Saturday, September 19, 2020

Any Ordinary Day

Image credit: Penguin Books Australia
So this week, I decided to take a break from the fiction and fantasy and classic literature and delve into something a little more modern and relevant. Having bought this book over a year ago, I figured now was a perfect time to read it, considering all that’s currently going on.
This week’s book was Leigh Sales’ Any Ordinary Day.

A gorgeous work of non-fiction, Any Ordinary Day sees journalist and 7:30 host Leigh Sales tackle the most tremendous and hardest of questions to answer: what happens after the worst day of your life? Leigh crunches numbers and contemplates the stories of a handful of people who have seen/been the victim of great trauma, asking them what it was like before, during, and after this one event that changed their lives.

Amongst stirring tales of resilience, horrible blindsides, and frightening close-to-home traumatic events, Leigh discovers the causes and functional reasoning behind our actions, words, and experience before, during, and after times of great stress, trauma, and grief.
She pads out each chapter with a satisfactory blend of stories and academic facts, making it a very informative piece of non-fiction that is also engaging and emotionally stirring.

Image credit: Disrupted Festival
One would think that such content as the Lindt Café Siege, familial homicide, freak accidents, and degenerative illness would be a rather dispiriting and depressing reading experience, but somehow Leigh manages to leave her readers at the end of each chapter with an uplifted feeling rather than bone-crushing melancholia.

While the book certainly does not set out to be like a media puff piece about the enduring spirit of humanity, a fair part of those feels are unavoidable as Leigh chronicles very sweet and down-to-earth interviews that take away the media furore of these highly-covered news events and brings reality closer to home, each one closing on messages about the awesome power of communication, love, laughter, and human kindness.
It’s a gorgeous read!

Author: Leigh Sales, 2018

Published: Penguin Random House Australia Pty. Ltd. 2018

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