Tuesday 24 April 2012

Teaser Tuesday and Top Ten Tuesday



Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of  Should Be Reading.



My teaser:
"Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can." - Moby-Dick


Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by The Broke and The Bookish.
All time favourite literary characters
In no particular order
1. Esther Greenwood- SO ME! 
2. Holden Caulfield- SO  ME! 
3. Amy March- Not really me but she was always my favorite March sister. 
4. Mia Thermopolis- SO ME!
5. Michael Moscovitz- I WANT TO MARRY+DO him  
6. Sirius Black- I can't get over his death. He can still come back from the Veil, guys. 
7. Ron Weasley- Come on, he is so nice and funny and just generally LIKABLE. 
8. Harry Potter- Childhood hero. 
9. Becky Bloomwood- Only because she is funny and dumb and I sometimes feel dumb so it's nice to have company. 
10. Humbert Humbert- How a child molester ended up on this list is the beauty of Lolita. 
This isn't really the only Top 10. Just the one that came to my mind right now. 

Send me your links too. :) 
And don't forget to stop by my Summer reading list! and check out the 10 things I love about Paper Towns by John Green 

My Summer Reading List Part 1 and thoughts on the *ahem* plagiarism debacle

Wow, the blogosphere has been pretty fucked up, huh?
So what better way to distract myself than making a summer reading list. This way I can keep the whole summer mapped out and finish off a large chunk of my to-read pile.
So here goes, 

1) Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by 


Why it is on this list?
Kafkaesque Underworld. Surrealism. Unicorn skulls. 
Wait, I need to say that again. 
UNICORN SKULLS. 
As if the book didn't have me eating out of it's palm at Kafkaesque


2) The Summer We Read Gatsby: A Novel by 

:) 

3) Suicide Notes by 

Light breezy romances are great for summer and all, BUT I NEED TO GET MY DAILY INTAKE OF DEPRESSING SUICIDAL READZ ON.

4) Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by 

Speaking of depressing as shizz but uplifting books, I am super excited about this one. I already started it and it's great so far. And I love the cover. So quirky.

5) The Boy with the Cuckoo-Clock Heart by 



But this cover is pretty fancy. 


Okay, so I noticed that almost all of the blurbs of these books describe them as "poignant". 
:/ 
We are lurking into pretentious book territory.
What to do? 
.
.
.
.
Oh look, problem solved.

6)  Sixteenth Summer by 


How is that for jazzing things up? That's definitely a non-poignant book. And possibly the most summery of the bunch. 

So, now that the quintessential cheesy summer romance book has been added, the PART 1 of my Summer Reading List is done. 

The whole list is like 30 books, so I am gonna divide it into a few parts and put it up. 

And now onto the plagiarism bit,
It's wrong as hell. I get it. In the blogging world it's the shittiest thing you can do. If someone did it to me, (I mean with all this eloquent shizz I pop out here, it could happen :P), I'd be super angry too. But this, what is happening, what I am sure we are all aware is happening, it sucks. It's just sad. It's one thing to say someone did something wrong and demand an apology, it's another to rally around attacking them on every possible level and write huge posts damaging their reputation. I am not taking any sides. I just feel like some people are not so much angry at the plagiarism per se, as they are overfilled with schadenfreude. 
Well, that was my two cents on the matter. 




“What a treacherous thing to believe that a person is more than a person.” 
- John Green




Sunday 22 April 2012

Paper Towns by John Green


When Margo Roth Spiegelman beckons Quentin Jacobsen in the middle of the night - dressed like a ninja and plotting an ingenious campaign of revenge - he follows her. Margo's always planned extravagantly, and, until now, she's always planned solo. After a lifetime of loving Margo from afar, things are finally looking up for Q . . . until day breaks and she has vanished. Always an enigma, Margo has now become a mystery. But there are clues. And they're for Q. 
Printz Medalist John Green returns with the trademark brilliant wit and heart-stopping emotional honesty that have inspired a new generation of readers.
Published October 16th 2008 by Dutton Juvenile






10 THINGS I LOVE ABOUT PAPER TOWNS


1) Dear John Green,
 You had me at, “Maybe all the strings inside him broke.”

2) Meet the characters:
Quentin: Nerdy, Alternative and Hipster. Basically, every John Green character.
MaRgO:  She capitalises random letters because otherwise it’s not fair to the other letters.
She is mad as a hatter and odd as a bat.
In Ben Starling’s words,"She's the kind of person who either dies tragically at twenty-seven, like Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, or else grows up to win, like, the first-ever Nobel Prize for Awesome."
Also, the show Revenge should drop Emily or Amanda or whatever and follow Margo because hell hath no fury like Margo scorned.
Radar: Nerdy, Obsessed with Omnictionary which is a site like Wikipedia and LOOK, IT EXISTShttp://www.omnictionary.com/index.php/Main_Page
 Oh, and owns the largest collection of Black Santas EVER.
Ben: Funny Ben is Funny.

3) Pop Culture references.
Example: "The last time I was this scared," Radar says, "I actually had to face a Dark Lord in order to make the world safe for wizards."
Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie and Wilco make a special musical appearance.
And THE BELL JAR! THE BELL JAR! MY The Bell Jar. 
Also, Emily Dickinson.

4) The entire novel is weaved along with Walt Whitma’s Song of Myself from his book Leaves of Grass.

5) This book followed major themes of Perception and the Mirrors vs Windows concept.

6) Urban explorers.

7) Quentin is the book version of every character Jesse Eisenberg and Adam Brody have ever played. ( Except Zuckerberg in The Social Network. He would fit too, if he were ever so slightly dumbed down. :P ) And if nothing else, that in itself is enough for me to love the movie.

8) The novel is divided into 3 sub-parts, each providing insight into a major metaphor.
So we have The Strings, The Grass, and The Vessel.
And the only thing I like more than awkward, hyperintellectual, neurotic guys (Read: Woody Allen, Jesse Eisenberg, Adam Brody) is METAPHORS. I can eat metaphors for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

9) I loved this paragraph.
“Here’s what’s not beautiful about it: from here, you can’t see the rust or the cracked paint or whatever, but you can tell what the place really is. You see how fake it all is. It’s not even hard enough to be made out of plastic. It’s a paper town. I mean look at it, Q; look at all those cul-de-sacs, those streets that turn in on themselves, all the houses that were built to fall apart. All those paper people living in their paper houses, burning the future to stay warm. All the paper kids drinking beer some bum bought for them at the paper convenience store. Everyone demented with the mania of owning thing. All the thing paper-thin and paper-frail. And all the people, too.”

10) THE ROAD TRIP. THE BLOODY ROAD TRIP. It was all types of awesomeness and coolness and I can forever fangirl over the road trip. And honestly, it made me wonder why I haven’t read any books on road trips before. Picked up On The Road by Jack Kerouac the very next day. Any other recommendations? 

I don’t know how a book filled with pranks, clues, mystery, beer and naked graduation manages to be philosophical, but this one does. 






Friday 20 April 2012

I Am Back and Friday Follow.

Okay, so I know I was MIA for like a month or so, but that does NOT mean Blogger can go all Facebook on my ass by changing the interface COMPLETELY. 

WHAT IS GOING ON?
WHY DOES MY POST BOX LOOK SO DIFFERENT?

I guess I'll just have to put on my big girl panties on and deal with it. People have had it worse. They had to run from Voldy No-Nose Lord for seven bloody years, fight in The Hunger Games whilst people with whisker's and dyed skin with gems implanted in them watched , or worse still, become a princess in an awesome funny book which Disney RUINS by making it into a lame movie where MICHAEL-FREAKING-MOSCOVITZ ISN'T EVEN THERE. And MIA ISN'T EVEN BLONDE.AND GRANDMERE ISN'T EVEN SCARY. Oh, and Boris and Tina are a no-show too. Grr, okay now I am just upset. 

So, (FINALLY) moving on, I am here to apologize for my long absence, which was because I was super busy with my exams and shit. However,it's the first day of my summer vacations and so I am back to blogging, and am gonna post several book, movies and TV Show recs soon.



Q: Fight! Fight! If you could have two fictional characters battle it out (preferably from books), who would they be and who do you think would win?
Cheshire Cat and Fat Louie. Fat Louie would just sit and laze about and be fat, while Cheshire Cat impresses with his wit and smile.
So, maybe there would be no fight. Mmmm.
How about Arnold, the pygmy puff and Pigwidgeon, the tiny cute owl?
Their fight would be all cute and adorable, like two small furballs rolling about. It would be more like a fur-fest, than a fight. 
So for reals, Gandalf and Dumbledore and I'll never know who won because I can't tell one from the other.

Also, Walt Whitman could have joined if it wasn't strictly fictional characters. 


Ho, Ho, Brandish those beards.  



Q. Book Blogger Influences: Has there been a particular 
book blogger who's influenced what you read? Share with us a review/book blog 
that convinced you to pick up a certain book.


Before I started blogging or knew that Goodreads existed, I read tons of books based on The Story Siren's reviews. Kristi just had this large number of YA books in her archive, so I used to go about leisurely through them and make a to-read list. It didn't influence my reading choice per se but when I was in the mood for YA, it helped. I still do that sometimes, like once a month or something.  Everything is just so systematic and regular in that blog. (Unlike this one :P) 
However, these days I just use Goodreads. I fucking love that site. 



Please drop by links to your answers. 
XO

P.S- You can also follow me on Twitter for my incessant whining or on Pinterest which I LOVE LOVE LOVE and haunt regularly.
http://pinterest.com/thebellejar/
https://twitter.com/#!/WickedWillow666




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