A Little Island of Words

The sorrows of the mind

Be banished from the place;
Religion never was designed
To make our pleasures less.

Let those refuse to sing,
Who never knew our God;
But favorites of the heavenly King,
May speak their joys abroad.

There we shall see His face,
And never, never sin!
There, from the rivers of His grace,
Drink endless pleasures in.

Yea, and before we rise,
To that immortal state,
The thoughts of such amazing bliss,
Should constant joys create.

The men of grace have found
Glory begun below.
Celestial fruits on earthly ground
From faith and hope may grow.

The hill of Zion yields
A thousand sacred sweets
Before we reach the heav’nly fields,
Or walk the golden streets.

— Isaac Watts

Sorry guys,

I’m sorry that I haven’t been posting anything since I finished the 30 day challenge, but I wanted to give myself a break. I’ll go back to posting poems or what have you once the school year ends, possibly sooner.

If you guys are writers yourselves, you should feel free to submit your stuff to get exposure. I’m thinking about asking Tumblr writers if I can use their stuff in order to avoid running into copyright issues ANYWAY so…

ALSO, I was voted to be the editor of my school’s literary magazine for next year.

It’s super exciting. I have so many ideas and hopes.

Your Favorite Book

Fiction: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

This book is the most amazing thing. I read it the first time during my freshman year in college and got to read i again last year.

This book tells a number of stories about loss and human attempt to hold on to what it is we lose. The focal point of the story (that of our narrator, Oscar) is an eleven-year-old boy who lost his father on September 11th. He attempts to reconnect with his father by continuing to play a game that the two played, specifically a wide-scale scavenger hunt.

A secondary story is that of Oscar’s grandfather, who unbeknownst to him, has moved back to New York from Desden after hearing about his son’s death. He has his own history with loss stretching back prior to September 11th, 2001 however, as the love of life was killed in the Dresden bombings.

Lastly (more or less) is the story of Oscar’s grandmother (the sister of his grandfather’s late lover) who desperately wants the love of Oscar’s grandfather in spite of knowing where his feeling really lie.

As should be obvious at this point, this book is extremely, unrelentingly depressing. You will cry. You will cry like a child. Whether you have lost a family member, a friend, or a lover YOU WILL CRY. It is also beautiful and manages to construct this story in an unconventional way; Jonathan Safran Foer uses (seemingly) random text, color, photographs, and whole pages of numbers to make his point. As a matter of fact, it may not make sense on a first read, but once you reach the end and realize what it all meant you will cry some more.

It’s basically the “500 Days of Summer” of the book world.

Nonfiction: Orientalism by Edward W. Said

As someone who is studying in literature and history and has race studies as another interest — this book was fantastic in my opinion.

Said uses many literary passages (mostly from Victorian novels) to make his points. He discusses imperialism and the perception of “Eastern” things — and people moreover — as novelties. If this sounds interesting to you, you ought to read this book for yourself.

A book that makes you cry (replaced by most beautiful)

I kind of answered the first question already, so I figured I’d talk about something I haven’t before: the beauty of some books — both visually and in terms of diction.

Fiction: Breath by Tim Winton

This book (which I read for a class about depictions adolescents in literature) is partially about surfing and also partially about erotic asphyxiation. It’s also REALLY, REALLY  beautiful. We actually talked about what our favorite sentences were in class. It’s basically like eating a literary cheesecake and then wondering how the hell that cheesecake tasted so good when it was just cheesecake. It’s a very simple book — but it is really, truly gorgeous.

Nonfiction: The Book of Kells

THAT IS ALL.

Favorite Title:

Fiction: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime (by Mark Haddon)

Great book, even better title.

Nonfiction: Silent Spring

If you’re into environmentalism, you really ought to read this book (assuming that you haven’t already). I love the title because: A) It’s alliterative and B) It just sounds elegant to me for some reason.

The Most Surprising Plot-Twist or Ending

Fiction: The Harry Potter Series

Sorry for mentioning Harry Potter so much, but at least I’m talking about different things each time. The part of the last book that surprised me the most is probably not anything you guys would expect it to be.

Harry being a horcrux? Didn’t surprise.

Snape having been in love with Lily? I was happy that my theory had been validated.

Voldemort’s downfall? OF COURSE he wasn’t going to win.

Now Dumbledore being kind of a plotting douche-bag, THAT I did not expect. If that bit confuses you, message me and I’d be happy to talk more about it. But I have a lot more to do and am (literally) sick and tired, so I’m intending to do another quick post.

Nonfiction: This essay on imperialism and children’s literature

It has a very meta twist to it which I absolutely love.

A Book That Changed Your Opinion On Something:

Fiction (?): The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien

When I first read this book my junior year in high school I HATED IT. I was confused by the narrative thread between the stories O’Brien told. Were the stories truth or lies? I felt as though O’Brien was insulting me by holding this thought over my head. It took a few added years and more maturity for me to appreciate this work, which I now consider masterful.

This book changed my opinion on (for lack of a better way to word this) how exactly one can define truth. I used to think of truth in terms of real and unreal, truth and lie — my view on the situation was very black and white. But once I read this book in the right context, I found that “truth” was in fact a very different animal in terms of narrative. Human memory never preserves things as they are, and societal memory does so even less (see the explanation for the book below). As such, things that we recall may or may not be true. Moreover, it is less important to capture what “actually happened” than it is to capture the emotions behind a situation. Regardless of whether or not a damn thing O’Brien says is true, I can only suppose that he gives a very authentic look into what war feels like. He brings up tales of fear, insanity, violence, and general ugliness — shying away from nothing. Arguably unlike the man featured in the biography below.

Nonfiction: Darwin, His Daughter, and Human Evolution by Randal Keynes

This work did not necessarily change my opinion on something so much as reflect an thought of mine that had been changed because it was really pretty much flat-out wrong. I know that above I spoke of the wibbly-wobbly-ness of truth, and we speak in my historiography class all the time that there is no single “real” history, but just a bunch of different ways to interpret/present historical events and figures. However, some people and things become misrepresented when in the hands of society at large. Unfortunately, Charles Darwin was a victim of this. 

Because Darwin penned Origin of the Species, Christian creationists often take to viewing him as the enemy. They look at Darwin and see a militant atheist, as do many people who don’t know anything about Darwin, as did I at first. But then I started reading Darwin, his letters, and his biographies and discovered that he was quite different from how I had pictured him. Darwin’s religiosity is nebulous, though he says in his autobiography that he could not believe in the God many of his contemporaries praised because a benevolent God would never cause so much suffering to occur. It is notable to think about this very human reasoning, as well as the fact that he had a religious wife and had children who were raised religiously. Moreover, he answered the theological questions of his readers with astounding sensitivity. I now sympathize with Darwin to a large degree.

Character You Can Relate to Most

This is going to be another short one folks.

This photo is from the 1994 miniseries starring the here pictured Juliet Aubrey. Upon reading Middlemarch, I felt a kinship toward a character that I had not felt since I was a tiny little girl reading Chrysanthemum. Dorothea, like me is very sensitive. She has so many feelings. I would in fact go as far as to say that she feels all the things. Also like me, she wants to be a much better person than she is in actuality. She has a tendency to make decisions based on romantic visions of a future that turns out being much bleaker than what she had envisioned, at least initially. Coincidentally, her love interest is A LOT like one of my exs.

Nonfiction: ….Robert Browning…?

…okay…so I know that Robert Browning is not exactly a character. He was a very real person in the Victorian era, but I still relate to him a great deal. Like me, Robert Browning appeared to be a rather cheerful person, but he wrote (and thus thought up) a lot of really twisted stuff. Read “Childe Roland.” Seriously. Also, his relationship with his wife (while it has given me entirely unrealistic hopes for future significant others) is so beautiful, and their entire courtship sounds like something I would get myself into…

1) Falling in love with a person through letters, never having seen them.

2) Being prepared to love whoever you find when you DO visit them.

3) Leaving behind everything you have ever known to be with them.

4) Never stopping loving them. Ever.

A Book You Wish More People Would’ve Read:

Fiction: The Monk by Matthew Lewis

I read this book for a Gothic fiction class last year, and I think this one best managed to strike a balance between really crazy and really good. It was also a really subversive book at the time. Although Lewis was writing in the eighteenth century, he was: subverting (or at least playing with) gender stereotypes, including explicit sexuality, and filling the church with some pretty corrupt characters. I could talk about The Monk forever, but talking about it any more than I already have would involve spoilers. Seriously. If I tried to give you a plot summary it would be full of spoilers. Just please, please read this one. It’s kind of ridiculous (seeing as its nineteenth century Gothic literature written by a nineteen year old), but absolutely wonderful.

Nonfiction: The Historian’s Craft by Marc Bloch

If you’re even slightly interested in history, you MUST READ THIS. I read it for my historiography class earlier this semester, and it is full of win.

Sorry for another short post, end of the semester and all….