I've been really sick the past week. The whole family passed around a cold that could knock you on your ass. I would love to say that I was so sick I couldn't write, but that would be a lie. The real reason I haven't written any posts lately is because I haven't made the time for it. It's a conscious choice a writer makes every day. "Today, I am going to write!" I've been choosing to do other things. For instance, I painted so many pumpkins I began to feel like I missed my calling in life. I should have been a professional pumpkin painter all along! I also went to a lot of wedding-ish events and read a lot of books.
Books I Read/am Reading:
1. The Scorch Trials by James Dashner. I read The Maze Runner (the first book in the trilogy) back in the Spring when a classmate suggested it. It was ok, but like a lot of trilogies, nothing was resolved in the first book and you're left with more questions than answers. Even though I only thought the book was decent I had to read the rest of the trilogy just to have all my questions answered. Book 2 was a vast improvement over the first, but it still left you wondering "what's the point?" at the end.
2. The Death Cure by James Dashner is the final book in the trilogy. I am not quite done with it, but so far it has been the best of the three. I haven't had any major questions answered yet, so he better pack a lot of information in the last hundred pages or I will be one very unhappy reader!
3. The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett. I started this behemoth of a book months ago...I am sure I will get around to finishing it one day. I went into it with zero expectations of enjoying it, so I was pleasantly surprised when it held my interest for five hundred pages. Now if I could just pick it back up and read the last five hundred I will feel like I've put a challenge behind me. Maybe when I'm done with my current reads...
4. The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells. I just finished watching every episode of Warehouse 13. Anyone familiar with the show knows the intriguing storyline crafted around H.G. Wells. Between that and my desire to read as many of the classics as I can, I decided to give Helena a try. When I'm not struggling to decipher the bizarrely spelled vernacular of the English villagers, I actually like it. Literary people don't shoot me for this, but I was always under the mistaken impression that The Invisible Man was about a black man in pre-integration America. Oops! Not so much...
5. Before I Fall by Lauren Oliver. This book brings us back to the monster cold I'm nursing. When you're already congested and stuffy and miserable, the last thing you want to do is cry. Crying only makes nasal problems worse in my experience. Not to mention the massive headache that usually accompanies serious bawling. I went into this book knowing it was about a girl who dies. I knew the premise- she lives her last day seven times and has revelations about her life and death. I knew this, and yet it never occurred to me that I might be turned into a heaving, sobbing, wailing mess as I read it. I cried when Dumbledore died. I cried when Dobby died. I cried when the bodies were catalogued at the end of the castle fight. I cried for The Host, 13 Reasons Why, and Ella f'ing Enchanted. But I have never, in all of my reading years (19) sobbed until I thought my head would split apart at the seams and all the water and salt in my body would gush out in a fountain of tears. I cried hard and long is my point, people. It's not even that it was sad, which it was. It was that you come to know and care about Sam(MC) so completely that her death is real. I wasn't just crying for Sam, I was grieving. That words can have that much power...that 26 letters strung together in a near infinite number of combinations to make words that are then strung together in more infinite combinations that when read produce emotions and physical reactions that hurt and dig and cut...that is why I want to be a writer.
No comments:
Post a Comment