Great news: I've found where my reading mojo has been hiding! After a long period of endless distractions and limited concentration, I've rediscovered my love of reading and am thrilled to have actually finished a book!
Of course, I shouldn't be surprised that my first successful reattempt at reading came from the pen of New Zealand's most prolific children's author,
Joy Cowley.
Navigation (2010) is a delightful collection of memoirs from Joy's life and we get to know this amazing woman through what she does best: story telling. Warm, welcoming and humorous, we learn about Joy's childhood growing up in Foxton (when she herself struggled to learn to read), her journey through motherhood and the colourful life experiences that led to some of New Zealand's finest children's books and generations of readers. She shares with us anecdotes about how Greedy Cat came to exist as well as other characters such as
Mrs Wishy-Washy. It's no wonder that children all over the world have fallen in love with reading and story telling because of Joy's writing.
Joy also has plenty to offer adult readers and her reflections on life are often quite philosophical. I particularly loved this passage about growth:
"Growth means movement, rupture, division, leaving something behind to come to a new place of development, and that is usually accompanied by some kind of discomfort. Whatever our close view of such transitions, when we look back at them from a distance, we see that they were exactly right." p 78
Now that my mojo has returned, I look forward to gleefully attacking the pile of books that has accumulated by my bed this year and, perhaps even more excitedly, becoming attached to
my new toy.
What are you reading at the moment?
No comments:
Post a Comment