Time to introduce some of my friends and where we hang out.

I thought it was high time to introduce you all to some of my friends. Some of which I have had for a very long time and some I have met and befriended quite recently. Also some of them are much older than I am but i think they are cool anyway.

This is the main place that we hang out.

I recently went and found a new large group of friends.

This group has fallen in with some high caliber, exclusive friends of a friend in a secondary meeting place (in other words my person best friend needed somewhere to store her books whilst she made room for the newest member of the family due in march, lucky me)

The bottom half being her's and the top half being mine.

I hope you liked being introduced to some of my friends and seeing where we hang out.

Really fantastic visual of gore

Started reading "Panic" The Wildfire Chronicles Vol 1  by K. R. Griffiths yesterday and came across one of the most fantastically gory visuals I have read in a long time

 "The priest's face was a vision from a demented nightmare, flesh melted away from his skull, partially revealing bone. Both eyes were gone, rendered liquid, oozing down across his cheeks, fusing with the superheated meat that had been his nose and jaw."

I am now 50% of the way through this and am enjoying the incredibly visceral descriptions.

Why all the cats and books

In response to all the photos I am seeing of cats (supposedly cute, but whatever) and books on social media lately I give you Colin the reading dog.

He reads!

And then contemplates what he has read.

I would also like to say this was completely unstaged. I wast reading "The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities" got up and came back to this. I believe he quite enjoyed to book, as did I.

 

Ardent Forest by Nancy Jane Moore

This was a nice, if not overly complex, quick read that did not take much effort to get through.

The two privileged girls, Rosa and Cecily, are the step daughter and daughter, respectively, of the governor of Texas in a post economic meltdown of the US (and apparently that means the world too.)

The Governor, Guy Gisborn, seized the governorship from Rosa’s mother 5 years before the story takes place and in a fit of paranoia exiles Rosa from the city.

This sets up the rest of the story but I felt that everything came to the girls without the hardship and trials that make a good science fiction/ fantasy story.  It had all the elements and the set up but the complexities were not there.   The people or things they were looking for were found almost effortlessly.

If Moore was trying to also make a statement about sexuality and gender stereotypes in the modern world, that was also done poorly as the characters that were addressing these issues did not face any sort of judgement or hardship because of who they were, which is unfortunately the case at this point in time.

I gave this 2 out of 5 stars.

I received this book to review through Library Thing Early Reviewers  

War and Peace....Done!

I have finally finished last book of War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy.  I have to say, I’m a little proud of myself. Yes, I have been listening to most of it (I found an app that streams the Gutenberg recordings of books,) and I couldn't say I could give you an in depth analysis of all the military movements and battles contained within, but I can say I really liked it.

I liked it for the same reasons that I like some of the English classics like Pride and Prejudice and Emma and that ilk. I find the old world charm of the way they conduct themselves in "Society" incredibly attractive, beguiling and intriguing. The social structure was so well established and pervasively known by everyone that, although to us, it seems like a mysterious dance, but to these people, it was their life.

I had an emotional investment in Tolstoy’s characters. Who wouldn't have cried when the Princess Lisa Bolkonskaya died. It wasn't the death of the little princess with the fuzzy lip that made me cry but the truly heart wrenching description of the accusatory confusion on her face upon her death that gripped my heart and made me weep. “Why?” was her question in death, and that was heart breaking.

Being a little bit of a sucker for a happy ending, however, I did so enjoy the eventual joining of Princess Marya Bolkonskaya and  Nikolai Rostov.  With Nikolai’s act of devotion, he improved so many lives without compromising his morals of marring for money, (which he got anyway.)

Along this line, I felt the joining of Pierre Bezukhov and Natasha Rostova was a match made in heaven, to use I tiered, old phrase.  Both Natasha and Pierre needed someone to dote on and be doted upon.  Both deserved the happiness that they found in one another after all they had been through.

So, I cried, I laughed, I developed a deep emotional attachment to the characters and the journeys they underwent, and I can now say “I have read War And Peace”  

The stigma of the audio book.

I will get I right out in front, I really like the audio book. There I said it.

I know that there are lots of book snobs that don’t like the audio book because they like “actually reading” the book.  Well I have a few points on why I really like them.

1.  There are times when I cannot possibly be reading, but as a complete book addict, that is all I want to do. In comes the audio book. I will give you a few examples that I have done this week whilst listening to the end of War and Peace;

I have taken the dog for a walk. Turns a peaceful walk though bush land into a literary experience, or, when I’m listening to Tolkien style fantasy where they have to walk somewhere and fight dragons and the like, I get to live out part of that world with my faithful side kick Colin to protect me.  I whole heartedly recommend it.

Oh, and as a side, listen to horror stories where the victim has to run through bush land to get away from the axe murderer if you want to get your heart rate up, possibly at dusk to make the shadows that much more ominous.

I have marked exam papers and written reports whilst living in the world of war and peace this week.  This has a twofold effect, one, I have almost finished the books nearly 18 months after starting them, and two, working in an open plan office, I can block out idle chatter that I’m really bad at ignoring on my own, whilst still being aware enough to respond to things that are important.  Can’t do that with music.  

2. My Mum would get me books on tape from the library, on school holidays.  So, audio books have this nice childhood memory thing attached to them.

The nice up side of my Mum having done this is that she lucked upon one of the recommended ways to help kids with dyslexia, which I have.  When I was a kid, to read, I had to concentrate really hard to try and get the top and the bottom of each line to stay in place, I have got better with practice. But, because of this level of concentration, then creating the story in my head was more than my brain could handle.  This is why a lot of dyslexics don’t like reading or “find reading boring” because they don’t have the capacity to make the story can come alive in their head. For me this level of concentration would give me headaches and sometimes (even now) would make me feel nauseous and anxious.  The best thing you can do for dyslexic kids, and even adults, is get them to listen to audio books, because their brain doesn’t have to concentrate of translating the words and can just create the story in their head.

3. This kind of relates to point 2 and my dyslexia but sometimes, in the case of War and Peace, although I was riveted to the plot and the different story arcs and characters, I could not get my head around the style of language used.  When reading this sort of “dry old” language, I find myself reading lines over and over again, without actually absorbing anything, or find I have got to the bottom of the page and haven’t understood and damn thing that has happened. When I listen to those same words however, I take more of the story in and understand the plot much better.

So to those people who tell me that I haven’t really read War and Peace because I didn't actually look at every single word on a page, I blow raspberries at you and I say this. 

I have read War and Peace. I have read many books. It’s just that some of them I have read with my eyes and some of them I have read with my ears! 

The Yellow Wallpaper

Today I finally read "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

I have been aware of this book for a while and am well aware of the plot and its feminist overtones, with Gilman making statements on the wrongs of women only being "true women" when fulfilling a role of mother and housewife and the horrible methods with dealing with mental illness or the "fragility" of women of the time. However, after reading "The Yellow Wallpaper", I am struck by the truly horrible plight of the our poor narrator and how she documents her spiral into madness.  Her sad story made all the more poignant by the fact that she has no name...... this story could be anyone's. I am left wondering how far we have actually come in the treatment of mental illness in the 120 odd years since the publication of this book.

People with a mental illness are still treated with disdain, and called weak willed when they can't just "smile and get over it." Its like smiling and getting over a broken leg, can't be done with will power alone. People have to struggle and suffer through years of the wrong prescriptions with no guarantee that they will ever get the right ones.  They may not be able to work enough or at all the support themselves or even dependants because of the reality of their illness. I honestly don’t think we have come very far from this truly haunting tale.

The gut wrenching final scene of this story, I think will stalk my dreams for a long time.  Where our narrator, in her delirium, believed that she had in fact freed herself from the ghastly yellow wallpaper by ripping as much as she could reach off the walls and then continues to creep around the walls, following the smudge, crawling over her husband’s body,  celebrating her freedom in her utter madness.    

Look what I got!

Look what came in the mail and was sitting on the door step when I got home from work. I will admit that I haven't read the second book yet but I could not pass up the opportunity to get this when I saw the post for McNally Jackson Bookstore in America on my Tumblr feed.

Inspiration and realisation

So, I have started writing a novel/book/story. This is a big step for me as I have always wanted to write a novel but have always stopped myself for various reasons. The biggest reason in my mind has always been that nothing that I could possibly produce would stand up to the comparison with my favorite authors, namely Sara Douglas, George Orwell, Terry Pratchett and, of course, the great Douglas Adams (because all of these people are hoopy froods that know where their towels are at!) However, I have come to realise that the version of these authors books that I know and love, is not, in any way, shape or form, the version that they first put to paper or computer. Ohh Duh you say but sometimes things in my brain don't always click into place nice and easy like. How I came to this quite obvious realisation is a little roundabout but bear with me. I have now been a high school teacher for three years and in Australia, there is a big focus on really supporting new teachers with professional development in order to give us the conscious skills needed to run highly effective classrooms, and I honestly praise the work that gets put in to us new teachers in order to reduce the drop out rate. It works. Hence I have a "tool kit" of skills to draw upon in the classroom to deal with all sorts of situations. This development made me aware of the tools I had to do other things outside of my career. I was a student for a very long time, and it wasn't until I repeated year 12, did I learn the skills of how to study. I then went on to do a bachelor of science in chemistry, where I learnt lab skills and research skills. This process of looking back on my life and the thing that I have become proficient at, I realised that I had to learn/be taught or teach myself all of the skills required, even if i had a natural talent for something, I needed to practice some aspect of it. With that epiphany, came the well timed "Future of Storytelling" MOOC (Massive Open Online Course). I jumped at the chance to actually learn the skills I require to get the stories out of my head. The final piece of the puzzle dropped into place when I was watching one of the MOOC's videos that had an interview with Cornelia Funke, author of the Inkheart trilogy among others. She was saying that she had read approximately 50 books in the research of one of her novels, and said novel had taken 7 years to write (or 5 years, i can't quiet remember, but a really long time.) My brain lit up. She couldn't possibly have put the whole story down on paper in one go for it to have taken that long, it must have had multiple drafts and re-writes for that length of time....I can do that. Also this year I have been hearing about the 10,000 hours theory of mastery. It takes at least 10,000 hours of practicing something to master it. Considering I'm just this semester feeling confident about my teaching in a class and I have been teaching for three years, that equates to about 3000 hrs of classroom time. So once I get to about 3000 hours of writing, I should feel pretty good about what i am producing....maybe. So, I have started writing a novel. It may take me 10 years, it may never be published, (who knows what the book industry will look like by then) but you will hear about it here and I think I will enjoy the process.

200 pages in.

So, as you may have guessed from the title, I am 200 odd pages into the Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan and i can tell you 2 important things.

1. I am quite enjoying the story. Rand and his crew have just got to Baerlon where white coats abound and rumors of all sorts on happenings are being bandied about. There are also some really strong willed female support characters that I believe that I am going to like a lot, as long as they don't succumb to being the "love interest" and stay quite one dimensional. (live in hope and all that.)

2. The copy of the book that my supervisor very kindly got me is rather old, has a tiny, little font size to fit all that text on some very sepia toned approximately 800 pages that is seriously screwing with my dyslexia and absolutely refusing to be read at a faster rate than about a page every, say, 3-5 minutes.

I know, I can hear you being truly surprised at that rate of reading, hence only being 200 pages in after 2 weeks on the one book but that is the reality of dyslexia and the reason why so many dyslexics don't read.

This is also why i jumped on the ebook band wagon as early as possible (we didn't get the Kindle down here in Australia until the second generation) because I can change the font size to a comfortable reading position.

I also taught myself to speed read to a degree last year, but it only works for the right sized font on certain background colours.  So when the world is against me, I am forced to go back to my old struggle style of reading, word.......for.......word.......very........slowly.......

Hence if i was not enjoying the story, there is no way I would still be reading it!