“Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is a proof that humans are capable of magic”

-Carl Sagan

Harlequin Valentine | Neil Gaiman
from Telling Tales

…I pin my heart to Missy’s front door.
The heart is a deep, dark red that is almost brown, the color of liver.
Then I knock on the door sharply, rat-a-tat-tat!,
and I grasp my wand, my stick,
my oh-so-thrustable and beribboned lance
and I vanish like cooling steam into the chilly air. 

The Curse Workers trilogy by Holly Black
White Cat | Red Glove | Black Heart 

Review: Less Than Zero
Author: Bret Easton Ellis
Genre: Coming-of-age, contemporary, young adult
My Rating: ★★★★ (3.5/5 stars)

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Whenever I feel the need to visit literature’s moral badlands, get a hefty dose of realistic grit, or just watch in-your-face messages bleeding through un-sugarcoated storylines, I always crack open a Chuck Palahniuk book. Spinning tales with all these ingredients is his specialty. However, even if I do like his works, I’m averse to not sprinkling a little spice onto my reading list. I sought for other authors who play with the same elements in a completely different way, and luckily, I stumbled upon Bret Easton Ellis and his first work, Less Than Zero.

To a complete tenderfoot in Ellis’ works (like me), Less Than Zero does seem to emit a little vibe similar to Palahniuk’s themes… but that ends at the period of the book’s blurb.  The first page would instantly give you the feeling that you’re in for a different kind of read. The narration, characters, and dialogues weave together a tale with a gloomy overall ambiance that I haven’t seen in the fictional works I’ve encountered before.

Considered by many as a cult classic, Less Than Zero is Ellis’ unflinching dark portrait of the MTV generation—rich kids of Los Angeles caught in a string of drug-driven bashes, big C’s buy-and-sell sessions, casual sex, prostitution, and practically everything that falls under the category of self-destructive hedonism. It zeroes in on the story of Clay, an eighteen-year-old boy who comes back to LA for a four-week Christmas vacation. Instead of rest, what he finds himself facing is the inner demon of apathy that resides in all his friends—and in himself as well.

Having a penchant for characters with four-dimensional complexity, I found myself on the brink of disappointment when my attempts to connect with Clay became more and more exhausting to establish. I always believe that in order for a book to be more enjoyable, its main character must have the ability to “click” with the reader. The narrator feels more alive to me that way. He/she must move on the borderlines of his/her world without exactly breaking a fourth wall, extending his/her reaches past the physical restrictions of the paper to latch onto the hearts of the readers using sympathy, relatable experiences, loneliness, love, or even rage. In short, I believe the speaker must make me feel things, regardless if these things were negative or not. For the most part, Clay failed in this department. He’s detached from the world, wallowing in cold cynicism, moving like a trembling marionette with strings that are all too tangled that it was no use to track where they originated. I tried to dismiss it as an effect of his drug addiction, but his coke-reliant friends appear to be more fleshed out than him sometimes. That’s saying something, since he’s already given the fact that no character in the novel has depth of a remarkable kind.

It was only near the end that Clay finally made me feel something, proving that he is not the drug-fueled automaton that I initially think he is. I was irritated for the slow responsiveness, but I found myself wanting to pat him on the back when he begins to become disillusioned with his friends’ extreme self-indulgences. Vivid episodes from his pasts, which include dysfunctional families and fractured relationships, stand in stark contrast with his bleak present. This explains a little about his behavior.

In almost every book, there is at least one character that you would want to wrap in a hug, cradle against you, and whisper that everything will be okay. I was almost surprised when someone like this popped out of the book’s vapid cast of characters: Julian. Clay’s relation does not give away too much about Julian’s situation, but it’s adequate to guess how the boy just got his life’s compass haywire. He is plunging headfirst into his own destruction and he knows it.

Plot-wise, there is nothing much to say about the novel. I must admit that the story’s lack of conventional structure comes off as a strength rather than a weakness, portraying a gritty world as it should be through the eyes of a rather unreliable narrator. No frills and no embellishments, raw and stripped of sweet euphemisms.

Despite the book just basically being a peek into the quotidian lives of well-off kids who pass around drug-filled Daffy Duck Pez dispensers, it gave me a queer feeling that I do not usually get from other books. It has a rough kind of charm that I found unexplainable; it left me a tad empty by the last page, but it also gave birth to a tiny voice in my head screaming, “I’m ready to feel a little emptier if it means I’ll be able to find out what happens to the characters in its sequel, Imperial Bedrooms.” And that, of course, hit me hard: I do care about the characters to a certain degree! I do not know what kind of magic Ellis posses that made him turn the tables on me without me noticing. Whatever it is, I like it.

I think Ellis is a master of minimalism, his narration containing little to zilch emotional tinges that perfectly complements the lethargic attitude of the characters. I find it amazingly ironic how the stream of consciousness style seems so cleanly penned when its contents are generally dirty patchworks of the protagonist’s thoughts and memories. Content-wise, what the novel really wants to show is the perils of stoicism, of how too much pleasure can rob you of your humanity little by little.

I’m excited for the sequel! :)

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Photo by: fanoussss

STACK. I need more closet place (and time, of course!). I’ve recently added to this stack my UK version of Black Heart by Holly Black, The Discomfort Zone by Jonathan Franzen, and Eat Your Peas by Cheryl Karpen. :)

You might smack me with all the redundant intro’s but—I’m still sorry for all the sparse updates! A flurry of (non-work and work-related) events are taking over my life lately and they are eager to pull me away from my online havens. Not from my books, though! To join my other babies (which I know were silently whimpering for the lengthy week of ‘abandonment’ I just did to them) are these:

• Rant: An Oral Biography of  Buster Casey by Chuck Palahniuk. I think I need a dose of Palahniuk’s trademark mind-squeeze-inducing stories, I terribly miss it. :) I think this one’s about a serial killer.

• Less than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis. My first of Ellis, lots of people are shooing me away from this for some reason—and it’s not that it’s a badly written book. Anyhoo, I decided to try it. USA Today said it’s The Catcher in the Rye of the MTV generation—we’ll see about that. From Amazon: Set in Los Angeles in the early 1980’s, this coolly mesmerizing novel is a raw, powerful portrait of a lost generation who have experienced sex, drugs, and disaffection at too early an age, in a world shaped by casual nihilism, passivity, and too much money a place devoid of feeling or hope.

• Divergent by Veronica Roth. Finally.

• Numbers by Rachel Ward. I like the premise of this book, even if (or especially because?) it sounded a lot like Death Note. After her mom’s death, the girl protagonist can see the dates predicting deaths of people with brute accuracy—when she looks them in the eye.

•  Pandemonium by Lauren Oliver. Sequel to the dystopian love story Delirium. Hope it’s better than the first book!

• The Name of the Star by Maureen Johnson. This is going to be my first MJ novel. I bet it would be nothing like her awesome shorts! It’s a thriller set in London, full of humor, suspense…and ghosts. :)

• Cinder by Marissa Meyer. Everybody knows I love fairytale reimaginings. Meyer offers the world one of her own, with  a cyborg Cinderella in the forefront. How. Can. I. Say. No. To. This?! I hope Cinderella is not a damsel in distress in this one. :D

• The Future of Us by Jay Asher and Carolyn Mackler. Ah, I love time-bending tales. Two youngsters could mysteriously see their future—spouses, careers, status updates—in Facebook, at a time when Facebook was not even invented yet. “As they grapple with the ups and downs of what their lives hold, they’re forced to confront what they’re doing right—and wrong—in the present.” Sounds promising. :)

• The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern. Been hearing a lot of good things about this book! Chris Schluep’s blurb says, “Erin Morgenstern’s dark, enchanting debut takes us to the black and white tents of Le Cirque des Reves, a circus that arrives without warning, simply appearing when yesterday it was not there. Young Celia and Marco have been cast into a rivalry at The Night Circus, one arranged long ago by powers they do not fully understand. Over time, their lives become more intricately enmeshed in a dance of love, joy, deceit, heartbreak, and magic.”

Anyone who’ve read these? Thoughts?

FREE COMIC BOOK DAY!

May’s first Saturday is perhaps the Christmas Day for comic book geeks around the world! Robinsons Galleria’s lower ground floor was jam-packed yesterday as Comic Odyssey celebrates FCBD. I attended the event with a friend, and we swore to go to FCBD celebrations of Fully Booked and other participating shops in the next few days.

The lines were long, but ennui was out of the question when you were surrounded by people that are obviously made of awesome. Behind me, a man in his late twenties was reading a Spiderman issue; in front of me, a group of constantly snickering boys were munching on shawarma. Based on the snippets of convo I got from unintentional eavesdropping, they still have hangover from the latest Avengers flick. I bet my bottom peso they love Tony Stark :p

And oh, there’s a Superman and a Batman loitering around. A Loki was seen lining up for his copies of free comic books, too. :)

As you can see above, I got a special edition preview of Vertigo’s graphic novel adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I wasn’t keeping tabs on the spin-offs and whatnots of the Millennium trilogy lately, so this took me by surprise. Totes cool! The first volume will be out November this year. Check out the gorgeous art!

Clicky here for more my long-ish post about FCBD, including blurbs for Fairest, Saucer Country, The New Deadwardians, and Dominique Laveau: Voodoo Child. Oh, and I also penned an article for this event on Gala magazine’s May issue, please do grab a copy! I interviewed Comic Odyssey proprietor Sandy Sansolis for that primer. :)

And more than one brain for understanding? *sighs*
So many books, so little time. :(

For all of us who spent our childhoods discovering new worlds with Antoine de Saint-Exupery‘s Little Prince, there’s a little more to be uncovered yet. According to an APreport, draft pages of Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince “that may shed new, political insight on the classic book” have been discovered in a private collection in Paris, and are set to go up for auction next week.

“The first page contains a piece of text that’s partly retained in chapter 19 of the published work,” AP reports. “But the second leaf of the work is completely original. The little prince arrives on Earth and meets the first person on the planet, a completely new character, who’s described as an ‘ambassador of the human spirit.’ This ‘ambassador’ is almost too busy to speak to his inquisitive interlocutor, saying he’s looking, in vain, for a missing six-letter word. The meaning of this is not immediately clear.”

A closeup of the pages. Photo credit: Remy de la Mauviniere

However, according to 20th century manuscript expert (and “Saint-Exupery enthusiast”) Olivier Devers, “He was a dreamer, he dealt with the war by floating up and dreaming. The six-letter word the ‘ambassador’ is looking for but can’t find has a humanist meaning. If you look at the context, you see that the word he can’t find is ‘guerre,’ (or ‘war’). It’s even more powerful because he doesn’t say it.”

[via Moby Lives, Flavorwire]

-Groucho Marx

Title: The Fault in Our Stars
Author: John Green
Genre: Young Adult, Drama, Romance
My Rating: ★★★★★

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How would you feel about life when you know that—after some kind of a miracle that postponed your meeting with the Grim Reaper—it’s only prolonged by a tankful of oxygen? How would you feel if your breaths are dependent on the said tank, which is tethered to you like an ominous shadow?  The final chapter of your life has finally been published, and all these medicine and hospital visits represent the recklessly scrawled, long-winded epilogue. Then, when all you’re waiting for is that final punctuation to close your tale, a reason to actually be glad to be alive popped up in front of you. The reason’s name is Augustus Waters.

This is The Fault in Our Stars, the story of Hazel Grace Lancaster, sixteen-year-old stage IV thyroid cancer survivor. But don’t throw it away just because you realized it’s “just another cancer book,” because in reality, it is not.

This is not a story about death—this is a story about life.

First of all, I want to say that I’m not particularly fond of novels that obviously use the theme of death only because the author knows it will sell like pancakes. I’m not averse to writers wanting to make the readers feel, but using the same formulaic thing over and over comes off as a mere strategy for commercial success. To me, capitalizing on something that guarantees an easy, heavy emotional impact from the audience sometimes feels like cheating. I believe you can touch, pinch, twinge, or even break the hearts of readers using (1) plotlines that do not require the attendance of some scythe-toting skeleton guy or (2) new material that does not zero in on the subject matter begging for tears. Countless of novels about cancer already exist; when I heard about John Green writing one, I backpedaled a little. But what can I do when a larger chunk of my nerdfighter heart trusts Green and all the stories he spins to life? I went through The Fault in Our Stars…and I’m more than glad I did, because even though it’s not perfect, I think it’s one of the best contemporary young adult books that I have read.

Hazel Grace is perhaps the best Green heroine so far. She gets her own humanity, refusing to take the mold that Alaska Young of Looking for Alaska and Margo Roth Spiegelman of Paper Towns share (there’s someone in the novel that squeezes in the cast, though: the enigmatic and “bitchy” Caroline Mathers). While she still exhibits what I fondly call JG’s Smart Kid Syndrome, her raw honesty about life are impactful, especially because the readers take it as the acumen of someone who came so close to Death’s embrace and knows that Death is still an arm span away from her.

But if you’ll ask me who I think takes the spotlight here, I’ll say it’s Augustus. A glimpse of the world from his perspective is never shown, but this is not deterrent for the readers to see he’s perfectly clad as the star-crossed hero. I kind of saw his fate a long, long way before it was revealed, but that knowledge didn’t prepare me when that time finally came. He’s just so alive, so hungry for more truths about the world, so funny, and so beautiful a person that his fate appeared to me as a crime when it took its course. In a short span of time, I’ve grown to love this boy.

Hazel and Augustus’ situation did not transform their love to something you can banner as an extraordinary romance. The book is too honest to subscribe to this trope, and for this, I commend Green. I’ve grown tired of love stories trying to flaunt their magic or whatever because of instances that Lady Luck frowned upon. Hazel and Augustus’ relationship is about as complex as any realistically tragic story—they know they’re an unlucky pair, and they have no choice but to accept that.

This leads us to the cornucopia of wisdom this book offers the readers: what it means to be alive, what it takes for a person to leave a mark, what happens to the people you leave behind, why unfairness seems to be a constant ingredient in recipe of mortality, and how you can say you have lived a good life. If you think about it, The Fault in Our Stars just enumerates things we already know, except that Green shifts the angles of his writing lenses a little so we may see the facts in a new light. It’s refreshing, well-written, and powerful enough not just to make me think, but also to make me laugh and cry (and sometimes both at the same time).

I also have to say I love the Peter van Houten part. In a way, we are shown a facet of love affair with books that can strike a chord with anybody who has been totally invested in a work of literature. Do the characters live long after you’ve flipped the last page, or do they stay as the fictional creations that they are, flat and unmoving on the pages?

This is a great read all in all. I’ll give it 4.5/5 stars! :) 

cinderellainrubbershoes:

Little Red Riding Hood trivia:

1. Name. In some accounts, the name of the girl in red riding hood is Maisie.
2. A tale of seduction. A French engraving that accompanies the first published version of the story (1697) shows a girl in her déshabille, lying in bed beneath a wolf. The story says that she has just strips out of her clothes and joins the beast in bed, whom she thinks is her grandmother.This is Charles Perrault’s version (Le Petit Chaperon Rouge). The wolf’s act of “eating” is sometimes interpreted as a metaphor for sexual assault.
3. Lost Virginity. Because of this tale, the popular slang elle avoit vu le loup, which translates to “she’d seen the wolf”, is an expression commonly used when a girl loses her virginity.
4. Color of Sin. Still in Perrault’s story, the color red of the hood signifies the girl’s “sinful nature”. Perrault said that red symbolizes scandal and blood, which in turn implies the girl’s sin and her impending fate in the hands (or jaws) of the wolf. Some versions said this symbolizes rape.
5. Wolves in Court? In the earliest versions of the tale, the antagonist is sometimes portrayed as an ogre or a werewolf (also known as a ‘bzou’). This makes the story a bit relevant in a time where inquisitions and witch trials are rampant as well as trials for werewolves (see the case of Peter Stumpp).
6. No happy-ever-after. Little Red Riding Hood was intended to teach children and well-bred young ladies the danger of talking to strangers. In the Brothers Grimm’s desexualized/sanitized version, a hunter or a last minute rescuer comes for the heroine; in the earlier versions, she is just devoured by the wolf, and no rescuer came.
7. Cannibalism. In an Austrian version, the grandmother is eaten by the wolf before Little Red Riding Hood arrives. Granny’s entrails are used to replace the string on the door latch and her teeth, jaws and blood stored in her cupboard. When Little Red arrives, she is hungry and so is directed to eat her dead grandmother’s teeth (rice) and jaw (chops) and drink her blood (wine). 
8. Variations. Since then, a lot of other writers create their own versions of the tale. There is one where there is striptease or defecation involved; there’s one where the werewolf is a vegetarian and the heroine is a lesbian; there is also a version where Little Red Riding Hood kills the wolf with a revolver.

art by ciahra.

FANDOM ON FIRE V.01: Hunger Games Goodies

I’m dying to post my thoughts on Gary Ross’ big screen translation of The Hunger Games right now, but the odds of me not getting fired when I do that are not in my favor. Haha! Can’t leak! I wrote a full-page review for it in our magazine GALA, which will be out in bookstores, coffee shops, convenience stores, etc. on April 1. (Please do grab a copy! It’s an events magazine and we cover everything from festivals and fun runs to album launches and movie openings.)

Anyway, I think I can find a way around this little dilemma. I can post things that I didn’t include in the review, like book vs. film nitpicks, favorite moments, and things I’m looking forward to in Catching Fire. You know, the usual things regular Tumblristas know. *wiggles eyebrows*

In a non-review related HG news in Airizverse…I got new goodies! 

1. The Hunger Games Companion. Here’s a book to stand cheek by jowl my other favorite The Hunger Games meta-essay compilation of some sort, Lea Wilson’s The Girl Who Was on Fire. While I  fangirl THG like it’s my day job, I still love in-depth discussions that go beyond the usual “shipping” stuff. I love metas. I’m about 90% sure I’m going to like this.
2. The Hunger Games Tribute Guide. There’s nothing particularly new in this book, but it’s a must-have for all THG fans. It includes colored photos and quotes from the movie and a few detailed information about all the districts. I would have appreciated this more if I bought this before I saw the film, I think. But as I said, it’s a treat for any THG fan who wanted to have anything and everything about the film and the book.
3. The Hunger Games soundtrack. It’s The Hunger Games: Songs from District 12 and Beyond, featuring tracks by Taylor Swift, The Decemberists, The Secret Sisters, Arcade Fire, The Carolina Chocolate Drops, and many more. The songs were written and produced exclusively for the album.

   Any miser’s going to shake his head and say “You could have just downloaded the songs.”  Yes, I could have, but like the usual books/ebooks stuff, I think there’s nothing like a physical copy of it. It’s not solely mine, though; my friend paid half the price, even if she only wanted to rip the songs from it. :p

   More Hunger Games post in the future! Happy blogging and may the odds be ever in your favor! ;)