‘Stanley & Marvin: They Hadn’t Seen Each Other in a While’
‘Victor & Susie: He Came in the Vegetable Box’

Children’s books are illustrated with typographical symbols! How much do I love this concept? A lot. Says the author:

‘the main idea was to stress the images and text equally, and play with the fact that they’re both made out of the same ‘ingredients’, which are simply arranged and subsequently read differently. Children’s books often treat text and images like they belong to altogether different worlds and we wanted to avoid that.’

From Creative Review (+1) via Meanjin

I wish I’d read Norweigan Wood a year ago when I needed it most, rather than at the tail end of a deeply frustrating period of personal growth.

If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking. That’s the world of hicks and slobs. Real people would be ashamed of themselves doing that.

The years nineteen and twenty are a crucial stage in the maturation of character, and if you allow yourself to become warped when you’re that age, it will cause you pain when you’re older.

‘You know what girls are like,’ he said. ‘They turn twenty or twenty-one and all of a sudden they start having these concrete ideas. They get super realistic. And when that happens, everything that seemed to sweet and lovable about them begins to look ordinary and depressing.’

Sure they sound trite when taken out of context, but it would have been good to have something to cling to when stewing in the emotional pits of late adolescence. The last quote is particularly apt, especially if you add to the realistic line ‘also bad-tempered and deeply anti-social’. This isn’t to say, as my 21st birthday creeps over the horizon, that I’ve totally pulled myself together and things will be super dandy from now onwards (oh it’s not) but at least I’m not so foggy-headed about Life and Everything In It. etc.

On burning envy and "I could have written that"

Bennett Madison says something I feel resonates amongst many of us:

The worst and most ironic part is that the closer a book feels to your (my) soul, the more you (I) can’t totally enjoy it.  Peter Cameron’s SOMEDAY THIS PAIN WILL BE USEFUL TO YOU is probably one of the funniest and most moving books I read all last year, but the narrator reminded me so much of myself when I was in high school that I had to get up every few pages and fume over the fact that someone else had written the book that I was meant to write— and worst of all, had done it better than I probably could have.  If I had read the book ten years ago, none of this would have occured to me; I would have just really liked it.  OH LOST INNOCENCE.

What it ultimately means is that I can basically only read things that are either really shitty or things on topics that I don’t care about at all.  Things published before the death of Kurt Cobain/birth of Lourdes Ciccone are usually okay too because somehow that just feels like a whole different category.  As for everything else I have a hard time. 

You would think that this would take the fun out of everything AND IN SOME WAYS IT IS THE SADDEST THING IN THE WORLD, but the flip side is that it does make it much more pleasurable to read stuff that sucks.  Terrible literature makes me feel so great inside.  Airport bookstores are now my favorite.  Happy ending!

Oh I don’t think you’re supposed to take that as a recommendation to throw your highbrow literature out the window and stew in the morass of pulp fiction. But awful (and published!) books might spur you into writing something decent — or so I like to tell myself.

(via ikeepitall)

Okay, I might have to visit Toronto after all (imagine little lovehearts in my eyes with Michael Ondaatje’s initials engraved upon them)

In summary: homosexuals “inverts” are miserable outcasts who don’t deserve the right to fulfilling relationships. Everyone’s dead or degenerate or married and popping out babies, and it ends with the main character’s entreaty for God to ‘Give us also the right to our existence’ (which goes to show the overplayed role of religion in the book).

Oh wow, I just saved you the effort of plowing through 500 pages of misinformed gender theory and florid prose. There are plenty of other lesbian novels that are much better, including ones that deal with religion in a (slightly) more coherent manner.

"You get a little moody sometimes but I think that’s because you like to read. People that like to read are always a little fucked up."