Quitting Plastic
Clara Williams Roldan & Louise Williams
Quitting Plastic is a quick guide to quitting plastic! Plastic has insidiously invaded modern society due to its convenience and perceived cleanliness. But the throwaway nature of plastic is killing the environment and isn’t sustainable. This is a great book to introduce people to the concept of reducing plastic waste.
First off, there are lots of interesting (and horrifying) facts about the true amount of plastic in the world. Then there are practical and accessible ways to approach quitting plastic. Something I found particularly good was that each tip comes with easy, medium, hard, and ‘it’s personal’ symbols. Just a few little steps can make a huge difference. As per the starfish parable – it makes a difference to that one (original story, story in common use). If one less plastic straw makes it into the body of a turtle, that’s a big deal to that turtle!
For a person like me who has already done a lot (I hope) to reduce my plastic impact (and I honestly feel sick when I see the amount of plastic trash around) this might serve as a guilty reminder that we could be doing more. For example, I should be washing the foil seals of dip containers and putting them in a can to be recycled.
At the time of me publishing this review many councils in Victoria have decided to stop taking recycling – so in fact it’s all going to the tip. So now is a good time to think about the Zero Waste initiative and the five Rs – refuse, reduce, reuse (+repair), recycle and rot. I actually rot quite a lot of paper waste because I have !6! compost bins, but I still have a very full recycle bin.
My co-blogger Kyria has already requested that she be next in line to read and review this book. Her journey to reduce plastic is beginning – and I know she and her family will get lots of helpful tips. Just realising how easy it is to do some of the options is the first step. Pick this book up for yourself, read it, take notes and pass it on to someone else who you know is ready to reduce plastic.
Allen & Unwin | 4th February 2019 | AU$19.99 | paperback
I hoped that this book would discuss how to exploit people as media. Instead it reads as a list of facts with no actual argument. My wife got half way through this book before she gave up and needed to rant to me about it. She did read the second half (no other books on offer at the time) which had more details and practicality in terms of what will happen next eg. ‘getting lots of likes’ is the way that things are heading.
What I thought I was going to get out of this book was a series of interesting, respectful stories about funerals Wilde had directed. Instead I encountered a memoir that aimed to dispel a negative ‘death narrative’ and restore a knowledge of death as inevitable, but not bad. While there are some stories, this book is more about how Wilde has changed his attitude towards God and religion since being a child afraid of hell through to being an adult who sometimes suffers from compassion fatigue.
I hated this novel. I finished it, but I completely skimmed the last half of it because I was impatient with the slow action and boring protagonist. Passing between the present dinner and past memories could have added some momentum, but instead just served to push me out of the narrative, and wonder why the dinner table format had been used if the novel was going to contain flashbacks anyway.
I didn’t see that ending coming. I mean, I knew that it would probably be someone out of left field, but really? That person? I’m not sure the author gave me enough warning, but perhaps a second reading would make it obvious for me. The relationships of the other characters were sweet, but they could have perhaps had a bit more backbone, particularly Ben. But I suppose not all of us are the Jack’s of the world.
At the very beginning of this novel I was bewildered by the number of characters that I was going to have to keep track of. I thought of drawing a mind-map in fact! Slowly though I kept track of the three main women and their important connections – Sophie, Claire and Bec. I generally enjoyed the past interspersed with the present, and found that although the past parts could have been excluded, they added a depth to the current day fears of the women (and men).
Suzanne is a tormented character with multiple facets that I loved. The magic here was that I could see things from her perspective and her flawed logic, even as I hated the way that she treated people. Strangely enough, I had just read 
Meg Jay has really delved into this topic with insight and sensitivity. Some of the chapters really resonated with me, even as I struggled with the concept of the horrible human circumstances that some people grow up with (eg. sexual/physical/mental abuse, neglect or alcoholism). The statistics on how many brilliant people come from adversity were really eye opening.
You can tell that this novel is written by someone who actually understands Muslim culture, and isn’t just writing a novel in the ‘genre’ because it’s ‘popular’. Often I find in novels that there is a lot of going on about hijabs, when really most of the time it’s not anything out of the ordinary for the woman in question. Ayesha is comfortable with her faith even as she rebels against some of the requirements and expectations of her family.