The one where I discover the magic of short stories

This summer I read, among others, a book named M Is For Magic by Neil Gaiman. It was a collection of short stories and I got it as a second thought, because I'm not usually a fan of short stories, but I figured why not?

It was so good. I couldn't even precisely tell you what I thought was so good about it, but it's the kind of book that you read before going to bed and you still have a small smile as you turn out the lights. It gives you funky dreams and keeps you saying "Just one more, they're short stories, it won't take long" and by that time you've read the whole book.

They're very sweet little tales, some are creepier in true Gaiman fashion, but there's one especially that is so precious. It's basically all the months of the year gathered around a campfire and sharing stories. There's very little in terms of description of their physical appearance and so a lot is left to the imagination. Leave it to Neil Gaiman to make you picture what April and August look like sitting around a campfire like kids at summer camp.

I would recommend this if you're looking for short little stories to read before going to bed without the commitment of reading a whole novel.

Have a nice day!

W.O.W. (!)

I'm not just very enthusiastic, W.O.W. does spell out the initials of the most recent book I read,  Wide-Open World by John Marshall.

What can I say, I was at work and this book appeared on my cart, what did you expect me to do? Not check it out? Come on, we all know I'm a sucker for travel books. 

This book is the memoir of a father of two, living in Maine, and desperate for something to change his life. Not that he has a bad life, he's got two smart and healthy kids, and a wife who is very happy to teach yoga and go on the occasional international yoga retreat. But his kids are disconnected from him (and too connected to the Internet in his daughter's case) and his marriage is certainly not what it used to be. So, to avoid the terrible prospect of a dull life, John and Traca decide to make a huge change. They quit their jobs, rent their house, pack their things, book some flights, and travel the world with their two teenage kids. The thought behind this adventure is not only to reconnect a family that is subconsciously drifting apart, but also to travel the world to unexpected places and volunteer to help others. 

Volunteering their way around the world is perfect for the Marshalls, as it enables them to travel the globe but not spend more money than absolutely necessary. 

In this manner, they travel to Costa Rica, New Zealand, Thailand, India, and Portugal (no volunteering in Portugal, just meeting up with old friends). They leave for six months, and in those six months they awoke again, they reconnected, and they faced some truths about themselves.

I was so inspired by this book. It did nothing but enflame my travel bug further then it already is. I think it's amazing that "real" people (you know, the kind of people who don't have garages on their yachts for their boats) can do something as life changing and as daring as a trip like this. 

I would absolutely recommend this book. It's funny, easy to read, difficult to put down, and there are cool pictures of their travels (it's selling point, trust me). I always find that summer is the time when I have the most inspiration, and this book fit very well into my summer mindset. 

A different kind of read

As we all know, I am a big fan of anything fiction/fantasy. However, in the last several months I've found myself picking up more and more books in the non-fiction shelves of the library. They're not so much autobiographies as epic tales of profound human experiences. For example, I read Eat, Pray, Love a while ago and many of the books I've picked up recently are of the same autobiographical/memoirs register.
All these books were, of course, picked with wonderful intentions of long nights spent reading, or of lazing on the porch with a book in hand. As you can imagine, I have done very little of that, and many books I am sad to say were returned without having been read. This book, however, made it through the very narrow filter of the books I've had time to read.

Of all the books that didn't make the cut, I'm very glad this was the one I took time to read. The Kindness Diaries are the record of Leon Logothetis's adventures around the world with no money and a yellow motorbike as his only means of transportation. The idea was that he wanted to make it around the globe relying solely on the kindness of other people, who he hoped would give him money, food, gas, and shelter so that he may be able to continue on his travels. He did have his own reward system, in which he helped people who helped him. One homeless man in Pittsburgh provided him with a safe place to stay for the night, and in return Leon gave him the funds to get an apartment and enroll in culinary school to pursue his dream of becoming a chef. All the stories, be they in Europe, Africa, Asia or America, are like that. 

This book was inspiring, to say the least. Some of Leon's adventures seem too surreal to be true, and in return the gifts that he gives people seem extraordinary. Yet the concept of the book is simple, and frankly, quite beautiful. He was able to travel around the globe, hitting almost every continent, thanks only to the kindness of complete strangers in foreign countries. 

If you need a feel-good book, or you need a hefty dose of inspiration, or even if you just want a good book about a good man, I cannot recommend The Kindness Diaries enough. 

Of rose and wartime

A while back I read a book called Rose Under Fire by Elizabeth Wein.

My friend had suggested I read Code Name Verity by the same author, and while I tried to read it I just couldn't get into it. A few months later I picked up Rose Under Fire completely forgetting that the two were written by the same author, which was probably good because had I realized that they were I might not have read Rose. 

This book takes place during World War II, originally in England, and then in a bedroom in Paris where flashbacks to Ravensbrück, the Nazi's women concentration camp. Rose Justice, an American pilot, transports planes across England to be used in combat, but never actually sees combat herself. Dodging bombs and having to suffer the war far from her family is hard on Rose and her fellow pilots, but when she gets the chance to be more involved in the war by transporting a plane to Paris, Rose cannot refuse. To her, this is her chance to contribute more effectively to the Allied effort. This was discounting the fact that she would be found by the Nazi air force and made to fly deep into enemy territory where she would eventually find herself a prisoner in the now-infamous women's concentration camp of Ravensbrück. There she becomes a shadow of who she used to be, kept alive solely by the scrappy group of women she befriends, and by her incredible memory for poems, and her own poetry writing. Among the notable characters of her friends are a Rabbit, which was the name given to the girls used by Nazi doctors for experiments to test war wounds, a widowed novelist who has lost her entire family, and a Soviet fighter pilot. Despite indescribable pain and loss and terror, these women refuse to lose hope in rescue or in the end of the war. 

This book was captivating, as I believe a lot of books about WWII are. It was also, not surprisingly, incredibly heartbreaking. I picked it up at the library and read it in under a week because I could not put it down. The poems in it do a good job of conveying the mood in a way that mere description could not. Personally, it had a strong effect on me simply because it hit me once again how tragic the entirety of the war was, and the cruelty that some humans are capable of. The characters were fiction, but the stories were real. However, the author was able to balance the awfulness of the war with some more light-hearted but not too corny moments of warmth. 

All in all, a good book, and I would recommend it with the knowledge that it is quite dark and some description are quite graphic, especially concerning the Rabbits. 

The Ocean at the End of the Lane

Sometimes a book's given title is wonderful enough to also be a post title and this is one of those.

Neil Gaiman, first of all, is one of my favorite authors. I don't really know why, but if I had to pick a reason I would say that it's because he writes fairy tales for adults. He writes stories that are fantastic and magical without being childish, as a matter of fact his writing is actually pretty dark at times. 

This book is another one of my many library finds. I was shelving and I saw a little book peek out and I'm just a sucker for long titles like that, so I read the blurb and quietly slipped it onto my cart to check out. I do this nearly every week but this week I actually read the book I found. It's quite short, and with the weather getting more and more beautiful every day I just wanted to sit outside and read in the sunshine. There's just something about summer and the end of a hard week of final exams that made me want to stick my computer on my desk and go do something else. It's been hard for me to find books that I want to read and consequently find time to read them, but just this once the world worked out.

Now this book. This book is about a boy (man) whose name we never find out. He returns to his old childhood haunt, a pond known as an ocean, at the end of the lane where his friend Lettie Hempstock used to live. He sits at the edge of the ocean, and remembers things that he had long, long forgotten about a time of his life that doesn't seem real. 

I don't really know how else to describe it, expect that there is magic and a lot of ambiguity in the characters and what their role is. Are they good? Some are very good. Are they bad? Some are very bad. Some, however, are both, and therein lies the interest of any story if you ask me. 

I would definitely recommend this book, especially if you are on a time constraint because it reads quickly and while it does require a certain degree of focus it shouldn't be overly complex. It's also only 181 pages long (including the Acknowledgements which I always enjoy reading). 

Have a great week!

Perfume: creepier than I expected it to be

As part of the IB program that I am currently enrolled in, we have to study a works in translation as part of our English class. My teacher chose Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Süskind, a book originally written in German.

I loved this book so much, it's so different from everything I've ever read in school. I genuinely enjoyed reading it and analyzing it. The style is intriguing and the language is really descriptive without being boring. What really stuck out to me is the depth of the main character, but before I elaborate on that I should probably give at least a brief synopsis of the story.

So this story takes place in 17th century France, beginning in Paris with the birth of a strange boy in the fish market. From the very start of his life, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is a remarkable human. He tends to bring death and misery to those around him, is frequently compared to a tick, and most importantly, does not have a smell. He has an incredibly developed sense of smell, but he himself does not have an odor. This is the story of his journey for identity, and a quest for his scent as he becomes a master perfumer. He does end up murdering several (too many) young women for their scent. 

What is fascinating about this book is that while the murders are a huge part of the plot they really aren't a part of Grenouille's characterization. His reaction to the murders he commits is a lot more telling of his character. I like to think of him as a cauterized wound, because while he does have a totally numb exterior, it is revealed that his mind that is deeply wounded by his very existence. He's really a despicable character, both physically and psychologically, yet at no point in the book did I ever hate him. I felt bad for him at best, disgusted by his actions at worst, but mostly I just wanted him to find peace. 

I would read this book simply because it's a classic, but also because it's simple on the surface and still leaves a lot of loose ends that you can tie up yourself if you read more into it. 

2014 Reading Count

At the beginning of last year I'd set myself a personal goal of reading 100 books. I didn't know how many books I could read a year, so I thought "why not?".

Spoiler alert I did not read 100 books I have other things to do. (Besides that would be like reading  nearly two books a week and I don't think that's possible.) But I did read 37 books, which I will list for you here, hopefully in order.

1. Ask The Passengers by A.S. King
2. Stardust by Neil Gaiman
3. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
4. Why We Broke Up by Daniel Handler
5. The Five People You Meet In Heaven by Mitch Albom
6. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (the time I didn't read it for school)
7. Water For Elephants by Sara Gruen
8. Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell
9. Eleanor and Park by Rainbow Rowell
10. Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky (not for the first time)
11. Looking For Alaska by John Green (again not for the first time)
12. If You Find Me by Emily Murdoch
13. Please Ignore Vera Dietz by A.S. King
14. Tell The Wolves I'm Home by Carol Rifka Brunt
15. Distant Waves by Suzanne Weyn
16. Ailleur by unknown because I'm stupid and didn't write it down
17. Méto: La Maison by Yves Grevet
18. What I Had Before I Had You by Sarah Cornwell
19. Méto: L'Île by Yves Grevet
20. Méto: Le Monde by Yves Grevet
21. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
22. Fangirl (again)
23. The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
24. Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
25. Eleanor and Park (again)
26. The Fault In Our Stars by John Green (not for the first time)
27. Perks Of Being A Wallflower (again I know shush I ran out of reading material)
28. Why We Broke Up (again)
29. Attachments by Rainbow Rowell
30. Landline by Rainbow Rowell
31. Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert
32. The Friday Night Knitting Club by Kate Jacobs
33. The Museum Of Extraordinary Things by Alice Hoffman
34. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston (for school)

35, 36 and 37 I read for school and didn't write down when I read them so this is not chronologically correct, but I also read The Great Gatsby again , To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee, and Othello by William Shakespeare.

So there you have it, my year in books. For those of you keeping up, you may see that I have not yet finished On The Road but it will happen eventually. I am currently reading Bossypants which is Tina Fey's autobiography and very entertaining. I do like reading biographies.

I think my goal for 2015 will be to read 40 books, see if I can beat my record for this year, and to re-read less books. I need to be more prepared when I traveled, that's where the issue lay. Lack of preparation, which can only be expected from me, not gonna lie.

I also think I should tell you that for the first time ever I have filled a whole journal.

If ever you're looking for a journal, I highly recommend Moleskines. I know they're expensive but they are such amazing quality. I've been carrying this one around since 2013 and it really doesn't look any worse for wear. I usually prefer spiral notebooks, but this one was flexible and sturdy and honestly just perfect. I got a new one from my brother for Christmas and I am excited to fill it up.

I hope you had a great 2014, and here's to a 2015 filled with new books, new blank pages and many pages to fill them with.