Break out the Bubbly - Farewell to 2013

 
Willy looking noble

2013 was in all a pretty interesting year, with no personal disasters to mar it. It is now exactly three years since I quit work, and I find I still enjoy retirement enormously and don’t miss work at all.  There are always plenty of things to do to fill time, and even if a lot of that is spent in front of a computer, I rarely get bored.

A highlight of the year for me was witnessing Black Caviar winning two of the last races of her career, and being part of the crowd on the occasions when she was at the track. I watched Australian Story last Sunday, which featured the Black Caviar story and was thrilled and moved all over again, seeing her win her races so effortlessly. She certainly was one in a million, and it will be a long time before we see her like again.

This year I attended more race meetings than ever before, and I saw all the equine stars strutting their stuff up close – Atlantic Jewel, It’s A Dundeel, Fiorente etc, etc.  I’m looking forward to the Melbourne autumn racing season, when I will venture track wise again.

Cat stand off

In January this year we adopted Talya, the Russian Princess, so she’s been living with us for almost a year.  Both she and Willy are used to each other now, and despite Talya occasionally being aggressive to Willy, he appears to take this in his stride. They’ll never be friends, but  they are not sworn enemies either, and tolerate each other quite well. Most days when it’s cool they will sleep on the bed together, Willy on my pillow, Talya on B’s, only a few feet apart. Also Willy appears to have come to an accommodation with Monty the cat next door, as they haven’t brawled for ages, and have been observed sitting peacefully together in the front yard of the house two doors up.

Books & Music

I didn’t get to many live shows this year, but the few I did attend were all different and equally enjoyable. The discovery of the year was The Milk Carton Kids, who hopefully will return in 2014.  As I also didn’t listen to music all that much and bought very few CDs, I haven’t any particular favourites from 2013. Patty Griffin’s new CD American Kid was one of the best, as was The Milk Carton Kids’ The Ash & Clay, but nothing much else really took my fancy.

As usual I read many books, some rereads of old favourites and quite a few new books.

My best of 2013 are:

Flight Behaviour by Barbara Kingsolver – my review is here.

The Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson – my review is here.

Life After Life by Kate Atkinson - Life After Life follows Ursula Todd as she lives through the turbulent events of the last century again and again. This novel is very different to her Jackson Brodie series, but an engaging and clever novel just the same.

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt – a coming of age novel, a thriller, a page turner fraught with anxiety.

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler – my review is here.

Hild by Nicola Griffith – I finished this novel the other night, and I’m still haunted by it. It is an imaginative biography of St Hilda of Whitby, set in a turbulent seventh century Britain.  It is a remarkable novel with a remarkable heroine. Hild leaps from the page in all her  intelligent complexity. I loved this book, and can hardly wait for its sequel.

Last Friends by Jane Gardham – the third book in the Old Filth trilogy, tells the story of Filth’s rival, Terry Veneering. It was laugh out loud funny in parts, and quite as wonderful as anything Jane Gardham has written.

I just realised that my favourite novels of 2013 were all written by women, with one exception. I’m sure I did read books by male writers, but they didn’t grab me as much as the books mentioned above.

Despite the title of this post, I have no intention of breaking out any bubbly tonight. As usual we’ll be spending a quiet evening at home with the cats.

To finish, here’s a card we received from friends at Christmas and thought hilariously appropriate.

Happy New Year everyone! May your 2014 be full of delightful surprises, good health and happiness.

Butterflies & Flight Behaviour

The above butterfly is a dingy or dainty swallowtail, which I spotted browsing on the miniature irises in the front garden. It obligingly remained still while I photographed it. I don’t know why it is called dingy as it’s quite a pretty butterfly, slightly larger than the common white cabbage butterflies that are often seen flitting around the garden.

Anyway, I took the photo as it coincided with the book I was currently reading, Barbara Kingsolver’s splendid new novel Flight Behaviour, which, among other things, is about butterflies, the Monarch Butterfly in particular.

I  finished the novel the other morning and found it to be an engrossing and very enjoyable read, as good as any of Barbara Kingsolver’s earlier works.

In this book she returns to a rural location, in Southern Appalachia where not surprisingly Kingsolver lives, and sets the scene around a freak of nature, the massing of monarch butterflies where they have never massed before.

Dellarobia Turnbow is the engaging heroine of this tale, shot gun married to the boy who got her pregnant at 17, mother of two young children, living with her husband Cub on his family’s  sheep farm, with very few options for escape, hogtied to the dreary sameness of her life.

The novel opens with Dellarobia, who is prone to infatuations with men other than her husband,  on her way to finally consummate one such sexual attraction up on the mountain above her house. She is stopped from throwing away her reputation by the sight of the monarch butterflies, massing in millions up there -  a veritable sea of fire that strikes her so profoundly that she forgoes her assignation and returns home. Because she is short sighted she doesn’t recognise the butterflies as such, but sees instead a vision of  unearthly beauty.

It turns out to be an anomaly in the butterflies behaviour, the monarchs missing their normal migration location in Mexico to come together in Tennessee.

Flight Behaviour is a novel bearing a powerful message about global warming, and it is also a portrait of an isolated rural community, to whom aberrations in weather are seen as an act of god. It is more than that of course, the title of the novel refers to more than butterflies.

Dellarobia is not typical of the community she inhabits,  a religious sceptic with a rebellious streak and a lively intellect that is wasted in the life she is obliged to live.

The arrival of scientist Dr Ovid Byron to investigate the butterfly phenomenon, changes both Dellarobia’s life and that of her young son Preston.  They are both intellectually stimulated by the study of the insects and enlightened to the fate of the world in the wake of climate change.

I’ve always thought that Barbara Kingsolver creates wonderful male characters, and Ovid Byron is one of her best, charismatic and attractive, an intelligent man dedicated to his subject of study – Monarch butterflies. 

The novel is filled with marvellous scenes and set pieces, from the evangelical reaction to the butterfly phenomenon starring Dellarobia as its discoverer, though she never lets on how she came to know about the butterflies; to scenes in second hand stores where, being poor, the Turnbow family are obliged to shop, and Dellarobia’s brush with fame through a media coverage that goes viral on the internet, where she is dubbed the Venus of the Butterflies.

The tone of the novel is alternately wry and serious, the writing witty and lyrical and of course informed by Barbara Kingsolver’s lucid intelligence.

Flight Behaviour is already my favourite read for 2013, and it will take a really special book to knock it off the top of the list. Of Barbara Kingsolver’s earlier books, Flight Behaviour reminded me most of Prodigal Summer, a novel I reread regularly it being a big favourite of mine. It is also set in a backwoods rural community and also deals with environmental issues.