Was this the most dramatic day in the history of this planet? The Last Day of the Dinosaurs by Riley Black

 

The Last Days of the Dinosaurs by Riley Black:

I have always loved dinosaurs. Having watched brilliant videos such as Kurzgesagt in a Nutshell’s The Day the Dinosaurs Died really boosted my curiosity about the details of their extinction. 

This was the most dramatic day in the history of the Earth and Black helps explain why the asteroid was so deadly. It’s not like Earth hadn’t been hit by asteroids before.

So it was a great thrill to come across Riley Black’s account of their end. It’s a fun, informative book with enough detail to satisfy the general reader but they don’t make the mistake of going too deep into the science.

I particularly liked their approach to the details, starting at before impact and moving outwards, through the first hour, the first day and the first year after impact to finish at one hundred thousand years after the impact. The power of this collision is damn near incomprehensible and one can't help but imagine what would be left of us were a similar event to happen today. Spoiler alert: not much!

If you enjoy reading popular science books and the end of the dinosaurs attracts you, this is well worth a read. You can pick it up from your favourite online bookstore or ebook provider. *

* I don't currently intend to link books that I write about. If I start getting a few readers I might but for now we'll keep it clean :) 

Is it better to make a grand final and lose it, or just not make it at all?

As a Dragons fan, I'm experienced with fine seasons ending in crushing failure. I've had the dubious privilege of watching us lose the 1985, 1992, 1993, 1996 and 1999 grand finals. I saw all but the 92 defeat in person. This was when I really cared about rugby league to boot!

I also saw us lose the 1984 preliminary final, where we lost to a last minute try after Kevin Roberts gave Parramatta 2 dodgy penalties. In truth, this was more devastating than all the grand final defeats except 99. 85 was horrible but wasn't as raw as 84 was. 85 just made 84 worse as we had Steve Rogers then and might have handled Canterbury better than we ultimately did.

I have great memories of every grand final qualifier that we won and then subsequently lost the grand final. They're all among the highlights of my many years of going to the footy and being a committed supporter. Sure it would have been nice to pick up a premiership when my passion was higher (I would have slept just fine had the Chooks roasted us in 2010) but I got a lot of great moments out of those runner up seasons.

Making a grand final is a great achievement and it's exciting! You could win the premiership! Even when I knew we had fuck all chance of winning I was excited we were there. I was really nervous prior to 85, I just had this feeling we weren't going to play well. I felt pretty good in 99. We had the better team, after all. I kept right on feeling good until early in the 2nd half when it was obvious that we had come out badly. That was one of the worst in-game experiences ever because the whole half was a fucking train wreck. In 1985 we knew that the 6-0 halftime lead was probably going to be enough as Canterbury were dominating and had near flawless defence.

 We weren't favourites the other 3 times so I was more relaxed. I had some hope going into 93 because we had been playing so well and we were such a disciplined unit but I was always a bit concerned about the gulf in class. We copped some injuries on the day which didn't help but the opposition were definitely our biggest problem. 

For me, as bad as those losses were, they're still a memorable experience, which is part of the point of following a sports team. The semi final wins you get in the lead up also create great memories. You can't win it if you're not there! 

The last 12 seasons, where St George Illawarra have rarely threatened to make the semis, and haven't come within cooee of the top 4 by and large, have been a crashing bore as a supporter. Granted, I'm nowhere near the committed obsessive I once was, but surely even for the nutcases there's been very little to remember. I still watch and get into State of Origin and the semi-finals, so I haven't lost complete interest in the game and could certainly make more memories should the Dragons ever deign to be a competitive unit that challenges for premierships again.

What about you? Would you prefer to see your favourite sports team being a regular challenger for titles, even if they lose a fair bit? Or would you prefer to avoid the pain of defeat and just poke their heads up every so often to win a title and slump back into painless mediocrity? 

Roger Federer wins the 2017 Australian Open! A Retrospective.

The 2017 Australian Open was a memorable one for many reasons, Mirjana Lucic not only winning her first match at the Australian Open for 19 years, but then going to make the semi finals! 36 year old Venus Williams, battling an auto immune disease, made the final and matched up once again with her sister Serena, who *only* won her 23rd Slam and set a new record! Dennis Istomin and Mischa Zverev, after long, injury riddled, careers purely as journeymen, cut loose and took out Novak Djokovic and Andy Murray respectively. 

Rafael Nadal, after battling injuries in recent years and rarely being a threat in big tournaments, fighting his way through to the final. Any of these storylines would have provided excitement and magic in a Grand Slam. 

This Australian Open had all of the above only for those stories to be toppled by Roger Federer, who triumphed after a 6 month layoff due to injury by beating his nemesis Rafael Nadal in an instant classic!

Roger Federer has, over the years,  with the possible exception of Pat Rafter, become my favourite tennis player of all time. He's exceptionally exciting to watch, charismatic, well mannered and respectful of the game's history and traditions. It's been a great ride, barracking for the upperdog has been a rare experience for me in following individual sports and it's definitely has its pluses. I can count on regular victories, fine performances and not too many heartbreaks. Certainly it's been a lot more rewarding following Roger Federer than watching Greg Norman contend in over 20 majors whilst winning 2 and blowing more opportunities than I care to remember.

After winning Wimbledon in 2012, Roger followed up with a weak 2013 that seemingly signified the beginning of the end of his time at the top. Roger had other ideas, explaining that a sore back had hindered his play and hiring Stefan Edberg to implement a makeover on his game. Stefan persuaded Roger to change to a larger racquet and convinced him that net rushing remained a viable approach given the strength of Roger's attacking game.

The results were impressive, with an inaugural Davis Cup victory in 2014, along with some impressive Slam performances capped by 3 finals across 2014-15, all of them against Novak Djokovic, with the closest being the 2014 Wimbledon final where he held break point late in the 5th set. 2016, however, saw Roger injure his knee bathing his daughters in Melbourne and he never fully recovered, eventually shutting down his season after Wimbledon in order to get fully fit for 2017.

So, suitably regenerated,  he arrived here and as the #17 seed, was no longer protected by the high ranking he usually enjoyed as an elite player. His draw meant Thomas Berdych in the 3rd round, Kei Nishikori in the 4th, Andy Murray in the quarters, Stan Wawrinka in the semis and Novak Djokovic in the final! Not surprisingly, I didn't harbour any illusions about this fortnight, not bothering to watch his opening two rounds against qualifiers.

However, being a Federer fan meant turning up for his meeting with Berdych. I'm not sure what I was expecting but what I got was three sublime sets of tennis as Federer took Berdych apart in the best performance I had seen from him since he worked a similar spell on Andy Murray in their 2015 Wimbledon semi final. Berdych played quite well, not that it mattered. It crossed my mind that if he kept playing like this he might go deeper than I had anticipated as I didn't see anyway Nishikori could beat him on that form.

Two days later Nishikori played well and while Federer didn't play as well as he had against Berdych he had enough quality of play along with sufficient energy in the tank to take him out over five entertaining sets and advance to his inevitable quarter final meeting with Andy Murray. Only it wasn't inevitable and it wasn't Murray because the barely known journeyman Mischa Zverev had put together a serve volleying clinic par excellence to remove Murray from the equation and put him on a plane home!

I was starting to get excited here because I knew that Zverev's serve-volley game, as well as he was playing, matched up perfectly to Roger's versatility and shotmaking wizardry and that he would, in all likelihood, have a stress free path to the semi finals. And so it proved. I was also noting, with a certain sense of foreboding, the magnificent performance of his old rival Rafael Nadal in dispatching Alexander Zverev,  the younger and higher ranked brother of giant killer Mischa over five torrid sets.

So, the semi finals it was to be. There was a time when Stan Wawrinka was an opponent that a Federer fan looked forward to. There would be some great rallies, the odd wonderful backhand from Stan and absolutely no chance that Roger would lose. But while the head to head still strongly favoured Federer, Stan had creamed him in their last Slam meeting in the 2014 French Open while subsequently demonstrating his considerable skills on faster hard courts by winning the US Open last year with some wonderfully tough tennis. Any man who can take the best of Novak Djokovic and emerge triumphant is a man to be feared. The Stanimal would not be going gently into that dark night or any other.

This was another ripper of a match. Federer won a tight first set, looked good in the 2nd, Stan appeared hurt and responded in the way we've come to expect from him in recent years, hitting harder and stronger and capturing the next two sets. Federer had to dig deep and play some great tennis to bludgeon the match from Stan's grasp and advance to the Australian Open final! At this point I was more pumped than freshly made car tyres.

There was just one little thing taking the air out of those Roger powered sails. 24 hours later, the Roger slayer set about the entree to his main course by taking on Gregor Dimitrov. Gregor's known as being a  slightly inferior Roger clone, possessing a big serve, strong forehand and athletic movement to go with an elegant one handed backhand. He doesn't have the imagination and versatility of Roger but he's a strong player and he absolutely gave it to Rafa on this night! For the best part of 5 hours he hammered away at Nadal, pumping backhands up the line, nailing strong serves and blasting big forehands behind them. Ultimately one of the best performances of Gregor's career was not enough to slay this warrior with Rafa's ability to open up the court with his wicked swinging serve into the backhand being a key factor in his victory. I really wanted Dimitrov to win, not because he couldn't beat Roger but because I was in mortal fear of Rafa and his ability to control the game and win the big points.

So, with hope in my heart but doubt in my brain, I awaited the final of the 2017 Australian Open, the renewal of the greatest rivalry in the modern game at the highest level there is. The major problems for Roger Federer against Rafael Nadal over the years have been the damage that Rafa has done to his backhand, repeatedly forcing defensive shots which allowed Rafa to stay in the rally until he got the chance to counterpunch combined with Roger's awful record on break points against Nadal, both when trying to break serve and hold serve. In most of their matches the points tally was close and the sets lost were usually closely fought but the big points kept going to Nadal.

So I was in for a surprise when early on in the final, Roger Federer took hold of some backhands and absolutely cracked them back over the net, both cross court and down the line. The hope had been that Roger might be able to get to net regularly and assert himself up there but Nadal's depth rendered that a rare option. This was a duel that had to be won from the baseline. Empowered by his stinging backhand, Roger was able to get a break and serve out the first set! Hope was kindled.

The 2nd set quickly dashed those as Rafa grabbed the early break and carried it through. One set all. Given their history, my expectation was for Nadal to carry on and take the match. It certainly wasn't for Roger to spend half an hour treating Rafa like Dimitrov and absolutely smashing him six games to one in the third set! Once again, the backhand was stinging Nadal, getting Roger on top in the rallies and giving him the opportunity to strike winners. Two sets to one, all of a sudden, this was one very serious tennis match. Just one set. One set. One fucking set and I don't care about Roger Federer's future tennis success.

It wasn't to be the fourth set, however. As per the 2nd set, Roger's serve went down early and Nadal, playing with his usual dynamic brand of awe-inspiring skill and relentless intensity, was able to draw level and send this most unexpected of finals to a deciding set.

I hadn't experienced tension to this level in a tennis match since Pat Rafter went deep into the 5th set against Goran Ivanisevic in the 2001 Wimbledon final! Roger's first serve went missing in the opening game of the decider and Rafa broke for 1-0. Given Roger's inability to break back earlier, I wasn't feeling good. Fierce games for 2-0 and 3-1 didn't raise my optimism any. Roger was playing the better tennis, at 3-2 in favour of Nadal the winner count for the set was 14-6 in Roger's favour! But he wasn't winning the critical points, like always when playing Nadal. Someone wake me when the story changes.

In the sixth game, Roger created some more chances, which Nadal negated, only to miss some forehands and give the break back! The story had changed. WAKE UP! OMFG, it's 3-3 in the 5th! Which, 60 seconds and 4 dominating points later, was 4-3 Federer! Promptly followed by two more strong points and a double fault and all of a sudden, Roger Federer had triple break point to get a chance to serve for the title!!!  Nevertheless, A screaming crowd, an opponent on a roll and enormous pressure are not enough to cause Rafael Nadal to crumble, if you plan on winning a match against him, you are going to have it to bludgeon it off him. Three near perfect points later, it was deuce.

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, at this point we must interrupt the dramatic re-telling of one of the all time great Grand Slam finals to bring you THE RALLY where Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal played out the match in microcosm. Twenty six full blooded strokes of the highest pace, placement and power followed, with both men gaining the ascendancy and having it taken from them by their opponent's ability to to respond to great shots sent their way under pressure by shooting back a better one. Finally, stretched out on the forehand by a classic Nadal two-hander, Roger reached wide and drilled it down the line, over the high part of the net, for a blazing winner to bring up another break point.

Interestingly, Nadal sent just 2 shots to the Federer backhand in the duel, one of which ended up being crushed crosscourt and nearly finished the rally right there and then. Nadal was clearly unwilling to go all out against the Federer backhand, a virtually unprecedented occurrence on a big point between the two players. It is a measure of Nadal's mental strength, that despite losing a pivotal point like this, despite being challenged by his opponent's unexpectedly lethal backhand, he still saved the break point with a thunderous serve down the middle to the forehand.

So Roger needed to being up break point again, and with a series of ripping backhands opening up the court for another big forehand to force the error he did precisely that. Facing another pivotal break point Rafa  sensibly decided it was time to go back to his best serve,  firing a big serve wide to the Federer backhand. Roger ripped it crosscourt and Nadal had no chance of getting the return back into play! 5-3!!

If I ever imagined this moment, I would have anticipated that I would be screaming and yelling, reaching a level of ultimate excitement. And I did yell a "Come on!" but then I paused, surprised by the blurred vision I was experiencing. Clearly, I must have left an onion lying around the television somewhere. Perhaps Roger paused on the verge of the summit as well, for his service game started badly and he quickly found himself facing two break back points. Nobody beats Rafael Nadal without a fight. Ace succeeded by massive and brave inside-out forehand to level up was followed by another devastating first serve and it was match point. Which, naturally, was saved, despite a successful overrule to a double fault call. 

Another ace set up a 2nd match point! This time, a beautifully placed swinging serve down the middle drew a short reply which was despatched by a forehand whipped onto the line and, after a delay for a challenge, it was over! Roger Federer, the 18 time Grand Slam champion, was now the Australian Open champion after defeating his ultimate nemesis, Rafael Nadal!!!!!

I was completely stoked and remain so, writing this piece four days later. I just wasn't expecting it at all, I hadn't totally given up on another Federer Slam win due to his excellent play over the last 3 years but to get it here after 6 months off, with a torrid draw topped by facing Nadal in the final?? I never contemplated such a scenario!

All Hail Roger Federer! I never thought he could win a Slam in a manner that would top the 2009 French Open. But he just did!

* I wrote this in 2017 but, for some reason never posted it. I came back to it recently and realised that it is a good piece of writing with lots of energy and it thoroughly deserves to be published. So, to celebrate the current Australian Open and Roger's retirement, I have published it now. 

Reviving a Passion - The Went Report and its Beginnings

 

Reviving a Passion – The Went Report.

As a primary school student one of my obsessions was to be the first child to finish the work. I still recall the exasperated look on my teacher’s faces when they saw me coming out to show them my work, well before they were expecting someone to finish! Part of this was because I’d been told when I was younger that I was a slow worker and I was still burned about it. The other part of it, though, was that these were days when the concept of free time for children in school was not a laughable one. Being a reader, if my classroom had a decent class library, which some of them actually did – another rare event nowadays – I would read, but in Year 5 I cottoned onto a different activity.

I would ask the redoubtable Mr Wilson for a piece of art paper, skip back to my desk and create a mini newspaper sharing my thoughts about the most important thing in the world – rugby league! I was completely obsessed about the sport then, reading all the stories in the papers every day, harassing my brother David savagely if he failed to bring home Rugby league Week on a Thursday night, David got paid on Thursdays and being a young man who enjoyed a smoke and a drink he often had other plans but even drunk he learnt it just wasn’t worth not having it with him when he got in the door.

So, I would pour out my views about Rugby league and other assorted topics onto the page. But I needed a title for my work – even today, I feel the need to title things that I write. The editor of Rugby league Week was Geoff Prenter and he wrote a column every week called “The Prenter Report.” What better thing to imitate than the elite column in the most important magazine in the world? Voila, The Went Report was born!

So, I would fill the piece of art paper with my scribblings and when I was finished I would proudly take it back to Mr Wilson to show him. Being a league fan and a keen supporter of the Wests Magpies, he may well have enjoyed it but even if he didn’t, he was an experienced enough teacher to make it look like he did!

I assumed he showed it to the class on one occasion although it’s certainly not out of the question that, buoyed by the positive feedback he gave me and my seriously inflated sense of my own worth, that I took the opportunity to show it off to all of Year 5 boys. Sorry girls but at that stage of my life the opinions of the girls was absolutely inconsequential to me!

In response to my capture of writing glory, my future friend Andrew decided he needed to muscle in on the action and one day he created his own mini- newspaper! And the other boys flocked to read it! Scandalous behaviour. I was completely cut. Being an unrepentant know it all and completely unafraid to point out the lack of knowledge of other people about anything I happened to know and a few things that I didn’t, I wasn’t exactly the most popular boy in town.

However, after his successful raid, Andrew lost interest and I continued happily making my own Went Reports for the remainder of the year.

The Went Report went into hibernation until 1985, when my beloved St George Dragons embarked upon what would ultimately fall 2 points short of being the perfect season as they nearly triumphed in all 3 grades, a big deal to rugby league obsessives at the time. Unfortunately, those 2 points happened to be in the grand final against the evil enemy, the Canterbury Bankstown Bulldogs, the local team for Picnic Point High School and thus followed by a majority of the kids! The fact we hadn’t lost to them all year didn’t exactly soothe this mortal blow to my ego!

Nevertheless, the thrill of having a successful sporting team to follow fired up my creative urges. My brother David would take Geoffrey and I to most of the games that year, with my oldest brother Peter normally in attendance as well. Sometimes, my father would come but fortunately not too often. He and I weren’t close and his attendance increased the odds of the adults drinking, which added unnecessary stress to the whole event for this budding teetotaller.

Attending all 3 grades was par for the course for us so writing reports about all 3 grades was a logical next step. That became page 1 of the Dragon Weekly, a magazine I created about St George. Page 2 was the Went Report, containing all my views about the team and the game, followed by pictures cut out from the papers, Rugby League week and Big League, carefully captioned by yours truly. I was such an obsessive in 1985 that I would write the new competition table every Sunday night, including for and against and put the page in my wallet! I had been planning an epic edition had St George won the grand final, but the disappointment was such that all I could manage was a game report and a Went Report column.

Interestingly, it was rare for me to show The Dragon Weekly to anyone. My brothers saw the occasional edition, but more in passing rather than me showing it to them. This was to become a theme in my writing. I wrote other magazines about varying topics during high school, but I didn’t show them to people either. Consequently, it never occurred to me or anyone around me that I might have had some potential for journalism.

I get great pleasure out of creating something that did not exist before I made it. I can’t draw, I can’t sew, I can’t make things, I can’t fix things, I can’t sculpt or paint. But I can write. I do it often enough, I just haven’t had the courage to share or the determination to commit to writing regularly for an audience. Reflecting on this past history, I wonder too how much I’ve wanted to have an audience. Still, I always have an audience in mind when I write. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be so meticulous with my word choices and in drafting, re-drafting, then carefully re-reading and editing.

Do I want to make money from writing?

No, not especially. I have a job. I even like it.

How big an audience would I like for my writing?

I wouldn’t complain if something went viral but I won’t consider my writing to be a failure if nothing I wrote ever did. Some regular readers would be excellent.

What will I write about? The short answer: Whatever I fucking want to.

The long answer: Whatever interests me so my family, politics and current affairs, education, history, sport, books, movies and TV shows are all likely to appear should I hook into writing regular blog posts. There’s no shortage of topics.

I would love to write over 100 blog pieces in one year. That would show that I was taking it seriously. But if I managed something every week that would be a vast improvement upon previous efforts!

I tell Cassie that she needs to be creative in her life. The same is true for me and writing has always been how I express creativity.

I just want to write regularly, have a record of what I wrote and to know that some of what I write is reaching an audience.

I want to write with intensity and passion. I want my love for life and my enjoyment of my interests to come through in my writings. I want to be brave when I write. Writing for the public is not for cowards. Cowardly writing is weak, dull and boring. It’s easy enough to be boring without virtually guaranteeing it through a reluctance to be honest. Readers deserve better. As a writer, you’re asking people to devote their time, which they can literally give to thousands of other options at that moment, to you. The least you can do is come to the keyboard with intensity!

 

Reviving a passion

The first hints that I had that writing was more to me than something I did to get good grades at school when I saw how much joy I gained from writing long love letters to Kathryn, my first girlfriend. In late1988, with Year 12 having ended, along with that relationship which I had allowed to flicker out, I spent many hours writing in my diary. It was a long piece about how I was and who I wanted to be. It's a piece of surprising maturity, I knew even then that a wife and family was going to be very important to me and that the type of person that I would share my life with mattered far more than her looks or accomplishments. I look back on it and realise I did not fail myself on that front, once I finally developed the nerve to play the game instead of spectate. My 18 year old self would have been very pleased to know that he would one day have a wife like Kristy and a daughter like Cassie.

What I remember most, though, is how I felt while I was writing it. It was empowering, I was burning with excitement and power, it was a creative flame erupting inside me. The joy of the moment was such that I found myself diverging from my thoughts to record that "I am writing brilliantly at the moment." A quarter century on, I look back at that night and realise just how truthful I was being. I *was* brilliant. Writing was seducing me that night, inviting me to be her lover, to seek her rewards, to take a journey with her. Writing was showing me what was possible and asking me to give myself over to her. She was asking me to commit to her with my heart and soul.

But we know about young men and commitment. Writing, like any true lover, expects much of you in return for stoking that flame inside you. She has her expectations. And her tests. I took the road more travelled by. I refused the temptation. I read obsessively but wrote only sporadically. The fire of that night faded to embers, periodically stoked by an email or a travelogue or a journal post, powerfully written but just a monologue. 

I failed the test. Writing has been a path that I refused to take even though it beckoned to me. I denied who I was and I have kept right on denying it. Not the first time in my life that happened! I would not accept who I was. I wouldn't accept that failure was part of the equation, that one could give everything to a passion and come up with very little to show for it. I never realised that it is the journey that matters, not the destination.

And so here I am, making restitution to my younger self at the keyboard. Can one resurrect a failed love affair? Is it too late to become the person you always wanted to be? 

Who am I now? I am a husband. I am a father. I am an educator. I am a learner. I am a reader. I am a chess player. I am a man trying to live a life that's closer to his dreams.

Along with those things, I am a writer. It's been a terribly private journey, with so much of my writing aimed at an audience of one. That is the thing I seek to change about my writing. I shall continue to write and I shall seek an audience for my writings. I have so much that I want to say and I am going to say it. There are stories I want to tell, there are ideas I want to explore, there are passions and beliefs I want to share. I want to think of this piece when my life ebbs away and know that I didn't pass up the opportunity a second time, that I took the time to pursue my lone creative passion!

I hope you will join me on this path and that my passion for writing will liven up your day from time to time. 

The unread books.

This post has quite the history. I commenced drafting it a year ago and it had quite a different tone from the final version. The post started with this paragraph, "www.goodreads.com have a yearly reading challenge where you set yourself a certain number of books and try to read that many over the course of a year. I don't find that particularly interesting as I read because I want to and don't need to set a goal to make myself read, any more than I need to set goals to breathe."

This arrogant and inaccurate paragraph was composed while I was clearly in denial about the radical shift in my reading habits. Yes, I still read with a voracious appetite, but firstly the Internet and secondly and more powerfully, the smartphone and tablet have combined to revolutionise my reading habits while I wasn't even noticing. I read copious numbers of short articles and longer articles and that time has been filched from my book reading allocation. It's January 28 and I've only completed 3 books in my Year of Books series. For me, 3 is not a satisfactory total and indicates that more time needs to set aside for book reading.

The primary purpose of this post is to list the books that I've had for a long time and failed to read for whatever reason but still want to read. Recent purchases do not count, most of these books have been on the reading list for a decade or more. as of the 28th January 2017, this is

The Unread Books List: 


Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell I read the start of this and liked it but I didn't finish it, I think the pacing was an issue.

The Wizard Knight Gene Wolfe is a great writer, but his works are usually fairly demanding and the first 100 pages of this was no exception!

 Watchmen I have no idea why I haven't read this yet! I've read other great comics.

Master and Commander I wanted to find out if I would be interested in the whole series - I enjoyed the film! Again, it has been tried but not finished. If the next attempt fails, the book will be culled.

The Last Lion: Defender of the Realm: Winston Churchill is my all time favourite biographical subject and William Manchester wrote two compellingly readable volumes in an intended trilogy. Unfortunately old age got the better of him and he was struck down by a stroke which caused permanent damage to his memory, rendering him unfit to finish the book. He chose Paul Reid to finish the trilogy, which has been well reviewed, but I haven't yet started his contribution.

Pillar of Fire and At Canaan's Edge by Taylor Branch; Parting the Waters was a magisterial account of the civil rights movement and given it's one of my favourite all time books, it does the beg the question of why I haven't read the sequels. A question which I must confess that I have no reasonable answer to.

War and Peace and Anna Karenina by the incomparable Leo Tolstoy. I've read some of Tolstoy's short stories, loved them but his two masterpieces read I have not.

Charles Dickens is another great author whose works I've read comparatively little of. I'm adding David Copperfield to the list as I own the book, but I could add most of his novels.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. Another unread classic.

The Red Badge of Courage by Steven Crane and Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman can safely be added to the unread classics list.

For some additional history books there's Norman Davies' Europe: A History. Simon Schama's Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution  can't be ignored and Orlando Figes' A People's Tragedy, A history of The Russian Revolution is a critically acclaimed account of that dramatic period.

How about some biography with David McCullough's magisterial Truman or the concluding volumes of Edmund Morris's magnum opus about the most important President of the twentieth century, Theodore Roosevelt,  Theodore Rex and Colonel Roosevelt?

Looking for some modern classics? Try Tim Winton's cloudstreet, Commac Mcarthy's The Road or Garbriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude.

There are some shared characteristics among the books listed here. They're nearly all long and they're generally densely written. They require some effort to read. I found making that effort easier in the pre-Internet age. Also, there were fewer entertainment options for me, there's only so long I can watch television before I get bored, that's not the case when surfing the Internet.

I don't anticipate that A Year of Books will be overrun by these titles but I aim to take four of them off the list this year, that's one every three months. That's an achievable target!

The wisdom of ages.

One of the areas that I have found most difficult over my life has been making a consistent effort at fulfilling whatever my goals at a particular period may be. I have been good for a spurt of effort, particularly at deadlines, but prone to dropping off tasks if they become too challenging or require too much work over a consistent period of time to be achieved.

This trait has caused me problems both personally and professionally as I regularly find myself behind whatever timetable I need to be following. This can be highly stressful and where possible, my favourite response to stress is to eliminate it!

During November last year it occurred to me that the fact my tutoring numbers hadn't reached the level I want was reflecting problems that were going to need more than just a few days work to rectify. I analysed how my business was meeting the expectations that I have of a tutoring business, its organisation, structure, administration, presentation and the overall quality of the service that I was providing.

While there were many good things about that service, it was obvious that the answer to the question "Are you doing the best you can do with this business?" was no. Tutoring's a competitive business and that answer reflected an approach where the pursuit of excellence hadn't been the number one priority. I had developed a business that was, in practice, aiming to be 'good enough'. Unfortunately, good enough isn't always good enough.

My characteristic response was to create a list detailing the tasks that needed to be completed in order to raise my business to a standard that I could be proud of.  I am a past master of creating detailed, well structured lists of tasks that need to be done so that I can achieve a series of personal goals. The lists just don't get completed. With around 50 items, most of them outlining lengthy tasks, this list was particularly long and seemed no more likely to be achieved than any of its predecessors.

Nevertheless, it was completed and I commenced work. While I hadn't formalised an order of priority in formulating the list, there was definitely one in my head. As per usual, the first few days were good, making a well structured list is empowering and generates a burst of enthusiasm in the same way the New Year gets us off to a strong start in terms of fulfilling personal goals.

Historically, a good day for me has been the precursor for a disaster as I get satisfied with myself, think that I'm doing well so I relax, do nothing productive the next day and drift back to the spiral of time wasting, feeling guilty about time wasting, doing less and less because of that guilt and eventually giving up on the project. This time I have been reviewing each night what I have achieved that day, asking myself what I seek to achieve the following day. If I'm stuck for inspiration, I look at the list, which gets added to as relevant items occur to me. It's approaching 70 items now.

Initially, I had to be very tough on myself, guarding against the idea that I was getting somewhere significant and constantly re-iterating that my performances today were what mattered, not yesterday and not tomorrow. I can live quite happily in visions of a future that will never be achieved!

As this has gone on I've noticed those thoughts coming readily to my head, and the process of reviewing the day's achievements and mentally planning for tomorrow occurring naturally, instead of needing to be forced. Similarly, I'm finding that leisure breaks are becoming just that, that there's an actual desire to get back to the main game. This is virtually unprecedented for me. Today I told Kristy I wouldn't be doing much today but I actually am because I have habituated the process.

THE list is by no means completed and I anticipate that there it will take me months to tick off the items currently on it but many items have been completed and completed to a standard that I am proud of.

What's struck me most about the change is that I am internalising the wisdom of Will Durant, summarising the approaches of Aristotle;

"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit." 

The wisdom of ages.