2018 Reading List

1. Love, Lies and the List by Kasie West Done, didn't much like it, barely scraped 3 stars
2. Cruel Prince
3. The Mortal Instruments Series
4. The Poet X 
5. Saints and Misfits
6. Illumina 3: Obsidio
7. Iron Gold
8. Milk and Honey
9. The Princess Saves Herself in this One
10.  Restore Me
11. A Case for Jamie
12. The Infernal Devices 

 So edit: it's March, crossed out what I've already ready there are a lot more that are on on this list follow me on goodreads to stay up to date. Warning, I am an adult who sometimes reads adult content books.

Book Review :: An Enchantment of Ravens

I gave this book 5 stars. 

I LOVED this book. It is a short, atmospheric and lightly spooky read filled with the best elements of moody folklore and fairytale. The author uses masterful imagery, setting personification and poetic diction to weave a vivid and enthralling tale of adventure, fantasy and romance.

The author personifies the forest heavily; the trees and even the very shadows they create seem to have a will that is human in drive and determination to live and fight back. It is as though the writer has taken the very essence of an Autumn October, turned it to ink and then wrote from that ink every word on the pages of her book. Every chilled wind, stray vibrant leaf and special seasonal treat come together to create the perfect setting for this short tale of ancient prices and shadowy lore. It is one broody but sweet adventure that sets to work all of your senses for a holistic reading experience.

Her diction is poetic, it makes you feel like you've been swept up in a ball room dance that is this story of two lovers, forbidden to love by the laws of nature and creation themselves.

Margaret Rogerson's use of imagery is bold, colourful and sensory in all respects. Her use of folklore is both enchanting and brooding. This novel makes you want to sip it slow and savour its season while being uniquely aware of the beauty of volatility found in the living and in the dying and the changing.

The character of Rook is cocky and princely but naive and proud and the mix somehow results in humerus folly and witty charm. Rooks powers and the waning of them we are privy to as our characters journey continues, also show us the impracticality of a desire for immortality. It becomes a metaphor for how such a desire, if achieved is inherently unnatural, warring with the concept of time, goodness and longevity.

Isobel's distaste for the notion of immortality is made continuously tangible with her approach to food in the fae courts as though to reinforce that it is slotted once unto man to die, everything else seems to result in a lengthy state of rot and the remnants and remembrance of living instead.

Isobel is a driven artist with a vivid view of the world. All the world's pigments come across as tainted in a heavy, weighty saturation she manages to emotionally express on paper, both its beauty and it's horrid gloom. This turns out to be both part of her mastery of skill and the thread of her undoing.

Honesty, adventure and trust are what hasten their romance. While it remains ever easy to go the route of 'fae prince and human girl in need fall in love' the author dares her characters to question timeliness, choice and validity of what they feel, bringing an interesting modern realness to the story.

All in all it is a fantastic, one sitting read with a beautiful cover that gets you swept up in elemental courts both in your imagination and with the accompaniment of all of your senses.  There are themes of savoured seasons, the fantastical elemental, longing, love and more. One of those books that is in and of it self an experience all yours to savour like a hot beverage on a chilled evening, on an empty bench at a park, during the golden hours.

One of the quotes I loved:

"You are like a living rose among wax flowers, we maybe last forever but you bloom brighter and smell sweeter and draw blood with thorns" ~ Margaret Rogerson: An Enchantment of Ravens

And isn't that the beauty of a temporary life itself?

Follow me on goodreads to see what else I'm reading.

Yes Please by Amy Poehler Mini Book Review

Morning lovelies, so I finally read Yes Please and I wanted to write about it some. 

Took me two days, I did it as a bit of stress relief when preparing to tackle my sociolinguistics final. Usually I do literary reviews because, well, I like them. For this one though, I feel like doing a mini review.

Mini Review: When I first started 'Yes Please' I had no idea who Amy was nor have I seen her in anything on tv. I admit her style of comedy isn't really my slice but as the book went on I really got a sense of her. Honestly, I felt like she was trying way too hard to be funny in the earlier chapters but I get why, I mean it is her profession after all. She really turned out to have a lot of wisdom though.

Amy Pauler uses flashbacks and episodic instalments of life experience to shape the purpose of her book. When she first begins we simply get a look at her as a person chasing a big dream but as she go on the audience stops being a listener or audience and for or a partner present in the moments she is sharing about. The author resets each scene fore you so that you almost feel like you were standing next to her in these moments she talks about like looking at the stars or when her doctor dies.

The language of her book changes coming to the second half from introspective to dreamy and then back again. Personally, I really liked the dreamer sections where she is just a person pouring her heart out about how she feels about things and less about how you should feel.

I guess i'm bias, i don't usually like books that suggest i should feel this way or that about a thing, at least not out right, let me decide but this does a lot of that and with what is very much like a moral of adult life coming to the end of each chapter.

It's an interesting perspective on an ordinary life made extraordinary with will, perseverance and a refusal to settle for  a notions of exception due to things that can be changed such as location and occupation.

In this book the author dares to ask boldly and with reckless abandon why not in the face of can not every time. When life presents her with the tiniest possibility of a shimmer of greatness she raises her hand and steadily adheres Yes, please.

It's wonderful to read what happens on her bath as a result of this.

Book Review :: 31 Prayers for the dreamer + the doer Book Review

This review is a little different. Reading 31 Prayers for the dreamer + the doer was quite the experience. The various authors use imagery, metaphor and personification all in the form of prayer to create a book that oozed with the tone of reference and intimacy.

After getting through the Women In The Word plan from #SheReadsTruth, feeling like I was submerged in the The Word everyday, on a long desert road running into biblical woman after woman who would stop and chat with me as we go over the events of their lives, their personal encounters with Christ and how it changed their life and mine I felt a unique fullness I doubt that I can explain.

This was different.

This was a devotional written in the added form of prayers. My religion warns against repetition of the same prayer over and over so I was a little sceptical but I soon realised that is not what it would be for me anyway and those fears subsided.

This was so much more intense that I anticipated it would be. There I was, reading prayer after prayer from woman after woman, feasting my eyes on their intimate conversation with their creator over the desires and pains of their heart.

Watching, marvelled as they spoke words I have thought in private.  Feeling an extraordinary kinship with these women I will never meet, who are spread far and wide across this earth who have  and are fighting the same if not a very similar fight as I am. Fights with self and with Him.

It was kind of amazing.

I knew that in the preface they said every chapter may not reach you as it did the woman who wrote it, it may not mean as much to you as it did not them and I am so glad they said that and so glad i read the preface cause that's something I usually hate doing haha.

For indeed, every single chapter did not mean as much to me as it seemed to to the woman that wrote it but you know what? I still treasure the experience, their experience that they were brave enough to share with me because I get it.



I get what it's like to be a creative, to think and feel like a creative and I get what it means to share that with someone. I also get that though theirs may be a battle I have already won or a battle I have yet to encounter it is a battle and there is much to be learned from war, like defence.

Some of the chapters that meant a lot to me were: prayer, the word, wellness, authenticity, dreams, comparison and goals just to name a few.

Definitely an regrettable buy and pretty to boot! Are you using any devotionals lately? Tell me about it in the comments I'd love to hear about it.

Peace. Love. Pray.

Book Review: Very Good Lives the fringe benefits of failure and the importance of imagination

In Very Good Lives J.K Rowling uses imagery, humour and metaphors to emphasis the determination failure can expose and the change imagination allows.

If you've never read any of Rowling's work I'm so sorry for your loss you don't know how incredibly funny she is! In this book in particular she uses said humour to remind us that her warnings come from a place not just of experienced success but a place of failure too. As such, this gives her hands on, practical experience with and liberty to speak on both.

Her tone is comfortable and almost whimsical as she shares the importance of ones inner self made magic; the most important kind. Using these prominent themes of imagination and failure, together with well crafted imagery, Rowling makes her tale easily applicable to the lives of both the audience and the author.

She shares intimate details of the earlier part of her life, wording her sentences so that they vividly take you there to that long corridor where her views on life were further informed by the actions of unsung victims and hero alike. A corridor one cannot help but see as a representation of the middle ground between her past failures and her future successes.

A middle ground graduation day often is to so many of us.

Her choice of figurative devices succeed in stressing the existence of potential energy to enact change waiting just behind open eyes. The author goes on to suggest that if this state of active presences is placed beside a willingness to make a change, it will amount to an extraordinary life well worth living. Not to be overlooked is Rowlings call to the read to step up to a responsibility with which every person is charged, to encourages us to make education count for something much bigger than the individual that achieves it.

-----

I know that this is a speech she has given but I chose to read it anyway for the reading experience because I wanted to internalise it in that way. That sounded weird I know, I'm a weirdo, ah what to do, enjoy it yes?

I think that I have very good taste in books because this too is going up on my library once I buy it in hard copy, oh I can't resist it! I loved this book for so many reasons, I'm doing my undegrad. degree, I too am a writer, I have tasted to bitter slice failure deals one and I have danced amidst with an incredibly active imagination. Balance is key, how easily we forget. This was a beautiful reminder that though such a balance is not easily achieved, the journey of that has you tipping this side and the other is more often than not ultimately beautiful.


What have you been reading lately?

Peace. Love. Very Good Lives. 

2 Books on My 2015 Literature Watch List

The literary greats have been kicking butt and taking names y'all and its kind of a big deal! Well for those of us who like that kind of thing. haha All images and synopsis found via Amazon books.

Blurb: Go Set a Watchman is set during the mid-1950s and features many of the characters from To Kill a Mockingbird some twenty years later. Scout (Jean Louise Finch) has returned to Maycomb from New York to visit her father Atticus. She is forced to grapple with issues both personal and political as she tries to understand both her father’s attitude toward society, and her own feelings about the place where she was born and spent her childhood.'

Blurb: ‘What you do to children matters. And they might never forget’ Sweetness wants to love her child, Bride, but she struggles to love her as a mother should. Bride, now glamorous, grown up, ebony-black and panther-like, wants to love her man, Booker, but she finds herself betrayed by a moment in her past, a moment borne of a desperate burn for the love of her mother. Booker cannot fathom Bride’s depths, with his own love-lorn past bending him out of shape. Can they find a way through the damage wrought on their blameless childhood souls, to light and happiness, free from pain?

Toni Morrison’s fierce and provocative new novel exposes the damage adults wreak on children, and how this echoes through the generations.

---

Not only have I read their previous work like Beloved and To Kill A Mocking Bird but i have also had the pleasure of studying them formally. I CANNOT WAIT to get my hands on these new works of fiction from such skilled word-smiths.  I think I'll go search their noble prize in literature speeches to placate my taste buds in the mean time!


What new works of literature are you looking forward to or excited about this year?

Peace. Love. Literary Greatness. 

Musing :: Mind : The Book Lover that does not Read

(A handful of the books I've had to read as course work for my degree)

Do you remember back when you were so hungry that you were willing to read by street light, candle light, lamp light, flash light after your mother went to bed after having told you to put that damn book away already light? The reminiscent of daily light even, vaguely noticing the reflections of a sunset on your page as you leaned towards your open window but it didn't matter...it didn't matter if you were moving or walking or reading by dim bus light you just had to read you just HAD to read because...you were hungry for life and LIFE was the written word....and you were hungry for LIFE.

In a time when we have successfully invented so many gadgets to give us more free time than ever before...Did you forget what that felt like?

Peace. Love. Put your money where your mouth is

What I Read :: The Great Gatsby Book Review (and movie expectations!)

I've a short Semester's break this week so i thought i would indulge in reading something for pleasure that had not been assigned to me. Sure enough twas a good time! I had forgotten what it is like to pick up a book and read it because you want to in your leisure time. To long for the moment when you can pull it out and smile to yourself, sharing secrets with pages and ink and characters and an author, to have heavy eye lids but whispering in your heart, despite all the obligations of tomorrow just one more chapter... A feeling i think no writer should ever let themselves forget.

I'd been running across a lot of hype for this movie lately, i figured well if the release is about a week away, a week is enough to read the book and have fun seeing how the big screen adapts the story. The movie premiers today.

Warning: There will be spoilers in this post if you haven't read the book.

Fitzgerald uses mysterious delayed introduction, foreshadowing and my favourite, beautifully crafted similes to tell a lovely short story showcasing what is often classified as the American dream. I think what i enjoyed most about this novel was the rich, vivid description of details one can not readily see with the eyes of an onlooker, yet...he is one. The author uses very careful diction, piecing it together to say a multitude of meaning in one sentence. His writing is like poetry, he strives to use the perfect words, not one more and not one less.

His choice of point of view helps to farther the alluring mood of his story, taken from the perspective of an innocent by stander sucked into a world of glitz and glamor, of wealth and prestigious. Nick, the person through who's eyes we see this tale, while has come from some money one gets the impression that he has not particularly adored it or sought to proudly own it but rather to simply live, purposefully To be rich in character and wisdom, both superficial accessories in the time when the book is set.

Summarizing Nick from the text:

' Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.' Chapter 2

It takes the reader a little time to get past the well described frills of the aristocratic society that is a central theme of the novel, one finds that at the heart of the story is a heart, a broken heart, a longing heart, a heart that seeks to feel the drum beat of love again, that seeks to be told that self worth is truly in equal proportion to prestige as it appears and as is handed down religiously by society.

This man seeks to do anything to move forward by going backwards, to live by re living happiness. And so he spends his entire life chasing the key to the road not traveled and for him, his key comes in the shape of a beautiful refreshing Daisy...

But what happen when one grabs hold of a key to the garden of love where youth was spent? Will the flowers still be in bloom? Or will they have withered by the time you get to prying that door open again with hands finally worthy to touch it?

We often expect a memory, a place, a feeling in time to stay exactly as we remember it...but is that possible? Is our memory, is the strength of our love enough to sustain it?

That is the dangerous question The Great Gatsby (oh the irony!!) has forgotten to ask himself...

There is a moment in the story when Daisy crumples up Gatsby's letter and one wonders if they really just spend the entire novel asking each other with hopeful eyes if the paper crumbled up can be perfect again...

Quotes i loved:

That Summarised the book:

Chapter 9

'They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made… . '

Chapter 9

'Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter — to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther… . And one fine morning —— So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.'

That Summarize Characters: 

Gatsby:

Chapter 5

'consumed with wonder at her presence. He had been full of the idea so long, dreamed it right through to the end, waited with his teeth set, so to speak, at an inconceivable pitch of intensity. '

 Tom:

Chapter 6

'He knew women early, and since they spoiled him he became contemptuous of them, of young virgins because they were ignorant, of the others because they were hysterical about things which in his overwhelming self-absorption he took for granted.'

 Daisy:

Chapter 8

' And all the time something within her was crying for a decision. She wanted her life shaped now, immediately — and the decision must be made by some force — of love, of money, of unquestionable practicality — that was close at hand'

 Random Well Worded Others:

Chapter 5
 ;No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.;

Chapter 6

 ;The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself.;

Chapter 7

;There is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind,'

Chapter 7

'' and it occurred to me that there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well'

Chapter 9

“I’m thirty,” I said. “I’m five years too old to lie to myself and call it honour.”

 My Very Favourites:

Chapter 7

“Self-control!” Repeated Tom incredulously. “I suppose the latest thing is to sit back and let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere make love to your wife. Well, if that’s the idea you can count me out… . Nowadays people begin by sneering at family life and family institutions, and next they’ll throw everything overboard and have intermarriage between black and white.”

Chapter 4

“There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.”

What I'm looking forward to from the movie the most? 

 

Honestly? i CAN NOT WAIT to see Gatsby's car! Its such a repeated motif, the vehicle of his splendour, at the centre of his highest greatness and lowest of lows, looked upon as he grasps hold of it all and watches all slip away. Magnificently bitter sweet!

  Also, might i add i passionately dislike Daisy. I can't help but notice how dapper Tom looks in the movie too! lol did not picture him so hot!

 These two (Nick & Jordon) were my favourite and i can't wait to see them lovin' on each other!