List of Books to Read in 2012

For I am a reader as well as a writer. In no particular order:

• A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami
• A Million Little Pieces by James Frey
• The Great Gatsby by Scott F. Fitzgerald
• Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
• Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson
• Betwixt by Tara Bray Smith
• Tales of Madman Underground by John Barnes
• Walden by Henry David Thoreau
• The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
• To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
• The Stranger by Albert Camus
• Les Miserables by Hugo Victor
• The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
• 1984 by George Orwell
• Mark of Athena by Rick Riordan (once it comes out!)
• Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie
• The Color Purple by Alice Walker
• Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
• Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
• One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• A Tree Grows in Brookyln by Betty Smith 
• A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
• I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou (summer reading list)
• The Little Prince by Atoine de Saint-Exupery
• City of Lost Souls by Cassandra Clare (when it comes out)
• The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
• Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak (my childhood stank, obviously)

Oh lordy, wish me luck. As you can see, I read pretty much anything except for romance. I don't expect to enjoy all of these books, but I do want to read them in case I do. Have a happy new year!

Some updates.

Sorry it's been so long! Not that anyone's noticed, anyways, but I still faithfully update this blog as a sort of writing diary, I guess? Huh. It's been over month since the occurance, but I finished my novel! Congratulations to me. I'm in the editing stage and it's like a literary hell. All these passages and plot holes and bluh bluh. I'm so lazy. I can't deal with it right now, so I've been reading a great deal to take my mind off the novel and absorb some good writing skills, hopefully. Expect a truckload of book reviews in the near future.

Also I'm in the Philippines. It's really hot. I went scuba diving. Hurray.

And right now I'm watching Peter Pan (the live version from eight years back) and the Aunt just said, "There is nothing as difficult to marry as a novelist." I laughed and thought of a piece I read called You Should Date an Illiterate Girl, which led me to think of another piece I read called Date a Girl Who Reads, both of which I think are beautiful.

Okay, bye.

In which I managed to write 10k words in one night.

Decisively deciding that yesterday night would hold a decisive battle in the war against me not winning NaNo, I headed to the sofa and thanked God for the fact that we didn't have Internet in our hotel room. (Right, I was in a hotel room. I could have been watching TV or playing pool or whatever you do in hotels, but I wasn't. Props to me.) My fingers tap tap tapped the keys like mad; I think typing should be a sport. I had to take a break because I got hand cramps. I deserve a medal in my humblest of opinions. Four hours after a mad dash to 40k words, I press alt+T+W and alas! I had reached my word count goal for the day.

If I could write at that breakneck pace everyday, then I'd be long done with my novel by now. But I don't work at a mechanically steady pace. I have my lackadaisical why-am-I-even-doing-this days, and my less common determined let's-get-down-to-business days. There's only three days left in NaNo, and I need to stay in the latter stage in order to be a winner. Let's hope I do.

3k words behind on Nano.

One brave Sunday, Dana faced the computer screen with the challenge of writing 6k words in order to catch up to her word-count goal. To say the least, she caught up to her word-count goal. It was a feat of sorts, how she managed to write that much on a busy day.

She is faced with the lighter challenge of writing 3k words, but unfortunately, the brave heroine is fatigued from her writing journeys. Will she suck it up and write? She should. But will she?

midnight masterpiece;

Let the cool air fill up

your lungs, bring nighttime into your

body—forget to exhale.

Decipher the Braille written

across your skin,

the cold of your fingers

raising the dots on your arms.

Let the sky swallow you,

wrap you in dark blue and

spread constellations like freckles throughout

your skin.

Lose yourself in the midnight masterpiece—

join the stars.

join the stars.

Lagging.

I feel like I'm the computer and the computer-user at the same time. My heart has been clicking on my mind's "fucking write something" command but my mind is lagging, loading the action perpetually.

I'm only behind by 3k words, which is not bad at all under normal circumstances. I've been incessantly lackadaisical though, lately. Ughfaksljfhasdlkfjh.

Book Review: Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac by Gabrielle Zevin

Title: Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac
Author: Gabrielle Zevin
Rating: 4.3/5
Rationale for Rating:

I got this book on an impulse, because I adored the cover, and because I'd read Elsewhere in sixth grade and loved it. I got more than I expected. I thought it would just be some fluff to read, but it was more than that. It still met some of my expectations. However, I found myself incredibly attached to the best friend--which I often do with books, especially when the best friend is of the opposite sex and oh-so-secretly in love with the MC. Anyways, I digress. It was a decent book.

Basically, Naomi Porter is sixteen and about to start her junior year when she gets a concussion and amnesia from it. She can't remember past sixth grade, which is hard when eleventh grade is such a crucial year for her. She has a boyfriend, Ace, who she can't remember. She's the co-editor of the school yearbook with her best friend, Will, whose inside jokes she doesn't understand. Her parents' divorce, which happened four years ago, is brand new to her, and her dad's fiance is even brand new-er. She has French, photography and tennis, none of which she knew she was into. And amidst it all is James, the mysterious boy that called the ambulance on the day of her accident.

It received a 4.3 because of the lack of character development from some of the secondary-but-not-minor characters, the bland prose, and the uncharacteristic choices that Naomi makes. And I didn't like how the author sort of explained things instead of using dialogue or some other clever method. And I thought that it was sort of unnecessary to have Naomi be an adopted orphan from Russia. Also, I hated James. I just did. I recommend it mostly to teenage girls that like romance books but think that Nicholas Sparks' books are too long. Just kidding. I guess it's a nice book to read when you want a decent love story.

Spoilers from here on out.

Like I said, I enjoyed it, for the most part. But I hated James, her love interest for most of the book. I hated how he rejected Naomi's love but also pined for her incessantly; I hated how he was such a terrible influence on her. He had depression, yeah, but he seemed to blame all of his problems on that. What a hypocrite--he already said to Naomi that she shouldn't blame all of her problems on her amnesia.

And at some point in the book, I hated Naomi, but only for a little. I hated that she was suddenly so dependent on James, so needy. She made huge sacrifices for a love that lasted for, like, four months, maybe shorter. Months and time lapses weren't really mentioned in the book, which annoyed me because I never had a sense of when things happened. Anyways.

But I loved Will completely. As stated previously, I have this thing for best-guy-friends. The second a male is introduced as the female protagonist's best friend, I almost immediately ship them (with the exception of Hermione and Harry). I call it the Rudy Steiner Syndrome. I love his wisecracks and formally casual way of talking and I loved how he was so subtly concerned about Naomi and I loved his mixtapes and the birthday present he got for her and I loved how he loved Naomi oh-so much.