Hello!
First of all, I'd like to apologise for taking so long to get my blog sorted! I haven't been slacking off, it's just that I decided to tackle the fabled shooter game genre for my first post and it has taken much longer than expected! (I'm also a full-time student doing 4 subjects if I can use that as an excuse? Or, maybe, my dog ate my blog!) It has been hard for me to find good topics to write about as I feel like I am not in the my area of expertise over here. I'm a TESOL major that seems to have gotten lost in the library! However, I've been feverishly slaving away on my blog for weeks! I also discovered that I am a bit of a Luddite even though I like to be ahead of the technological curve. I've got the tech but I can't use it effectively. This is not surprising given that my undergraduate degree was in Classical Languages!
Therefore, I'd also like to apologise for using Blogger. Wordpress scared me a little bit, but Blogger is an incredibly nostalgic platform for me as I used to blog about Young Adult literature when I was just a teeny-bopper. To indirectly age myself, I distinctly remember dragging my poor old dad to see Twilight when it came out at the cinema when I was about 14 years old! I've never seen anyone fall asleep in a cinema before, but my dad managed that feat!
After a little bit of digging I actually found my old blog but it seems that I deleted most of my posts when I left high school. I can tell you that it was called 'The Rambles of a Tea-Sipping Bookworm' and I'd like to say that not much has changed based on that glorious title, but I really don't read as much as I used to. I started to feel guilty that I was not working when I tried to read for pleasure around the time that I wrote my Honours thesis. I wrote about the Latin epic The Aeneid which drained my life for an entire year. I also am in a little bit of a reading slump across all genres, but particularly Young Adult. I've read one too many of those unsolicited #unpopularopinion pieces written by boring human beings about how YA literature is garbage, and I also kind of feel like I'm too old to run straight to the YA section at Dymocks! I have a plan of how I navigate Dymocks in Brisbane CBD, but I hardly ever buy anything from there because they never seem to have the books I want (and *cough cough* it's kind of expensive).
However, feel free to suggest your favourite books so I can start reading again!
There was one relic remaining on my old blog, a list of my favourite books when I was younger. So, I'm going to live vicariously through my past self for a moment and rattle off the books that I listed as my favourites:
'
After analysing the list, it seems that my past self was a pretentious-but-edgy rebel who liked both Classics and YA, and apparently hated traditional top-10 lists! I'm roasting myself as I'm surprised that there was no mention of vampiric or dystopian series on my favourites list. I loved the House of Night series by P.C. and Kristin Cast, The Vampire Academy series by Richelle Mead, and the Uglies series by Scott Westerfeld to name a few. I also have a special place in my heart for the works of the late Louise Rennison. (Harry Potter also goes without saying!)
Overall, I think that this list is an inaccurate representation of what my favourite books actually were when I was younger, therefore I want to dissect the potential reasons.
Judging Books by Their Cover
If I'm honest, I don't think some of my favourite books fit into the aesthetic I was aiming for.
I hated the original covers of the Vampire Academy series, for example, as they used photos of real people in awkward 'Mills and Boon' style sultry poses. I was definitely captured by a desire that many teenage girls had; to own pretty books that reflected the trends in fashion (Yampbell, 2005). This is perhaps even more relevant today, with platforms like Instagram and YouTube. There are many guides on the internet about how to create a bookstagram, but the best way to sum it up is the tips from @theguywiththebook: focus on visual content creation, rather than the content and type of books that you read. This is the foundation for the complaint that my friend who often dabbles in bookstagramming shared while I was asking about her eReader: that bookstagram only focuses on form and not substance. Books are becoming props and accessories (Connolly, 2018).
Something which is slightly off topic but deserves a quick mention is the expanding niche of K-pop book recommendations. Some recent K-pop music videos have been based on books, which causes an explosion in popularity for those books worldwide. The cover doesn't seem to matter when super popular idols mention their favourite books! There are even articles, blogs, and reddit posts dedicated to books that idols have been seen reading or have recommended. I much prefer this type of recommendations, as they are often about the content of the book, rather than appearance.
Serial Killers
It seems that Young Adult series have been snubbed for a very long time. For example, in the 20th Century, children's librarians in America ran campaigns against book series in order to establish a cultural authority (Reiner, Ali, England & Unrau, 2014, p. 1-2). Stand-alone titles were apparently deemed higher quality.
What is a little bit ironic about judging books in a series, is that some of those 'classic' novels that came out of the Victorian era were often serialised themselves! Authors, like Charles Dickens published their novels in short bursts in magazines. This form of literature was also deemed as tasteless and trashy at the time (Delafield, 2016)
I do have a slight issue with books in a series though. When the next book in the series came out I used to devour it so quickly, then face a long wait for the next one. I often forgot about certain characters or plot elements (as I suspect, so did the authors) so I would always get confused and eventually I grew tired of the cycle. This is where authors could perhaps learn lessons from the past, as serialised novels were crafted in such a way that keeps plot elements and characters fresh and recognisable (Delafield, 2016, p. 5).
Those Bloody Books
One of the egregious omissions from my list is the infamous vampire young adult romance novel. This is simply because I felt ashamed to read them. This is perhaps due to the forbidden desires and pleasures involved in vampire romance (Piatti-Farnell, 2014, p. 1). It is definitely the romance aspect of Young Adult vampire novels that made them the subject of much hatred and criticism. Hawkes (2013) accounts for this phenomenon in a generational review of vampire literary history. Before they were a romantic trope, vampires were cool and classy, and often associated with the narrative of the teenage boy. This is because teenage boys were equipped with the required popular culture knowledge to be able to combat vampires (Hawkes, 2013). Then vampires became outrageously romantic and girly, so most people moved on to zombies. This is incredibly generalising, and filled with gender stereotypes!
As the literature on vampire fiction is so big, I believe I've barely scratched the surface here. So if you can think of any other reasons why I left vampires off of my list, even though I read all of the Young Adult vampire books I could sink my teeth into and enjoyed them, please comment or point me in the direction of more literature!
Finally, I want to finish this post with an updated version of my favourite books!
References used and perused:
Connolly, H. (2018). Is social media influencing book cover design? Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/aug/28/is-social-media-influencing-book-cover-design
Delafield, C. (2016). Serialization and the novel in mid-Victorian magazines. London ;: Routledge.
Hawkes, L. (2013). Staking and restaking the vampire: generational ownership of the vampire story. In S. Pearse, V. Muller & L. Hawkes (Eds.), Popular appeal: books and films in contemporary youth culture (pp. 79-110) Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Lew, K. (2018). 9 books made even more popular by K-pop idols. Retrieved from https://www.soompi.com/article/1163059wpp/9-books-made-even-popular-k-pop-idols
Naseem, F. (2017, May, 17). Bookstagram for beginners [Web log post]. Retrieved from https://theguywiththebook.com/2018/05/17/bookstagram-for-beginners
Piatti-Farnell, L. (2014). The vampire in contemporary popular literature. New York: Routledge.
White, M. (2017). #Bookstagram: how readers changed the way we use instagram. Retrieved from https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/bookstagram-how-readers-changed-the-way-we-use-instagram_us_59f0aaa2e4b01ecaf1a3e867
Reimer, M., Ali, N., England, D., & Unrau, M. (2014). Seriality and Texts for Young People The Compulsion to Repeat . London: Palgrave Macmillan UK. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137356000
Yampbell, C. (2005). Judging a Book by Its Cover: Publishing Trends in Young Adult Literature. The Lion and the Unicorn, 29(3), 348–372. https://doi.org/10.1353/uni.2005.0049
Mike Wasowski GIF: http://litographs.tumblr.com/post/91405257975/when-we-try-to-read-more-than-one-book-at-a-time
Omelas: https://aminoapps.com/c/btsarmy/page/blog/sin-city-effect-gifs-updated/kwr5_GwXhGu7v5z6PLmJkgxYDrbn1DNNlmX
Google trends: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=demian%20herman%20hesse
This is an accurate depiction of my life right now. (GIF Source: http://litographs.tumblr.com/post/91405257975/when-we-try-to-read-more-than-one-book-at-a-time from the 2001 Pixar movie Monsters Inc.)
Therefore, I'd also like to apologise for using Blogger. Wordpress scared me a little bit, but Blogger is an incredibly nostalgic platform for me as I used to blog about Young Adult literature when I was just a teeny-bopper. To indirectly age myself, I distinctly remember dragging my poor old dad to see Twilight when it came out at the cinema when I was about 14 years old! I've never seen anyone fall asleep in a cinema before, but my dad managed that feat!
After a little bit of digging I actually found my old blog but it seems that I deleted most of my posts when I left high school. I can tell you that it was called 'The Rambles of a Tea-Sipping Bookworm' and I'd like to say that not much has changed based on that glorious title, but I really don't read as much as I used to. I started to feel guilty that I was not working when I tried to read for pleasure around the time that I wrote my Honours thesis. I wrote about the Latin epic The Aeneid which drained my life for an entire year. I also am in a little bit of a reading slump across all genres, but particularly Young Adult. I've read one too many of those unsolicited #unpopularopinion pieces written by boring human beings about how YA literature is garbage, and I also kind of feel like I'm too old to run straight to the YA section at Dymocks! I have a plan of how I navigate Dymocks in Brisbane CBD, but I hardly ever buy anything from there because they never seem to have the books I want (and *cough cough* it's kind of expensive).
However, feel free to suggest your favourite books so I can start reading again!
Here's my old Blogger blog title and background.
'
I'll transcribe it below in case the picture doesn't work or it is too hard to see:
1. The Catcher in the Rye- J. D. Salinger.
2. The Fault in Our Stars- John Green.
3. Anna and the French Kiss- Stephanie Perkins.
4. Looking for Alaska- John Green.
5. Brave New World- Aldous Huxley.
6. The Perks of Being a Wallflower- Stephen Chbosky.
7. Slaughterhouse 5- Kurt Vonnegut.
8. Wide Sargasso Sea- Jean Rhys.
Here's a brief summary of some of my immediate thoughts about this list:
- As I read the list I started to wonder where Slaughterhouse 5 was because I was obsessed with that book (and I am still) but it was just hidden near the end of the list. It was an assigned text for my Year 11 English class. Every time I read it I discover something new about it.
- It had to be Brave New World and not 1984, that's a contentious choice!
- Say what you want about John Green, but Looking for Alaska is a fantastic book. It still hits me right in the feelies. The Fault in Our Stars really was not as good, I must've been influenced by the hype.
- Anna and the French Kiss is so bad that it's good. I read it when I lived in Country Victoria and it made me pine for Paris, even though I've never been. This fact becomes even more ridiculous when I remember to mention that I'm actually British, and I moved to Australia when I was 14 years old. Why have I never been to France?!
- Wide Sargasso Sea is often described as 'fanfiction' by booktubers (YouTubers who make video content about books) as it is based on Brontë's Jane Eyre. Rhys brings the story of Bertha, the woman in the attic to the centre of the stage and extracts retribution for her characterisation in Jane Eyre. However, don't read this book if Mr. Rochester is your fave Romantic Hero. Wide Sargasso Sea was an assigned text for my Year 12 Literature class, it also popped up in my first year Literature class at university, and I recently wrote an assignment on it for Sociolinguistics (LCN638)!
After analysing the list, it seems that my past self was a pretentious-but-edgy rebel who liked both Classics and YA, and apparently hated traditional top-10 lists! I'm roasting myself as I'm surprised that there was no mention of vampiric or dystopian series on my favourites list. I loved the House of Night series by P.C. and Kristin Cast, The Vampire Academy series by Richelle Mead, and the Uglies series by Scott Westerfeld to name a few. I also have a special place in my heart for the works of the late Louise Rennison. (Harry Potter also goes without saying!)
Overall, I think that this list is an inaccurate representation of what my favourite books actually were when I was younger, therefore I want to dissect the potential reasons.
Judging Books by Their Cover
If I'm honest, I don't think some of my favourite books fit into the aesthetic I was aiming for.
I hated the original covers of the Vampire Academy series, for example, as they used photos of real people in awkward 'Mills and Boon' style sultry poses. I was definitely captured by a desire that many teenage girls had; to own pretty books that reflected the trends in fashion (Yampbell, 2005). This is perhaps even more relevant today, with platforms like Instagram and YouTube. There are many guides on the internet about how to create a bookstagram, but the best way to sum it up is the tips from @theguywiththebook: focus on visual content creation, rather than the content and type of books that you read. This is the foundation for the complaint that my friend who often dabbles in bookstagramming shared while I was asking about her eReader: that bookstagram only focuses on form and not substance. Books are becoming props and accessories (Connolly, 2018).
Something which is slightly off topic but deserves a quick mention is the expanding niche of K-pop book recommendations. Some recent K-pop music videos have been based on books, which causes an explosion in popularity for those books worldwide. The cover doesn't seem to matter when super popular idols mention their favourite books! There are even articles, blogs, and reddit posts dedicated to books that idols have been seen reading or have recommended. I much prefer this type of recommendations, as they are often about the content of the book, rather than appearance.
This is the google trends spike for Hermann Hesse's Demian from after BTS released their 'Blood, Sweat, and Tears' music video in 2016. The video was based on elements of the book, and even featured a passage from the book.
BTS are repeat offenders when it comes to literary references, the 'Spring Day' music video was based on Ursula K. Le Guin's short story Those Who Walk Away from Omelas. (GIF source: KirstyLouise https://aminoapps.com/c/btsarmy/page/blog/sin-city-effect-gifs-updated/kwr5_GwXhGu7v5z6PLmJkgxYDrbn1DNNlmX
It seems that Young Adult series have been snubbed for a very long time. For example, in the 20th Century, children's librarians in America ran campaigns against book series in order to establish a cultural authority (Reiner, Ali, England & Unrau, 2014, p. 1-2). Stand-alone titles were apparently deemed higher quality.
What is a little bit ironic about judging books in a series, is that some of those 'classic' novels that came out of the Victorian era were often serialised themselves! Authors, like Charles Dickens published their novels in short bursts in magazines. This form of literature was also deemed as tasteless and trashy at the time (Delafield, 2016)
I do have a slight issue with books in a series though. When the next book in the series came out I used to devour it so quickly, then face a long wait for the next one. I often forgot about certain characters or plot elements (as I suspect, so did the authors) so I would always get confused and eventually I grew tired of the cycle. This is where authors could perhaps learn lessons from the past, as serialised novels were crafted in such a way that keeps plot elements and characters fresh and recognisable (Delafield, 2016, p. 5).
Those Bloody Books
One of the egregious omissions from my list is the infamous vampire young adult romance novel. This is simply because I felt ashamed to read them. This is perhaps due to the forbidden desires and pleasures involved in vampire romance (Piatti-Farnell, 2014, p. 1). It is definitely the romance aspect of Young Adult vampire novels that made them the subject of much hatred and criticism. Hawkes (2013) accounts for this phenomenon in a generational review of vampire literary history. Before they were a romantic trope, vampires were cool and classy, and often associated with the narrative of the teenage boy. This is because teenage boys were equipped with the required popular culture knowledge to be able to combat vampires (Hawkes, 2013). Then vampires became outrageously romantic and girly, so most people moved on to zombies. This is incredibly generalising, and filled with gender stereotypes!
As the literature on vampire fiction is so big, I believe I've barely scratched the surface here. So if you can think of any other reasons why I left vampires off of my list, even though I read all of the Young Adult vampire books I could sink my teeth into and enjoyed them, please comment or point me in the direction of more literature!
Finally, I want to finish this post with an updated version of my favourite books!
1. Wide Sargasso Sea- Jean Rhys
2. The Secret History- Donna Tartt
3. Howl's Moving Castle- Diana Wynne Jones
4. Looking for Alaska- John Green
5. We Were Liars- e. lockhart
6. Slaughterhouse 5- Kurt Vonnegut
7. The Handmaid's Tale- Margaret Atwood
8. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone- J. K. Rowling
9. Turtles All the Way Down- John Green
10. Sad Girls- Lang Leav
- As you can see, there are some here that remained the same, and I got suckered in to reading the latest John Green novel!
- We Were Liars was at the centre of a booktuber ad campaign, where they talked about how good the book was, and warned that it needs to be experienced without any spoilers. This made the book seem really mysterious and enticing.
- Sad Girls I just picked up one day at Dymocks. It was a little bit predictable, a guessed a major plot twist within 10 minutes of reading, but I was glued to it and read it in a couple of hours. The author, Lang Leav, is actually a poet by trade and it shows in her amazing command of the English language.
- I also read Howl's Moving Castle in a day. It's very different from its Ghibli movie counterpart.
- The Secret History is a mammoth murder mystery. I really liked it because the students in the novel were all Classical Language students, like myself. I could see some of the characters manifested in some of my friends.
- (Yes, that is the Latin version of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (Harrius Potter et Philosphi Lapis), it's the only version I had to hand!
References used and perused:
Connolly, H. (2018). Is social media influencing book cover design? Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/aug/28/is-social-media-influencing-book-cover-design
Delafield, C. (2016). Serialization and the novel in mid-Victorian magazines. London ;: Routledge.
Hawkes, L. (2013). Staking and restaking the vampire: generational ownership of the vampire story. In S. Pearse, V. Muller & L. Hawkes (Eds.), Popular appeal: books and films in contemporary youth culture (pp. 79-110) Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Lew, K. (2018). 9 books made even more popular by K-pop idols. Retrieved from https://www.soompi.com/article/1163059wpp/9-books-made-even-popular-k-pop-idols
Naseem, F. (2017, May, 17). Bookstagram for beginners [Web log post]. Retrieved from https://theguywiththebook.com/2018/05/17/bookstagram-for-beginners
Piatti-Farnell, L. (2014). The vampire in contemporary popular literature. New York: Routledge.
White, M. (2017). #Bookstagram: how readers changed the way we use instagram. Retrieved from https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/bookstagram-how-readers-changed-the-way-we-use-instagram_us_59f0aaa2e4b01ecaf1a3e867
Reimer, M., Ali, N., England, D., & Unrau, M. (2014). Seriality and Texts for Young People The Compulsion to Repeat . London: Palgrave Macmillan UK. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137356000
Yampbell, C. (2005). Judging a Book by Its Cover: Publishing Trends in Young Adult Literature. The Lion and the Unicorn, 29(3), 348–372. https://doi.org/10.1353/uni.2005.0049
Images and GIFS: (All pictures are my own unless explicitly mentioned).
Mike Wasowski GIF: http://litographs.tumblr.com/post/91405257975/when-we-try-to-read-more-than-one-book-at-a-time
Omelas: https://aminoapps.com/c/btsarmy/page/blog/sin-city-effect-gifs-updated/kwr5_GwXhGu7v5z6PLmJkgxYDrbn1DNNlmX
Google trends: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=demian%20herman%20hesse
Hi Jenny,
ReplyDeleteThis is more than a tea-sipping bookworm's blog. For me it is more like an encyclopedia of good reads. As I am not a voracious reader now, I feel overwhelmed by the content though ;). But I found we share some difference in our interests while talking about vampires and their love stories :). In fact, one of my blog post is about the most famous vampire romance Twilight saga. Also I am not keen in reading stories based on murders or violence. Yes, we share some similarities as well. I also used to select books looking at the cover when I was young. I like the way you justify the reason for liking or disliking the books.
Being a mother of a 4 year old, full time student and a part-time tutor, I am unable to find some time for reading which used to be my passion while I was a teenager.
All the best on you reading journey and studies!