Page Turners: Leaves of Grass

I am still reading The Emerald Atlas. It's great but as much as I like the setting, characters, tone, storyline etc, I don't feel any pull to sit down and read it. I have no idea why and it's very annoying.

I also read Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman this week. I read the Kindle version, despite not having a Kindle, because it's free. But I would have bought it in book form if there hadn't been a free version available to me.

Leaves of Grass is dense, some of the poems are really long and that can be a bit off putting at times but others are only a few lines. It is a celebration of the human body, of being alive and all the tiny seemingly insignificant details of daily life that we often miss. Walt Whitman also enjoys sex and loves to talk about it in his poetry without any pretence, he doesn't shy away from the reality of the human body, complete with arm pits, pubic hair and genitals. 

Some snippets I liked from Leaves of Grass:

I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so
placid and self-contain'd,
...
I stand and look at them long and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
No one is dissatisfied, no one is demented with the
mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands
of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.

Here, out of my pocket, some moss which I pull'd off a live-oak in
Florida as it hung trailing down,

To me these and the like of these are curiously answer'd by my
lovers, my dear friends,
When he whom I love travels with me or sits long while
holding me
by the hand,
When the subtle air, the impalpable, the sense that words and reason
hold not, surround us and prevade us,
Then I am charged with untold and untellable wisdom, I am silent, I
require nothing further,

Behold this swarthy face, these gray eyes,
This beard, the white wool unclipt upon my neck,
My brown hands and the silent manner of me without charm;

Listen To This: 2ne1

2NE1 - Ugly

I love doing my work to Kpop, it really motivates me. So here's one of my favourites.

Sunday Catch Up

Well this week my fiancé and I treated ourselves to a lovely new camera. The old point-n-shoot that my Dad gave us is out of action because my fiancé lost the charger and apparently they don't make it any more so you can't really buy a new one. Great. So I decided it was time to upgrade to a better camera anyway and we got this bad boy:

Isn't it a beaut? I'm in love.

Nikon Coolpix L120

My mum also gave me a load of plants for out yard...and then it rained for about three days straight. So I didn't get to actually plant them and put them outside until Thursday. Here is what our yard looks like, it's tiny and full of weeds.

The bricks are from what used to be the house's chimmeny and my fiancé's dad kept them for some reason. So now they are the plants home. The brown pot on the left, which I think might have daffodils in it, is our pet rat Brave's resting place. Living in a house with no garden makes it hard to bury your pets but I think she'd be cool with living in a plant pot with flowers. Also my fiancé remarked that we should grow a watermelon in it because she loved them.

In other news! I'm going to be taking part in Bloggiesta this year!

I plan to spend the weekend, 31st March and 1st April:

Brushing up my SEO skills.

Creating a new page listing the books I've read so far this year and a page for last year.

A page dedicated to archiving my reviews so it's easier for you guys to find them.

Copying reviews over to Goodreads and Amazon.

Updating links.

Look into making my own business cards for the anthology event, couldn't hurt right?

Sort out my website.

If you want to take part too then you can sign up here.

Something For The Weekend

Something to watch:

Gunbuster 2: Die Buster

I love this anime to bits. It has cute girls, space monsters, lots of shouting and over-powerful weaponry/fighting moves and it's all about friendship, courage and guts. In short, it's awesome. It's also from Gainax which is one of my favourite animation studios and directed by the same person who did FLCL which is another favourite anime, and it's only six episodes or 98 minutes long.

Something to read:

Image Source

I downloaded a copy of Leaves of Grass because the Kindle version is free! I don't actually own a Kindle but you can read it on your computer so I thought, why not? It's free, so who am I to say no?

Something to eat:

Vegan Baked Corndogs

I have never eaten a corndog in my life, so of course I want to make them myself at home! The only reason these are a vegan version is because that's the recipe I found, obviously you don't have to make vegan ones if you don't want to. Mine will at least be vegetarian though.

Baked Tofu in Peanut Sauce

My fiancé loves tofu, whereas I only like eating it if it's cooked in certain ways. I'm really fussy about food textures and if it's too squidgey then it needs to be as far away from me as possible. Grilled tofu is yummy, as is however they cook it at Wagamama, and firm cubes in my miso soup is a must so I'm hoping that baked tofu is going to be good. Fingers crossed!

Feature Friday: International Women's Day

Yesterday was International Women's Day so today's post is dedicated to famous women writers.

Here are just a few!

J.K. Rowling

Ursula Le Guin

Cornelia Funke

Banana Yoshimoto

Margaret Atwood

Maya Angelou

Judy Blume

Sylvia Plath

Kate Chopin

Virginia Woolf

Anne Frank

Enid Blyton

Agatha Christie

Christina Rossetti

There are hundreds of amazing women writer's so this is a very small sample but isn't it great that there's so many to choose from? The list just keeps getting bigger too. I haven't featured many contemporary writers because I think it takes time to become 'great' and so most of the 'great women writers' we think of sadly aren't with us any more. But their work lives on and if you haven't read it, you should. I do wish that there was more variety in race with my list...any recommendations? 

Thursday Thought: Kony 2012

Kony 2012

I'm pretty sure that everyone is aware of the Kony 2012 video that's circulating the internet at the moment. It appears on my Facebook several times a day and I'm already discussing it on two forums. But it shocks me that so many people were unaware of Kony, the LRA and just generally what's going on in Uganda. I don't expect people to know everything, I don't and most of what I know it because a friend of mine lived and worked in Uganda.

But guys, please research things before you start jumping on bandwagons! It's not hard. You have the internet and therefore instant access to millions of pages of information.

Look I've even done some of the hard work for you to give you a start:

The Guardian - Kony 2012 video goes viral, and so do concerns about producers

Metro - KONY 2012: Campaign shedding light on Uganda conflict an online success

Justice in Conflict - Taking ‘Kony 2012′ Down A Notch

Herald Sun - Social media sensation KONY 2012 cops criticism for 'cashing in'

Huffington Post - The Problem With Invisible Children's "Kony 2012"

The Daily What - On Kony 2012

There's just a handful of various people talking about Kony 2012. It took me about two minutes to find them all. It probably took me longer to link them from my blog. So it's not hard.

I'm not saying people shouldn't be activists, it's fantastic to see people taking an interest in things outside of themselves and wanting to make a difference. But don't just sign any old petition that sounds positive. Be intelligent and question things! Don't just go along with the crowd. Read around the subject and then make your decision.

Coveted Cover: The Snow Child

The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey

I need this book in my life. Based around a Russian fairy-tale that I am very familiar with, The Snow Child promises to be a heart-wrenching novel. Plus it's so pretty! The alternative covers are equally gorgeous too. I particularly like these ones:

Although I think the first is my favourite out of them all. Also, I apparently have a thing about stories set in snowy places (this one being set in Alaska), in forests and influenced by Russian fairy-tales. I have a bit of a thing for Scandinavia despite having never been there. If you're interested in the fairy-tale that influenced this novel then read it here, there is also this one that reminds me of The Snow Child even more so, it's one of my favourites, but Ivey refers to The Snow Maiden story by name so I'm guessing it's that one which inspired her. Though I'm not entirely sure.

If you want to read an excerpt of The Snow Child then you can read it at Ivey's website, here.

From Goodreads:

Alaska, 1920: a brutal place to homestead, and especially tough for recent arrivals Jack and Mabel. Childless, they are drifting apart—he breaking under the weight of the work of the farm; she crumbling from loneliness and despair. In a moment of levity during the season’s first snowfall, they build a child out of snow. The next morning the snow child is gone—but they glimpse a young, blonde-haired girl running through the trees. This little girl, who calls herself Faina, seems to be a child of the woods. She hunts with a red fox at her side, skims lightly across the snow, and somehow survives alone in the Alaskan wilderness. As Jack and Mabel struggle to understand this child who could have stepped from the pages of a fairy tale, they come to love her as their own daughter. But in this beautiful, violent place things are rarely as they appear, and what they eventually learn about Faina will transform all of them.