Month in review: January

I started 2014 full of ambitious resolutions, but you know how it is with resolutions: you're lucky if they last a week. In short, my main plan was to say yes more, but also to know when it's OK and right to say no. So far, I've managed to stick to a lot of my goals, and get into some good habits. I've started swimming once a week, and already I'm noticing the difference, feeling fitter and achieving more lengths every time. I swam 500 metres this week, which is a personal best for me. Let's see if I can do 550 next week. I'm really enjoying it; it is soothing and relaxing, a good way of winding down after a busy day at work.

Not that it's been that busy at work; after the Christmas madness, we are returning to something vaguely resembling normality, and it's been very quiet. Not that I mind; continual customers are exhausting. I've had my hours cut back down to three days a week, though, a downside of the quiet time of year (at least as far as money is concerned. On the other hand - more reading time!)

Winter post-Christmas is generally quite a gloomy time, and so far this year the weather has been pretty disgusting, with storms and floods galore. Often the winter gets me down, but I've decided to make the most of the long evenings, reading books and catching up on DVD box sets. This winter is the third year in a row I've really got into a Joss Whedon series. 2012 introduced me to Firefly, and last year it was Dollhouse. This year I've gone back to the one that made Mr Whedon's name: Buffy the Vampire Slayer - only 17 years late! I remember watching and enjoying the first couple of episodes when I was 13, but for some reason I never got into watching it regularly. I'm partway through the second season now, and although I have a vague knowledge of some things that are to come, remembering my school friends raving about it when it was new, most of Buffy and her friends' adventures are a complete mystery to me. Charlotte suggested I write update posts as I watch the series (and you can all laugh at my ridiculously wrong predictions and wonder whether I've been living under a rock for the last couple of decades.)

I auditioned for a role in the new Isle of Wight Shakespeare Company's Much Ado About Nothing last Sunday. I haven't heard back from them, and so am assuming I've been unsuccessful, but it was great fun trying out and meeting interesting new people (including one who I've interacted with online but never met in person before.) We started off with some warm-up and workshopping exercises, before auditioning in front of a panel with a prepared piece. I've done auditions before, but usually reading from a piece of paper. This time, I saw the audition piece beforehand, a valuable thing with Shakespeare, as it gives you the chance to learn the lines and, if any of the meaning is unclear, do some research. I may not have got a part, but I didn't disgrace myself and am very pleased with how it went.

I've also got into a regular writing routine, aiming for 500 words per day on a story about two sisters, starting in 1999. It's been very interesting looking back to that time and seeing how much things have changed. The plan is to follow the sisters over a fifteen-year period, but so far I'm not sure how all the pieces fit together. It's still early days yet. I've missed a couple of days' writing, but have managed to write over 12 000 words. Of course, I expect to cut a lot out in the edits.

January's Reading Stats:

8 books read

8 books acquired

3 female authors/5 male authors

5 new reads/3 rereads

5 British authors/2 American/1 Canadian

2 kids' books/ 4 adult fiction/1 non-fiction/1 play

Favourite book: N0S4R2

Least favourite book: Mindstar Rising

Bout of Books 9.0 Days one and two

Monday:

So, somehow the first day of Bout of Books 9 has been and gone without a blog post update. Most remiss of me! This time around I've decided to do two or three days per post, as that's how the last few readathons have turned out in the end. I might as well set out to do that from the start (and also that's fewer posts of waffle clogging up people's feed readers!)

Monday started out quite well for me. Now the Christmas rush has died down, so have the staffing levels at work, meaning that this week I'll only be working my contracted three days. On the plus side - plenty of reading time! I spent most of Monday morning sitting on the reading-nook-slash-pillow-fort I set up for myself on the spare bed in my room, buried in Joe Hill's excellent NOS4R2, following Victoria McQueen in her fight to save her son from the kidnapper and serial-killer Charlie Manx, from whose clutches she barely escaped with her life as a teenager. This book almost makes me afraid to pick it up each time. I've grown very fond of the troubled Vic, her son Wayne (first name Bruce) and Wayne's geeky dad Lou, and I fear for what the plot might have in store for them. 

Despite the predictions of "the worst storms in twenty years," the weather was pretty good yesterday; cold and windy, but dry with a respectable amount of sunshine. My friend Judith finished work early afternoon, and we decided to go for a walk over the cliffs from Shanklin to Sandown. Although we enjoy the fresh air and exploring the Isle of Wight, we don't tend to go very far from home in the winter, and today I remembered why. Despite living no more than about half an hour's drive from every coastline, I have to allow at least an hour to get anywhere on the buses. (You figure that out!) By the time we got to Shanklin, the sun was very low in the sky, and we did not get very far on the cliff path before we found it had been closed due to landslides. Instead, we walked along the seafront, where the waves were pretty impressive. The only people to be seen were dog-walkers, who enthusiastically declared the angry sea "fabulous."

It was dark by the time we reached Sandown, and another hour on the bus home. We spent more time on public transport than on our actual walk, and I'd foolishly forgotten to bring my book with me. Judith is the sort of friend who is quite happy to spend time together in person, but both completely ignoring each other in favour of a book.

In the evening, I wrote another 500-odd words of my latest story project, in which I am vividly reliving being a teenager at the turn of the millennium. It's early days in this story, which I only began on New Year's Day, but the plan is that this story will chronicle the lives of two very different sisters over the course of fifteen years or so. The focus point of what I am ambitiously calling the novel is a shared journal, and the true stories, which may differ greatly from what they chose to share with each other. 

Monday's Stats:

Books read today: NOS4R2

Pages read today: 151

Running total: 151 pages

Books finished: 0

My life outside books: Stormy walk along the seafront.

Tuesday:

Another day off began when I was woken from sleep by the weather throwing everything it had at my bedroom window. However, it's one of those days where I can't really say I've properly woken up all day. Although I haven't let the winter weather get me down yet this year, there are some days where the greyness seems to get inside my head, keeping me feeling very sleepy and a bit headachy, and no amount of coffee can quite bring me to life. Today is one of those days.

I started my morning off by getting my day's writing out of the way before getting settled into my book. Although I'm quite excited by the ideas of my novel, it's still early days; I'm still experimenting and finding my feet, setting the story up and trying to figure out how much is world-building and how much is waffle. I suspect that a large percentage of the first chapters will be cut out of later drafts, but you can't get later drafts without getting the words onto the page (or screen) first.

After lunch, I finished my first book of the readathon - and the year - Joe Hill's excellent NOS4R2. If this is an indication of the quality of books I'll be reading this year, I'm excited. Now on to start the review, before I forget all the things I want to say about it. (I still need to even draft my review of Fangirl, too.)

I've been indoors all day so far, and ought to go out at some point to get some fresh air and exercise, try to shake off the sleepy headache, even if it's just going for a short walk down to the river and back. 

Books read today: NOS4R2

Pages read today: 121

Running total: 272

Books finished: 1: NOS4R2

My life outside books: Grey, sleepy, fuzzy-headed sort of day

Signing up for another read-a-thon

Well, winter is definitely upon us. I'm writing this wearing two jumpers, fingerless gloves and fluffy slipper boots. It's cold, it's dark, it's gloomy - what better than to lose myself in books? Dana and Jenny seem to be in agreement, as they have scheduled a monster two-week read-a-thon for December, a last chance to get through as many books on the 2013 to-read pile as possible. Count me in!

The End of the Year read-a-thon will be taking place between 9th and 22nd of December, which means that even though it's a busy time of year with work and Christmas preparations, I should still have plenty of time to devour a few books - hurrah!

I won't be setting myself any specific goals for this read-a-thon. My to-read pile has doubled since the end of 2012, and I'd like to clear some of my books off in order to make room for new ones in the new year. Which these will be, however, depends on my mood when I finish the previous book. I've got all genres to choose from: crime and thriller, science fiction, horror and fantasy, general adult fiction, teen and children's books too. I've even got a couple of non-fiction books waiting to be read. (You can see my books in the side panel of my blog.) As it's coming up to Christmas, I may well also revisit some old favourite seasonal reads as well.

Readathon discussions will take place on Twitter under the tag of #readingcram, and Dana and Jenny have some awesome challenges and post prompts scheduled to inspire our blogging creativity. Bring it on!

Wintergirls, Laurie Halse Anderson

At the beginning of Banned Books week in September, the Speak Loudly internet campaign reminded me that among the rubbish, there is a lot of important and good-quality young adult fiction about, and I returned to Speak, one of my favourite books when I was about sixteen. Anderson's mixture of humour and tragedy, poetry and really serious issues that made you think, and I was excited to read another of Laurie Halse Anderson's novels.

I found Wintergirls to be a much more disturbing and difficult read than Speak, full of poetic and creative imagery, but lacking the latter's humour. Its central character is Lia, an eighteen-year-old girl who is trapped in a dark, cold world of anorexia and self-harm. Cassie, the girl who was her best friend since third grade, has just died, killed by her own eating disorder, and added to Lia's troubles is the knowledge that Cassie had tried to call her that night, not once but thirty-three times.

Unlike Speak, whose sad, lonely protagonist was one I could recognise all too well in myself, I found it difficult to identify with Lia, and found myself baffled and frustrated to read her thoughts and know all too well where she's all wrong. A few years ago, I was with a friend of a friend who was stick-thin and counting calories on the back of a pot of pasta salad. I could see she had a problem, but I felt helpless, knowing that I couldn't get through to her telling her that someone of her age and size shouldn't even know what a calorie was. Reading Wintergirls provoked the same reaction, and I felt quite baffled and adrift in Lia's thoughts. It was clear from early on that her goal of losing more weight wasn't about looking slim to be pretty, but a target to aim for, and keep aiming for. When she achieves her goal of losing five pounds, she sets herself five more to lose.

"The number doesn't matter. If I got down to 070.00, I'd want 065.00. If I weighed 010.0, I wouldn't be happy until I got down to 005.00. The only number that would ever be enough would be 0. Zero pounds, zero life, size zero, double-zero, zero point. Zero in tennis is love. I finally get it."

Now, I'd always been told that "eating disorders are mental illness," and "it's not about losing weight, but control," but I'd never really been able to understand this. Books I'd read as a teen exploring the issue, tended to be rather two-dimensional: girl (because they're always girls in the books) thinks she's fat, girl goes on a diet, girl keeps pushing to lose a little more weight, family starts to worry, girl thinks they shouldn't worry, girl admits she has a problem, girl gets treatment.

Wintergirls has many more dimensions. As an outsider I found Lia difficult to fully sympathise with: she knows she's got a problem, why doesn't she want to be helped? At the same time, as an insider - reading her thoughts in first person - I found her hard to understand. Then I realised, Lia was trapped, didn't understand her own thoughts. Anderson uses a great deal of poetic imagery, which could be very effective but I couldn't always understand what she was trying to say. Again, perhaps this was a deliberate decision - to portray a messed-up mind, where madness and reality mix and mingle to create a new reality. Wintergirls evoked in me pity more than empathy, and I think I will need to read it more than once to pick up on what I missed the first time around.

Book Blogger Hop, 3/12/10



Me and Roderick the Snowman.
I take no credit for Roderick, he's
Dad's creation. I merely named him.

 It's Friday again, and here on the Isle of Wight there is a pretty thick layer of snow everywhere, very unusual indeed, and especially at this time of year. The white Christmasses you imagine while reading A Christmas Carol just don't happen. I'm bundled up in two jumpers and have purchased one of those slightly ridiculous-looking bobble hats with ear flaps - but it keeps me warm, and that's the important thing.

I'm hoping that the snow doesn't stay too long, though, because I've got three new books on order and the postman hasn't been getting through:

Fixing Delilah - Sarah Ockler

Getting Revenge on Lauren Wood - Eileen Cook

Wintergirls - Laurie Halse Anderson

The Book Blogger Hop


Hosted by Jennifer at Crazy for Books

This week's Blog Hop question:

"What very popular and hyped book in the blogosphere did you NOT enjoy and how did you feel about posting your review?"

Anything with angels in it, but in particular Becca Fitzpatrick's Crescendo, sequel to Hush, Hush. In the first place I have a problem with the glib usage of Angels as The New Vampire, which bear no resemblance to angels as I understand them. Vampires, too, being The New Mr Darcy don't rememble vampires at all. Instead, you've got a kind of Interchangeable Dangerous Magical Boyfriend Creature. But on top of that I didn't care for the story much, or the character relationships. When I posted my review, I was apologetic that I couldn't give a positive review, mostly because I didn't want to upset the author if she stumbled on my post. But I had to be honest. A good review means nothing if you write nothing but good reviews.