A Wrinkle in Time - Mrs Who

A Wrinkle in Time is a book that's transcended time. It's fifty years old but is still widely read and referenced. In fact, many dystopian books that you read today are inspired by Madeleine L'Engle's planets and worlds. There's a town in A Wrinkle in Time where everyone is perfectly synchronized to a schedule: everything is done at the same time every day, always perfectly. A planet that is made out of paper. Worlds that are beautiful and scary and weird - this book flips through them like a public mirror in its reflection of faces.

And what's so great about A Wrinkle in Time is that the characters who see these worlds are completely memorable. One of my favorites, who I'm going to be focusing on today, is Mrs. Who.

I like the mystery about her. More than her sisters, Mrs. Whatsit and Mrs.Which, she is unreadable and curious. She uses other's words, in quotations and cliches, rather than her own. She speaks through other's sayings. In French, German, Latin, Greek, she moves throughout languages like a verbal dancer. You don't ever really know who she is, because she quotes Shakespeare instead of answering a question, which is an answer but only in cryptic terms. In that way, you can get a glimpse of who she is by the quotes and phrases she uses, but not fully. She's a mystery, and I love a character you have to keep guessing about.

I think that's partially the reason her name is what it is, because you want to know who she is, and because she's apparently an ironic tease, she names herself after that fact.

Mrs. Who wears these spectacles, which are talked about several times in the book. This is also part of her character, because she essentially sees through other eyes both in her words and in her vision.

"Suddenly two eyes seemed to spring at them out of the darkness; it was the moonlight striking on Mrs Who's glasses." Like an owl, that one. If the three W sisters were menacing, Mrs. Who would be the scariest, because her character is so unpredictably creepy. Her weapon of choice would be knitting needles.

But the W's are more helpful, mysterious narrators than monsters. They help the characters through the journey, and are even the start and end of that journey, so they keep the plot running while you and the main characters experience it.

Mrs. Who is probably the most elusive character in this book, but that's why she's so intriguing. Even though she uses other's words instead of her own, she has a lot to say.

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The 50th Anniversary edition of A Wrinkle in Time is in stores now, and it includes a lot of extras if you want to revisit the story. It has photos, L'Engle's acceptance speech, letters from authors, and more. This post is part of the 50 Years, 50 Days, 50 Blogs Tour, and you can check out the other stops on the tour here, through the A Wrinkle in Time facebook page.

Nostalgia

Alice in Wonderland is one of my favorite books, mostly because the whole thing feels like a dream, both when you're reading it and when you're remembering it. Looking back, I remember it in tiny fragments of talking plants and careless running and unlucky hedgehogs and nonsensical dialogue. Very much like the memory of a dream that you can't fully piece together.

The Tim Burton movie, which was more like a sequel, was awesome because it gave everything a darker feel, which you can expect with Burton as the director. I went to his exhibit when I was in LA, and the dude has a weird, twisted, fantastic mind. His version of Alice made me want to revisit that world, a heavy dose of nostalgia hidden under the mad hatter's hat.

Nostalgia. It's like watching Hey Arnold or Rugrats reruns if you're a 90s kid. If you were introduced to it when you were older, you would probably wonder why Arnold's head is shaped like a football, but because it made sense to you when you were a kid, you think his football head and very unfortunate hair are adorable sentiments.

There's something unnameable about nostalgia that is entirely perfect.

Another favorite of mine, maybe my favorite favorite (that's similar to like-liking someone in elementary school, except in this case with words instead of candy hearts,) is The Secret Garden. Every time I see an ornate fence or unruly rosebushes, I think of this book. The combination of nature and horrid/fantastic characters, and the similarities between both - it's kind of brilliant. I have never disliked a character so much as the main character of that book, and for that reason I loved it. It was nothing like I had ever read before as a kid, and I wanted to go and find that secret garden more than anything. Even the thought of it now makes me want to be a kid again.

That's why when Where the Wild Things Are came out in theaters, I knew I had to see it. (Aside from the fact that they used my favorite Arcade Fire song on the trailer.) Because I could slightly remember the smile on my face when I was falling asleep with the pictures of giant fuzzy creatures in my head.

If you could buy nostalgia on the black market, I'd be so unlawful.

My post tomorrow has to do with a certain book that a lot of readers will find nostalgic to visit again: A Wrinkle in Time. I'm going to be talking about one of my favorite characters from that book for the 50 Year Anniversary tour. So check out the link, read some of the other posts, and revisit it again (or, if you haven't already read it, now is a good time to start some nostalgia for the next decade.)

Once Upon a Time & The Price of Magic

So I'm kind of addicted to ABC's Once Upon a Time. I love fairy tales and retellings, but I was pretty adamant on not liking this one because the commercials looked so undesirably corny. But then I watched the first episode and I saw the sheriff and I was like "hey, maybe I like this show more." Yeah, I was pretty much a complete girl about it. But then I got past the first episode and realized that the show was actually kind of...good? The kind of good you don't even feel guilty about.

Because there's Rumpelstiltskin, played by brilliant actor Robert Carlyle, whose this evil, manipulative, slightly glittery son of a gun who needs a new dentist but is insane in the best possible way. I love a good villain, and this is a good freaking villain.

The show goes back and forth between modern day, where none of the fairy tale characters really know who they are but are trapped in a town conveniently called Storybrooke (I see what you did there, ABC) and the past when they are characters you went to sleep learning about. But the stories have that slight Grimm touch on top of the classic spin - they give a root of dark underneath the stories you're accustomed to hearing, and it's pretty great.

Anyway, back to Rumpelstiltskin.

He says this thing in his origin episode that I had to prove either right or wrong: "Magic always comes with a price." And when he first said it, I was all "yeah, yeah, cliche, the price is the loss of toothpaste," but then I thought it was really true.

Every story with magic in it always ends with people lamenting about their miserable lives. Clark Kent wanted to know his family and maybe drink a nice cup of tea with them, but noooooooo. Harry Potter was tired of getting stared at and wanted to snog girls, but nooooooo. It gets very angsty, and they always talk about wanting to be normal.

It's either that, or they're a complete power-eater like Sylar, but while villains are fantastic, having them as main characters causes plot issues because when they start killing unicorns and drinking children's souls, they lose likability. And then, the price is humanity. Sure you can do that cool laser-shooting thing, sir, or you can turn people into insects, chick, but no one likes you. Even the evil witch in Once Upon a Time gets emo about that.

Apparently there isn't any magic without paying involved. Where are the characters who are like, "Hey I can breathe ice like in that one episode of Powerpuff Girls, that's pretty cool, I think I'll go finish reading To Kill a Mockingbird for class now." Haven't come across one. Any person who suddenly gets magic automatically changes and becomes either really responsible (ie, saving children from burning buses) or really irresponsible (ie, stealing all the beer from the convenient store and/or catching school buses on fire, respectively.) The responsible ones always have some kind of unavoidable pressure and wish to go back to normality, and the irresponsible ones always morph into people that are completely inhuman. And I think it's because magic is synonymous to power - like if you gave a charitable person money vs a greedy person money, one would spend it to help others and one would spend it to help themselves. But with magic, it's glorified and the justice is a lot swifter. There's always a price. (Unless you're Matilda, because it all went pretty well for her, so children are exempt.)

And nothing tells stories of evil and justice better than a good fairy tale., especially when there are villains that sweat glitter. So I guess Rumpelstiltskin was right.

Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor

"She had been innocent once, a little girl playing with feathers on the floor of a devil's lair."

The first book I finished in 2012 was Daughter of Smoke and Bone, and I think it's more of a book to go out on than to go in on. Because finding a book to top it is like a whimper compared to a bang. I'm sure at some point in 2012 I'll read a book that makes me stop and run my hands over sentences again, but maybe not quite so often as this one. Laini Taylor's writing is so gorgeous it made my eyes hurt. Like staring at the sun for so long. I'd actually think this book was made of sunshine, if there weren't so many tragic parts.

The main character, Karou, lives in Prague, "a city of alchemists and dreamers," with wind that "carried the memory of magic, revolution, [and] violins..." She also has blue hair and a best friend who makes marionettes. They often eat their lunch on top of coffins in this restaurant that has statues covered in gas masks. And, yeah, her foster family is a group of chimera, half human half beast creatures, and they run a shop that sells wishes for teeth.

This book is a combination of the weirdest, darkest, quirkiest bits of life, both real and surreal, printed into words. Karou runs errands, trips to the farthest reaches of the world, to get teeth from graverobbers. The wishes she receives in payment are ranged by the type of deed or teeth she acquires, from tiny wishes like hair dye to slightly larger wishes like learning languages. Karou doesn't know what her family does with the teeth, though, and when you find out, the book gets even better.

This is a story inside of a story, a mix of past and present. It's one of the most original books I've ever read - the world created in this book is unlike any I've ever even side-glanced into, but the mythology and lore of it essentially makes sense. It uses our own pre-judgments and myths and shreds them into one of those ripped-pieces-of-paper puzzles, but one that's missing eight pieces. You can see human's own myth creations behind it, but it's so delightfully torn apart, in a way that makes such solid sense, that it's something entirely different. It's pretty fantastic.

The other POV in this book is from this stranger named Akiva who thought humans were legend until he was able to step foot onto Earth. We were legends. Not the creatures you already know about in the back of your head, that are introduced with a gasp and reluctant belief on page 100 in book X or Y. We are those creatures, to this character.

CAN YOU GET ANY COOLER THAN THIS BOOK? I think only if you are the child of Ellen Paige and Joseph Gordon Levitt or something. Probably not even then.

Seriously. This book is so awesome, I want to use it as my main food source.

And the ending isn't really a cliffhanger. It's more like that moment when your fingers are clawed into the earth, hanging over dead air, right before someone steps on them with a crunch and then there's no hanging involved at all. It's pretty much like this quote from Daughter of Smoke and Bone:

"...and just like that, the creature un-was. It was, and then it wasn't. Karou's stomach roiled as she contemplated the possibility of being so suddenly not."

My stomach didn't want to deal with the not-ness of the book, either.

2012

Reading and writing in 2011 was pretty sporadic for me. I read a lot of great books and a lot of mediocre books, created a lot of great characters and a lot of bad scenes, interspersed between snippets of life. I posted less often because I read less often, writing only about the books I read and not the moments in between.

But in 2012, I want to write more. That's what I created this website for, back in 2007. I wanted to talk about what made those great books so great, the people in them and the way they experience their lives. I want to write about the times I feel infinite like Charlie and golden like Ponyboy and the times I want to shout "eat my shorts" like Judd Nelson's tv version of Breakfast Club.

The writing that makes me smirk or makes me angry or makes me cry. I want to write about it all.

The first week of the year I took off from blogging here, to think about what I wanted for my literary life. I have a lot of other things going on, with music and with traveling and with college, but words are something I always want to be a part of. Blogging about them is a kind of redundancy that appeals to me. Writing is such a huge part of my life, that I can't even get away from the temptation of writing about words.

So my late resolution is to make sure I spend more time doing what I love, and writing about it. I want to post about reading and writing and adventures, a mash up of literature and everything behind it. The ink stains on my fingers, the keyboard I bought because I love the way it sounds, the marathons of tv I watch, art that inspires me, places in books that I've visited, music that connects to scenes. It's all going here. This has always been considered a "reviewing website" but in 2012 I want to steer it away from that label. I want to just write words. About books and movies and coffee binges and characters I want to go to Paris with.

This is obviously a literary website, but literature has a much more broad meaning to me now. Everything that goes into it, people and culture and inspiration, that's all literary to me. Myths and fairy tales and legends. Campfires and whispered secrets. Tea kettles and steam and ideas that fail. I think in broadening my view, in seeing the things that go into making a book, into making words and art, I can go back to doing what I love. Reading a book and writing about it can be a routine, and to me, writing is about thinking outside of routine. I want to research the grit behind writing, the smoke and bone behind the daughter. I'll read amazing books and I'll write about those books here, but I'll also write about the times in between, the things my English professors say that I do or don't agree with, writer's lives and the places that inspired them, hidden gems underground and the people that found them. I want to write about stories, literally - about books, and I want to write about stories that aren't books, but the tales of people and writers. The stories behind the stories.

I have a feeling 2012 is going to be an enlightening year, and I'm fighting to make it entirely full of words.

Heartsinger by Karlijn Stoffels

I went to Chicago a couple years ago and, at a book event, ran into Karlijn Stoffels and the woman who translated her novel into English. I got a copy of it, a small little book that ended up sitting on my shelf for two years. And now I can't believe I let this one collect even the tiniest bit of dust on its pages. I picked it up because it was short and I needed a small-paged book to go between two long 486475676198734 page books I was reading. Might have hyperbolized that.

But this book was good. It's told from alternating POVs, one being a young boy, Mee, whose deaf parents had died without ever hearing his voice, whose songs made people dance anytime he sang them. After they died, they made people weep. So he traveled the world and was a Singer of Sorrows, playing at funerals. Every time he arrived at a funeral and sang a song for those who had died, the succeeding chapter was the story of each life that went behind that death.

The other perspective was a girl, Mitou, who played the accordion like a boss and brought happiness to everyone who heard it. The opposing use of music, for both grief and joy, was pretty brilliant.

It felt like a slightly morbid fairy tale, which is just the kind of book I love to read. It's such an interesting, different way to tell a story. You find out all these unrelated tales of the past, through Mee's singing, and you'd think that would pull you away from the book because of it's break from the plot, but it made me more connected to it. This book felt long, not because it dragged but because there were so many characters and lives inside of it.

I felt like I had found an ancient book of stories at some abandoned house, a foreign group of tales that were entirely vivid and partially myth. From the woodcutter who was in love with a sailor to the princess who would never look away from her mirror, it broke into both small side stories and one interwoven plot.

I don't reread books a lot, but Heartsinger is one I'll definitely pick up again. Maybe 2358693427 more times.

Things That Roar

Dragons. I'm able to be classified as a nerd because I've read at least five books with dragons in them. From the classics, like Beowulf, where the dragon is evil, to popular YA books like the Inheritance series where dragons are intelligent and people ride them like horses that can talk. Except it's cooler than that. And then I've read books like Firelight, where the main characters are descendants of dragons, half human and half dragon.

And then I watched this show on, I think, Discovery Channel, where they showed how dragons could have been real - the idea that all these cultures depicted the creature in their cave drawings without any supposed way to communicate to each other. And how their whole fire-breathing thing would work. Which means I qualify into uber nerd category.

But dragons are cool.

My friend showed me this video of Maleficent the other day (after talking about the show Once Upon a Time) where she turns into this crazy purple dragon and goes and melts stones and shit. And I had just finished the latest Eragon book, so I was all dragon-minded and thought I'd create some kind of literature guide to dragons because that's what I like to do with my Monday nights, aside from Psych marathons.

So we have three types of dragons, right?

There's the evil kind, the kind that Disney, etc, loves. The kind fairy tales are made of. The evil, giant beast that guards princesses in castles and kills them if they get too close. Like Bowser from Mario. And you don't really realize how messed up that is, until you take a step back and are like - woah, what the heck IS Bowser and what is with the reverse beastiality? Anyway, we've got that kind. Like the previously referenced Beowulf. Slay the dragon, win the prize. (Generally a pretty girl that doesn't know how to escape said castle.)

Then there's the intelligent kind. The mythical kind that can speak and are kind of superior to humans, but they let you ride them anyway. Like in Inheritance. And also like in Never Ending Story except less creepy. I think these are the books for horse lovers who don't have horses. There's something people love about new creatures that only connect with certain humans. Like in Avatar with those bird-things, which is totally my favorite part of that movie and is probably why I like these kinds of books so much.

Then there are the dragons who are human-like, like in Firelight. Also like in that one episode of Supernatural. Dragon blood. I'd make a Charlie Sheen reference, but that's really old now and everyone has moved onto Ryan Gosling which I approve of. But anyway, this is kind of a new trend that's really interesting.

So, bam. Dragons. What fire-breathing books have you read?