Another bleep and another book
So, the weekend – where’d it go? Saturday morning I went to a meeting for our Made Fair Markets at church, which was very pleasant and I always enjoy meeting with and thinking about ideas with those folk, and we ate extremely large croissants, then on the way home I went to the shops and supermarket because we were having Lunches for Eight at church on Sunday and I’d said I’d host one (why not? – it’s a pretty easy way of doing hospitality when you get told who’s coming), so then when I got home I did the usual housework in preparation, washing, went for a walk/run because I’d been too lazy/tired to get out of bed and do it before the meeting, then went to bookclub over dinner (and I was slightly ambitious in deciding that the venue was walking distance from my house). Then Sunday I got up, managed to be unlazy enough to go for a jog, came home and sorted few house things, started cooking lunch (and being one of those people who is always ready too early for everything I thought I had heaps of time, but I seemed to still be flapping about wearing an apron when people arrived), people came and ate lunch and stayed till I had to be at church at 4 pm to do stuff, went to church, then came home to tackle the pile of dishes and mess in the kitchen, and so somehow lunch seemed to take all day. Now it’s Monday.
It was a good weekend though. I think Lunches for Eight/Guess Who’s coming to Dinner/whatever you call these things are a great idea, that aren't so hard to execute. (And incidentally, this post by Andrew Cameron on “communitarianism” is worth a read. I concur that it’s a whole lot easier to be talking and talking about community than it is to actually be doing it.) We had one girl come along who has only been in the country for a month, to learn English, and her English is not yet that great, which was a challenge, but she pulled out her course homework and soon we are all helping her do it (she had a captive audience of English speakers!) and being interviewed (she had to ask people questions like “how often do you go to the hair dresser?), which was funny.
As for The Book Thief, I finished it, and I liked it. Like some others at bookclub, I didn’t find it overly profound in how it treated the content, but what I actually didn’t know is that Marcus Zusak is a children’s writer, and that this book is young adult fiction, so that might be a factor in it. And in the end I was relieved. See, I am sure Death said, somewhere along the way, that in seven months time he came back for Hans Hubermann, and so I was waiting anxiously for that, because, like Liesel, he is the person I loved the most. I assumed he was going to suffer a horrible fate at the hands of the Nazis. But then a whole lot more than seven months went by, he was sent away to war, he came back alive. Finally, when he died in his sleep in a bomb strike with the others, this was OK with me.