Sincerest apologies for my unexpected week long absence from the world of book blogging, but sometimes music, friends and adventure are necessary diversions for maintaining sanity. Reviews will resume as usual from Wednesday. I went to Sydney during the week to see one of my favourite bands play live (and saw them again just a few days later in Melbourne.), hung out in the city for a few days, very maturely and joyously jumped on the hotel bed to pop music, hugged a superhero, got drunk with a British tourist, went book shopping:
- No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai
- King Kong Theory by Virginie Despentes
- The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
- The Magus by John Fowles
- Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
- Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
- Point Counter Point by Aldous Huxley
- Prick Up Your Ears: The Biography of Joe Orton by John Lahr
- Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
- The Collected Poems of Tennessee Williams
- A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams
- Suddenly Last Summer and Other Plays by Tennessee Williams
- Sweet Bird of Youth and Other Plays by Tennessee Williams
A loot which did not interfere with my baggage limits, thank goodness. My favourite place in all of Sydney would have to be Kinokuniya, which had the most diverse range of books I have ever seen in a store. I said to my traveling companion Matt, “I hope you don’t get bored waiting around for me” but it turned out that he was just as enraptured by the store as I was. Later that evening, after our minds were blown by the experience of seeing Brand New live again, in a new city, new setlists, right up the front, sweaty, dancing and screaming; we agreed to get some food and end the night there. We were in bed before midnight, each of us reading our new books by lamplight like some oddball married couple, which was a little bit cute.
It was TOTALLY worth traveling all that way to see the band, such an intense live show and it strangely and inexplicably felt like closure and a new beginning at the same time. Not just garden variety closure, but boarding the windows, bolting the door shut, throwing away the keys to the locks, digging a moat around it, throwing a couple of nasty beasts into the moat, and blowing up the bridge to prevent anything from that part of the past returning. All that just from seeing a band! It feels like a pretty miraculous and exciting place to be.
[Image: Portrait Fille by Tamara de Lempicka]