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First things first, look what finally arrived!
Yes, it's my third time buying a Cabin Pressure boxset, and my stereo is still broken, but it has a booklet and extras! And there's the new Souvenir Programme seasons too! Last time I tried to buy them, they got lost somewhere in Germany, not kidding. But now my collection is finally complete! It's definitely time to buy a new stereo though. As it is I have to use my super old portable cd player, and it's a miracle that thing still works.
I have a new entry for the Reading Bingo, completely unplanned too. In Italy today was the "M'Illumino Di Meno" day, a day to turn off the lights to remind ourselves not to waste electricity. This time it was twice as special, as Sam Cristoforetti took a picture of our country from space at the moment when all lights were turned off. Since we were supposed to keep the lights off for an hour, from 6 pm to 7 pm, I sat on the couch with the cat in the dark and read a book I'd just bought on Amazon with the Kindle app on my phone. I didn't like the book, but the experience was still lovely, although a bit claustrophobic. We are indeed creatures of the light.
The square is "A Short Book", and the book is Your Body is an Ocean: Love and Other Experiments by Nikita Gill. I found a couple of quotes by her I liked on tumblr, got curious, and since the book itself was really cheap, I bought it. Sadly, apart for a couple of inspired lines, the book itself is boring and pretentious. It's 33 short stories, poems, dialogues, but they all read as something written by a teenager who's very full of herself. There's this pervasive feeling of the author being that one special snowflake, and all stories are about doomed romances. With the exception of a couple of clumsy attempts at addressing mature romance, it's mostly about a young girl and a young boy falling out of love. Not as cheesy as it could be, just very boring, with nothing original or truly personal to say. Not once I felt connected to the author, or to her characters, not once I felt like she was truly feeling what she was writing about.
Basically, this is what it made me feel like.
In other news, I learned how to play Johnny Cash's Hurt with my ukulele. All while learning that it's a cover of a Nine Inch Nails song. What the hell, I was so sure it was a Cash song, it never even occured to me that I could be wrong! I listened to the original, only 20 years late to the party, and I liked it, but not nearly as much as I love Cash's version. Which is also surprisingly easy to play. I should work on the strumming pattern though, that's the hard part.
Yes, it's my third time buying a Cabin Pressure boxset, and my stereo is still broken, but it has a booklet and extras! And there's the new Souvenir Programme seasons too! Last time I tried to buy them, they got lost somewhere in Germany, not kidding. But now my collection is finally complete! It's definitely time to buy a new stereo though. As it is I have to use my super old portable cd player, and it's a miracle that thing still works.
I have a new entry for the Reading Bingo, completely unplanned too. In Italy today was the "M'Illumino Di Meno" day, a day to turn off the lights to remind ourselves not to waste electricity. This time it was twice as special, as Sam Cristoforetti took a picture of our country from space at the moment when all lights were turned off. Since we were supposed to keep the lights off for an hour, from 6 pm to 7 pm, I sat on the couch with the cat in the dark and read a book I'd just bought on Amazon with the Kindle app on my phone. I didn't like the book, but the experience was still lovely, although a bit claustrophobic. We are indeed creatures of the light.
The square is "A Short Book", and the book is Your Body is an Ocean: Love and Other Experiments by Nikita Gill. I found a couple of quotes by her I liked on tumblr, got curious, and since the book itself was really cheap, I bought it. Sadly, apart for a couple of inspired lines, the book itself is boring and pretentious. It's 33 short stories, poems, dialogues, but they all read as something written by a teenager who's very full of herself. There's this pervasive feeling of the author being that one special snowflake, and all stories are about doomed romances. With the exception of a couple of clumsy attempts at addressing mature romance, it's mostly about a young girl and a young boy falling out of love. Not as cheesy as it could be, just very boring, with nothing original or truly personal to say. Not once I felt connected to the author, or to her characters, not once I felt like she was truly feeling what she was writing about.Basically, this is what it made me feel like.
In other news, I learned how to play Johnny Cash's Hurt with my ukulele. All while learning that it's a cover of a Nine Inch Nails song. What the hell, I was so sure it was a Cash song, it never even occured to me that I could be wrong! I listened to the original, only 20 years late to the party, and I liked it, but not nearly as much as I love Cash's version. Which is also surprisingly easy to play. I should work on the strumming pattern though, that's the hard part.
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For the "A Book With A One-Word Title" I read Rainbow Rowell's Fangirl. I bought it because the cover art was by gingerhaze, an artist I love. I devoured the whole book in less than a day, it was wonderful. It's the story of Cath, a fanfiction writer who's on her first year of university, has social anxiety, and whose relationship with her twin sister is starting to crumble. She falls in love, tries to keep the deadlines on her hugely popular Harry/Draco fic, all the while worrying about her family and her future. Story-wise, it's nothing new, but the characters are so alive and real that it all feels new and exciting. The importance of fandom for Cath is described with love and respect, and every chapter starts with an excerpt from either a fic by Cath, or from the imaginary Harry Potter books she adores (they're not called Harry Potter, but they're obviously talking about Harry and Draco). Plus the writing is great, fluid and fresh, and the author avoids all the tropes she could have easily fallen into. If I had to find one flaw, I'd say the ending is a bit rushed, but that's probably because I was loving the characters so much I didn't want it to end.
For the "Free Square" one, because holy hell these squares are getting harder and harder to fill, I went with a short story I read in the South Terminal of Gatwick Airport, Annie Proulx's Brokeback Mountain. I'm not sure what I thought of it. I really liked the language, word choices, structure, and the style in general. But having seen the movie, it felt like reading a very rushed synopsis of it. And I know it's dumb, because the movie was based on the short story, not the other way around, but I fear that seeing the movie first completely ruined the short story for me. Plus it's an even more depressing story than I remembered. Really, really depressing. I'd really love to read a story about two guys, or two girls, who fall in love and live happily ever after. Seriously, I still have to read anything, outside the wonderful realm of fanfiction, where gay romance has a happy ending. 
