2008 Year In Review

Hello Blogsophere!

Best wishes for the New Year and I do hope you all had a joyous and relaxing Christmas break.

It’s been so long since I last posted that I  feel a little like the kid who after a year on exchange returns to find that everything is both comfortably familiar yet strange and altered! I have no particularly good excuse for my patchy apperance, except to say that life just seem to explode in the last six months and my writing and reading for that matter really feel by the wayside. In the last six months I changed jobs again, moved into an apartment all on my own (squeal!), waved my best friend goodbye as he moved overseas, and had the good fortune of meeting two wonderful new people, with whom much time has been spent becoming good mates. The second half of the year moved so quickly that I’m still struggling to accept that it will be a new year tomorrow,  and can’t help but feel as if I somehow didn’t get my money’s worth from last year.

So in lieu of six months worth of rambling posts, I thought I’d take a quick look at the highlights and lowlights of the last year, bookish or otherwise.

Music

Highlight: Finally seeing both my favourite Billy’s (Bragg and Joel) in concert. I’ve been waiting many years to see both these performers and the planets aligned and made it possible this year. Remembering that night in late January, when a die hard Sydney metro crowd sung Billy Bragg’s ‘A new England’ with so much passion that we drowned out the actually performers voice, still makes my skin tingle with joy. Likewise getting to hear Billy Joel close his outstanding  December show with a stunning and simple rendition of  ‘Piano man’, book ended a perfect year in music for me. *sigh* Lowlight: Performer’s so drunk they can’t even play their instruments let alone entertain a crowd. Note to wannabe ‘rock stars’;  just remember that my hard earned cash is subsiding your ‘career’. If  I want to see adults  slobbering over themselves in a drunken fugue state I can see that every night of the week, at my local pub, for FREE.

Art

Highlight: Whilst I enjoyed  the big blockbuster exhibitions that landed on our shores this year, Picasso, Monet and Degas, for me the real gem of this art season was the Art Gallery of NSW’s ‘The lost Buddha‘ exhibition.  In 1996  construction workers in the Chinese town of Qingzhou were levelling a sports field and  accidentally stumbled upon close to 400 stone Buddhist sculptures on the site of the long-destroyed Longxing (Dragon Rise) Temple.  For me this exhibition was an absolutely haunting spiritual experience.  Lowlight:People who think it’s cool to bring screaming toddlers into the exhibition. I’m not anti-kiddies in the least, but listening to a child hysterically scream MUMMY!!! MUUUUUUMY!! (poor tiger) for 20 solid minutes whilst trying to see a European master is not cool. Ignore your clearly distressed child on your own time and dollar not mine. Grrr.

Books

2008 was such a disappointing reading year for me. Not because the books I read or attempted to read were bad, far from it,  it was more  a case of me falling into a non-reading slump that I just couldn’t seem to find my way out of.  I only managed to read thirty books for the year which is a paltry figure compared to years gone by. For some reason every time I found myself with the opportunity to read I was always too tired/exhausted/distracted or cranky to get through more than a couple of pages. Grumble, grumble. Anyways… Highlights: Sue Miller. Ms Miller I simple could not get enough of your candid explorations into feminine psychology, and your subtle critiques of the double standards imposed on women today. While I was gone and The world below were two of my enjoyed reads this year. I also really enjoyed seeing David Sedaris on his When you are engulfed in flames tour. He is a very funny man both on paper and in person! A couple of other notables are, Dead Europe by Christos Tsiolkas, which was just stunning and What should I do with my life? by Po Bronson which I found enormously inspiring. Lowlight: One word, Borders. I am officially over the  evil empire of books pricing their new release tall paperbacks up to $8 above the RRP, the result of which is that the new books I’m dying to read come in at close to $40 AUS!! And that’s not even in Hardback!! You people need to step to real if you think that I’m going to pay that extra amount for a product that is more often than not damaged, impossible to find and oh, retailing for the RRP or cheaper across the street at a locally owned bookstore. Pond scum is what you are.

Movies

Highlights: Slumdog millionaire, American Teen, Waltz with Bashir, Burn after reading and Hunger, were all wonderful and intellectually nourishing films. Lowlights: Choke, I hate seeing a loved book mangled on screen. X-files I want to believe, I wanted to believe that it wouldn’t be bad. Not enough support for the local film industry in cinemas. Its kind of hard to see Australian films if they are never on at the cinema, or are on at ridiculous times like 10am on a Wednesday morning…seriously who can see that?

Finally for some New Year’s reading resolutions. Usually I have a dozen detailed lists of ridiculously unachievable reading goals that I fail to meet year after year. So this year I’m going to keep it very, very simple. For 2009 I’m going to strive to stop my all or nothing approach to life and instead I’m going to work on achieving something that vaguely resembles consistency in all aspects of my life, including my reading and blogging. I’m keen to improve upon my patchy 2008  reading and blogging performance, and for me that means setting goals that are realistic and actually achievable, otherwise I end up falling of the horse no matter how much I enjoy it (are you listening brain, that means no huge thou shall read lists or crazy hairbrained schemes). Instead the mantra for this year is consistency…consistency…repeat and reaffirm…consistency!