The Intrepid Reader and Baker: This week....

Life

This weekend was Melbourne Writers Festival in Melbourne and I was lucky enough to go to two sessions. the first was Irish author Paul Murray and American author Bryan Washington talking about their latest books, The Bee Sting and Family Meal respectively.

The other was Japanese author Toshikazu Kawaguchi who wrote the hugely successful Before the Coffee Gets Cold series. It was an absolute delight to attend this session! My plan is to write more about both of these session next week.

In other news I have to go to the doctor every day, but other than that my recovery from my hospital visit last week has gone quite well!

We did go the beach last night to try looking for Southern Lights. There was us and several thousand other people. I haven't seen that many people at that beach since the last time there were fireworks for Australia day which would have been at least 15 years ago! Unfortunately, we were not lucky enough to see them. Maybe another time!

I'm reading

After a bumper reading week last week, mainly due to enforced rest, I really haven't read much at all this week. I am making some progress on The Shakespeare Sisters by Juliet Greenwood, but not enough. I need to get a wriggle on so that I can read my upcoming review books, otherwise I will start to the feel the pressure.

I'm watching

I was very excited this week. I found not one but two new Bake Offs. We have watched the Canadian Bake Off before but I didn't realise a new series was coming. The other was the South African version which I have never seen before!

We also started watching the third series of Welcome to Wrexham. Even though I know what happened during the season, I still can't wait to see how it all plays out during the TV show.

We went to watch a film that is showing as part of the German Film Festival last night. It was called From Hilde, With Love and it is based on a true story. I have wondered for a long time what kind of stories authors from countries like Germany tell about significant events like WWII. This was a German film telling a German story and it was very interesting. There were some things that I found really surprising. For example, there wasn't a single bomb dropped during the movie, mainly because during the time when the movie was set the war was elsewhere in Europe. My husband actually really enjoyed this and we had a really robust conversation about it on the way home.

Here's the trailer