasons. Firstly, Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward were married in real life so it was fun seeing them together on screen. Secondly, it was interesting to see the way that the race question was addressed in this movie. If you had of asked me to name a movie which starred Sidney Poitier which addressed issues relating to race I would have said Guess Who's Coming to Dinner or To Sir With Love. This movie looked at how different the experience was for Poitier's character living as an African American in Paris compared to what it would have been in America at the time. Another point of interest for me was seeing Paris itself. Yes, there was glamourous side of Paris, but this movie was made in 1961 and there were evident signs of the destruction of Paris during WWII. For example, there was a scene where they visit what looks like a market, and the market is set up amongst some runs.
After watching two older movies, Hugo was a more recent movie (made in 2011) but set in the 1930s. It surprised me that this movie was made by Martin Scorcese. I always associate his name with more violent movies but this was a very sweet movie which was based on the book The Invention of Hugo Cabaret by Brian Selznick.
In this movie orphaned boy Hugo lives in a train station in Paris, keeping the clocks wound up as he was taught to do by his uncle before he disappeared. He is trying to fix an automoton that his father had found at a museum, in the hope that he would get one final message from his dad. In order to survive and get the parts that he needs he steals from various stores in the train station, which brings him to the attention of the station policeman. If I had one criticism it is about the police man, but otherwise it is a great cast that brings a lovely story to life.
There were so many layers to this movie, which at its core is about the power of imagination and in particular the magic of movies.
I am really looking forward to watching The Intouchables this week. It is a movie I have been meaning to watch for years!
Life
We did spend a lovely afternoon have afternoon tea at Oxi Tea Rooms. It is more of an immersive experience rather than just afternoon tea. I will post more about it in a couple of weeks for Weekend Cooking but this is one photo.
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