Let’s Talk

I feel like blogging even though I don’t want to write a review (or post ones I have already written) and I have no meme or whatever they’re called to participate in on a Thursday. So. You and I, dear Readers of mine Blog, we shall talk.

About what exactly I am not entirely sure of. Okay, I joke. Obviously, being bookish sorts, we shall talk about books. And reading. And cute authors. Oops. Did I say that out loud? I actually meant intelligent authors who write books that supersede the um, physical attraction of oh forget it. I meant what I said initially. Okay?

What are you reading nowadays?

Me, I have many books I’m reading/supposed to be reading/happy to be reading.

First there’s The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss. Which I have to buy because it’s 621 pages long and the pace at which I’m reading… well, let’s just say there is no hope in hell that I will meet my library due date with a finished book. And the book is really good. The prose is beautiful and while the pace was slow initially, it did pick up and I see why people have rated it so highly.

Then there’s The Curse of the Elroys by Ksenija Yoder Batic. I haven’t read much of this one yet but it does seem promising.

I also started Witchlanders by Lena Coakley. It’s for review so I should have it read before its release date if I’m very lucky. It’s promising so far, more like a high fantasy than a urban fantasy and I tend to prefer the latter. Plus the protagonist is male. Which would usually mean its difficult for me to concentrate but funnily enough, the Protag in this one is entirely relatable.

I’ve also been reading The Hobbit by Tolkien and it’s chugging along merrily. As long as I have it done before the movie comes out, I’ll be happy. And since the movie is coming out December 2012, I have lots of time! :D I love the Tolkien movies, the ones helmed by Peter Jackson because he’s such a great director but I haven’t been able to get through the books because the pace is so slow and the singing drives me nuts. But The Hobbit isn’t too bad.

And finally, I’m reading Waterfall by Lisa T. Bergen. That’s entertaining as well. So… this is what I’m reading.

What are you reading? Tell me because I want to know. Really. Snooping peoples reading list is a guilty pleasure of mine.

Let’s Discuss the Mean Girls

She is the commonest villain out there.

In fairytales:

The villains (mean women?) are the ones who are:

a) beautiful (most of the times, okay? Let’s forget the Mermaid villain and Cruella, she’s not a true fairytale villain anyway)
b) confident
c) in a position of power
d) bold

In Korean/Hindi/Japanese dramas (these being the ones I’m most familiar with):

The “mean girl” position is often given to women who are:
a) beautiful
b) confident
c) bold
d) in a position of power

In YA novels:

The mean girls are the ones who are:

a) beautiful
b) bold/confident
c) cheerleaders
d) sexually liberated

Even the books that I really like make use of this trope. This overused, exhausted trope. I, too, am guilty of using “mean girls” in many of my stories. I use them to make my main character look better, nicer, more approachable. But I don’t understand why we have to bank on stereotypes, especially ones that are so detrimental to the liberation of women to make our points.

And for the most part, this is so senseless. I was watching this Indian TV serial with my mother the other day and I noticed that in EACH AND EVERY serial, there is ONE woman who without rhyme or reason is out to get the main character. She is the designated villain of the piece with no reason except that she may be jealous of the main character. Just like in YA novels, there are mean girls who bully the main character without any reason except that she may be jealous.

Why do we do this to ourselves?

I mean, most of the writers in YA (that I read anyway) are ladies. Women. Why do we not foster a sisterhood – yeah, in literature, and maybe this will sufficiently weaken the stereotype that, in real life, one won’t see a cheerleader and automatically label her as a mean girl. And if you absolutely have to have a mean girl in your story, give her enough of a development, enough of a backstory that the readers can explore why exactly she has to taunt and traumatize the main girl. See it through to the end. Don’t take the easy way out.

You know. Like…”oh, I need a conflict?” “Right. I will use this girl who is like SO GOOD at everything and who hates Main Character because…” … “ah, yes, because Main Character might have a thing for her boyfriend and even though she’s so much hotter, she’s still insecure enough to resort to bullying her and in the end, without consequences, Main Character can have the boyfriend.”

Right?

No. Wrong. If a girl is so confident, bold and powerful, chances are she has enough self-esteem to walk away from a boyfriend who is not that great.

When you take a girl who is awesome in all other aspects and then reduce her to a paranoid, blubbering mess just because of a guy? Yeah. It’s not so cool.

When powerful women are perpetually labeled as negative characters, it teaches children that women and power do not mix well together. Not explicitly mind you. It’s an implicit thing. Things are changing, of course. But they would change faster, and for the better, if in our literature, we stopped taking the easy way out.

Yours sincerely,
A Mean Girl.

More Facebook Hilarity.

Wild Wednesdays #4

I write poetry. Okay, this is somewhat bookish but it’s not to do entirely with reading so it counts right? I am not sure I write good poetry but (according to my creative writing prof, I don’t) but mehhh. I used to only write poetry and stories seemed beyond me. That changed. The thing is, I can’t connect to “professional” poetry because they seem so structured, so technical that they lose the sense of feeling they are supposed to promote. You are not supposed to work hard to see what they mean, it’s supposed to hit you while you read it. Like Neruda’s poetry. Anyway. I write poetry as a form of catharsis.

————————–

I wrote this in the summer after I watched the news about a little Afghanistan girl who died after being caught in a crossfire. I don’t remember her name nor do I remember the details and that makes me sad but this was my response.

Once upon a smile in a desert
starved for cold, a feeling was born and
here’s a song to you, Soul,
for as blackened as you have become, there
is hope for you yet, your eyes wet with tears still
and once upon a yearning on a winter morning,
time stood still and questioned its own existence and
what beauty breathes in little organized sentences so that
once upon a sunset, a father buried a daughter he
hadn’t yet seen grow up and a mother wept for
that transient life so that the world would know for
a moment that her light too had flickered brightly for a
second before once upon a world where songs have
lost their music, she was stolen from her childhood and now
once upon a whisper in the dark someone
will shed a tear which may just be a scribble on
paper but once upon a broken heart, someone will remember her
and she will exist for just a minute again.

My Libraries

Being a college student means that most of my money goes to tuition, textbooks and food. If I’m lucky, I will enough left over for books. But then, there are also clothes to buy and shoes…well, you get the idea. This is why I use the library. A lot. I get that many people don’t like libraries because they’d much rather buy the books and that’s awesome. If you can afford it. I have this other quirk though – I hate buying books that I will end up hating. So if I read a book I got from the library and I love it, I’ll buy it. And I’ll feel good about it. I’m so so thankful that I live in a country where the libraries are so well stocked. So, today’s post will be showcasing all the libraries I am a member of. Yes, plural.

 

New Westminster Library. It has the distinction of being the first public library in British Columbia.

Burnaby Public Library. Has an awesome collection of YA titles.

Walter C Koerner Library at UBC. It has the a lot of literary hard-to-find novels. The roof of the library is a book set down with it's spine up.

Koerner at night. It's open late because that's where we sell a bit of our souls at a time to finish assignments.

Vancouver Public Library, Central Branch. It's the round building in the middle. It's so gorgeous and the architecture is amazing. Oh and it has all the books a bibliophile could ever want.

VPL, Central Branch in spring or maybe summer. It's a gorgeous picture. Be jealous!

There are other libraries that I frequent at school but those will have to wait for another time. Like the Asian library and the Education Library (which has awesome YA books).

I was tempted to do a bookshelf tour but I have way too many books to go over and not get tired. Maybe I’ll take  pictures of my shelves, heh. Anyway, do you have libraries you love?

(Just so you know, the pictures I ganked off Google. They’re not mine. If they’re yours, please let me know and I’ll credit accordingly. Thanks.)

Because it’s Valentine’s Day and I’ve been known to write Sappy Stuff

Here is something I wrote a while ago. It’s expressive of love (sort of?). This is all I have to offer today.

—————————————

He might be a stranger on the street. A whisper in your ear. A touch in autumn and a kiss in winter. He could be your everything and yet at the same moment, he could mean nothing to you. When your love is a sandcastle, you learn to fear the waves. It is in the middle of the affair that you seek the beginning of it all.

When did it start? That new awareness of him as a person more than he used to be. His voice is a caress and his gaze is a promise and you are a smile halfway to heaven. In this world of black and white and sorrow uncovered, he is the colour of the blush on your cheeks. The shape of his hand, the grooves and the lines and the length of his arm are an ode to beauty that the world composed for you.

You could be the nightingale that forgot how to sing or the hand raised in farewell of a goodbye said too soon. A gray day that even the rain wants to avoid and the crack on the pavement that little children jump over. You could be the regret that simmers in a heart for a youth passed by or a word said too sharply. But with the knowing that you in his heart are the sun in the morning on a clear summer sky is the reason you could spend forever in the feeling that eternity is made of.

 

Places I Wish I could Be

(http://placesiwishiwere.tumblr.com/page/9)

This Year in Books (Part 1: Where I Talk About my Reading Journey)

I have read 253 books so far (there are still 7 days left before the year is over and I am pretty certain I will be able to read at least three books more).

Is that a lot?

I haven’t read as much as I would have wanted to read. I remember, one year I read about 350 books but I was younger, with fewer obligations and things that took me away from reading. Reading is not really about escaping for me. It is more as though discovering you have wings and you can fly.

When I was younger and in Fiji, books were scarce.

This is me before I became a criminal, still innocent. This picture was taken in the aftermath of a hurricane when the roof of our house had been blown away.

I have done a lot of things for books. Some crazy things.

The City Library was a one roomed building with musty volumes that were either uninteresting to me or had been read countless times already. The “kids” section had fast lost its appeal but they wouldn’t let me get an adult card without a parent’s signature. So I, being desperate and not thinking straight, forged my Dad’s signature.

It’s not that he wouldn’t have signed the form had he seen it. It’s just that I lived in a village some ways from the “city” (Lautoka City in Fiji, google it) so going to “town” (as we called it) was somewhat of a chore. Buses ran very infrequently and people were too busy to take me by car. They only let us take two books at one time anyway.

Buying books, new ones that is, was out of the question. They cost way too much.

Romance novels, the trashy ones, were easily available and readily devoured by my cousins and I. And then we discovered that dollar stores carried books they bought from suppliers in New Zealand and Australia. 50c/book. We saved our allowances each week and then splurged on books on Friday afternoons, dodging teachers to go to the stores (where we were most certainly not supposed to be going).

My life of crime and rebellion, you see, had started back in grade six with the signature forgery.

I had arguments with the school librarian who refused to let me read the books that were there on the shelf, citing that it was saved for the upper forms. (We have Forms 1-7 for High School.)

In Fiji, there are end of the year exams and the kids who come “First, Second and Third” in the entire class are awarded book prizes. That, right there, was my entire motivation for working hard. I didn’t care about school but the end result. Hee. I wanted the books.

Once, my uncle who was a school teacher brought to my house the book prizes that were to be wrapped up for the kids the very next day. He told me that I had the whole night to read them and dude, I nearly read my brains out that night. I can’t even tell you what I read. I just did. It was all colours of insanity.

Kids here have no idea how lucky they are to have so many books readily available to them. If only they wish to read. They are so privileged and as such they take for granted these…dare I say, blessings?

When we moved from Fiji to Canada, I had managed to collect quite a number of books that I had starved for and I couldn’t reconcile myself to the idea of leaving them all behind. So I left behind clothes, things that I might otherwise have deemed irreplaceable for books. My parents were amazed but I wasn’t going to be convinced otherwise.

I really had no idea that I would be able to get books so much more easily here, you know. I wasn’t going to take chances.

I laugh at my younger self now but I also feel sorry for her. Because I know she wasn’t the only one thirsting for books. Because I know that right now there is someone, whether in Fiji or in some other country, who is longing for books to read too. And some day, I’m going to help other kids quench their thirst.

Checking In

I feel like I am neglecting this blog. Which I totally am. It’s not that I don’t read anymore. I do. It’s just that I don’t have the time to sit down and write about the books I read which is such a pity. Because I have lots to say.

School is wearing me thin. Spreading me out like mayo on a slice of bread. From Korean suddenly getting all difficult to that Brit Lit paper I have to write but have no idea how to proceed with, I am just going out of my mind. Plus the fact that creating a course from scratch requires a lot more planning than I thought it would. PLUS people actually expect me to have some energy and time left over for a social life. Yes, please ignore me, I’m being a whiney bug. But it’s the weekend you know? I want to sleep in tomorrow. Wake up late, have brunch in my jammies, just relax for a while before I crack open the books.

But I have to get up at six and head to school at about 8 (it actually takes me one whole hour to wake up, honestly) so that I can get there at 10. We have the SDS seminar tomorrow (SDS: student directed seminar) where they’ll hopefully teach us some pertinent things about making up syllabus etc. I’ve been thinking about Grad School too and I think I want to go into Children’s Literature. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to spend all my time studying fairy tales etc? Heh.

Anyway. What I’m trying to say is that I probably won’t be posting here as much as I used to. This, of course, could be entirely bollocks if I suddenly find time to do so. But I think I’ll worry about it after I’m done with that evil paper. T.T

Other than that, happy reading! I shall be back soon enough.