Holiday Reading

I can't believe we've been home a week now and that Christmas has already come and gone. Now we are looking forward to New Year's Eve celebrations at our place and I am contemplating plans for 2019. In the meantime I'm back to reading.

Whilst at Rotorua we visited a Friends of the Library book sale and I picked up a copy of The Zoo on the Road to Nablus, the story of Palestine's last remaining zoo and its dedicated vet, Dr Sami Khader who dreams of transforming the zoo into an international enterprise. Wonderful true story by British journalist Amelia Thomas. Its funny, its sad and always entertaining. Reading status: finished.

Photo Ark, by National Geographic nature photographer Joel Sartore, is a tribute to the animal world and especially those species which are endangered. The foreword by Indiana Jones' Harrison Ford, who is Vice Chair, Board of Directors, Conservation International, is thought provoking and the full page photographs are truly inspirational. Reading status: nearly halfway through, but one of those books I will look through time and again.

And then there's our very own Poles Apart by editors Anita Hansen and Brita Hansen, a production of The Royal Society of Tasmania. The editors have researched a large collection of volumes held by the Society about the Arctic and Antarctic including the search for Sir John Franklin's doomed expedition to the Northwest Passage. Reading status: just started.

What's next?

Still time to read...

The past few weeks have been about entertaining guests (with a breakfast for 24 still to come) but in between I've had time to read a few good books.

Woolly by Ben Mezrich is 'the true story of the quest to revive one of history's most iconic extinct creatures'. Given the amount of research I have done on the topic I was afraid I may not discover anything new - but this fabulous book provides even more information about the people I have already 'met' and their plans for the future. There's even talk of making it into a movie!

Dinosaurs: How they lived and evolved by Darren Naish & Paul M Barrett is a CSIRO publication but it is written for novices like myself and is packed full of interesting information and beautiful coloured drawings and photographs. What a treat!

And then I picked up a book that many people have already read, but I never had. Salmon Fishing in the Yemen by Paul Torday is funny and entertaining and not at all what I thought it was going to be. I'm about halfway through and looking forward to what's coming.

I have just purchased a copy of National Geographic's The Photo Ark by Joel Sartore. I watched the television series as professional photographer Joel travelled the world photographing the animal kingdom, one by one; the endangered, the unusual and the downright cute. What a fabulous book.

And I plan to read the crime thriller The Crossing by Australian author B Michael Radburn. I read the second in his Taylor Bridges series, The Falls, set in the Victorian high country, and loved it. Then I found this one, the first in the series, which is set in the Tasmanian wilderness. I'm really looking forward to it!