Beautiful Book Covers Tag

Dear Reader,

You may remember that a few posts ago I wrote that me and cameras and I don't get along to well. But then I watched this book tag created by theheavyblanks and on an impulse I decided to be brave and face the camera again when making a response. So, yep, I made a youtube video. Its my first ... ever. Here it is. I hope you enjoy it, dear reader. If not, your welcome to tell me how I can improve if I ever decide to make another.    

Nida

Life: as I see it - my Space (Revised) edition

Dear Reader,

Confession: I've been feeling rather nostalgic lately, for obvious reasons, and so you'll just have to bare with me for this post. So, since it has now been a year (+2 weeks) since I posted Life: as I see it - my Space edition (one of my most popular posts) I thought it was time I showed you, my dear reader, how my bookshelves have changed and how they haven't.

I can't wait to add Maggie Steifvater's Forever to this, which is now finally out. It is something that can't be help it, I'm a compulsive completionist.    

Other favourite writers on this shelf are Na'ima B. Robert and Jamilah Kolocotronis.     

This shelf is directly underneath the one above. You'll  find here Kristin Cashore as well as Kate Mosse, with some Robin McKinley being cut off at the bottom of the picture. 

This use to be my "Classics" shelf, but is now mainly Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters, followed by the DVD of my Favourite BBC adaptations of Classics, including: North & South, Cranford, Middlemarch and Little Dorrit.      

This is my, much more serious, non-fiction shelf of mostly medical books, with the exception of Green Deen and  How I Killed Pluto, and Why it Had it Coming.

Aaahhh, Poetry... These huge collections are three of my favourites (minus LAT - see the comment on the link): Thomas Hardy, William Wordsworth and John Keats.  

And peeping in from the top are some of Rudyard Kipling's best works. 

The One and Only, Original bookshelf. Once upon a time, when I was a very little girl, this was the only bookshelf in my bedroom. Hence it still contains the likes of the Chronicles of Narnia and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. I have to admit, I haven't much grown out of these books in all these years.  

I'd also like to mention Philip Pulman's Sally Lockhart books, the under-appreciated Garth Nix, and Frank Beddor for obvious reasons. 

Here we have a small neat section reserved for historical fiction and my favourite autobiographies. I think the titles/authors in this picture are clear enough to read, except the orange Dairy of a Young Girl. Anne Frank, may you rest in peace. 

This is where the rest of the Classics from the "ex-Classics shelf" have ended up, including Charles Dickens (in green), Victor Hugo (in the stripped blue)  and my copy of the Selected  Poems of Lord Alfred Tennyson. 

This is the spot where my beloved Inkworld Trilogy use to reside, but it was burrowed by an old friend and never returned. :'(

So to fill that gap in my heart...I mean shelf, I have filled this spot with the not as much beloved Books of Pallinor. Sorry Alison Croggon, that is just the honest truth.      

   

The Twilight Saga has been transferred, to the top of my big wardrobe to have a teeth and claw battle with...

... Christopher Paolini's dragons. Who will win this epic dual of fantasy vs. horror in the Young Adult Fiction genre? 

Let me know what you think in the Comments section below. 

Aside: Vampires come into the 'horror' category, don't they? Or am I thoroughly deceived? 

To lend his support to the Fantasy genre, is my collection of Tolkein's work, 

(also found at the top of another wardrobe).    

And finally the most important shelf in my bedroom, which resides in the top right-hand corner of my desk, hold my religious books. Most things Islamic, can be found in this shelf with The Noble Qur'an at the heart of it all. If you have been following my blog for long enough, you'll remember that much-used little blue book at the top is my pocket-size version of The Sealed Nectar, a biography of the Prophet Muhammed (PBUH).   

By the way, if you look to the far left, you'll see two unnamed books. They're mine. The grey one is choked-full of my poetry and the floral-pattern-one being my first note book entirely concerned with my novel-in-the-making Life in Conversations.    

I hope, dear Reader, that you have been awed and inspired by my vast array of books. I was going to continue on to a little piece about the gardening I've been doing recently with my mum, and the efforts we have put into salvaging and saving the lives of about 16 small and starved geranium plants we found on sale at B&Q. But I've realised that this post is already far too long and that tales of my epic weeding might bore you, dear Reader, to death. And that is something I don't want on my concious. 

Anyway, making this post longer is now no-longer an option as I must go and make some greek-style pasta for my ravenous brothers. 

Nida

Writers Writing and Reading!

Dear Reader,

Even though I'm trying my very best to keep the obsessive-irrelevant-fiction-reading to a minimum, I've still managed to find myself just-about half-way through The Reading Group by Elizabeth Noble. I felt it started a bit slowly, when I was completely clueless of what the characters were like, but that turned out to be fun part; discovering the people these characters were, guessing where they were going and where they were coming from, 'who is the one with the "straying husband"? and who's looking for a "new lover"?' But reading this book has left me in emotional turmoil. For example, right now I'm...:

1) hating Harriet, for having the perfect "Mr. bloody Darcy" husband and being completely unable to appreciate him,

2) intensly angry with Nicole for being a coward and not leaving the worthless Gavin who doesn't even deserve to stand in her shadow (in my opinion),

3) greatly happy for Polly for having found Jack (with all the romance of a new love),

4) sympathising and loving Susan for her devotion to her mother,

5) anxious and excited with Cressida over ther pregnancy

6) and, most of all, I can't help wanting to cry everytime I read about Clare.

All this in the space of the first four chapters. How is anyone suppose to handle this sort of rollercoaster, even someone like me who is well known for her 180-degree-mood-swings-per-hour (just ask my brothers; they  will willingly testify to this claim)?

I think that all this (the emotional turmoil stated above) is because I believe that Elizabethe Noble has done exactly what she said (through Harriet's mouth) makes a good, no, great book: "I realise that it is because I care so much more about the characters..." And I haven't even come to the best part of the book yet, which happens to be the parts when they are all sitting together disscussing the books that are on their reading list. It's intriguing to read the often-overlapping, detailed, (anonymous?) conversations trying to guess who made what comment and seeing how I could relate it to their different stories.

And this brings me not-so-neatly onto the main topic of this weeks post: writers reading and writing about other writer's writing. A few weeks ago I came across this Link to a post about "Author Bashing" - in the wise words of Robin Mckinley. It's about what some really-famous authors have said about other really-famous authors. Some of those quotes I already knew about but I never really realised how harsh and critical writers can be (which is quite strange coming from a person who's written a number of "harsh and critical" reviews herself). For example, here is Mark Twain's opinion on our beloved Jane Austen, "Every time I read 'Pride and Prejudice,' I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone." For reasons beyond my understanding, I found this quote the funniest of the lot, maybe because the image in my head remined me so much of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, a book that made me both laugh out loud (ROFLMAO-style) and feel quite queasy, at the same time! Ah, but Mark Twain himself has been called a "hack writer" by William Faulkner, who then goes on to say that he [Twain] "tricked out a few of the old proven sure fire literary skeletons with sufficient local color to intrigue the superficial and the lazy." I guess we should all believe in karma then!  

 

But despair not, my dear Reader. Not all of what writers say about each other is hateful. Just yesterday a read such a wonderful review by Robin McKinley - a favourite author - on one of my favourite books, Lament by Maggie Stiefvater. BTW, having read all of Maggie Stiefvater's released books, I am now eagerly anticipating Linger, the sequel to Shiver (can't wait!). 

As far as writers' "supposed egos" go I've even found, unsurprisingly, that some writers are fans of other writers. Follow this Link if you want to know what happened when one writer/fan, Lucy Coats, met with the writer of the exceptionally brilliant Books of Pellinor Series, Alison Croggan.  

Anyway, thats about all I have to babble about this week. I must now return to my pot of yohgurt and berries. 

Nida

P.S. - Have you noticed how almost all the writers I've typed about today are female? Not deliberately done on my part, I just noticed it myself right now. BTW, I have nothing against male writers, in fact, many of my favourite books and poems have been written by men ... but this seems like a discussion for another post so I'll just leave it at this, for now.