I Did a Jane Austen Thing

Ask yourselves this: what’s the one thing that can get an introverted book nerd to leave the house in coronatimes?

If your answer was A Jane Austen Thing, you would be correct.

It’s been a long time since I did a coronavirus-related post, and that’s partly because for the past few months, things in Croatia seemed to be going okay. Sure, our case numbers were rising, there were quite a few outbreaks in nightclubs and bars and officials hurriedly appearing in the media blaming young people for being… well, young people, but for the most part we were enjoying the summer, travelling, seeing friends. Apart from the fact that we had to don masks whenever we entered a shop, life seemed to have more or less gone back to normal.

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Top 10 Super Long Book Titles from My University Essays: Being a Short and Incomplete Historie of the Ridiculously Verbose and Unnecessarily Long Titles of the Tomes Brought Forth for Studye During My Younger and More Academic Years, Written in the Yeare 2020

I’ve been out of academia for a while now, but if there’s one thing that I remember about being at uni, it’s the fact that there is a lot of reading. And I mean a lot.

Sometimes that reading is fascinating, sometimes it’s decidedly not (I’m looking at you, Jacques Lacan, you bastard). I’ve already written a list of top 10 books I think every lit major should read, and this week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic was a great chance to revisit my university days once more. As soon as I saw the topic was extremely long book titles, the reading I did at uni immediately sprang to mind. Because if there’s one thing academics love, it’s a nice, long, and juicy title.

Should the Narnia books be read in chronological order or in publication order?

The Narnia books were a massive part of my childhood. I read them and re-read them, listened to radio dramatisations, and anxiously awaited the release of the movies, long after the age where this sort of feverish devotion to a children’s series might have been deemed acceptable.

So naturally the question of whether they should be read in chronological order or publication order is one that I feel I have to weigh in on, and since that’s the theme of this week’s Classic Remarks, well, here I go.

My Top Ten Favourite Quotations

If you’re anything like me, you keep a notebook of your favourite book quotations. It’s a fancy book, perhaps gilded or with some nice patterns on it, because as we all know, pretty covers make books just a little bit more interesting. (Incidentally, the same rule applies to all of the following: movie posters, mediocre wine, cheap t-shirts, and all the men you met before the age of twenty seven.) But sometimes there are also some incredible quotations inside those covers. I’m using today’s Top Ten Tuesday prompt to explore some of my favourites.

Thanks, Davie – A Classic That Changed My Life

I haven’t written about Dickens very often on this blog; in fact, I feel like I’ve downright neglected him. And because this week’s Classic Remarks prompt was about life-changing classics, I thought I’d take this opportunity to talk about one of my earliest encounters with classics, and finally give poor Charlie a bit of facetime on this blog.

Welcome to the Sci-Fi Machine: The Machine Stops (1928), by E.M. Forster

There’s a lot of people out there who are doubtful about sci-fi. Isn’t it all weirdly phallic spaceships flying about and aliens shooting at each other using an assortment of weapons that look like someone took the contents of a kitchen drawer and went bananas with a can of spray paint and some furniture polish, they wonder? And, yes, there is that. But kitchen utensils notwithstanding, I’ve always been an unabashed lover of the genre. So it was a source of endless delight to me to discover that one of my favourite early 20th-century writers had written a short story set in a dystopian world run by something known only as the Machine.

Top Ten Books with Colours in the Title (Plus! A Lot of Really Bad Colour Puns)

It’s Top Ten Tuesday time again. Because today’s prompt was delightfully open to interpretation, I decided to think long and hard about how I could be creative with it.

But after about two minutes of strained cogitation I decided that was too difficult, so I just combed through my Goodreads list until I found ten books with colours in the title. So here they are. Forgive me if my choices come a little… out of the blue. I hope I won’t come out of this too red-faced. Then again, I’ve always been a bit of a black sheep.

(WARNING: there will be a lot more of this. I make no apologies. I’m just showing you my true colours.)

The Great Reading Slump of 2018/2019

Source

So here’s a sobering thought: in the year 2018, I read a grand total of 15 books.

Yes, you read that right. 15 books. It’s a number so astonishingly low you would be forgiven for thinking that I in fact died in February of the previous year, and have spent the remaining time haunting the library and bewailing the fact that when I try to pick up a book now it just passes right through me, which incidentally is the feeling I get whenever I try to muster the enthusiasm to finally read Ulysses.

The Real Neat Blog Award

It’s December, and you know what that means – Sara’s going to turn up out of the blue with a long-overdue blog post!

As you know from my recent (and by ‘recent’ I of course mean ‘from-two-months-ago’; doesn’t everybody?) Versatile Blogger post, I am terrible when it comes to blog awards. And although it’s a bit late and I really don’t deserve it for leaving this so late, I wanted to respond to the little squid’s nomination for the Real Neat Blog Award. Thank you, and I’m sorry it took me three bazillion years to respond (actual count of the time that has elapsed since the nomination).

The Versatile Blogger Award

Okay, I’m the worst when it comes to these things. Carolyn very kindly nominated me for the Versatile Blogger award two years ago (yep, two years ago). I think it’s fair to say I’m stretching the definition of ‘versatility’ to the limit by applying it to the presupposed time limit that usually applies to these things.