entranced by The Rosie Project

This book was recommended to me and sadly I just missed hearing the author Graeme Simsion talking in one of the free sessions at this year's Brisbane Writer's Festival. However, I was prompted to buy the book and reading it was easy. OK so my first impression was that this was a scientific attempt to identify love. I was prepared to be swept along on Don Tillman's journey, given that he was a professor of genetics. However, it quickly became apparent that while he was very intelligent and he used an evidence-based approach, he was behaving like a person 'on the spectrum'. His obsessive need for control made his low emotional intelligence quotient fairly obvious. However,his insightful honesty was endearing, and I decided to travel with him, for his wife project; using a survey to filter out women who drink, smoke and arrive late! So when Don met Rosie Jarman, who was quickly disqualified, he was somewhat disarmed, and ended up helping her on her personal quest to find her biological father. So that began the challenge as to whether he would or could recognise the friendship as anything more...

Lurid (surrealist) Beauty at National Gallery Victoria

I have always been fascinated by surrealist art and the somewhat successful communication of a very intellectual message through the visual senses. Renee Magritte is one of the few artists that have challenged and rewarded me with a deeper insight. So the recent exhibition in Melbourne set out by proclaiming that surrealist artists used techniques such as automatic drawing and collage to liberate the unconscious mind and disrupt current social and political realities. I remember the reaction in northern Europe to the psychological theories of Freud and Jung, and how artists explored ways of communicating with and about the unconscious mind. I enjoyed reminding myself of some of our classic and esteemed painters such as Albert Tucker and Russell Drysdale and the wonderful photographer Max Dupain. But the most surprising insight for me was that I just enjoyed the visual and sensory experiences as I escaped from my own reality for part of an afternoon.

Tracy Chevalier recreates Remarkable Creatures

It was such a luxury to enjoy reading a historically factual novel without realising it. Tracy Chevalier transported me back to the early 1800's in Lyme Regis, along the southern English coastline. I enjoyed her interacting story of 2 women of different ages and social classes, united by their love of fossil hunting. For Mary Anning, the fossils were her survival as she sold them as curios to passing travellers. Elizabeth Philpott had been sent to the coast with her 2 sisters by her brother upon his marriage. They were quite physically dislocated from London and socially disconnected as none of them had ever married. Elizabeth genuinely enjoyed collecting and categorising objects of difference. So as they gathered fossils of increasing magnitude, they both began to question the traditional view of creation in their very conservative society. So while it was fun to read the alternating chapters in the language of their heroine, the great challenge was in how the two ladies reacted to the attention and perhaps love of a passing gentleman. The personal and class differences were so powerful yet the personal courage and integrity of Elizabeth in requesting credit for the discovery work by Mary was impressive, by any time or standards. A totally captivating read.