Amy in the TARDIS // Tuesday for the Muse

Now that I'm more than halfway through Doctor Who Series 5, I felt I could start listening to the first half of the soundtrack.  (I generally don't like to listen to music for episodes I haven't seen.  Somehow it feels like spoiler-hunting.)  This is my favorite song from the soundtrack so far, and I've been listening to it over and over again the past several days.  It plays during the scene where Amy first enters the TARDIS, and it conveys a strong sense of magic, of a long-held wish finally being fulfilled, a childhood dream gently becoming reality.  All of those are themes that resonate with me, which I think is why I like this song so much.  This track actually caught my attention while I was watching the episode, which in my world is a testament to how good it is.    Most Doctor Who music isn't written specifically to be lovely, but this piece is just lovely anyway.  
Now, to hunt around for a dollar so I can download it from Amazon...

Kingdom Dance // Tuesday for the Muse

Inspired by my friend Katie and her lovely fashion blog Beautifully Pure, I've decided to start a weekly music feature, focusing primarily on songs that inspire me (but also including songs that I just plain love).

This week, I chose a song that I've loved for a long time but only just downloaded last week.  It's the music from the Tangled soundtrack (by the brilliant Alan Menken) that plays during the dancing scene.  I fell in love with this song the first time I watched the movie, even before the scene was over.  Dancing (and songs that make me feel like dancing) have always had a special place in my heart, and this song perfectly captures the energy of a dance while retaining a sweet innocence that we in the modern era have forgotten with our dancing.  I personally believe old-fashioned community dances should make a comeback.  What do you think?

A Lonely Library Stack and Intelligibility

I know I'm a little crazy, trying to write a whole blog post in the brief time I have before school.  But I've been thinking about my poor, neglected blog all week, and I figure the only way to get something done is to take what small chance you have to do it. 

So, gentle reader, I give you a basic update on life:

Reading:  I haven't been doing very much of it all.  I think this is due, in part, to the fact that my stack of library books looks rather empty at the moment.  There are plenty of books that I would like to have read and that I think I should read at some point, but I haven't had the inspiration to get very far into any of them.  The one book I picked up in the past week that I thought was going to be interesting -- Split Infinity, by Piers Anthony -- I had to put down after the first dozen pages due to sexual content.  Blegh.  And he had such an interesting concept, too...

Anyway, what I really need right now is a quick, engaging read that I can blaze through in a couple of days.  Probably something YA -- but you know my standards.  I won't go for anything with adult content or swearing.  If you have a book in mind that fits this description, please send it my way. 

Writing:  I have been participating in an informal Poem-A-Day (since this is National Poetry Month), but I started a couple days late and missed the last three days.  Oh well.  I figure that any poetry I write because of PAD is more poetry than I would have written otherwise.  Writing is good. 

Also, I've been a little concerned because it feels that with every time I sit down to write, I make less and less sense.  Of course, it doesn't help that I don't have a specific project I'm working on.  But it's like I've spent so much time away from writing that as soon as my pen touches the paper, all this esoteric goop spills out.  And that's not what I want.  I don't write with long words because I want to sound sophisticated.  I use those words because they best express what I want to say.  There's nothing nearly as wonderful as knowing you used exactly the right word for what you meant.  But still, I'm not sure what to do with myself.  I would like to be at least a little intelligible.

Final Note: My life doesn't consist solely of reading and writing, I hope you know.  But I have run out of time to talk about anything else. 

Spring and Mockingjay

Today is the most beautiful, most spring-like day we've had so far this year, even now at 5 o'clock in the afternoon.  Saturdays are our family house-cleaning days, and today as we traversed the house with vacuums and scrub-brushes, we were able to leave the windows and doors open, letting in a fresh breeze and the sunshine that's lost its winter pallor.  As I sit on my bed to write this blog entry, that light illuminates my room, and my window is still open.  Things smell alive again, even if they don't quite look like it yet.  

I finished reading Mockingjay yesterday.  While I've enjoyed the whole Hunger Games trilogy quite a bit, I cannot come to terms with the ending.  For those of you who haven't read it yet, the end is solidly bittersweet--with a whole lot of bitter and precious little sweet.  Now, I am not someone who has to have a happy ending no matter what.  In fact, some of my favorite stories have tragic endings.  (I never could resist anything that made me cry.)  But there has to be a reason for the ending.  If a story ends bittersweet, it should be because a happy ending would have felt wrong.  Sydney Carton had to die at the end of A Tale of Two Cities, because if he had just swooped in, saved the day, and taken everyone back to England safe and sound, the book would have lost a lot of its meaning and power.  

Alright, so let's start with the concept of meaning and apply it to Mockingjay.  The ending would be understandable (and forgivable) if Collins had something specific to say.  And I think she does have something to say, but what it turns out to be is something as broad and bland and over-parroted as War is bad.  

Yes, war is bad.  But in my entire life span (which, admittedly, isn't very long), I haven't run into a single living person who thought war was good.  So really, did Collins have to sacrifice the ending of this trilogy for the sake of telling us something that we already believe?  

Now, while this is one major problem I have with the ending, I think the real reason I didn't like it was not the ending itself, but the promises I felt the author had made to us that weren't fulfilled.  Looking back on the series, I feel like there were a number of opportunities that were wasted, and a number of aspects of the ending that made it distinctively unhappy.  For example:

*SPOILERS AHEAD*

• Peeta's speaking abilities are mentioned and come into play a number of times in The Hunger Games and Catching Fire.  Because it kept coming up, I felt, when I was speculating about Mockingjay before I read it, that something meaningful Peeta says in public should have a pivotal role in the book, particularly at the end.  Instead, Peeta is a prisoner of the Capitol for the first half of the book, has a severely altered personality in the second half of the book, and the only major part he plays in the end is to keep Katniss from committing suicide after she makes the final decisive action of the book.  Yes, that action belongs to Katniss, since she is the main character.  But the story is also Peeta's in so many ways, and to have his only role in the book be as a source of angst for Katniss is just disappointing.  I wanted to see him act.  I wanted to see him come into his own as a well-reasoned, decisive man.  I wanted him to have a moment where I could stand up and cheer for him.  But the book had none of that.  
• The romance went kaput.  Despite how well it was written, I'm not sure I liked the love triangle.  Being yanked back and forth between Gale and Peeta created a lot of tension, but after a while I just wanted it to stop.  Also, the way in which it got resolved wasn't really a resolution.  Katniss admitted that a part of her would always hate Gale for her sister's death, and Gale, for the most part, walked out of her life.  And after that, Peeta and Katniss fall back in love again in a very boring way off-screen.  After three books of constant romantic tension... that's it?  
• In the end, Katniss has Peeta again.  Great.  But everyone else is gone.  Even the people who aren't dead are gone, such as Katniss's mother.  Throughout the book the one source of comfort for Katniss has been other people, but at the end of the book she's all but completely alone.  The book ends with a profound sense of loneliness, which I found very depressing.  No reward at all for suffering through all the gruesome deaths that litter the pages of the book.  

Those are just the main problems I can think of off the top of my head.  In all, it felt to me like Collins performed a series of tricks, dazzling us with her ability to keep us constantly in suspense, jumping higher and higher each time.  And then, after all those surprises, she found that she'd left herself only a few options with which to craft a good ending.  So she made the ending bittersweet, because that was all that was left.  

Now, the one thing I haven't addressed is that the ending is realistic.  In real wars, people you love die horrendous, pointless deaths.  Happy endings are in short supply.  But most people don't read fiction for realism.  We have real life for that.  Good fiction tries to make us better than we are, not by reinforcing the hopelessness many of us already feel when looking at the world, but by telling us that evil doesn't always win, and that there's a reason to keep hoping and keep fighting for what's right and true.  If a book's central message is "Life stinks," I don't know if it can really be classified as a good book.  

But, despite all the negative things I've said, I do think Suzanne Collins is a talented author with great storytelling abilities, and I would still recommend The Hunger Games and Catching Fire -- and, yes, maybe even Mockingjay, though not without fair warning -- to someone looking for an engaging book to read.  I won't deny that reading these books has been fun.  And I'm still looking forward to the movie.  

It is a good and pleasant thing when friends dwell together in craziness.

There is a reason no one has yet hired me to write proverbs, as you can see from the title of this post.

Anyway, I say such a thing because, while the rest of the city prepares for a blizzard like none we have ever seen (if the hysteria in the weather reports is to be believed), my family and I are going with friends to get ice cream.

Because, after all, absurdity is best shared... especially when it's tasty.

I shall dispense with giving-forth of timeless wisdom in order to say:

HI I'M BLOGGING AGAIN LOOKIE LOOKIE LOOKIE--

*shoves overly-enthusiastic blogger-self back into the closet*

*looks around to make sure no one noticed, then whispers discreetly to self*

That was unprofessional and in very poor taste.

*turns back to blog readers*

Ahem.

Well, as they say, skeletons are best left in the closet...

Overly-Enthusiastic Blogger-Self: I'M NOT A SKELETON!

...so we shall conclude this post.

Overly-Enthusiastic Blogger-Self:  BUT I WANTED TO KNOW IF ANYONE MISSED ME BECAUSE I'VE BEEN GONE FOR SO LONG AND I MISSED ALL OF THEM AND...

*sighs*

*pulls out duct tape*

If you will excuse me.  Babblers are best dealt with soon and with strong and sticky substances, after all.

*disappears into the closet*

Overly-Enthusiastic Blogger-Self:  STRONG AND STICKY WHAT ON EARTH DOES THAT MEAN OH MY GOSH GET AWAY FROM ME THAT IS SO NOT mmph.  Mmmph mmm mph!  Mmmm-mmnm!

Reading

(This is a post I posted a couple days ago on another blog, but I decided to move it here.)

I spent the greater part of today working with books: making a list of all the books I've read in 2011, cataloging my own personal library of books, and the like.  I started out this year with the goal of reading 25 books in 2011, and... well, I read 53.  I am quite pleased.  

Looking over the list of books I finished this year, there were a couple of themes that stood out.  I read 32 fiction books and 20 nonfiction books.  I read more YA fiction this year than in all previous years combined -- mostly thanks to Scott Westerfeld, since I discovered his Leviathan trilogy early this year, which lead me to read his Uglies series while waiting for Goliath to come out.  I also read a number of dystopias, from Brave New World to The Hunger Games.  G. K. Chesterton was probably my favorite author that I read this year.  I discovered him in 2010 when I read his biography of Charles Dickens.  This year I continued my journey through Chesterton with Orthodoxy, The Flying Inn, The Man Who Was Thursday, Heretics, and Saint Thomas Aquinas.  Chesterton is the kind of person that makes me wish I could steal his brain and make it my own.  His writing style is gorgeous, and the thoughts he has are so profound.

While it's tempting to see if I can read even more books in 2012, I think I'm going to take a different approach.  Instead of aiming for a number, I'd rather have the luxury of taking my time reading a book, choosing longer books to read, or rereading books.  In my eternal quest to improve as a writer, I want to examine the works of my favorite authors in detail to see what I can learn from them.

And as a rather odd resolution, I've decided I'd like to dive into the Christian fantasy genre.  It came to my attention as I scanned the fiction shelves at Family Christian Bookstore the other day that, even though I think of Christian fantasy as the genre I'd like to write it, I haven't actually read that much of it.  So I plan to begin my journey with Donita K. Paul's DragonSpell and see where it takes me from there.

Guess who posted! (Guess who also didn't proofread her post. Being in a hurry is not conducive to some things.)

Wow, it's been forever since my last blog post!  The little egg timer in my head went off again (rather belated little instrument, that is), so here I am.  Since I currently feel like there's not much in my head right now, that means this is going to be a random post.  Oh well.  Here, I'll turn it into a numbered list to make it look more official:

1. School (my last year of homeschool high school!) has been going for about a month now, and so far it is turning out to be my favorite year of homeschool ever.  Instead of doing regular math and science, I'm doing accounting and economics.  Economics is my new love.  I'm reading Thomas Sowell's Basic Economics, which explains a fascinating subject with Sowell's crystal clarity.  The book may look imposing at 654 pages, but it reads like an intriguing news article, and I don't feel I've worked that hard to get halfway through the book.  Do I even need to mention that I recommend it highly? 

2. Today is a busy day, but one of the pleasant side effects of having a busy day is that I get to go to the library (=D) where I have several books waiting for me:

• No Plot? No Problem! by Chris Baty.  (This is a reread for me.  I just want a refresher, since I really want to do NaNoWriMo but have just about given up hope on the subject, since I have almost no ideas, and the ones I do have don't play nice with each other.)
• Incarceron by Catharine Fisher.  I need a nice fluffy YA read.  (No, I don't suppose Incarceron is fluffy, but for me, YA of any kind IS fluff, even if it's an action-packed science fiction YA.  True fluff mostly sticks in my throat and makes me gag.)  
• The Lightning Thief, by Rick Riordan.  I've heard a lot about this series, so I thought I'd dip my toe into the first book.  It's also research of a sort, since the lone idea I've even partially entertained for NaNoWriMo has some similarities with what I've heard about this series, so I thought I'd see how this author handled it.  

3. Look at me, I used a numbered list AND bullet points in the same post!

4. And unless I want to discover this blog post sometime next week and realize to my shame that I never posted it, I should post it now, since school is starting.