June 2023 Reading List

I listened to The Things We Leave Unfinished as an audiobook and it has a female and male narrator to tell the story of newly divorced Georgia Stanton and author Noah Harrison.

Georgia has moved to the estate of her late great-Grandmother, Scarlett Stanton, a well-known author. Scarlett had started writing a book in her early years but was left unfinished. Noah has been brought on board to complete Scarlett’s book.

The story switches between Georgia and Noah’s current day to Scarlett’s early life during World War II, and we soon discover some great secrets.

A great story you can’t wait to hear how it all ends.

Trigger warnings (from the Author’s website): Death of a great-grandparent (past), death of a character, war, violence, death, mention of domestic violence.

Narrated by Tim Paige, Carly Robins, it runs for 14 hours and 32 minutes.

The Secret Book of Flora Lea is a recent release (May 2023) so it’s in all the book shops and emails. I was fortunate to get a copy from my library to read on my Kobo.

Hazel is living in London in the 1960s and works in a rare bookstore. When she unpacks a children’s book that tells the story that Hazel made up in her childhood to comfort her sister Flora, she wonders who wrote it as her sister went missing over 20 years ago. Does that mean her sister is still alive?

When Hazel was 14 and her sister Flora was five, they lived in London but when bombs started to be dropped during World War II it was decided that all children were put on a train to live in the English countryside where it was safe. During this time Flora went missing and even though investigations persisted over the years they never found out what happened.

Now this children’s book has turned up, they have some new clues to track down what happened to Flora.

Truly riveting as we go down many paths to find Flora.

I read Cheryl Strayed’s other well-known book Wild back in 2017, and I have also seen the movie adaptation. I enjoyed them both. Every so often I think of her long walk on the Pacific Crest Trail and whether I would do the same, it seems like a fantastic way to get away from it all – only for other problems to arise.

Back to this book, Tiny Beautiful Things.

Strayed was an advice columnist for over a decade under the pseudonym Dear Sugar. She imparted her wisdom on a variety of topics, and some of them have been put into this book. Even though the book is now over 10 years old, the knowledge imparted has stood the test of time.

I liked:

When I have something to say that’s particularly hard to say, I often write it down first.

Cheryl Strayed

This was a difficult book to get through and there were quite a few times when I wondered if I should just stop. But no, I persevered and got to the end, and really I should have listened to my instincts and just stopped.

The target audience is university students and academics, not Mums like me who want to remember what they read.

Ahrens describes the “Zettelkasten” method that was created in the 1950s by Niklas Luhmann, a German sociologist and a prolific author.

The method boils down to

1. Read and take “smart” notes
2. Review notes and write one idea on one side of an index card, and bibliographic information on the other
3. Number and place the index card near relevant ideas in the slip box for easy cross-referencing
4. Generate insights and ideas from those index cards

Ahrens does explain that you can use a physical box to store these notes, like Luhmann did, or you can use various digital options now available.

On the whole, the book had a lot of extra “fluff”, that was repeated over and over again – it really became tedious. So I wouldn’t recommend anyone read it. I suggest if you want to know about this method look at the Wikipedia page or Google the “Zettelkasten Method of Taking Notes”.

And no, I won’t be using this method. Since my university studies a few years ago whenever I read a textbook I would always take notes in A5 blank notebook and then rewrite them into one Note in Evernote, and reference them when needed. But the extra steps of “Zettelkasten” seem very convoluted and I can think of better ways to spend my time.