Twenty to ahem Forty Books That Stayed With Me or Influenced Me..

[shadowkat]

Choose books that have stayed with you or influenced you. (It was 20, but I couldn't choose just 20...sigh. Just put the covers, no explanation. It's probably a good idea to remember I was an English Lit Major, and studied Drama in college.)

It's supposed to be thumbnail pictures, but I can't figure out how to do that.


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Comments

[shadowkat]

Where are you in Australia? Melbourne? Perth? Sydney? Or the suburbs?

[dirtygreatknife]

Yet another essay of a comment!

Heh. There's more to Australia than Melbourne or Sydney. The rest of the country gets annoyed when people forget that, and it's often people in Melb or Syd who push that narrative. (Sometimes Brisbane too. The Eastern states like to think they're the be all but they're not.)

So I am in Adelaide, capital city of South Australia, which is the bottom middle chunk of the country and is the driest state in the driest country in the world. Drought is our middle name; for example while the weather is quite nice right now, having had a cool change, far north Queensland has been dealing with tropical cyclones for the last 4 months and most of it is under water. I have a friend up there and she had to evacuate a few weeks ago, only able to go back a few days ago. Everything is soaked, and there's no food in the supermarkets and she and others are despairing. And it doesn't look like it's going to let up any time soon. Are we due any rain in my state? Not in the foreseeable future.

I was born and raised here, I've lived all around the suburbs and in the city center itself. My brother used to live in Sydney; I still have a lot of good friends there. I also have family in Queenland, in Ipswitch and in Western Australia, in Perth. I have friends in Melbourne, Sydney, Queensland, I used to have some in Alice Springs and Darwin (Nothern Territory), but one of them moved to Toowoomba in QLD and the other moved to the US (Kansas), and I have friends in Perth. I've travelled all over this great country of mine except for Tasmania, I love Sydney and Perth, I enjoyed Brisbane and parts of the Sunshine Coast in QLD, I did not enjoy Darwin bc omg so HUMID and HOT, but Alice, despite it's problems (crime, alcohol abuse, drug abuse) was amazing. Canberra bored me, probably bc it's the capital of the country and where all the politicians are and it is also title holder for the greatest number of porn shops per capita in Australia, which amuses me greatly. My friend C, who I write about in my DW was working there for a few years and I think she was very glad to get back here. I'm not really a fan of Melb, even though I have a lot of friends there, I think Sydney for all its huge sprawling size is more welcoming and relaxed. And I love Perth, it's beautiful, when it's hot it's a dry heat which is far easier to deal with than all that humidity in Syd, Bris and Darwin.

Adelaide also is the only city in Australia that was planned. When it was designed by Col. William Light, he designed it in a grid formation, with the center being bordered by roads named for each point of the compass and accurate to those compass points, ie, West Terrace faces the west and so on. I'm in the north eastern inner 'burbs. Then he had the whole CBD surrounded with parklands, so we're also ranked in the top 5 green cities in the world bc of that. Adelaide is known as the Festival City and SA as the Festival State bc we have so many festivals in our city (and neither of those links are a complete list of what we have here). Plus we have a river that runs through the center, on the edge of North Terrace, called the Torrens River. Wouldn't go swimming in it, but you can rent paddle boats or go on a slow boat tour on a boat called the Popeye, which is fun.

However, while life here is good, as with anywhere, there's a darker side. Adelaide also has the monicker of "City of Churches," bc there seems to be one on just about every city block (I remember in the later 80s there was a pub that was a church on Sundays, so you could get a pint and a sermon before it went back to regular trading), "and bizarre murders." Bc, well, yeah. We've had/have a lot of those. I have a penchant for true crime and there's a YouTuber named Bailey Sarian who covered one of our more unpleasant murders, and she went so deep into research that there were things in her two vid coverage that I hadn't known about and was floored by--and I live here and knew about the case and had been following it at the time!

But as with all major cities and locations, be sensible and you won't have any trouble. Like, don't accept a ride from a stranger or anything like that, that sort of thing. So I say this, but I do enjoy living here and while I live in public housing (thank god, again, I am very lucky to have it), I wouldn't choose to live in any other city/town in this country. They all have their own problems and they all have people who aren't good--just like anywhere in the world--and on the flip side of the coin, they and we all have people who are very good, kind and thoughtful.

[dirtygreatknife]

(Had to go for two parts for this one!)

So how about you? What city/state are you in?

[shadowkat]

Wow. Thank you for that. Being an arachnophobe - I'm glad I didn't see them. Mother wisely only told me about the one I knew about when I was there - and made it clear it was nowhere near me. LOL!

The difference between US and Australia - is the US media is ridiculously virulent around the world? So you may know a lot more about the US than I know about Australia?

I live in Brooklyn, New York - which is a borough of New York City - in a rent stabilized apartment.
New York City has five boroughs - Manhattan (which most people visit and tend to think about when they think of New York City, and often forget there's anything else), Brooklyn (which due to all the writers who live in the Borough and film makers and the ridiculous tax breaks filmmakers/television makers get for filming here - is also what most folks think about when they think of NYC - it's kind of a blend of residential/city and it's not until you get to the more Southern/Eastern regions of the borough that you need a car), Queens (tends to be more residential in character, and you need a car for the most part), Staten Island (also heavily residential in character), while the Bronx is highly residential in character, but also very much a city - similar to Brooklyn. I've lived in Manhattan, Queens, and Brooklyn. Worked in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx.

The area I live in is south of and between Greenwood Cemetery and Prospect Park - it's mainly residential but within walking distance of pharmacy, five or six grocery stores, two book stores, two libraries, numerous eateries, and four subway lines and several bus lines, also Greenwood Cemetery (a big beautiful park with tombs, mausoleums, graves and lakes and ponds), and Prospect Park (another huge park - but without graves, it has a waterfall in it and a lake and you can get lost in that park and it will take a few hours to find your way out).

I'd say it is for the most part safe? Depends on where you are in the city, there are areas you probably want to avoid at night. NYC gets a bad rap - but like anywhere else? It depends on what you are doing and where you are? Outside of being robbed once - they stole my laptop out of my apartment while I was sleeping - but this was 20 years ago, and in a brownstone under construction - I've not really experienced anything? Kansas was just as dangerous - there was a serial rapist in the 1980s preying off of shopping malls, and a lot of weird murders. Johnson County, Kansas and Kansas City were kind of like how you describe crime in Adelaide. It's a small sprawling city,

I've lived in other states as well. My childhood was spent in West Chester, Pennsylvania. I actually saw more potentially dangerous situations there - than I have in NYC. Although we lived in a more rural suburban area. This is a state just South and to the West of New York and about a two hour train ride or you can take ferry and car or just drive or bus. West Chester is about two hours outside of Philadelphia, PA. It's suburbs but also fairly rural - and horse country. Many of my friends growing up owned horses. We had lots of trees, forest in the backyard, and trees across the street, and creeks. And about an hour drive or so to the north - lots of of horses. I desperately wanted one at that time. (We never got one and I'm fine with that. LOL!) We also lived near Amish and Mennonite country. It's a very hilly state, with Mountains, although not high Mountains. The Poconos are in PA. When I was about 12, we moved to Kansas, or the suburbs of Kansas City Missouri, but on the Kansas side - in the Eastern Area of the State. Kansas is about a two-three day drive from Pennsylvania or thereabouts, and there's several states between. I went to College in Colorado - a mountainous State, about 13 hours from Kansas City, in Colorado Springs, which is at the foot of Pikes Peak. It's a smaller city. Not that big. Then for Law School - I went back to Kansas, and lived in Lawrence, Kansas, which was a small college town, not city about two hours from Kansas City.

I've been to most of the States, including Puerto Rico. I've been California - which is very different from the East Coast cities, it's more sprawling in its cities, and drier in the South, the North is very wooded. But the south is part desert. Also we've driven from Arizona to California which is about a two day drive? Arizona is mainly desert. Cactus. Scorpions. Tarantulas. Various types of birds, and rodents that live in the desert, along with coyotes, rattle snakes, spiders, insects, etc. There's areas here that are just sand dunes. New Mexico - I hiked in Bandalier National Monument - which is a terrain of buttes, cliffs, mountains, desert and evergreen forests with streams. Animals range from bears, raccoons, bobcats, cougars, coyotes, hares, and various types of birds. We didn't see anything but huge raccoons. Also saw spiders - lots of spiders - that's where I saw my first black widow - climbing on someone's pack. And several tarantulas. I also have hiked up Pike's Peak. Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, and Utah make up a portion of the West or the American West, which is in a lot of American Westerns. Although a high percentage of American Westerns were filmed in New Mexico, and California.

I've been to all the states on the East Coast - and my mother currently lives in South Carolina - about one-two hours away by plane, thirteen to fourteen hours by car. My family lives across the US.
As do my friends. I've lived in NYC for about twenty-eight years now, so by far the longest. My brother lives in upstate New York. NY is an interesting state in that it has just about everything: a huge city, small towns, various islands, mountains, beaches, lakes, on the edge of one of the Great Lakes, Niagra Falls, rural farmland, major city, suburbs, etc. Climate? Temperate in NYC and rather mild, with it getting colder upstate. NY gets snow in the winter, and isn't that hot in the summer. (We consider anything in the 90s (30s celisus) hot. Animals: coyotes, bobcats, bears (black bears), wolves, deer, raccoons, rabbits, groundhogs,gophers. Brown recluse spiders (although they are in Kansas too and a lot in PA - saw one on a camping trip in PA when I was a kid), daddy long legs, etc. My niece is going to school in Montana, which is a state that is beautiful - it has rugged mountains, forests, rivers, bison (Buffalo), cattle, bears, mountain lions, etc. If you've ever seen the television series Yellowstone? My niece is going to school where that series is filmed.
It's cold in the winter and receives a lot of snow.

We do have monstrous cock roaches in the US, we just call the big ones "water bugs or water beetles" and they fly. But the big ones tend to be in the Southern US. In NYC - the city of roaches, they are everywhere. Although (knock on wood) - I've not seen any in a while - but my apartment complex has an exterminator that comes through monthly and exterminates regularly the apartments requesting it. Spiders I see less - but I also live in a six floor apartment complex - and on the third floor. I do see them, just small ones. If I was in a house - I'd see them more.

My brother sees bears, deer, coyotes, raccoons, gophers, ground hogs, and rabbits. He has 11 acres and lives near a forest with a large meadow of wildflowers and greens that the deer love to frolick in.

Our biggest insect issue is ticks - my brother has contracted lyme disease three times from ticks.
Also wasps, yellowjackets, hornets, flies, horse flies, actually I think we may have the same insects you do? We also have the snakes. But I don't need bug spray that much and rarely use it. But I also live in a big city or urban environment, bordering on residential (lots of trees and flowers, not much grass) - in the country we do need it. So it depends on where you are. I think this is true everywhere though?

[shadowkat]

And happy Galentine's Day (per New York Magazine - Galentine Day is non-romantic love day). Hee hee.

[dirtygreatknife]

[ I will come back and answer this properly--just been running around like a one leg chook without a head atm (one legged bc my bad knee is very, very bad right now), so when this current period of everything is over, I'll have more time. ]

[shadowkat]

Eh, take your time. I admittedly didn't put a lot of effort into it. Oh, by the way, they have the Australian version of Alone on Netflix now - with people surviving in Tasmania, which I find amusing, considering I traveled around Tasmania in the 1980s with my family. It does have undeveloped wilderness - mainly rain forests though.