Anyways, now that I've found a playlist of somewhat decent music on Youtube to calm me, I think I can refocus my efforts on this. And what I was actually going to talk about.
So I finished Lord Sunday this weekend, and gosh, such a sad ending. But my fetish for the evil types has blossomed again as I found myself beginning to like Lord Sunday (one of many antagonists) over Arthur (protagonist). And although Garth Nix did a pretty good job tying up all the lose ends, and I probably should have seen this ending coming, I still feel like it didn't do justice to this amazing series.
I now found myself trying to mope through Sunday (the actual day of the week) with the heavy feeling that comes with the completion of a series. You feel heavy and sad that it's over, but there's also that tingling undermined spark of self-confidence in the fact that you did read them all, every single one of them. And that makes you proud. But you always feel a little emptier inside when you finish novels.
I think Cornelia Funke put it best in Inkheart when she said "Books are like flypaper... memories cling to the printed page better than anything else." And it's so true. Every time you read a good novel, you put a little of yourself into it for safe keeping. It holds the memories of the time that you read it, like a snapshot of your life. It's been dragged through the day, lugged from place to place, switched from bag to bag, swapped, traded, loved, shared, fought over, and usually at some point in the climax, been thrown at a good solid wall. It's beat up and tattered. It has dates and names and places scrawled hastily into the flyleafs. You remember the book that you took on your trip to Italy, or the one that's been to New York and back. You remember the one you lost, panicked, and then found buried in your bookshelf. You forget the ones you read too quickly, or forgot to take with you (they're usually not the best ones). You cherish the ones that got you through rough times, the ones you escaped to, and the ones you read over and over again as a child.
Books are constant landmarks in a readers life. I remember reading Red is Best when I was going into Kindergarden. It's one of the few things I do remember from this time.
I remember being fascinated with the tales of Robert Munsch, and Mercer Mayer, and Ronald Dahl. I faithfully read Dr. Seuss to the class and read Wallop and Wiz and the Bottle of Fiz and Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Day every night. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone got me through Grade Three Testing, was my first true novel and is also the first book I was afraid of finishing. My mother had to read it to me.
The first few books of Jenny Nimmo's Children of the Red King series got me through terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad Grade Six where I clung to books and whatever friends I had to survive. My grade six book project was on Artemis Fowl: The Arctic Incident (Eoin Colfer), the first time I started a series in the wrong order, not that I regret it.
My grade eight book project was Sir Thursday (Garth Nix), which I read about four times through, and I never made the mistake of picking a book in the middle of a series for a book report ever again.
Grade nine was Twilight (Stephenie Meyer), Grade ten was Airborn (Kenneth Oppel). Grade Eleven sadly contains no book reports, but I read some amazing classics, like Frankenstein, Beowulf, and Interview with a Vampire, even if I din't enjoy them all.
I can map out the whole first seventeen years of my life in books. Isn't that amazing? If only you could create a list of all the places they've been too!
But enough about books. For my birthday with my family this weekend, my parents got me a brand new tripod that's actually my height, lightweight, and can go inches off ground for macro photography. It thrilled me and spurred me to complete a project I've been meaning to do for a while. I covered one whole wall of my room in prints. And let me tell you, it looks epic! It's all my favourite prints too. I can't wait to take more to cover the larger wall. :)
So hear I am, less than a week after my seventeenth birthday, surrounded by my passions, photography, reading, writing, and creating, and I'm think I might be starting to convince myself that despite what everyone says I really do want to go into some kind of English-Photography combo for Post Secondary. Though if I want to get anywhere in life, it's gonna have to be a university English degree, not a Sheradon collage photography major. Which I want to avoid thinking about right now because it means more work for me. Ugh.
Anyways, that's enough for tonight and the computer is really starting to piss me off.
Read on, write on ladies and gentlemen.
Sweet Dreams! May Itex never find you, Nightmare spare your soul, and Ford Prefect never get a hold of your credit cards. :)
Amanda Out.
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