Tag: books

5 Novels to Kick Off 2015

Erika Bell Leave a comment

This is my first post of the new year/school year, and I am excited to kick it off with something that not only is my current obsession, but something that I feel would help all of you fellow pro-2015, make-it-a-great-year people out there. Reading! I can’t imagine that anyone in this day-in-age would whine and complain about the thought of picking up a good book, outside of what is presented for us to read in the classroom. I mean come on, whether it be the classics or the new-age books of today, there’s nothing like curling up with a great book that you are excited to escape into.

It’s 2015 and everyone is all about starting afresh with new goals and new ideas of turning your life around and making it the best year yet. Well the best way to start these goals off would be to dive into some good reads within the first month of this journey. Books dedicated to inspiring you, teaching you, and entertaining you, are always helpful in planting seeds for prosperous growth. I have a 5-novel list of some of the books that I plan to crack open/have already read (before school swallows me up and spits me out), that I hope sets you all on the journey to growth and enlightenment this upcoming year.

1. The Examine Life by Stephen Grosz

The Examined Life is a book of short stories containing over 50,000 hours worth of conversation on psychological insight into individual lives. What sets this book a part is Grosz’s intentional avoidance of psychoanalytic jargon, which allow for these real stories of human behavior, mistakes, discoveries, and ideals of losing and finding ourselves, to seem real and attainable.

2. The Woman I Wanted to Be by Diane Von Furstenberg

I currently have me nose in this book by Diane Von Furstenburg, one of the most renowned fashion designers and business women of today. What sets her a part from the pack is her effervescent sense of self that stands on the idea of practicing independence, becoming one’s own best friend, and using any hard or difficult past to create the best future possible.

3. The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

This classic work tells the story of an Andalusian shepherd boy who is traveling to the Egyptian pyramids to find a hidden treasure. He encounters many people who aid in his journey to find this treasure, but what he comes to discover is the idea of finding treasure within himself. Cheesy caption, great read.

4. Girl Boss

Girl Boss follows the story of Sophia Amoruso, founder and CEO of Nasty Gal retail company, and her journey from the bottom to the top. There are many cliche’s and I-already-knew-that’s present in this read, but the biggest thing to take away is the idea of there ever being impossibility of succession, couldn’t be further from the truth.

5. The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You’re Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are by Brene Brown

This quintessential self-help book is one of my read-a-little-everyday reads. There are so many inspirational quotes and mantras to live by, as this book draws on classic psychological concepts of what is needed to mentally live a healthier and happier life.

The Reading Paradigm

Jeannie Marie Leave a comment

I have to admit, I’m quite disappointed in myself. This year has been going great, I’ve been on top of homework, getting enough sleep, and I see my friends regularly, and always enjoy my time with them.

But I’ve been neglecting one very important part of school. Reading outside of class.

I’ve always been a ravenous reader, ever since I was little. A lot of times when we’d have library time in elementary school, my friends would look at the I, Spy books while I was looking at the chapter books, the ones that were “harder” and “above my reading level.” I still remember begging my librarian to let me read a book because it was about rabbits and it had won a Newberry Award, so it had a fancy ribbon on the front. It was two reading levels above the grade I was currently in, but I read it, and I was able to tell my librarian what it was about afterwards, so she knew I understood it. I don’t remember it now, but that experience of being told no but doing it anyways was always my kind of style.

My reading habits carried on with me through middle school, although I will admit I went through slumps. Luckily, many of my friends enjoyed reading, so it wasn’t like elementary school where I was the only one reading while everyone else was playing Pokemon on their GameBoys. I honestly couldn’t get my hands on new books fast enough, and I’d often ask my mom to take me to the public library for more.

Each time I went, I’d check out about 20 books. Most of the time, I read them all. But now, I can’t even dream of finishing five. Mostly because the Michigan coursework challenges me enough that I don’t have much time for anything. But there’s another reason as well. Anytime I’m not doing homework, I’m being ensnared by something far worse.

O Netflix, we shall duel once again!

Now, don’t get me wrong: I love Netflix just as much as the next overworked college student. I just don’t understand why I turn to it first when I’m taking a break or done for the day.

Sure, I have to finish all the episodes in a TV show, and sometimes, there are quite a lot. But after I’m done with one show…I start another. I don’t go to my bookshelf, or my Nook containing so many unread books it’s unimaginable. I go to Netflix, or to my DVD collection, or…well, you get the idea.

And I’m truly disappointed in myself. I love reading, I really do. Last semester I had a reading-heavy course (think 100 pages per week, on top of two English courses that had a lighter but still formidable reading schedule), so I was able to excuse myself from my leisurely reading, because if I wasn’t doing homework, I was procrastinating on reading for that class – I was always behind. But this semester, that’s not the case. I don’t reach for my books, and the only time I have is when I was rereading Harry Potter, since we’re reading it later in one of my classes.

I know what’s happened. Reading is so active that I shudder just thinking about picking up a book after doing homework. Instead I’d rather watch something on my laptop, something that feeds me information and pictures rather than me having to produce it.

It’s mental fatigue, but it’s all in my head. I’m disappointed that I’m almost afraid of my books because I think it’s just another aspect of my work. Reading is fun, and it’s something I’ve forgotten in the past few months.

But today, I found for the first time in a while that I wanted that to change. Recalling earlier posts, I’ve expressed my undying love for the Academy Awards, and today I read an article online about female under-representation in the film industry (as in directing, producing, etc.). It made me think about the Awards this year, and wonder if any of the screenwriters nominated were women (note: there are 2 in the list of 10 movies nominated for Adapted and Original screenplay, both accompanied by men in the screenwriting credits).

It also made me think of the time when I thought about adapting my favorite books into screenplays, one of which I still have a 40 page script for in my bedroom back home. It’s a dream, quite far away and almost unimaginable, but how am I going to adapt anything if I never read anything that needs adapting?

My love for film and TV is almost unparalleled. My friends ask who’s in a movie and I respond with the actor’s name almost immediately. But that love is completely surpassed by my love for reading, and that will never change. I just happen to forget sometimes.

Winter 2014: the semester I read so much my eyes fell out.

Taylor Leave a comment

After entering recluse-mode for many an hour, I have finished my first book of the semester! The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf.

the voyage out 1

*takes breath*

Assigned for my Virginia Woolf class (whodathunkit?), the novel was a quick head on collision to what would be in store for me this semester: a whole lot of reading and a whole lot of feelings. The combination of reading and feelings often leaves me home alone, on my couch without pants, ignoring ambient/electronic beats wafting into the air like my incense, and staring into the massive void that is the winter in Ann Arbor because it never stops snowing.

While it was by no means Woolf’s best work, The Voyage Out is “a beginning” of sorts. Although not her earliest diary nor letters, this first novel stands as a type of fluid production from one of the most brilliant writers of the 20th century. I can see question and figure out what it means to write a novel as she pieces together allusions–from Conrad to Milton to Bronte to Austen to Plato. She tropes Victorian themes (the dying heroine) and twists them into a new modern sensibility as she meditates on deathly illness rather than the sentimental last breath of life. Unlike her other “more modernist” novels, however, there is a clear plot. WOAH. Step back.

Rachel goes to South America, falls in love, and dies. OR A bougie woman travels to a middle class wet dream of what the exotic other-as-land would be and becomes a body with out organs and disintegrates from life. OR Woolf’s creative idea of her dead sister, Stella, comes of age (whatever this means) in a post-Victorian world, and dies. The dying part is pretty consistent, but the other elements of the novel, well, including the death, too, are wildly complex. Meditating on the inability for anyone to really know anyone else, the downfalls of language, the ways humans feel, the ways human name their feelings as emotions, the ways men and women interact, the ways classes interact, what colonialism does to a collective consciousness, how patriarchy fucks over all women (and men), what death and life and love seem to be, etc., etc., . . . *this is a fragment I’m trying to save* . . . the Voyage Out covers a lot of territory that will reappear in the later fiction of Woolf.

the voyage out 2

Not only has Woolf impressed me but she has made me rethink what it means to be a reader in the 21st century.

As an English/Philosophy lover/snob/being, I enjoy a good book. To me, “good” refers to something along the lines of: published out of one’s century (unless your name is Toni Morrison) that either invests too much in the world, consciousness, and humankind or is entirely skeptic of everything including the very page it is written on. Whether Naguib Mahfouz, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, James Joyce, or Audre Lorde, Elizabeth Bishop, or Sylvia Plath, or Michel Foucault, Frank B. Wilderson III, Gilles Deleuze–I have a lot of opinions on what is “good.”

However, as a bibliophile that is moving closer and closer from the hallowed halls of libraries (let’s be real, libraries here means hipster/queer coffee houses) into the real world where the library is anything I can fit on a shelf in my hypothetical apartment in an imaginary Washington D.C. (my future plans), I realize that “good” means more than just “good.”

In reading Virginia Woolf’s first novel I have a newfound respect and curiosity for new authors. This–the ability to read for pleasure and explore new authors–is a epiphany that is oh-too-recent. I have always despised new books because nothing can replace what has already been written. But this despair, I’ve learned, is stupid. Just as I think I have merit and worth in the realm of scholarly writing (HAHAHAHA MY THESIS WHAT), others, too, have merit writing in the scope of fiction. I should honor their creativity.

the voyage out 3

Although new writers can be sloppy, can have an fluctuating style, can be apprehensive, they can also be full of new insights to my queer world–filled with new relations to humans, technologies, and myself, new relations to others, new relations to the environment, and so on. The world is not static, and, I guess what I’m trying to say is, neither should my bookshelf.

Thanks, V.

10 Reasons why Fitzgerald (not the president) Knows

Taylor Leave a comment

So I read “The Great Gatsby” in 10th grade. I was 15, living in suburbia and confused about the major topics in the novel–racism and eugenics, gangster/mob culture, and perceiving reality (alcohol).
I loved it then. And I love it now. Rereading the book for my Visual Cultures of the Modern Novel class has been such a treat. I now get things that are going on in the novel that weren’t talked about in my high school class (everything is homoerotic). And I feel that Fitzgerald, in describing the 20’s, describes college and he KNOWS my interactions with the world.
1. Friday, Friday, Gotta Get Down on Friday:

Daisy: “I always watch for the longest day in the year and then miss it” (16). Friday should be the longest day of the week–a day I don’t have class, a day where I wake up and cope from watching Scandal with a workout, a day where I don’t leave my apartment until 9pm. But all of a sudden I wake up in a haze with the sun attacking my eyes and it’s Saturday. Boo hiss. Friday over.
2. Everyone’s stupid and everything hurts:

Tom: “He’s so dumb he doesn’t know he’s alive” (30). Tom gets few things besides racism, classism, sexism, ableism, and ageism. But the other thing he knows is that most people I interact with don’t know that they’re alive. “Woah, I’m white–what does that mean? I have privilege?” My response: “oh, another one of you non-alive folks.” Or those people who ask me if I’m dressed up in costume on Halloween (today!) and I’m in regular clothes (peacock earrings, harem pants, tie-dye shirt, neon coat, stilettos).  These non-alive people are worse than zombies and at least Tom (and I) call them out.
3. We’re all gonna die:

Myrtle:  “You can’t live forever, you can’t live forever” (40). She gets this whole mortal thing (and this being-unto-death thing). As the first(?) character to die, she gets the #yolo life. While I will hopefully live more than once, more than 5 is a bit much–Myrtle understands. I refuse to JUST #yolo, but I’m ok with dying after one too many.
4 . To be a freshman is to thirsty:

Nick: “I was one of the few guests who had actually been invited” (45). Everyone at Gatsby’s party just shows up. WHAT. Its like all those nasty freshman that appear out of nowhere, all wearing AP Government shirts or their greek life paraphernalia, that drink the whole keg and then flirt with literally everyone. It’s the best when you’re at a small house party and the freshman flock to show up, finding 15 people discussing cultural appropriation and some good speakers. Come at me, freshman!
5. I’m going to leave this gem hear:

Owl Eyes:  “I’ve been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library” (50).
6. And this:

“‘Anyhow he gives large parties,’ said Jordan, changing the subject with an urban distaste for the concrete. ‘And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy’” (54).
7. OH, AND THIS:

Young Lady: “‘[R]each me a rose, honey, and pour me a last drop into that there crystal glass’” (65).
8. Everyone is reckless:

Gatsby: “‘I tried very hard to die but I seemed to bear an enchanted life’” (70). Sometimes you are out until 5am, sometimes you are awake in the library until 5am with marker smudges all over your face, sometimes you drink 2 pots of coffee a day, sometimes you sleep 12 hours to cope, sometimes you eat only hummus, sometimes you j-walk like life isn’t real and its raining and you jump into a bush to avoid a car (unlike Myrtle). Everyone is so intense but if the world likes us, we live to see tomorrow.
9. People troll and derail pretty much everything.

Narrator: “The automatic quality of Gatsby’s answer set us all back at least another minute” (92).
10. Aesthetics are real. Everything is Campy.

Daisy: “‘They’re such beautiful shirts,’ she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds. ‘It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such–such beautiful shirts before” (98).
The Great Gatsby might infuriate you. It might inspire you. It might make you nostalgic or make you happy that this century is not a teenager. But, either way, it gets some things. Gets them well.

Conversions and Conversations

Jeannie Marie Leave a comment

If you know the words “Good morning Hank!” and “Good morning John!” and where they come from, you’re probably part of the internet culture known collectively as Nerdfighteria. Brothers Hank and John Green have used internet vlogging as a medium to create things of awesome such as the Project for Awesome, an online charity event, and VidCon, a real life convention for YouTubers to meet with their fans on the other side of the screen.

However, it can be said that John Green is a much higher profile name. Known not only for his online hijinks, John Green is a New York Times Bestseller and a recipient of the Michael L. Printz award, the highest honor for authors of young adult literature. He has created such classics such as Looking for Alaska and An Abundance of Katherines that are loved by teens across the globe.

However, his most recent novel has been making more buzz than usual. In January 2012 John released his book The Fault in Our Stars, a realistic fiction about the joys and trials of teens with cancer. Inspired by his time as a chaplain straight out of college, The Fault in Our Stars was literally a project 10 years in the making. His hard work paid off – The Fault in Our Stars spent a year on the New York Times Bestseller list, and his publisher Penguin rented out Carnegie Hall for him to celebrate in January 2013.

This in itself is any authors dream, but fans clamored for more. And now, John is jumping from the small screen of the internet to the big screen. The Fault in Our Stars just wrapped up filming in Pittsburgh, briefly relocating to the beautiful city of Amsterdam, and is expecting a 2014 release. Yet again, John is making headlines with big names being attached to the project such as Golden Globe nominee Shaliene Woodley and seasoned actor Willam Dafoe.

On the TFIOS Movie Set

Currently, John is posting photos from the set, exciting fans and critics alike. And this is where I come in. A longtime fan of John’s work, I could not be more excited for this movie. But with every book to movie adaptation, I have met the news with a skeptical eye. I want the book to be represented well, as I saw with The Hunger Games, but I also want it to be an amazing standalone work, as with The Perks of Being a Wallflower.

But with all of the support from John and all of his pictures, tweets, and videos from the set, my mind has been put at ease. And I’m noticing a common trend. From the incorporation of real teen cancer survivors in the cast of prominent extras, to the recent wall of fan art that has been made for the book, I see the book mirrored in the filming. This time, I’m not talking about the fact that this is an adaptation – I’m seeing this duplication in the process of creating. John poured his soul into this book, and has said so on multiple occasions, and I see the same with the director and producers of the movie. They are incorporating what made the book so amazing – passion and realism mixed together to form something beautiful between producer and consumer. As encouraged by John, The Fault in Our Stars transcended the words on the page, becoming a conversation between the reader and author. And that’s what made this book so special, and what I think will be the defining characteristic for this adaptation.

I have never been more excited to dive back into this world again, and to have a new, fresh conversation as I sit in the theatre next year.

For more pictures from the set of TFIOS visit John’s twitter; for more about the Vlogbrothers and their various projects, visit their shared YouTube channel.

Film vs. movies and Literature vs. Books: End this war!!

Sarah Ogar 1 Comment

The other day, I went home for the weekend and to catch up on sleep and on Saturday night, catch up with my older sister.  We were sitting on her couch contemplating what to do for the rest of the night when suddenly, she got this mischevious look in her eyes that made her look like a third-grader with a secret to tell.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Oh nothing,” she said, like there was definitely something.  “Just…I feel like watching a really girly, really sappy movie.  Would you be up for it?”

“You bet!” I remember saying.  I was relieved that she didn’t tell me she had cancer or something.  But afterwards I thought about the trepidation she must have felt before asking me about what to do for the night.

And it got me thinking, as an avid cinephile and bibliophile, why are some people so ashamed of watching films or reading books that are in a genre?  What’s so bad about chick-flicks and chick-lit that makes normal people scrunch their faces and avoid asking you to watch them?

Does calling a movie a ‘film’ elevate it to some sort of high status?  Does ‘Literature’ confer a sort of sacredness to texts that ‘Thriller’ does not?

As someone who loves serving up some Austen, Tolstoy, Baudrillard, or Borges from time to time, I will also admit that I have read ‘Bridget Jones Diary’ waaay too many times to count.

And I’ve laughed out loud every time.

Gets me every time.
Gets me every time.

That is something that reading Baudrillard has never made me do (except when I’ve laughed at Baudrillard to avoid crying because I have no idea what he is saying).

This man has never made me laugh.
Never gets anyone laughing, but is lauded for dissing Disney World.

I am not saying that one is better than the other.  From time to time, I NEED challenging literature in order to assure me that my liberal arts brain can still function.  But from time to time, I think even the liberal artsy should get down from their marble column and descend into the pages or film clips of the genre book or movie and not be ashamed of it.