Hello,
hello. Have a seat.
How
are you? Currently in my life:
~
finished The Count of Monte Cristo.
Still processing.
~
stRESSED about school – there are essays left, right and centre and I am not
enjoying!
~
started Anna and the French Kiss. I’m
already half way through, and …
It’s
pretty perfect. But more on that another time.
So,
because I love LISTS, I am making one for you today. Recently on Paper Fury
Cait has done a couple of posts on her bookish turn-offs and turn-ons and I’m
going to share a few of mine.
I
love lists.
Bookish Loves
1. Books
about books / books about writers
I
love reading. I love writing. I love reading about characters who love reading
and writing. (I also love writing
about these characters, too, hence my novel MC is a writer …)
The Book Thief, amongst its multiple perfect qualities, is
all about a girl who loves books (and, later, a man who writes them). It exudes
its love of books from every pore. Rose Under
Fire, meanwhile, is narrated by a writer (Rose) and filled with her
favourite poems, and the ones she has written. It is fantastic to read. The
verse in some places tells the story. As for Inkheart, it’s a book about reading yourself into books’ worlds.
Count me in.
2. Amazing
friendships
Friendships
make the books go round. I am as much a Platonic shipper as a romantic one –
nothing invests my heart more than a brilliant friendship. I hate, hate, hate
when the romance takes precedence over the friendship in a novel with teenage
protagonists. Love between friends is uncomplicated, and it’s abiding, and this
is what I need in my books. See those four little figures at the bottom of the Skulduggery cover? Friends. I love them.
3. All
about the writing
I
am an absolute addict when it comes to beautiful prose, and for me, the quality
of the writing is one of the most important things about a book.
4. Coming-of-age
Don’t
we all love a good coming-of-age novel? I don’t know if it’s because I’m an
angsty teenage that I enjoy reading about other angsty teenagers, but these are
the books that affect me the most emotionally. What a book needs, in my
opinion, is for the MC to come out the other side a changed person.
5. Worldbuilding
win
I’ve
talked about this before, and (lucky you lot) I’ll talk about it again.
I
kinda idolise George RR Martin.
Not
the sex scenes. But the scope of his worldbuilding is absolutely stunning. He creates
races, cultures, cities, customs; languages, people, religions, ways of
thinking. From the first chapter of A Game of Thrones you’re pulled into the incredibly
complex and real world he is creating, and he never lets you go. If I could
build a world half as convincing as the Seven Kingdoms, I would consider myself
a master.
Bookish Qualms
1. “It’s
a children’s book, so who cares about the writing!”
As
I said, writing is very important for me, and what infuriates me is when
writers/editors/whoever decide that the quality is not significant for the
book.
I
recently read both of these – children’s fantasy. I enjoyed The Cry of the
Icemark very very much (Eragon much less). What they both had in common (Eragon
far more so) was the occasionally sloppy writing, the too-many-adverbs, the
general laxness that, I believe, came from an editor who was yawning their way
through the manuscript because they thought that children’s books didn’t need
good quality writing.
Yes,
OK, so maybe a nine-year-old isn’t going to notice it the same way I do. But
there is no way that that takes the pressure off the writer to make it good.
2. Love
Triangles
I
am really, really, really not into love triangles.
Sometimes,
they work. (Anne of the Island
practically has one.) Sometimes – don’t I know this – us female lot are
confused. Sometimes we like two guys at once. Sometimes authors do it really,
really well (like I said, Anne of the Island, as well as Maggie Stiefvater’s
The Raven Cycle, and also Anna and the French Kiss which I am currently
reading, all feature various males).
But
oftentimes, they don’t.
We
end up with a relationship-obsessed, whiney and sometimes needlessly cruel MC
who can’t see the dystopian government she’s battling / family crisis she’s
facing / quest she’s on / whatever because
she’s so busy moaning about all those guys who are in love with her. I am left
holding the book and thinking “gee. You are not one bit relatable.” All in all,
it’s a bit of a mess.
3. Women
as Goddess
This
is what you might call a classics-specific
Bookish Qualm.
I
read both of these recently (Count I
just finished on Tuesday) and I really loved them: they were beautifully
written, great plots and characters. But this is my problem: the young female
characters are all the same. Beautiful, sensitive, pure-hearted. The ideal of
virtue.
*cue
vomiting*
Right,
OK, I have no problem with sweet teenage girl characters. They – Lucie from A
Tale of Two Cities, and Valentine and Haydee from The Count of Monte Cristo –
are great, and I love them both. But can we stop with the fainting, the
blushing, the white shapely arms and cloud of hair, the screaming at every
moment. Cast your eye over this description of Haydee:
The extreme beauty of the countenance, that shone forth in loveliness that mocked the vain attempts of dress to augment it, was peculiarly and purely Grecian; there were the large, dark, melting eyes, the finely formed nose, the coral lips, and pearly teeth, that belonged to her race and country. And, to complete the whole, Haydee was in the very springtide and fulness of youthful charms -- she had not yet numbered more than eighteen summers.
This
is a beautiful piece of writing, and of course physical perfection is a trait
that some women, and thus some female characters, possess. But do you know what
else? They’re almost utterly two-dimensional. They have no flaws, it would
seem, apart from the girlish frailty and over-tenderness of heart. WAKE UP,
WORLD! WOMEN AREN’T LIKE THAT!
This
does not come up in the modern fiction I read and, interestingly, it’s only the
classics written by men that present
this idealised view.
Annoying.
4. Parents
Take the Backseat
How
many parents are there present in YA/children’s fiction?
Harry
Potter – parents murdered.
The
Hunger Games – no father.
Icemark
– no mother.
Inkheart
– no mother.
Septimus
Heap – an orphan.
Parents
are a rare breed! Of course it’s often necessary to the plot – Harry’s parents
need to be dead, we know – but I do like to see a parent now and again. They
are pretty necessary, you know.
So tell me: what are your bookish loves, and your
bookish qualms? Do you recognise any of mine? And have you read any of these
books I’ve mentioned? If you’ve done a post vaguely similar to this, link me
up. (If you haven’t, link me up anyway. I’d love to visit.)
Emily
x