Memories define us. So what if you lost yours every time you went to sleep?

Ohhhh. I finished, just the other day, an amazing proof copy of a book due out next month. Before I Go to Sleep was an incredible debut by S J Watson and I have fallen in love with adult fiction all over again.

The title of the post says it all to be honest. Christine wakes up each morning, unaware of the past twenty years of her life. She gets out of the bed she shares with her husband, Ben, and sees the pictures round the bathroom mirror, explaining who she is. But each morning, Christine also remembers. A little more each day. And Ben isn’t telling her the whole truth.

This novel was simply brilliant. As Christine begins writing everything down, and remembering some of it on her own, her life begins to make less and less sense. It’s a wonderful mystery that kept me gripped right to the end. It also kept me guessing, and whenever I thought I had the answers, Watson would switch everything around and have me guessing all over again.

Christine is a brilliant character, determined not to give in to her condition, but to fight it. Each day, she is given the chance to begin again but she never chooses to forget. I cannot really explain how good this book was without giving away a whole lot of plot (which I don’t want to do) but I really urge you to read it.

I might not have read a lot of crime thrillers, but I’m pretty sure this is how they’re supposed to be done.

You’re a wintergirl, Lia-Lia, caught in between the worlds. You’re a ghost with a beating heart.

I recently read Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson, author of Speak. I always find books about anorexia strangely fascinating, ever since I was in my teens. The idea of girls who would voluntarily give up food astounded me and I was desperate to get inside their heads. One of the first books I read on the subject was The Best Little Girl In the World by Levenkron, and I’ve been hooked since then.

Wintergirls starts just as Lia, a seventeen year old anorexia sufferer, finds out her old best friend, Cassie, has died, alone, in a motel room. On the night she died, she called Lia thirty-three times. Lia didn’t pick up. And so continues Lia’s ongoing struggle to be thin. To beat Cassie. Even if it means losing everything else first.

Anderson is a pillar of troubled teen fiction and I adored this book, just as I did Speak. Lia’s obsession with food is enormous, driving her to tamper with the family scales, and pour washing up liquid down her own throat. I did love the book and truly have practically nothing bad to say about it. The only thing I possibly wanted was a little more explanation towards the title. It could have been that I simply missed it in my haste to finish the book but I felt that, although it was a great idea, it needed a little more expansion.

Like I said, only that tiny niggle. Otherwise, it was a book I thoroughly enjoyed and would recommend to many.

Afflicted by love's madness all are blind.

Right. So. I actually did a bit of writing and finished a few books this week, hence the no blog-hiatus. But now, I shall do a couple ickle reviews.

First off, I had A Note of Madness by Tabitha Suzuma. She wrote a book I previously reviewed, Forbidden, and I was intrigued to check out her other stuff. I also liked the fact that she’s a British writer (they seem increasingly hard to find) and she was writing about a musician battling with depression. It seemed like an fascinating idea.

Our main character, Flynn, is a student at the Royal College of Music, preparing for an important concert. He begins to experience mad flashes of inspiration, days when he can compose all night and study all day, followed by days when he can’t lift his head off the pillow. His friends and family are concerned, and as Flynn spirals deeper into a bad spell, can anything pull him out?

I found the book interesting, but unfortunately did not feel quite as compelled as during my reading of Forbidden. Flynn was the perfect character and although I liked him, I couldn’t feel much for the other people in the book. Their characterisation was difficult; Flynn kept revealing distant memories about the other characters and I felt confused that I hadn’t known about them earlier. It was good to read about a condition I know little about and I found the prospect of so many different drug concoctions mind boggling, as did Flynn.

I have since looked into more of Suzuma’s work and I was startled to find every novel she has written focuses around some form of mental health issue. Going through the same thing in her own life, I can understand her fixation on the subject and the catharsis it brings writing about it. However, although her other books do sound interesting I think I may have to give them a miss. Too much writing by one author on the same subject and I find the stories tend to blend together, till each one sounds the same. It’s very similar to reading Jodi Picoult.

How Cat Got Her Groove Back.

Haha! I was right! Even pulling my brain through a couple of experimental blog posts made me feel all bubbly creative again. I believe I have been writing some poetry, not exactly anything astounding, but poetry it definitely is. Yay for me! So no posting up (it’s not fit for anyone at the moment) but just a happy blog to say (fingers crossed) I got my groove back. At least for now.

Meh.

So, I actually haven’t been doing a lot a reading recently. My brain seems to be shutting itself off to any higher forms of culture and is quite happy to make do with endless streams of banal television programs. Not that I’m finding said programs boring, it’s just very monotonous. 

When I find something I love, I tend to obsess over it for a few days/weeks/months. In the past couple of months, I’ve drifted through various phases, including fanfiction, The Totally Rad Show podcasts, low-end teen dramas (Hellcats, Popular!), and end-of-the-world anything. When I am in one of these phases, it becomes very easy to devour anything related to it; reading, watching involves a lot less effort. Thing is, at the moment, I’m not in a phase. Instead, I’m in a funk. 

I can’t focus on television, books, games, podcasts – nothing seems to satisfy. I’m feeling a distinct lack of anything even resembling enthusiasm and, as such, really don’t have a lot to blog about. 

My ‘200 books in a year’ goal is looking slightly impossible now. 

I’ve written this little post hoping that a bit of creativeness flowing about will help me feel inspired again. Can’t tell if it’s working yet, but I’ll keep you posted.

To die would be an awfully big adventure.

I’ve been reading quite a few books about the afterlife recently and it’s odd how Teen Fiction seems to focus on this quite a lot. A while ago, I reviewed a book called If I Stay by Gayle Forman which I really enjoyed, and a sequel is also on its way. Although teens are not exactly the closest age group to death, I think it’s definitely something you start thinking about a lot more when you’re that age. It’s also, I feel, the time when you’re most afraid of dying. You’re old enough to realise the significance of death, your own proximity to it, yet not old enough to have really experienced anything. When you’re feeling isolated in so many other ways as a teen, death just seems like a final way for you to be shut out of people’s lives, including your own.

I know I definitely thought about death a lot more as a teenager than at any other time in my life. I was madly afraid of dying; I couldn’t even bear hearing people talk about it hypothetically. It wasn’t until I went to University that the fear decreased. I was living, really living; therefore I didn’t have to be afraid of dying. I certainly don’t want to die, and would be very pissed if I died now, but I know that, statistically, it’s unlikely, and that, even if it does happen, I will have at least accomplished a few things in my life.

I think for teenagers that just isn’t there, and that’s why the idea of death and dying becomes, for some, a pathological fear, and, for others, a strange obsession. Obviously, there are many wonderfully, well adjusted young adults out there who simply deal and get on with it, but then when has teen fiction ever been about them?

Both of the books I want to talk about have similar ideas of the afterlife. Their characters inhabit a ‘heaven’ that works almost identically to the living world. People have jobs, own houses, drive cars, and pursue relationships, just like they do when alive. In both books, however, there’s a catch.

In Elsewhere by Gabrielle Zevin, Liz dies in a hit-and-run, aged only fifteen. She wakes up on her way to ‘Elsewhere’, a place where life does go on, except it goes on backwards. For every year spent in Elsewhere, Liz grows a year younger, yet this never stops her enjoying her after-life just like her first.

This book was great. To be honest, I don’t read a lot of funny fiction, and although this was by no means a comedic novel, it was very whimsical and sweet. Generally, everything I read is depressing, or dark, or very heavy, but even with a dead teenage protagonist, Elsewhere never feels like it’s a book about death. This is most definitely a book celebrating life, and all the wonderful things you can experience. It’s not a hardcore read, and is probably aimed at the younger end of the teenage market, but it was nice to read something light for a change and I think it offers an inventive take on the typical afterlife dilemma in fiction.

The other novel I read was The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier. Originally released as an adult novel, it has become a crossover title, possibly because of its length (it is only 250 pages), and its lack of overly complicated language. Although I read it believing it to be a piece of teen fiction, I did feel that it would work just as well as a short adult read.

The book centres on the African tribal belief of three categories of human; those still alive on Earth; the recently departed; and the dead. When people die, they become the recently departed, as long as someone still alive on Earth remembers them. In this novel, a deadly virus begins to wipe out the population of the world, taking many of the inhabitants of The City (where the recently departed go) with it. As the novel progresses, more people disappear, until only people known to Laura Byrd, the one woman left alive on Earth, remain.

The novel raises some interesting ideas about memory and how a person can ‘live on’ in our minds. I had never heard the three categories belief before, but I find it a very interesting way of looking at life after death. The idea that family and friends can continue to be alive in our memories is a common one, albeit one that Brockmeier takes to an extreme.

It is, however, interesting to think of how many people you can remember if you really think about it. At one point in the novel, the character Puckett attempts to count all the people he can remember. In the end, it becomes an impossible task but he estimates each person would recall between 50 and 100,000 people. I am going to attempt to do this at some point, count all the people I can remember. My memory is notoriously bad so I’m sure I won’t get anywhere near that number but it’s an interesting task in any case.

Brockmeier’s novel has an interesting premise and a likable main character. I do feel that the story would have played out better as a set of short stories, published together, but playing out independently of one another, or perhaps as simply one short story. I didn’t particularly enjoy the continual swapping between characters; although many other books have done it, and done it well, I felt it distracted me here. I would have preferred to read Laura’s story on its own, then stopped and read Luka’s story and so on. It is, in my opinion, a perfectly fine book, but nothing outstanding.

It’s just that I’m tired of being compared.

Over the last couple of weeks, I have indulged in something truly satisfying. I have laughed, I have cried, I have wanted to throttle, and I have wanted to console. Mostly I have been ashamed.

I have been watching a 90’s teen television show.

I have been watching Popular!

Brain child of Ryan Murphy, God of all things Glee, Popular! is a show set in high school about two girls from opposite social spheres whose parents get engaged. Chaos ensues as social barriers come tumbling, and crashing, down around them and force they, and their friends, to discover what it really takes to be popular.

It is a total guilty pleasure show; it’s ridiculous, stupid and downright absurd at practically every moment but it’s also hugely entertaining. The characters are brilliant, with just the right amount of randomness to make them believable, and every word of the script is golden.

The problem with many teen dramas is that they’re just too polished. The characters are too beautiful, too smart, too one dimensional to really make you believe in them. In Popular! each character displays such a myriad of emotions and characteristics that you start to think of them as real. People, especially teenagers, are confusing, unreliable, hypocritical, and change their mind as often as the wind, so why should teen characters not portray that? I love the fact that this show, in the same vein as Glee, also shows the funny side of everything. It takes the piss out of itself at every turn and never once apologises for it. An episode in Season Two, for example, sees the chemistry teacher, Ms Glass, write and direct a production in which the students play sexually transmitted diseases and perform to primary school children. Now that would (probably) never happen in a regular high school, but in Popular! it's completely normal.

It’s a shame that the show was cancelled after only two seasons. It ended on a massive cliff-hanger (life or death type cliff-hanger) and, apparently, the show’s producers had no idea the show would be cancelled. Even so, it’s still worth watching. If you enjoy shows like One Tree Hill, The O.C., and, of course, Glee, then it’s definitely worth seeing if you can get hold of Popular!

What you do, the way you think, makes you beautiful.

Uglies by Scott Westerfeld is a book that, when I heard about it, I instantly knew I wanted to read it. It sounded brilliant; in a world where everyone becomes ‘pretty’ on their sixteenth birthday, what does is really take to be beautiful? It had so many of my favourite teen fiction aspects; dystopian future, check; evil, sneaky government, check; band of misfit rebels, check; and morally ambiguous characters, check. It had so much going for it and I was disappointed that it didn’t live up to my expectations.

It didn’t grab me. That is literally the bulk of my problem with this book. Everything about it screamed that I would love it and I just didn’t. The plot was well constructed, the characters fully three-dimensional, and the bad guys suitably bad-guy-ish but I just didn’t get anything from it. I felt it plodded, rather than skipped, and I couldn’t bring myself to care at all about the characters. The protagonist, Tally, was whiney and sullen, and didn’t seem particularly enthusiastic about anything in the novel and, unfortunately, I feel that it transferred to the reader.

Now, the Uglies series has been widely read, and praised, and I don’t doubt that many people loved it. I have rented out the second and third novels in the series, Pretties, and Specials, and I’m hoping that reading about the same character a little more will endear this series to me. I’m not really holding out any hope but I challenge Westerfeld to make me love these books.

I do have to say, I love the premise of the books. I think it is a brilliant idea and, once again, is does seem likely to me that something of this nature will become the norm in society. Plastic Surgery is getting cheaper, is widely available and the stigma previously attached to it is decreasing. So who knows? However, Westerfeld’s novels do raise the interesting point that if everyone is beautiful, then really it transpires that no-one is. Our flaws and our imperfections are part of who we are, part of what makes us beautiful. Take away that, you take away all individuality and all you-ness. I think it’s a great message, especially with MTV and E! warping all our minds (including my own). I love this message, even if I didn’t love the novel itself.

Procrastination is, hands down, our favourite form of self-sabotage.

I took a mini holiday from work last week. Only a couple of days, but apparently it disrupted my schedule so much that since then I’ve been finding it impossible to focus on anything. So many goals, so little time. I’m hoping to have combated that now, but, to be honest, I’m way too good at screwing myself over. So here’s to beginning again, considering I have to keep beginning again every week or so, I should really just make it my new schedule.