Lol, I should be writing Part 17 by now. I knew when I started this project I’d have a hard time keeping up with the Reports. And, the longer I leave the reports, the harder it becomes remembering what I thought about the books. Well, here goes.

Book 48 … Tom Appleby, Convict Boy, by Jackie French, published in 2004 by Angus & Robertson, an imprint of Harper Collins Publishers.

When I read a book aimed at young readers, I’m often in the mode where I’m reading aloud. Asking myself whether it ‘sounds’ like an interesting read for both the adult reader and the young listener. And Tom Appleby sounds pretty good to my inner ear so I will be able to recommend it.

Although the main character starts off being only eight years old, his life will be so foreign to modern children being read to, there’s no flavor of childishness. And once the ships reach Port Jackson, Tom grows up a bit. He has to, in a community where hunger is the primary concern, and stealing food is not an option for him.

Tom is chosen by a sergeant in the marines for company for the sergeant’s son. The boys learn the skills necessary to survive together.

Though I’m not sure about the fact that they meet an old aboriginal lady who shows and teaches them native foods. Not sure how that would strike a modern Indigenous reader/listener.

Thirty years ago, Jackie French was a favorite source for read-aloud books. Seems like she could do with a revival. And the book has indeed passed on to its next home–the-adult-reader-and-young-listener combo.

Book 49 … A Simpler Time: a memoir of love, laughter, loss and billycarts, by Peter FitzSimons, published in 2010 by Harper Collins Publishers.

I’m glad FitzSimons called his book a memoir himself, saves me have to ponder once again about the differences between autobiography and memoir.

I saved this book from the dumpster because it’s set in the late 1950s and 1960s, and because the kids in it grew up at Peats Ridge, only about 39 kilometres by road and shorter as crows would fly from the suburb where my sisters and brothers and I were growing up in those exact years.

There’s even a possibility we might have met them at one or other time as we all would’ve traveled the same train services. Maybe in the school holidays or once we all graduated from our various high schools.

There were plenty of interesting comparisons and likenesses. The FitzSimon kids lived on a two-hundred-acre farm, where their parents had settled after WW2, to grow oranges, tomatoes and zucchinis. A seven days a week job.
We de Heer kids lived on a half-acre block carved out of the same kind of sandstone that supported Peats Ridge, covered with the same kind of bush that vegetated Peats Ridge. The de Heer father, also being a seven days a week man, chose to build our house himself on weekends, and after he got home from 12 hour days getting-there, working, and-getting-back.

There were five of them, there were six of us. The FitzSimons kids were boarders at Knox Grammar for Boys and Abbotsleigh Girls High. Both of them ‘flash’ private schools in the understanding of newbie immigrant kids like us. We went to state day schools like Asquith Girls High School and Asquith Boys High School, though one of my brothers managed to get a scholarship to attend James Ruse High School at Carlingford.

Our state primary schools, theirs and ours, would’ve been run by the same state education department, though theirs was a country school with only two classrooms and ours may have had 4 classrooms by then.

Peats Ridge. As soon as I picked up the book, it was like I recognized it and had to read it. Thoroughly enjoyed it and will send it to one of my youngest siblings for him to read.

Book 50 … A Banquet of Books: A Collection of Highlights, published in 2007 by the National Library of Australia.

I hardly know where I got this book. Must’ve been in the collection of secondhand books I saved from the dumpster. A job lot as they say. But an interesting little book, and about books you’d never ordinarily would see, hidden as they are among the collections or in the National Library’s acreage of store rooms.

After a brief intro, it is divided into three sections: Homegrown Historical Treasures; Masterpieces from Abroad; and Works of Art.

The introduction starts with one of the smallest books in the world—so small in fact that I don’t see how it could’ve been made—measuring 2.1 mm by 2.4 mm made in Germany in 2002. The largest book in the collection also gets a mention … Birds of America by James Audubon, 1785-1851. It’s a double elephant folio.

Part one’s Homegrown Historical Treasures includes a catalogue of fabrics (bark cloth or tapa) collected during the three voyages of Captain Cook. Part two, Masterpieces from Abroad, has a Book of Hours, and a leaf from the Gutenberg Bible and about fifteen more. Part three, Works of Art, contains Lionel Lindsay’s Twenty-One Woodcuts and Ann Muir’s Harvesting of Colour, from the 1990s, among a couple of dozen of historical maps, biographies, paintings by Gould, John Lewin, and other artists. I was amazed at the treasures the National Library has hidden away in its collections. Well worth visiting.

Book 51 … The Black Book by Ian Rankin, first published by Orion Books in 1993. This edition published in 1994 in the UK, but then printed in Australia in 2005 as far as I can make out.
I returned this to the library only yesterday and all I recall of it is that it’s the fifth in the Inspector Rebus series. Here a few more details by Wikipedia.

“The Black Book is a 1993 crime novel by Ian Rankin, [1][2] It is the first book to feature Siobhan Clarke, and the first one in which Morris Gerald Cafferty appears as a main character. It is also the first book in which Rebus is based at St Leonards police station.”

Neither awful nor fantastic, it delivered me a few hours of uninterrupted relaxation/reading when the stress of the previous couple of days meant my delayed fatigue forced me to rest up.