the book bum

     Hey guys!      So my English teacher assigned the book Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko for homework over spring break.  The book is set in the American Southwest, which by chance is where my family spent this break.  Specifically, we are in Arizona.  Reading Ceremony while exploring its setting was an enlightening experience - I've never had my reading material fit my location so well, except for the occasional NYC-based novel. Visiting Native American ruins and museums was especially helpful because the book's protagonist is  a young Pueblo World War II veteran.      From now on, I think I'll make an effort to match my travel novels to my travel destinations.  Here are a few ideas:      - The Dubliners by James Joyce in Dublin, Ireland      - Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov on an American road trip      - The Odyssey by Homer in Greece      - Carpe ...

     Now that I've finished applying to colleges, I'm back to blogging!  Sorry for the hiatus.          I read Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, the tragic story of a pedophile's obsession with a little girl, this fall and it blew my mind.  I read it twice before purchasing an annotated version, which revealed to me how intricate the book really is.  I picked up on the protagonist's manipulation of language in order to warp the truth on my own, but not until I read the annotations did I notice Nabokov's use of involution or literary allusions.  This may sound a bit pretentious, but it was so satisfying to understand all the tricks at work in the writing.  So I've compiled a cheat sheet/list of some motifs, devices, and patterns to look for when reading  Lolita.     1. Colors: Especially patterns of colors surrounding certain characters or emotions. 2. Quilty: It's an important name and it appears in dif...

     I invite you to consider this a Part 2 to last week's blog post, which was inspired by my yearning to fast forward two years so that I can backpack through Southeast Asia.  But whereas in that post I listed books to enjoy in lieu of travel, in this one I will list destinations for people who enjoy books.  1. London, England - I have heard great things about this city's bookshops.  Plus many great writers, such as John Keats, David Bowie, Virginia Woolf and Charles Dickens were born, inspired by, or resided here.  Plus the cold and rainy weather is ideal for reading (according to every Pinterest user ever, at least).  2. Writers' houses-turned-museums - There are bajillions of them, but the Mark Twain House in Hartford, Connecticut sounds especially beautiful. 3. Walden Pond Reservation, Concord, Massachusetts - THIS IS THE NATURAL HAVEN IMMORTALIZED IN WALDEN BY DAVID HENRY THOREAU!  You can actually visit it! There's a replica of h...

          Have any of you read  A Little Princess  by Frances Hodgson Burnett?  It was the book that made me love books.  (Does every book-lover have one of those?  Do you?)  I first read it when I was very little and have spent the last two days rereading it, as I tend to do every few years.             But the thing that struck me about the story this time around is that the story's preteen heroine, Sara Crewe, seems to have life completely figured out.  Even when she loses both her father and her fortune and is working as a hated scullery maid at her London boarding school to pay off her debts, she never sacrifices her virtues of benevolence, hope, and grace.  Her secret is that she considers herself a princess in spirit, even when she is no longer as wealthy and privileged as one.  Sadly, I have not yet gotten my life philosophies together and lack Sara's ability to gracefull...

          The summer has officially begun!           And not because classes are finally, finally over.  No.  The summer has begun because my co-blogger Grace and I went to our annual library sale this weekend!            This tradition, in which I force Grace to take me to her country house (which was built in the 1700s'!) so we can go to the Stone Ridge Library sale, is quite central to our friendship and, furthermore, provides me with a security net of books that I can dip into at any time for the rest of the year.  It's MUUUCH cheaper than going to Barnes and Nobles every time I finish a book, that's all I can say.           So this is a list of what I picked up this year! 1. From Rockaway by Jill Eisenstadt - Rockaway is my beach!  I spend pretty much all summer there, so I had to read this. 2. Handbook of Short Story Writing: Volume II , edited by Je...

      I know much less about music than I do about books, but I can definitely tell you that my taste in music is influenced by my appreciation for good writing.  I especially love songs with wordplay or that take on a slightly different meaning the more you listen to them.  With this in mind, I've compiled a list of my favorite poetic singers in the hopes that they will confound and delight you, too. 1. Marina Diamandis aka Marina and the Diamonds - She's probably my favorite singer of all time.  "Mowgli's Road" is one of her most poetic and clever songs, but I was totally mystified by it for a while. It's pretty clear that she's feeling pressure to conform to what the music industry wants from her, but then there's also this weird silverware metaphor about how "the cutlery will keep on chasing me" and how the "spoons are metally mean and "the knives are bloody cold".  It took me weeks before I suddenly had a eureka moment l...

      So, I have been a very happy camper in English class this month because we have just started the POETRY UNIT!!!! Yay!!  And what makes a sophomore English poetry unit so wonderful is that we don't even have to write poems for it.  Now, you might think that I would be upset by such a restriction, but actually I couldn't be happier with it.  After all, high school is full of kids who are full of feelings and lacking in experience. What I'm trying to say is that a poetry-WRITING unit would have resulted in a slew of terrible, TMI-inducing poems.      (I must say that none of the above sarcasm means that I am exempt from the crummy-teenage-poetry-writing crew of America.  I just, you know, keep my poems in a file where no one will ever see them :P)      But all of that aside, we were asked to pick a poem to memorize for this unit, and I chose "February" by Margaret Atwood.  And thus I became aware of the wonde...

     What an excellent question, people!  Magical realism is a type of fiction that goes along like any average realistic/historical novel until suddenly the character starts talking to her mother's ghost or bursts into flames at the sight of her one true love.  This kind of book has scenes of magic that highlight the book's themes and heighten the drama of the story, without completely turning it into a work of fantasy.  I started reading a magical realism memoir recently and it's reminded me of how much I love the genre, so here is a list of my favorites! Just to give you an idea of how many Post-Its I need to keep up with  Woman Warrior 1. Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts by Maxine Hong Kingston- This book is the inspiration for this post.  The writer interspersed stories from her life with stories from her family past, Chinese legends, warped oral histories, and allegories.  It's super confusing and trippy, but with...

      I've been a ferocious reader for over ten years now (exactly eleven in two months!!), and in my time as such I have learned a great deal about books besides the fact that they transport you to mystical places and are NOT MEANT TO BE READ ON TECHNOLOGICAL DEVICES.  No, there is much more to books than that, my friends.  For example, they have many excellent uses outside that may be less obvious to a  person who does not tote a book about with her wherever she goes.  Here are a few examples. All these lovely books have lots of potential uses, so don't just let them sit around gathering dust! 1.   They can be weaponized.   There is nothing unethical about this.  I am a small and innocuous/innocent-looking fifteen-year-old girl.  I am not a master of martial arts or kickboxing or even old-fashioned girl street-fighting.  I need to be able to defend myself, dammit!!!  So whenever someone gets too close, I whip out th...