I am sick in bed, and have just been wandering around the internet most of the day. Fascinating! My point is I came across a very cool site called booko. Now, I LOVE books, especially books about food and I buy a lot online. Booko has kindly saved me hours, maybe even days by finding  the cheapest place to buy books & DVDs in Australia. Just type in the book you want and booko will come up with a list in order from cheapest to most expensive, in Australian dollars! Click  on the one you want and buy direct from the book seller. The site is great, so simple and clean and easy to use. I know I am raving…maybe I have a fever but I get so excited when I see someone doing such a great job! Also check out booko’s blog, blogo…too cute.

This is a great book that I am reading at the moment for the second time.

It’s about the construction of the idea of the housewife and how the industrial revolution and it’s resulting technologies changed the lives of women and men and children.  Everyone! It’s really interesting and shows how the “time saving” devices invented to help housewives actually make more work for them. For example, the washing machine, before it was invented even poor women sent their laundry out or washed it less often. I recommend reading it, there seems to be very few books on the subject and it’s quite liberating if your feeling swamped.  Some availability in Australia but is expensive so may be coming from overseas but a lot of libraries would have it or buy from Better World Books.

And look, somebody loves me, and knows me well, birthday gifts…

That is not a tiny microplane, nor are they giant slippers. I bought five lemons to zest today! My idea of a fun birthday, what has become of me?

I stumbled upon (in real life, at a real library) this little gem of a book by Tom Hodgkinson, ‘How To Be Idle’. For me the book is about living your life free from “the work culture of the western world, which has enslaved, demoralised and depressed so many of us.”. Although it advocates laziness it is not about being irresponsible or selfish to the detrement of others, which I abhore.

I have always felt a great aversion to authorty and I hate to be told what to do, I guess I am quite rebellious by nature. I seek and admire individuality in others however I have sometimes struggled to accept my own individuality and feel I haven’t had the confidence to assert it. Reading this book has stripped away some of the guilt and pain that I have felt because I have never seemed to want the same things that other people “seem” to want. Although I believe in work for a good reason I stuggle with the work ethic of “work for works sake”. That is the constant “doing” of things in an unthinking, useless kind of way. Quite honestly I have never had the energy to keep up with it all and though I have tried I usually fall in a heap after a week or so of running around like a mad woman doing goodness knows what.

We might ask though: what is the ‘real world’, exactly? Does the ‘real world’ mean toiling all day to produce useless objects that make other people poorer and less happy?….Who is to say that all that stuff is not actually the fake world, the world we create in order to distract ourselves from the real world, which is the one we inhabit inside our heads? Both worlds are after all, the products of imagination and language. I don’t see why one should be privileged as being better than the other.”

Okay it might sound a bit of a stretch out of context of the rest of the book, a little contemplation can reveal some truths in that statement though. My favorite idea in the book is very simple…

If we could be happier with less stuff, does it not follow that we would have to work less, as we would need less money.

This book is a lot of FUN. Chapter headings include, Sleeping In, The Nap, Time for Tea, The Ramble, The Pub, The Art of Conversation, Party Time and Meditation. Sounds like a well rounded life!

Go to The Idler for more info. Another good site is Anxiety Culture.