I decided to flip a coin, flipping it five four times, with heads being a "yes" and tails being a "no". I also decided to give one extra point towards yes, so I would only have to get two heads to get a majority.
I got two heads... so here I am!
I will post at and around the witching hour Eastern Time.
I do not know how to make a reading blog. Part of me doesn't know what that is really supposed to mean. I do not know what I am doing.
edit: i changed my url bc I accidently made my title my url and my url my title so I fixed it I guess
I read only the first chapter of The Two Towers and...
Did Boromir just die? Just like that? The orcs swept past and just so happened to slay him?
It sort of just feels like Tolkien didn't care about him. The funeral scene was nice I guess--but I do picture a Disney style musical segment whenever the characters break into song, and that messed up the mood for me.
I even scrounged around in the dusty memories of the lotr movies, and yep! That's how he died!
I finished To Kill A Mockingbird and I have to say the ending of the book was underwhelming. I wish Boo Radely, the town recluse, never got camera time, or at least wasn't really focused on-- I wish he didn't speak in the book, and that he stayed a figment of a man to Scout and to the reader, if a kinder one. But I guess I shouldn't be complaining. It wasn't a bad ending.
Now I'll be reading The Two Towers, and the one of my two (2) followers who liked my samfrodo post and followed me for that will actually get lotr posts!
I am on ch 28 (out of 31) which means I'm past the trial scene and hoo boy
There's a few things I have thoughts about, and I'm worried that I waited too long so they are less detailed now
Firstly, it irked me how stringent the legal definition of rape was for the time, and that even Scout knew about it, but I guess I shouldn't be too surprised about that.
When I went through the trial scene and Mayella told her side of the story, I found it a bit silly that she was told to stop crying and was nitpicked for the details of the encounter, but looking back on it her behavior is perfect for a person scrambling to hide their guilt with a cover story, since she was the one who tried to coerce him and took it to a physical level.
And the pressing from the other lawyer on Tom Robinson about why he was scared from the situation and wanted to get away seemed purposefully obtuse to force the jury to view him with a suspicious lens as if he wasn't well aware of the dynamics between whites and blacks in their 1930s southern town.
The scene where Dill was just crying on the ground by the coldness and cruelty of it all, and Atticus sort of just told Dill that this is the way that things are in the world
And then Tom was shot in the prison yard only days later...
Side note: I have sort of a morbid facination with American racial segregation in media, and I think I figured out why. I think its becase I have an inlination to learn about things that I haven't seen or experienced in my life and search to find out about them through fiction, which explains my fixations with wartime and trans people.
I picked up To Kill A Mockingbird again after having to put it down due to library troubles (I am now pirating it off of YT ~w~) and just wow
I almost forgot how refreshing it feels to have a historical fiction book with a weird or 'tomboy' protagonist without it feeling stale. I think Scout works because she was written by a woman before the 90s before this type of character became popular in historical fiction. Maybe I am pleased by this for no reason and my conception of female protagonists has been ruined by children's historical fic books.
I just finished A Thousand Beginnings And Endings, a compilation of 15 retellings of Asian mythology and folklore. And I really liked it.
I only realized how many women authors there were until I noticed that the author of one of the stories was male.
Also one of the protagonists is a lesbian. She was a teenager and had had a girlfriend and the story wasn't weird about it, which was nice. The story was called Olivia's Table by Alyssa Wong and was about Olivia cooking for the Chinese ghost festival in an Arizona hotel staying afloat with its marketing as being haunted.
I guess my favorite story in it is The Land of the Morning Calm by E. C. Myers about a girl called Sunny whose mom died while playing a videogame of the same name, which the characters abbreviate as LMC. When LMC is about to shut down its servers due to bankruptcy, Sunny plays it for one last time. She ends up finding her mom's ghost in the form of a npc in the game and brings her into fan made servers emulating the game's code, by trading a necklace which had contained her mother's soul ever since she died. The story was based on a Korean epic named Chasa Bonpuli and also had a mash up of different Korean folk tale tropes.
I read a book titled 'The Trumpet of the Swan' the summer before my 6th grade, which was originally bought for my older brother.
(I'm pretty sure some of these plot points are either out of order or missing entirely)
The story is about a young swan named Louis who is mute (seemingly because of a problem with the vocal tract itself) and we see get older over the course of the book. He befriends a human boy named Sam who takes Louis to school, where he enrolls into the 1st grade and learns to write. He then goes back to the lake where he was born and sees his father, writing to him on a chalk slate Louis keeps on his neck with string to communicate. Louis's father cannot read this, and, realizing that his son has has no voice with which to call a mate, nor a method of speaking to other swans, flies away in a hurry to steal a trumpet.
He succeeds in doing this, but also cuts himself on the glass of the window he broke to get into the instrument store. He falls midair and is brought to an actual human hospital. They release him as quickly as possible, and is fined with the damages from the property destruction and the cost of the stolen trumpet. He goes home to the lake and Louis gets his trumpet.
What Louis also gets- realizing that his father is a normal swan who is not accustomed to human society and therefore can't really produce any funds- is straddled with his father's debt.
He begs Sam to help him get money, and Sam agrees, taking Louis to his summer camp, where Louis becomes a camp counselor. Because he has a trumpet, he is mainly given the job of playing his trumpet to wake up the children and tell them to go to sleep, with a distinct morning and evening jingle. Sam cuts the webbing of one of Louis's feet so he can actually play the trumpet.
At the end of the summer, Louis still needs more money, so he goes off to play trumpet for a club. The narration makes sure to mention that Louis hates his job and it is too loud with too many people, but he is trapped there because he needs to pay off his father's debt and has no other options as a trumpet playing swan who can't speak.
He pays off the debt.
I think at one point he starts travelling as a locally famous trumpet-playing swan?
Eventually, he goes to live at a zoo, and another swan named Serena falls into the swan enclosure. Louis, who is now an adult swan, plays his trumpet to call her as a possible mate. Serena agrees and they fall in love.
The story ends with Louis and Serena having chicks, travelling, and everyone living happily ever after. And Sam falling asleep wondering what the word crepuscular meant.
I really liked this book when I was reading it, and decided not to read more than a chapter in a day, so I could savor it more. Every time the book focused on a song Louis was playing, it showed the sheet music for a trumpet. On one of the first pages in the book, I wrote the each of the pages with written music for quick reference, and proceeded to try (and fail) to learn the melodies on the piano. The book also had illustrations in each chapter in a cartoonish style next to the scene they were depicting.
But, I think my favorite part of the book was how simplistic and childlike the story felt while reading it, and how wacky the adventures were while still seeming sincere.
It made me feel distinctly nice in a way I haven't really felt since. Maybe that's why I kept the copy, and still have it now.
copy pasted review of The Prophecies Begin warrior cats graphic novel, i did this before
"The Prophecies Begin graphic novel is an amazing book for any fan of Warrior Cats and graphic novels alike.
While it is clearly made with the fanbase in mind, it following the original story of Into The Wild also makes it great for those unfamiliar with the series.
The story follows a housecat named Rusty joining a "clan" of cats living entirely in the forest. These cats have hierarchical structure, code of honor (law) for all clan cats, and even a unique naming system where every cat has a name with one prefix word and one suffix word (ex. Poppyfrost, Jaykit, Rowanstar, etc.).
In this story, Rusty has to face many trials and battles with his best friend Greystripe to become a true warrior of Thunderclan, including a murder case involving the second-in-line to become leader.
The cats look very expressive, and the color scheming for each of the scenes fits very well.
The dialogue is neatly condensed from the original book, and I can tell that the writers knew when to include or exclude a scene from the original book without cutting anything actually important.
Also, I love buff Silverstream.😽"
why did I write this like an official book review from a rating website
this is a copy pasted review of Fellowship of The Rings i wrote, from a different website
"What words are there to describe my satisfaction with this book?
Also, even though Frodo and Sam definitely do not canonically have romantic feelings for each other, I must admit that they have a sort of chemistry, and that their relationship does add something to the book."
their relationship adds something to the book? you don't say, past me.
I also made a joke to my brother afterwards that Tolkien purposefully wrote Sam and Frodo's relationship like that so 70 years later people would almost think they were gay for each other.
