So, a lot of things have been going on right now. If you add homework plus stressing about finals plus rehearsals for The Producers PLUS my older sister repeatedly injuring her mouth to the point where she's made several trips to the hospital and has an unchanging duck face, that's not a lot of time left for reading. But I have been reading, like the good, studious girl I am. It's just not really up to my normal standards.
Ella Enchanted has always been my comfort object. Whenever I've been sad or stressed or just too exhausted to do anything else, I pick up my paperback which I stole from a lending library and start to read. It's seriously the best book for a rainy day. It's got all the elements: love, adventure, magic, honest-to-God hilarity and unfailing sarcasm. Ella, the main character, is alarmingly relatable, right down to her own internal monologue. I've read this book upwards of ten times and will continue to do so for probably my entire life. It reminds me that happy endings are difficult, but not impossible to achieve. That humor can solve virtually any situation. And that the perfect man has freckles and gives you baby centaurs for a present. I've noticed it's kind of a thing with me that the more I fall in love with the hero of a book, the more I end up enjoying it as a whole.
I would suggest this book from anyone ages 6 to 7000. Because if anyone ever lives to be 7000 years old, the best thing they could do with their time is read a children's book.
Wednesday, January 18, 2012
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
A Sham of a Post
So, I started reading this book called Nine Stories, which is nine short stories by J.D Salinger, and I'm liking it so far. I read a bit of Franny and Zooey and didn't like it, so I had sworn off of any Salinger except for Catcher in the Rye. But this book is good. I've only read the first story, and it's about a severely depressed man who kills himself after he is rejected by a little girl who he tries to reach out to. It was pretty tragic, but I enjoyed the way it was written and the way the characters came off. It was sort of sweet, even though he killed himself in the end.
The thing is, guys, I'm really not in the mood to write tonight. I haven't been reading much because of rehearsals and homework get in the way, besides my rereading of Lolita (76% finished!!!) and that book by the Broadway station DJ, which was not mentally stimulating or worth a discussion. Basically, some gay guys hooked up and then put on a Broadway show. So I haven't got much to talk about. I feel really inadequate just posting this...but...I will. Here's a present.
The thing is, guys, I'm really not in the mood to write tonight. I haven't been reading much because of rehearsals and homework get in the way, besides my rereading of Lolita (76% finished!!!) and that book by the Broadway station DJ, which was not mentally stimulating or worth a discussion. Basically, some gay guys hooked up and then put on a Broadway show. So I haven't got much to talk about. I feel really inadequate just posting this...but...I will. Here's a present.
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| Look at him. Look at that. He's just so beautiful I can't even stand it. |
Monday, January 2, 2012
Reader's Blog Post: Christmas Special Edition
Happy holidays, my fellow book-readers! Hopefully your Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanzaa/Yule/[insert weird holiday that I have never heard about but feel the need to include so as not to offend you, ya weirdo] was everything you hoped it to be and more. As for me, I have received a plethora of new books, which I am very grateful for, as Carrie has been completed and I had been rereading old Series Of Unfortunate Events books out of sheer desperation. I got Tender is the Night, a Fitzgerald book which I had meaning to get to. Also on the list was Broadway Nights, an autobiography disguised as a work of fiction written by Seth Rudetsky, the DJ of Sirius XM "On Broadway", the all-showtunes station on satellite radio. I got The Importance of Being Earnest, which is an old classic but undeniably hilarious, and also the entire book of Batboy, which is one of my favorite Broadway flops based on that creepy picture of that kid with the huge bug eyes and giant, fanged mouth out of Weekly World News. It's obvious why this show failed, right?
Last, but definitely not least, I received a brand new Kindle. Now, don't get me wrong, I have always been somewhat against Kindles. I relished the idea of reading and rereading a book until it has been ripped, dog-eared and tattered out of sheer love. That was how reading was supposed to be. But since this new piece of technology had been foisted upon me, I decided that the least I could do was give it a chance. I bought a few books on it (Bossypants by Tina Fey, Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris, those kinds of light entertainment that are just long enough to make you feel smart for finishing them even though they were full of penis jokes) and settled down for the plane ride to Santa Fe which I was taking that same day. Giving it a chance was a mistake. I was basically glued to that contraption for the entire week we spent in New Mexico. It was so handy! I finished two whole books on that thing, something I have never before done in the course of a mere seven days. There was no risk of reading a page, only to discover that you had just read that exact same page the last time you put the book down. If your D.H Lawrence became too heavy for you, all you had to do was press the little house button and select your favorite piece of teen romance trash for a quick brain-cleanser. Kindles are conniving evil geniuses, bent on brainwashing the human race into throwing away all their well-loved paperbacks in substitute for a cold, heartless piece of machinery and oh my God I love my Kindle so much.
And so, all biases aside, I really do like having a Kindle. I started rereading Lolita three days ago and I'm already 64% through it! (I know this because it says so at the bottom of the page, not because I'm some crazy mathematician who calculates the percentage at which she reads things. That would be weird.) Oh, and for all you people who have read my Lolita-based blog posts, rereading Lolita is a really good idea. I missed so many important parts, along with unimportant parts that were equally beautiful. Humbert's obsession with Lo is rooted all the way back to his childhood, where he had a little love affair with a girl named Annabel who he tried to have sex with a couple of times, but was always caught by either Annabel's parents or some ribald-talking sailors. The girl died shortly after they departed from some disease which I can't remember. So in a way, Lo is a little recreation of his Annabel, made to numb the grief of an untimely death. I can't believe I missed that the first time. I mean, I read it, of course, but I didn't actually absorb it. Oops.
Anyways, I know that this blog post isn't necessarily based on one certain book, but it does go into the details of several, so I figured it would be a suitable entry for a day when I wasn't even supposed to write a blog post in the first place. Whatever. I just wanted to rant about books and such. Enjoy the rest of your break, O reader, My reader! (O reader, My reader is a phrase used by Humbert Humbert several times in the book, and I found it sort of old-timey and romantic, even though in this context it's sort of uncalled for.)
Last, but definitely not least, I received a brand new Kindle. Now, don't get me wrong, I have always been somewhat against Kindles. I relished the idea of reading and rereading a book until it has been ripped, dog-eared and tattered out of sheer love. That was how reading was supposed to be. But since this new piece of technology had been foisted upon me, I decided that the least I could do was give it a chance. I bought a few books on it (Bossypants by Tina Fey, Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris, those kinds of light entertainment that are just long enough to make you feel smart for finishing them even though they were full of penis jokes) and settled down for the plane ride to Santa Fe which I was taking that same day. Giving it a chance was a mistake. I was basically glued to that contraption for the entire week we spent in New Mexico. It was so handy! I finished two whole books on that thing, something I have never before done in the course of a mere seven days. There was no risk of reading a page, only to discover that you had just read that exact same page the last time you put the book down. If your D.H Lawrence became too heavy for you, all you had to do was press the little house button and select your favorite piece of teen romance trash for a quick brain-cleanser. Kindles are conniving evil geniuses, bent on brainwashing the human race into throwing away all their well-loved paperbacks in substitute for a cold, heartless piece of machinery and oh my God I love my Kindle so much.
And so, all biases aside, I really do like having a Kindle. I started rereading Lolita three days ago and I'm already 64% through it! (I know this because it says so at the bottom of the page, not because I'm some crazy mathematician who calculates the percentage at which she reads things. That would be weird.) Oh, and for all you people who have read my Lolita-based blog posts, rereading Lolita is a really good idea. I missed so many important parts, along with unimportant parts that were equally beautiful. Humbert's obsession with Lo is rooted all the way back to his childhood, where he had a little love affair with a girl named Annabel who he tried to have sex with a couple of times, but was always caught by either Annabel's parents or some ribald-talking sailors. The girl died shortly after they departed from some disease which I can't remember. So in a way, Lo is a little recreation of his Annabel, made to numb the grief of an untimely death. I can't believe I missed that the first time. I mean, I read it, of course, but I didn't actually absorb it. Oops.
Anyways, I know that this blog post isn't necessarily based on one certain book, but it does go into the details of several, so I figured it would be a suitable entry for a day when I wasn't even supposed to write a blog post in the first place. Whatever. I just wanted to rant about books and such. Enjoy the rest of your break, O reader, My reader! (O reader, My reader is a phrase used by Humbert Humbert several times in the book, and I found it sort of old-timey and romantic, even though in this context it's sort of uncalled for.)
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