Books are magic!

What a wonderful Book Week 2020 was, where a range of bookish Library activities and competitions culminated on Thursday in a colourful and cheerful Book Week Costume Parade. A range of treasured fictional characters could be seen parading around Karinya during Break 1 - after devouring the old sausage-bread made by our student leaders. The participation in the parade was higher expected. With most students and teachers in costumes, we created a wonderfully positive and uplifting atmosphere. This was just what we needed after a rather challenging year. The day not only proved that we cherish books and reading, but it also demonstrated our community spirit at St. Peter's Catholic College.

Never forget the power of books and reading:

"Reading challenges, empowers, bewitches, and enriches. Books move us to tears, open up our lives to new insights and understandings, inspire us, organise our existences and connect us with all creation. Surely there can be no greater wonder." (Steven Roger Fischer)

During our college assembly on Wednesday morning of Book Week, a few teachers read extracts from one of their favourite books. Here they are for your enjoyment

and contemplation.

Tony Brosnan:

They had a big black young retriever dog–or rather an overgrown pup, a big, foolish, four-footed mate, who was always slobbering round them and lashing their legs with his heavy tail that swung round like a stock-whip. Most of his head was usually a red, idiotic, slobbering grin of appreciation of his own silliness. He seemed to take life, the world, his two-legged mates, and his own instinct as a huge joke. He’d retrieve anything: he carted back most of the camp rubbish that Andy threw away. They had a cat that died in hot weather, and Andy threw it a good distance away in the scrub; and early one morning the dog found the cat, after it had been dead a week or so, and carried it back to camp, and laid it just inside the tent-flaps, where it could best make its presence known when the mates should rise and begin to sniff suspiciously in the sickly smothering atmosphere of the summer sunrise. He used to retrieve them when they went in swimming; he’d jump in after them, and take their hands in his mouth, and try to swim out with them, and scratch their naked bodies with his paws. They loved him for his good-heartedness and his foolishness, but when they wished to enjoy a swim they had to tie him up in camp.

(from The Loaded Dog by Henry Lawson)

Paul Bowe:

My favourite piece of literature comes from an old story.

The context for the incident is a Middle East country with very strict religious rules where the consequences for breaking the rules can be life-threatening.

It is a sabbath day and Jesus is in the temple. A man with a terrible affliction approaches Jesus and says, " If you want to, you can cure me." The question hangs in the air. It is an all-male environment. The pressure is on. Jesus responses, "Of course I want to. Be cured"

The response, "Of course I want to', communicates a God, a Living Presence who wants good for people and challenges each one of us to want good and to do good for each other.

(The incident is from the Gospel of Luke)

Tegan Evans:

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him.

The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. At one end of it a coloured poster, too large for indoor display, had been tacked to the wall. It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features. Winston made for the stairs. It was no use trying the lift. Even at the best of times it was seldom working, and at present the electric current was cut off during daylight hours. It was part of the economy drive in preparation for HateWeek. The flat was seven flights up, and Winston, who was thirty-nine and had a varicose ulcer above his right ankle, went slowly, resting several times on the way. On each landing, opposite the lift shaft, the poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran.

(from 1984 by George Orwell)