This month saw us riding the bus to Bau (which is where the above photo was taken, and let me be clear: We admired the cake, but did not consume it); mopping up after the big storm; watching the Kuching Parade of Lights; dealing with a seriously dead gecko; checking out the fancy new bridge; and taking in a Rajinikanth movie.

We also stepped up the preparations for heading off on our next bit of travel. We've not been out of Borneo since we returned in February, and this Tern is very much looking forward to spreading its wings (it's a pity they're not its own wings, but hey...)

So... An OK month, but not a red-letter month (the number of purple photos is always a good yardstick for red-letterism).


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It has been a good period for reading, though.

Meaghan Green's exhortation to turn your reading list into "output" really resonated with me. I don't have the kind of self-generated "curriculum" that seems to be all the rage at the moment, but I do have a sprawling TBR list, and the things I pick off it do kind of link together, and the resultant Velvet Cushion posts do involve a little of what she calls "the act of creating something with what you've learned". And Book notes (there were two this month, on ruins, codes, and stereotypes, and on Viet Nam) to some extent serve as "string", dragging previous reading projects into the present, and tying them together. All of which means there's a bit of outputting happening, as opposed to just hoovering up texts.

Still, although I don't exactly feel the need to set myself essay questions, Green does inspire me to want to be a bit more output-oriented, in a more creative and thematically organized way.


This month's reading hasn't been especially tidy or purposeful, but there has been a little bit of coherence to it...

-- Under the 1920s rubric, there's The Green Hat, by Michael Arlen (an atmospheric if melodramatic story, that offers lots of side-paths of discovery), and -- if we extend the category to the decades that produced the twenties -- we can include Ragtime, by E.L. Doctorow (a wild ride in which the historical characters are more extraordinary than the fictional ones).
-- To file under "books built on other books", there's Demon Copperhead, by Barbara Kingsolver (an eye-opening and entertaining reworking of Charles Dickens's David Copperfield), and The Hours, by Michael Cunningham (a moving, three-stranded riff on Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway).
-- Huddling in the "dark academia" corner, there's Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro (20 years on, it's still chilling), and The Lessons, by Naomi Alderman (a thought-experiment around the question of how we would act if we never had to worry about money, and how that would play out for those differently positioned).
-- Miles apart from each other, but united in their perceptive treatment of families and ageing, are Us, by David Nicholls (poignant, observant, yet gloriously readable), The Summer Book, by Tove Jansson (simple, beautiful, and fathoms deep), and the television version of The Lost Child (which signs me off on a three-year, multi-lingual, multi-media journey through Elena Ferrante's four Neapolitan Novels).


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August also flagged a number of interesting articles:

-- Dense Discovery alerted me to a piece by Lydia Polgreen that articulates one of the great conundrums of our age: "We are living in an age of mass migration... All across the rich world, citizens have concluded -- with no small prompting by right-wing populists -- that there is too much immigration... But these vituperative responses reveal a paradox at the heart of our era: The countries that malign migrants are, whether they recognize it or not, in quite serious need of new people..." (Lots more useful data on global migration and migrants can be accessed here.)

-- In 27 notes on growing old(er), Ian Leslie sugar-coats nothing...


-- How noise sensitivity disrupts the mind, brain and body -- a title that says it all -- came courtesy of a friend, and was especially interesting in view of the long battle we've had with noise since moving into this apartment in March. At the end of the day, if you're particularly noise-sensitive (and I think I am, given my scores on a couple of self-tests), you've still got to find ways round it, because the world is not going to change to suit you (in fact, we can fairly confidently predict the reverse: I think the world is becoming, year by year, a noisier place). But it is helpful to realize that the misery you experience because of noise is not entirely your fault, which goes some way towards countering the feeling that if only you were tougher, calmer, more easy-going, more focused (insert self-blaming adjectives of your choice), you'd be OK... Which at least allows you to cut yourself a little slack...

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So, two thirds of another year gone... Do you find that scary? I do.

But we're still here. And, as Jane Kenyon reminds us, "It might have been otherwise."