'The Ladies of Missalonghi' by Colleen McCullough

After decades of not giving this book a thought, it popped into my head out of the blue, and I thought I might like to read it, although I had reservations in my teens when it was published for reasons which you'll read below. Just a few weeks later, I discovered a copy in a Little Free Library in a small Yorke Peninsula town named Warooka. I assumed reading it was meant to be, so I'm including it for the Romance category of my 2025 Aussie Reading Challenge. The back cover blurb calls it a 'magical romance' and tale of dreams come true.   

MY THOUGHTS:

The time period is early twentieth century, leading into WW1. The setting is a fictional town named Byron in the stunning Blue Mountains not far from Sydney. Missy Wright, a drab 33-year-old spinster, ekes out a spartan existence with her widowed mother, Drusilla, and invalid aunt, Octavia. They are bottom in the pecking order of their wealthy relatives, the Hurlingfords, who virtually control the whole town.

But something is stirring in Missy's stagnant, routine world. A possible diagnosis of terminal heart disease looms over her, leading her to question the inhibited way she's always done things. Driven by a rebellious instinct to have a little fun before she dies, Missy feels a scandalous attraction to John Smith, an auburn-haired 'cloud of energy' who has just purchased an extensive section of valley land which her own clan hadn't even realized was for sale. His sole purpose is to live alone, answerable to nobody. (Even Missy's wealthy Aunt Aurelia considers his generic name hard to believe. 'One is forever reading about John Smiths, but have you ever actually met one?' It is easy to wonder if he has something to hide.)

If you think all this sounds strikingly similar to Lucy Maud Montgomery's The Blue Castle, you'd be absolutely right. I never read TLOM back in 1987 when it was first published, but I remember the literary furore as McCullough was called out for plagiarism of ideas, and denied the accusation, claiming that she must've read TBC in her youth, and then subliminal memories evidently bubbled to the surface. Back then, as a loyal teenage Montgomery fan, I declined reading TLOM out of principle. The case was eventually dropped as nobody could dispute McCullough's word. 

Fast forward to now. Fan fiction is an extremely popular twenty-first century concept and I love re-imaginings of excellent plots in different settings. Having ripped through this, I consider TLOM to be a great Aussie replica of TBC. Missy's truly gorgeous, but flat-voiced and calculating cousin Alicia is an awesome counterpart to Valancy Stirling's perfect cousin Olive. In fact as a whole, the Hurlingford connection is even easier to hiss and boo than Valancy's Stirling clan, for rather than being merely pompous and annoying, they are corrupt and callous crooks who prey on widows and orphans. 

All these years later, I'd urge anyone to go ahead and read it. Our distinctive Aussie cheekiness along with a few risque innuendoes adds some spice. Although the two plots share the same foundation they don't play out identically in every respect. The twists are quite different but equally surprising. After willingly swallowing the unlikelihood that both Missy Wright and John Smith would choose to step so far out of character as we see here, it becomes easier to suspend disbelief all the way through. I just grinned at the shock supernatural machinations, as it's all in good fun. 

This book has the added appeal of lovely illustrations by Peter Chapman. The wonderful setting along with Missy's eventual triumph in living a simple life on her own terms, free of pecuniary stress, certainly made me feel happy, so grab refreshments of your choice and put your feet up. Morning tea for the Missalonghi ladies has an authentic national vibe, including pikelets with jam and cream, a sponge, some little butterfly cakes, and sour apple tart with cloves. That might be a good place to start.

And just for the record, I was probably wise to wait until now, for I'm not sure this would have been to my liking at the age of 17. 

🌟🌟🌟🌟 

Note: The more I think about this, the sadder I feel that the controversy ever happened, for even if McCullough's critics were correct in accusing her (which wouldn't surprise me since the similarities were spot-on in so many respects), she's done no different than what Barbara Kingsolver did far more recently with Demon Copperhead, which won a Pulitzer Prize.

 I guess the key difference is that while Kingsolver was quite open and aboveboard about her recycling of David Copperfield, McCullough's example was more sneaky and underhanded, if indeed it was intentional at all. And while The Blue Castle is soon to celebrate its publication centenary in 2026, it had just tipped its 60th anniversary back in 1987, which was nowhere close to becoming public domain. I guess it's a lesson to anyone who might take it into their heads to rip off Canada's national treasure with no acknowledgement whatsoever. If the whole thing really was planned, did McCullough honestly think nobody would ever notice?!

Even though it was never hailed as such, I'm going to include The Ladies of Missalonghi in my fan fiction page, because it ticks all the right boxes anyway. (If you're still with me, see my overview here.)

'Before Green Gables' by Budge Wilson

Summary: This is the story of Anne Shirley's very young life before the Green Gables years. 

MY THOUGHTS:

I found this novel in a local secondhand shop. Although I had misgivings about stirring up this part of Anne's life, fanfics of old classics are one of my passions, so of course it came home with me. It turns out this prequel was authorized by the heirs of L.M. Montgomery, and it's instantly clear that Canadian kids' author Budge Wilson took the honor seriously. The events play out according to canon. Wilson draws specifically from what Anne tells Marilla in Chapter Five of Anne of Green Gables, entitled Anne's History, along with Chapter 21 in Anne of the Island, entitled Roses of Yesterday, when Anne, as a college student, visits her parents' little yellow house and their gravesites.

Wilson also attempts to fill in the characters of Anne's earliest guardians, the Thomases and the Hammonds. But the novel begins with poor Bertha and Walter Shirley, who never realized how short their days were numbered, and ends with Anne on her appointment with destiny, where she's soon to meet Matthew Cuthbert at Bright River Station. It took confidence on Budge Wilson's part, to imagine she could replicate the magic of the original, and sadly I don't think she's pulled it off. There are four main reasons why. 

1) The genre is said to be children's fiction, but I consider it too bleak for kids. The starting point, with Bertha and Walter, is heartrending. Who was Wilson's ideal reader? Lots of little girls I know, (including my old self), would have found the subject matter far too harrowing. And I'd bet minutiae about housekeeping gets tedious for young readers. Yet it surely isn't an adult or YA novel either, crammed as it is with Anne's streams of consciousness at the ages of five and six, including long soliloquies to 'Katie Maurice' in the glass. (Dare I admit these get very boring!) 

2) An omniscient narrator frequently pops up to embellish Montgomery's details, shovelling on more injustices. Wilson adds extra layers of rejection and unfairness to Anne's very early life that we never imagined. I can't help making my objections in capitals. SINCE  ANNE'S  BACKSTORY  WAS  ALREADY  SO  BAD,  WHY  MAKE  IT  EVEN  WORSE? And just so nobody misses any injustice, the narrator often ends chapters with remarks that state the obvious, such as, 'Anne had no idea what she (Mrs Thomas) meant, nor would she ever find out.'

3) Anne herself, although lovable and poignant, isn't the same Anne we bond with throughout the rest of the series. Within these pages, tiny Anne Shirley is depicted as preternaturally wise with an uncanny knack of reading into others' deepest motivations. Yet Montgomery's Anne retains a certain vivacious sparkle, whimsy, and innocence that Wilson's Anne lacks. That being the case, this unintentionally misses the goal of staying true to the original character's voice.  

And when it comes to unlikelihoods such as drunken Mr Thomas taking advice from 5-year-old Anne, it loses credibility fast.

4) This story also lacks Montgomery's trademark sense of humor. I'm not claiming Budge Wilson had no sense of humor at all. It's just not the same style, or as refreshing as Montgomery's. Perhaps finding glimmers of humour in Anne's tragic backstory is simply too big an ask.

Overall, I wouldn't recommend this to fellow Anne fans. Although I could see that Wilson tried very hard, the canvas she starts with swings between too horrific or too mundane. I'm sure Montgomery intended it as mere backstory for an excellent reason.

🌟½

'Small Bomb at Dimperley' by Lissa Evans

This is a British novel by an author I'd never heard of, but I saw it highly recommended by another book blogger. When I checked it out, I decided to take my chance on a kindle copy, because it sounded right up my alley. Crumbling country manor house compiled of patchwork sections from different eras, post WW2 tale that's hailed as a joyful historical novel, sly digs at Britain's landed gentry, and heartwarming romance. What's not to love?

MY THOUGHTS:

It's 1945, the wake of WW2. As her hodgepodge ancestral home, Dimperley Manor, deteriorates around her ears, snooty elitist, Lady Irene Vere-Thissett mourns the diminishing adulation she considers her due, along with the death of her eldest son, Felix, who was everything a young baronet should be; handsome, polished, and suitably imperious.

 Lady Irene's second son, Cedric, can't possibly inherit the family title in Felix's stead, for a childhood bout of encephalitis arrested his mental development. The successor will have to be Valentine, the plain and inept baby of the family, who she's always brushed aside as an embarrassment and disappointment. Most galling of all for her is the fact that despite his aristocratic birth, he considers himself no better than anyone else (shock horror)!

Twenty-three-year-old Corporal Valentine Vere-Thissett baulks at the sudden inevitability of assuming the title of 'Sir.' As third in line, it'd always seemed a safe bet that he'd never have to step up, but now he's inherited the nightmare of a property in dire financial straits, with its dilapidated hazards and skeleton staff. His own estimate of his capability is rock bottom. All written documents have a rebellious habit of spinning and blurring whenever he tries to focus. (We readers recognise undiagnosed dyslexia, but he still believes his school teachers, who simply labelled him a dunce.)  

Meanwhile, others under Dimperley's roof try to move on with their disrupted lives. Felix's disheveled widow, Barbara, chafes under the control of her overbearing mother-in-law, while her teenage daughters, who'd been evacuated to America are now home dealing with tremendous culture shock. Pedantic Uncle Alaric is writing a drawn-out volume of family history which nobody has the heart to tell him is excruciatingly boring. But Alaric's capable secretary, Zena Baxter, turns out to be an unexpected ally for Sir Valentine. 

Zena is a working class girl with a history of being shunted from one foster home to the next. She's the struggling single mother of a precocious three-year-old, and depends on her efficient organizational skills to make ends meet. While the Vere-Thissetts are all too close to the situation to think creatively, Zena just might have an unexpected idea to help save the property. She's fallen under the spell of Dimperley Manor, but her feelings for the young baronet take a surprising turn as well.

Shout out to Zena's daughter, Allison, who deserves a special mention as an authentic, large-as-life three-year-old-character. Such youngsters are notoriously difficult to write authentically, but Evans has a brilliant way of weaving Allison's interruptions and non sequiturs into each scene so they become an integral part of the action.

I'm so glad I took the chance on this book. There are some hilarious laugh-out-loud moments. At it's core is a lovely romance between two great protagonists whose social backgrounds are poles apart, and who have both been emotionally damaged in different ways, yet who complement each other perfectly. The shocking turn of events is exciting too. I wonder if there will be a sequel to this. I guess it's no spoiler to surmise that Zena will be in for some serious mother-in-law friction. 

🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟    

Note: It puts me in mind of this novel, which is also a post-WW2 comic family tale of picking up the pieces, starring a young hero with scars and challenges, whose humor sees him through. This must be a 5-star combo for me. 

'Dark Quartet' by Lynne Reid Banks

I discovered this in one of my favorite secondhand bookshops which was sadly soon to close down, and it renewed my interest in all things Bronte related. As this date happens to be Emily Bronte's birthday, now is a good time to review and discuss it. 

MY THOUGHTS: 

This biographical novel from 1973 about the brilliant siblings from Haworth is an intense and mind-blowing read. Lynne Reid Banks thoroughly did her homework. Her forays into the inner lives of these four seem (mostly) consistent with what has been confirmed about them from the reams of correspondence they've left behind. Leaving room for poetic license, the book is sensitively written, with threshed out trajectories all round. Its title is well chosen, for their true lives were surely as Gothic and harrowing as anything they ever wrote. 

It's hard to decide where to jump in and discuss something with so broad and deep a canvas, so I'll tackle each of the four main subjects according to birth order.    

 The book delves into Charlotte's intense, private guilt, for feeling more passionate about her own secret world than she does about the conventional Anglican Christianity that is preached all around her. Yet she cannot change a thing, spurred on by the physical excitement she generates inside herself by her characters' elicit passions. (Whoa!) Even the poet laureate, Robert Southey, writes Charlotte a stern warning, to the effect that young ladies shouldn't let their imaginations run away with them. But any resolutions to guard her thoughts are feeble, since the fantasy world she's created is all-consuming. According to her aunt's and father's Calvinistic tinged strictures, Charlotte can't help fearing she must be damned.

Branwell comes across as witty, highly-strung, ever on the verge of breakdown, and in all likelihood a pain in the neck. He's not a fraction as confident as he tries to appear. Rather, he's a tortured soul who fears he'll always be a fall-short, unable to muster what it must take to satisfy the high hopes his family have pinned on him. He's undisciplined and reactive, allowing himself to be tossed about by any wind blowing. His petit mal seizures, commonly known as absence seizures today, alarm his family. (I know other biographers throughout the years conjecture that it was epilepsy.) And he seems to be allergic to actually finishing anything. 

I find Banks' dour dramatic version of Emily hard to like but easy to admire. Blunt and reclusive, she's also a nature mystic, but specifically for one spot; her beloved Yorkshire Moors. This goes hand in hand with a weird astral travel ability. (Did she really experience these out-of-body journeys? I can't find any factual backup.) A great admirer of strength and determination, she scorns herself as a weakling for retreating from Roe Head school with intense homesickness, but directs her self-criticism into shaping her writing to be the finest it possibly can. 

Anne, perhaps the least 'dark' of the quartet, takes upon herself the earnest anxiety of a youngest child to see everyone happy and content around her; an impossible task with her complex siblings and vulnerable father. (I still think she should have quit her position with the Ingham family, rather than gritting her teeth and toughing it out because she had something to prove. Hence she ends up being fired, which I can't help thinking was partly her own fault. See my review of Agnes Grey, her biographical novel.) 

It's all such interesting fodder, including Emily's hero worship of her employer, Miss Elizabeth Patchett, who resembles a favorite heroine Emily has created; and the formally written marriage proposal Charlotte receives from Henry Nussey, which may have influenced that abysmal proposal made by St. John Rivers to Jane Eyre. We meet the sunny natured curate, Willy Weightman, such a contrast to the dark quartet that all four can't help basking under his refreshing influence. There's a plausible reason why Branwell, in a fit of gloom, scrubs himself out of the famous pillar painting. And I love Charlotte's brush with the Catholic priest who tells her, 'Those who suffer as you are suffering often have a vocation to ease the anguish of others.' 

Of course Banks introduces the two married people who Charlotte and Branwell fall for. Monsieur Heger is depicted as a principled and decent (albeit overbearing) guy whose powerful sway over Charlotte occurs despite himself, but Mrs Lydia Robinson is portrayed as a heartless and duplicitous cougar.  

I seem to remember reading somewhere that when Elizabeth Gaskell wrote her 1857 biography of Charlotte, Mrs Robinson attempted to sue her for defamation over claims that she seduced Charlotte's younger brother. However, Dark Quartet was written well into the twentieth century so Banks didn't have the same problem. She paints Branwell's temptress with a thoroughly black brush. I wonder if Mrs Robinson's descendants remember her as the villain who ruined his life, and if so, whether the passage of time has made it more of a cool detail to include in their lineage than a source of shame. 

I took my time over this book. It wasn't one I could possibly rush through, and it wasn't easy to take all the harsh blows on board, but the effort was well worth it. However, the heavy emotion lingers. The world was robbed of whatever novel Emily was working on at the time of her death, and it might've been astounding, coming on the heels of Wuthering Heights. And I find the rift between Charlotte and Branwell, lasting until the day of his death, is heart-rending. Close to the end, Banks has him say, 'Charlotte, who was once closer to my heart than my own left lung, now withholds herself from me as if she fears to become a drunkard and wastrel herself just by looking at me.'  

And I won't even get started on the early chapters which dealt with the deaths of Maria and Elizabeth. They were almost too much for me at the outset.

My fascination for the Brontes has been well and truly re-ignited by this book. I visited Haworth Parsonage once, aged 20, and I'd swear you really could feel their creative, brooding energy still caught between those walls. 

I guess I'd better warn you to expect more Bronte posts down the track.

🌟🌟🌟🌟½

Agatha Christie - An Autobiography

When I bought this from the bargain table of a secondhand bookshop, the lady behind the counter predicted that I'd really enjoy it. She was spot on, although I initially balked at the size, thinking, 'This had better be good, Agatha!' It exceeded my expectations by far, and I know it'll be high among my ten best reads of the year. It's brimming with humor, and wise philosophical observations which come from living a long and interesting life.

MY THOUGHTS:

As far as I see, Agatha Christie's tips for living a good life amount to four key attitudes 

1) Try anything once.

2) Be flexible.

3) Set your mind on stubborn enjoyment. (If she were taking a gift to a child at a christening, Agatha would choose a naturally happy frame of mind.)

4) A sense of humour is vital.

On a personal note, I was instantly riveted because Agatha's early family dynamic was an exact replica of mine. She was the baby of the family, with a far older sister and brother, which meant she was frequently thrown on her own resources, and had to invent her own private style of fun from scratch. Perhaps being the late addition to any family unit helps us dig deep to craft our own personal inner world. I once considered it a drawback of my own life, but now, with the help of this book, see it as a formative benefit. And Agatha exited this world in the same decade I was just beginning it, the 1970s.  

 The autobiography begins with Agatha's early childhood during the late Victorian era with her parents, older siblings, and a household of servants in their beloved and blessed home named Ashfield. Agatha remembers the servants being happily appreciated for doing excellent, expert work. In her memory, they often loom as tyrants rather than menials. 

Her reflections about this stage of her life have convinced me that no modern person can possibly even begin to imagine the standard of fun enjoyed by Victorian and Edwardian kids from well-off families. 

Interestingly, Agatha doesn't recall her early world being remotely patriarchal, the way we've come to understand the word. The old matriarchs ruled the social fabric with rods of iron. 

She says:

'We women have behaved like mugs. We have clamoured to be allowed to work as men work. Men, not being fools, have taken kindly to the idea. Why support a wife? What's wrong with a wife supporting herself? She wants to do it. By golly, she can go on doing it.'

This girl took everything in her stride, including a teenage ambition to become a concert pianist, hard, gruelling VAD work nursing during her twenties in WW1, and later in the hospital dispensary, where she learned a lot about poisons and different substances that benefited her mystery writing in the years ahead. And she always manages to piece out fascinating, hilarious incidents from the mundane.

She describes her marriage to Archibald Christie, the first great love of her life, the birth of their daughter, Rosalind, and the aftermath in which Archie breaks their marriage and Agatha's heart when he leaves her for another woman. This book has softened my opinion of Archie, although I expected the opposite. For Agatha herself paints a great picture of him, and a bit of googling reveals that Rosalind remained on good terms with her father, and that far from being a general two-timer and cheat, he stuck with his second wife, Nancy, until the end of his days. 

The latter part of the book covers Agatha's second marriage to the archaeologist, Max Mallowan, who was fourteen years Agatha's junior. It includes heaps of travel to exotic and daunting locations, their lifestyle on his excavation sites in the middle east, and their survival during the second great war of that terrible 20th century.  

Her musings about progress, and what might be in store for us next, are rather ironic. ('I would like to be able to look into the future and see the next steps: one feels they will follow quickly on one another now, with a snowballing effect.') What would Agatha think if she knew the future would contain an AI version of herself teaching a virtual creative writing class, for that fact has been popping up on my newsfeed recently. From the tone of this book, I imagine it might be shock. 

The only slight warning I'll offer is that Agatha, swept along by nostalgia, gets a bit plot-spoilerish about some of her earliest titles. So if you haven't read them yet, keep this in mind.

So as not to inflate this review unduly, I'll add another blog post down the track specifically dealing with Agatha Christie's reflections about writing. For now, I'll finish off with a great quote from the autobiography. 

'It is astonishing how much you can enjoy almost everything. There are few things more desirable than to be an acceptor and an enjoyer. You can like and enjoy almost any kind of food or way of life. You can enjoy country life, dogs, muddy walks, towns, noise, people, chatter. In the one there is repose, ease for nerves, time for reading, knitting, embroidery, and the pleasure of growing things. In the other, theatres, art galleries, good concerts, seeing friends you would otherwise seldom see. I am happy to say that I can enjoy almost everything.'

🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟

'Ash Road' by Ivan Southall

I've chosen this for the Bushfire category of my 2025 Aussie Reading Challenge. I seemed to remember a few different fire themed novels around the place, including one called, 'You Name it, It's Burning.' I couldn't put my hands on that one, but luckily Ash Road was in a pile of recent acquisitions from a goodwill shop.  

MY THOUGHTS:

This was first published in 1966, and won the Australian Children's Book of the Year Award for Older Readers in 1966. It is one of those stories that just covers one single day.

Three fifteen-year-olds, Harry, Graham, and Wallace, are delighted to be camping unattended in the Aussie bush. They're a bit annoyed when they're forbidden to light campfires, since they'd been looking forward to their own cooking, but the north wind is hot and hard, and the scrub as dry as tinder. The locals know that a tiny flame may quickly become a monster. During the early hours of the morning, the boys accidentally start a raging blaze anyway, when Graham knocks over their bottle of methylated spirits near their faulty heater.

Consequences are catastrophic. Many properties are burned to the ground, livestock and wildlife are lost, and human lives seriously endangered. As well as the culpable trio, the story focuses on several residents who live along Ash Road and mistakenly assume their location will remain well out of the raging fire's path. While able-bodied adults head off to assist with relief efforts, the children and elderly folk left to hold down the fort are terrified to find the fire closing in on them. 

Five-year-old Julie Buckingham unwittingly overflows the bathtub and depletes the family's rainwater stores; Grandpa Tanner remembers an identical blaze around 1913, Peter Fairhall feels frustrated by his grandparents' protective initiative to send him away, and the George family are trying to protect their perishing raspberry crop. The day doesn't unfold the way anyone expects. 

It was a contemporary tale of its time, but Australia was on the brink of a total change. Currency is still pounds sterling, temperature is measured in Fahrenheit, and distance in miles. Only fairly senior citizens would remember this now. (Not me! I wasn't born yet.) Therefore it's an interesting snapshot from the not-so-distant past. I once updated all my technology details for the second printing of a contemporary novel, but this example suggests it may be more interesting to let novels age like fine wine. I would never change things again.

Under Southall's skillful pen, the fire becomes the main antagonist it deserves to be. 

'The smoke cloud was a pale brown overcast with billows of white and curious areas of mahogany and streaks of sulphurous-looking yellow. The sun shone through like a white plate in a bowl full of dye... There was ash on the road too, unnumbered flakes of it lying in the gravel and in the grass at the edges and caught up like black flowers in twigs and foliage... It was like a black and white photograph of enormous proportions, in the midst of which candles burned mysteriously.'

And how about this excellent description of the vile temper of the day itself.

'It was an angry day; not just wild or rough but savage in itself, actively angry against every living thing. It hated plants and trees and birds and animals, and they wilted from its hatred or withered up and died or panted in distress in shady places.'  

In spite of his evocative descriptions (which I believe helped win him that award), I find the fleeting time span covered doesn't really do justice to the extensive cast of characters. The plot has unpredictable moments when it draws complete strangers together, but it is ultimately one day in their lives. An extremely traumatic day, I grant you that, but I prefer longer time spans in stories to really get to know people. And the untimely death of one character who couldn't ever win a trick saddens me enough to knock off a couple of stars. 

Still, if part of Southall's goal was to warn people about the potential terror of bushfires, and subsequent need to take extreme caution, he surely succeeded.

🌟🌟🌟   

'Meditations for Mortals' by Oliver Burkeman

Summary: Meditations for Mortals takes us on a liberating journey towards a more meaningful life – one that begins not with fantasies of the ideal existence, but with the reality in which we actually find ourselves.

MY THOUGHTS:

Oliver Burkeman's Four Thousand Weeks was among my top reads of 2022, which inclines me to pick up anything else he writes.  

He suggests the uplifting benefit of the 'Done' list, as opposed to the guilt-inducing 'To Do.' For, 'it implicitly invites you to compare your output to the hypothetical situation in which you stayed in bed and did nothing at all.'

He addresses how to tackle reading lists in our culture of TMI, for as he says, it's evident in the 21st century that we're no longer hunting for needles in haystacks but facing towering mountains of needles. Treating our TBR piles as rivers instead of bottomless buckets is key here. We can dip in to pick a few choices here and there, without feeling guilty for letting others simply float past, even those deemed special or important by others. We should resist the urge to stockpile knowledge in our reading, and simply trust that each good book is subtly changing us into better people. Oh, and it's quite okay to read just for fun.

Regarding self-esteem, Burkeman suggests that too many of us tether it to the most crazy-making standard of all, which is 'realizing our potential.' This is a recipe for staying ever restless, for how can we ever know there is not more potential left to realize?

Then there's the TMI of daily living in our world of western media and digital technology. The horror and injustice of the whole world is flashed before us daily, with the implicit demand that we react with heartache and empathy every single time. Burkeman breaks the news that social media platforms invite us to care about more human suffering than the greatest saints in history would have encountered in their entire lives. No wonder compassion burn-out hits some of us so hard. His advice is not to retreat into our shells, overcome by the sheer hopelessness of it all, but simply to focus on one single battle we're willing to get involved with. 

He echoes advice I always seem to need hearing. Worrying is trying to figure out ways to cross bridges we may never even come to! (It's similar to Mark Twain's wisdom about refusing paying debts we may never owe, Jesus' teaching that every day has trouble enough of its own, or perhaps the old proverb, 'Don't trouble trouble until trouble troubles you.') To all this, Burkeman would add, 'Don't let the future destroy the present!' This has been a major stumbling block of my life, so I always appreciate having it reinforced.

Very interestingly, he's isolated the optimal number of hours required to chip away at our passion projects or professional goals, before our brains turn to mush and diminishing returns set in. It is just 3 - 4 hours! Therefore we'd do well to set non-negotiable rings around this time block, and let the rest of the day fritter itself away in the inevitable paperwork, errands, walks and socializing, or what Burkeman calls the 'usual fragmentary chaos of life.' Yet without being too rigid, we ought to make this goal 'daily-ish' for things have a way of happening. 

One thing I have trouble agreeing with is Burkeman's notion of 'scruffy hospitality.' This is allowing ourselves to be 'real' when we invite people over, and not putting it off until everything is perfect. Although I always feel refreshed as the recipient of scruffy hospitality, I fear I'll never be able to embrace this one. It goes too much against my upbringing, and as my in-laws are also pretty perfectionistic, it's a double whammy. Besides, there is always a fear lurking that my 'pristine' is a match for other people's 'scruffy' anyway. So nope, I think I'll always be running around with dusters and vacuum cleaners to create the illusion that I've got my act together. 

But the theory is good. 

I'll finish off with his comment about 'what premodern people knew.' It is simply that since life is so inherently confusing and precarious, then joy, if it's ever to be found at all, is going to have to be found now, in the midst of confusion and precariousness.

🌟🌟🌟🌟