A Book-Lover’s Thank You

In a kind of overly confident manner I’d like to claim that I am a reader. Now considering how little reading I have done in the last couple of years I do feel like this may be a farce but all the same I shall claim it.

When I was little and we were learning to read in school, I remember my teachers being rather discouraged by me and my abilities. I was very slow, probably disinterested and – I don’t know – just not the amazing reader that 7 year-olds are supposed to be. But I struggled my way through. Whether or not I enjoyed it, I cannot remember.

What I can tell you is that I was always attract to anything involving creativity and I think this was inspired by literature. Yes I may not have been the best reader but I still had grown up among books and even in my 7 year old room there was a bookshelf. My parents had read to me, along with all stereotypical fairy tales, a lot of Dr Seuss and probably the complete works of Beatrice Potter (creator of Peter Rabbit) and I think this helped me develop a belief and connection with the arts and all things creative predominantly literature. (Also I didn’t watch a lot of TV at all. And although I’m not completely against TV I do think this a factor and it is unsurprising that so little inspiration to read comes out of my TV driven generation)

Now jump forward another couple of years to a ten year old me. At this point I hated Harry Potter. I had watched the first movie with my parents when I was quite young and Fluffy, the three headed dog, had terrified me and I had vowed never to have anything to do with the Potteredom ever again. But my father eventually goaded me into watching the movie again about 4 years later and I was hooked. I watched all four movies (which were out at the time) in a weekend and then started reading the fifth book. An odd number to start at, I do realize but the truth. It was the only book in the series that I owned and I wanted to know what happened next. After that I read six and then from one to four and then had to wait patiently for the seventh book to come out.

Now according to my parents my love of reading started with Harry Potter or at least was kindled by it. I don’t remember enough of my life before then to comment myself but I certainly read a hell of a lot afterwards. When I first read them it took me about a week to read each one. As the books got longer I got stronger and more enthralled now (if I have time) I can read them all in a week.

After that I couldn’t keep my nose out of a book for very long. I was one of those people who didn’t feel like the fitted in with the world around them but in books nobody judged me and nobody cared and I could surround myself with the most amazing things.

As I got older I learnt how to deal with (and spend more time in) the real world and I started to find my space in it but I never let go of that love of reading. Reading is what taught me, it taught me my morals and my goals and my ever so over-the-top opinions. At the moment in my life I haven’t worked hard enough at making time for the books that I love so much. When I do pick up a novel that I love, it is like I never left and when I stuck my head in the comfortable pages of Half a Yellow Sun, I was excited by the simple experience of reading.

I don’t think I have ever experienced anything better than being lost for hours in the speckled pages of a book. Our world is scary and harsh but the worlds we create are spectacular beyond even realities potential. For little girls (and boys) like me who don’t feel like the world accepts them, books are there to hold your hand and be your friend and guide you through your greatest perils.

Novels, writing, stories of all kinds have been there as something I can turn to throughout my life and if my parents are right I may just owe some thanks to Joan Rowling and Harry Potter for leading me onto the path.

Half a Yellow Sun

It saddens me how expensive books are these days and so much like when I go into a good clothing store and more often than not end up leaving empty handed so to do I leave with nothing to show from book stores. But, like a sign from the god of all things student, our school gave us a shining gift of an ExclusiveBooks voucher at the end of last year which has been sitting waiting patiently inn my empty purse while I search for the right book to spend it on.

I had two requirements: 1 the book be about Africa and written by an African and 2 it must be written by a woman. These are difficult requirements to be filled considering literature trends are set by the ‘oh-so-great Canon of Literature’ (yes sarcasm) which was decided on and written by, years ago, old white men (not a common species to write about Africa) but after 5 months of debating I decided to spend the cash on Half a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. A Black, Female, Nigerian writer. Yes these are all important attributes as all three are rare in the literature industry and so make it harder to achieve in the sadly elitist world of storytelling.

It was good decision making on my part and very good writing on Adichie’s and I thoroughly enjoyed the book. I have always had sympathies for the Middle East specifically Palestine and surrounding areas because of my readings of Khaled Hosseini’s books. Brilliant well written novels which tell the Palestine and Muslim story from another more misunderstood (by the ‘West’ at least) point of view.

I was struck by the similarities in Adichie and Hosseini’s writings. They were about different wars between different cultures for different things and yet ultimately the raw human sacrifice, courage and terror which they wrote about were similar. They shared stories with such real and intimate detail that for me they shared a bit of the human suffering soul.

What I was also struck with was how little I knew about Nigeria’s history and trauma as the story was set in the countries turbulent 60s. I had never heard this story on any level and I was angered. The ignorance that I live in when it comes to my own continent is astounding and the misuse of the tools of novels to help educate myself that I withstood was depressing. This is where in part I blame my school system. I had a brilliant education but when it comes to literature (the understanding and discussion of it) I was limited and disappointed. I, in my high school career, have learnt the great lessons that 6 Shakespeare plays have to offer (not very enlightening), I can tell you what and when Anne Frank ate in her last days and most absurdly have read not one but two works on the Salem witch trials (very topical – I know) but have studied the grand total of one African work which was a South African Novel called Disgrace by J M Coetzee which was studied in an additional English class not even the mainstream one. How is it plausible? I think as young people growing up in a vibrant developing and AFRICAN city we should be learning about the world around us. Trust me I learnt far more life lessons from Adichie’s characters in a Nigeria-Biafra war time than from a pubescent Romeo’s deathly love.

As far as the actually book goes (as opposed to my literature outbursts). It is an extremely well written novel about human tragedy in a time of war. It portrays in a brilliant collection of words the story of Biafra and Nigeria. I couldn’t put it down. It felt good to stay up all night reading and forgo my cell phone for the sturdy pages of my book. The writing is undeniably brilliant and stories perfectly placed. The book enthralled and educated me and I was left feeling deeply moved by the experience of reading it. I went away feeling ignorant about my world as well as newly educated (a rather odd Catch 22). This book is not stereotypical or simple but it does make some very complex issues easy to read and understand. It manages to cross many cultural divides both between the Nigerian people and those outside its borders. There are issues of love, there are issues of hate and there are issues of faith in a cause, in education and in religion. The novel calls for us to think about everything that we have and do. It shows how easily one can lose everything and when that happens how all you have left is your ideas, your morals and your brain and how losing the physical can put the abstract ones to test. I felt more educated then I ever felt on a book in school and I certainly walked away with a better lesson.

So for goodness-sake take Shakespeare off the damn menu and give us a taste of the real world… our world.

Half a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie with a cup of my favourite cinnamon tea

Shantaram

So after 3 and a half months (yes seriously) I have finally finished the Everest of a read which is Shantaram. It has never taken me this long to read a book and there were moments where I felt compelled to give up just by the size of the book itself but I couldn’t because the story was so brilliant and the writing, so inspiring that I could not and would not put it aside.

I went to India once on exchange and when I came back I was asked by many who I told my story to, if I had read this great novel (although I am still perplexed as to why they would have expected a 15 year old to have read the 933 page text). Ever since I have been drawn to it, partly so that I could really challenge my abilities as a reader and partly out of curiosity that Google searches could not suffice. So at the end of last year I got my hands on the novel and plunged into the depths of its pages.

Now simply put (not that this piece is one that should be simply put) the idea behind the novel is about good and bad, it is about justice and honour, it is about how “sometimes it is necessary to do the wrong thing for the right reasons”.

The story follows the journey of an escaped Australian convict, ex heroin addict, who finds his way to India, Mumbai (an ambiguous city then as the time period is when the cities name was changed and so in fact in the book it is more commonly referred to as Bombay). When reading one cannot believe the situations in which our protagonist, known as Lin, finds himself. By extreme and unfortunate luck we follow Lin as he becomes a slum doctor, a black market business man, a Bombay Gangster and an Afghan warrior. But the actual events of the story, although intriguing and spectacular, are not what makes this book amazing. Rather it is the incredible fluidity and beauty which the author, Gregory David Roberts, uses words to package the story for us as readers and the fundamental philosophies and questions about life which he raises are what truly make this book unforgettable.

Now near the end of the book Lin has a conversation with the Great Mafia don Abdel Khader Khan as they sit in a small war torn village somewhere in Afghanistan, Khader explains the importance of two questions, “what is an objective, universally accepted definition of good and evil? And What is the relationship between consciousness and matter?” Now this book does not answer either of those questions but rather it displays a collection of people and stories and how their lives individually correspond to those questions. Before I read the book, I always ‘deeply’ understood that there were things in the world that were good and there are things that were bad and I knew on which side I sat. For the most part Pure Goodness and Pure Evil where things set in stoned but after reading this book I no longer believe this. I know that I do not know what is good and what is bad and I have no fixed idea any more. Don’t worry this is not a negative attribute of Shantaram but rather it is an achievement. Sure I have to now rethink my life and my role in it which is exhausting and will not be short or easy but it made me think, it opened my eyes to such a degree that my world was turned on its head.

The life that Lin and his friends, both native to India and foreigners, lived was one of excitement, one of change and one of emotion. This book may have taken me for ever to read and this is not only due to its physical length but the grasp that it takes on your mind and, if you believe in one, soul is exhausting and one has to take it at a slow pace because of this, but it was worth it and I think it is important that a book that is truly great (and I genuinely believe that, despite the author’s supposed failures and lies, this book IS truly Great) becomes part of life for a considerable length of time for the story and it’s ideas need to be felt rather than understood.

I wish that I could explain the strength of emotion that I feel for this book but my skills with words are not adequate. “Sometimes we love with nothing more than hope. Sometimes we cry with everything except tears. In the end that’s all there is: love and it’s duty, sorrow and it’s truth. In the end that’s all we have – to hold on tight until the dawn.” This book induced every kind of emotion inside of me. It helped me understand how to feel, how to know what I am feeling and how to allow myself to let my logically overly analytical mind be swept up and engulfed in the emotions of my heart.

I read Shantaram with a vile-green coloured highlighter in hand that I swept through the book with. It is not that I disrespected the pages in anyway but rather I could not let those words pass over my head without being recorded or remembered in some way. This book and these words retaught me an appreciation for writing.

Some of the ideas I do not understand and I think it would be extraordinary for a person to understand everything in this book but there were quotes which despite my ignorance still allowed me to understand them emotionally. Such as : “ When the wish and the fear are exactly the same… we call the dream a nightmare.” But there were also common ideas which I have never seen so perfectly described such as this acknowledgement of the people living in the Bombay slum, “there is no act of faith more beautiful than the generosity of the very poor.”

I implore everyone to read Shantaram. Maybe not today and maybe not tomorrow but one-day pick up the heavy red and blue covered novel and invest some time and maybe a piece of your soul into reading it because you might enter as someone and exit as someone else (and this is rarely a bad thing).

Oh and what I didn’t mention is that this is the story of India. Sure it is the depths of it’s poor and criminal world but nothing has as honestly shown the beautiful nature of the Indian people.

“ ‘The truth is that there are no good men, or bad men,’ He said. ‘It is the deeds that have goodness or badness in them. There are good deeds and bad deeds. Men are just men – it is what they do, or refuse to do, that links them to good and evil.’ ”

Books are for Boys – Creative Writing

When I was at school I participated (for many years) in a club called Writer’s Circle. It was an after-school activity which involved a few girls who were interested in writing. I did this throughout my high school career. I’ve always loved writing but I wasn’t very good at it. Attending these lessons and being surrounded by girls who were equally as enthusiastic as I was helped me grow as a writer. I was able to improve my own skills in a positive environment and was exposed to other styles. When I went to university I had to leave this behind. After 5 years of having to write something new every week, I felt creative-writing withdrawal so a friend and I decided to gate-crash the current circle while I was in Jo’burg. We wanted to really feel a part of it and so even went as far as to write a piece on the theme they had been given for homework.

I was busy and distracted and so left the writing to a rushed 15 minutes just before the lesson but I was still pleased with the outcome and simply excited to be writing creatively.

The week’s challenge had been to write a work from the perspective of a child, aged 5 to 13, and the topic was ‘A lesson I will never forget’.

The piece I wrote was called ‘Books are for Boys’ and here it is:

Daddy teaches me lots of things. Always when I am with him I must learn. He has this room in the house. It is big and round and the walls are made of books. I am not allowed in this room without daddy. Me and Amarah call it the secret room because it holds all the worlds secrets. Daddy is so smart, he knows everything.

Every night me and Amarah and daddy have learning time. Daddy told me I must know all that is in the world if it is ever to be mine. It is his job to teach me. Daddy gets home in the evening, eats what mama has made and then rings a special bell and yells “Tahil,” and we must come. I am older so he addresses me. I sit on his lap and Amarah sits at his feet.

 The other kids get stories before bed but not us. We learn about a different thing everyday.

Well we used to.

We don’t anymore. Amarah isn’t allowed in now. Daddy doesn’t teach her anymore because he is angry.

Amarah went in to the secret room without daddy. Amarah loves books. She can’t read them herself but she always sits and holds them and pretends to. Daddy has this old book. It is as heavy as an elephant and is as old as the prophet.

Amarah has always wanted to read it but daddy said no so she went in without him. When he found out he was very angry. He shouted so loud like a giant. I was scared so I covered my ears and hid.

Now Amarah has a scar on her face like mama’s.

Amarah doesn’t learn from the books anymore. Amarah doesn’t like books anymore.

And I now know books are for boys and not girls.

This is a very rushed and roughed piece and by no means my best work but I enjoyed writing it so much that I had to post it. I believe that sexism is very much alive and I wanted to somehow show this because it is currently an issue at the fore front of my mind. I also wanted to show how easy it is to manipulate and change a child’s bias.

I mean no offence by this work and it is purely fictional but I was just very excited to write it and wanted to share some of my more creative work with you because I don’t think you get to see that often.

x J

Dr Seuss Speech – Anecdote

The difficulty which comes when writing blogs is finding time to write them and when you are in your last year of school and for no logical reason you take a dozen extra things it is particularly difficult to fit blogging in. I’ve been sick lately. A ghastly bit of flu which I was bound to get when I spend so many hours of the day in confined classrooms with at least one sick person. Along with this I had the biggest and last English Oral of my high school career as well as a History preprelim (a pre pre final exam – yes it is a bit over the top) and so I have been running around, or more walking as flu slows one down slightly, like a headless chicken trying to prepare. But now today is over so I can blog but inspiration combined with laziness struck me so I thought “Why not just use the piece of writing you’ve been working on all week?”. I know pure indolent genius.

So I have decided to give you my speech. We were given no topic which posed difficulties. I mean you want to end on bang but not a flop so I in the end decided to talk about a person who I admire.

From now on pretend this is being read to you by an almost 18-year-old girl with a slightly posh (or at least my friends call me posh in speeches) South African accent of medium frequency with a slight nasal backdrop and if you really want authenticity imagine a cough here or there.

When given absolutely no speech topic at all it becomes quite difficult to shift through all the things worth talking about, all the things that one loves to find a singular topic that is speech worthy. So I did what I always do and decided to fall back on the author and poet that keeps me going through everything… good old funky and fantastic Dr Seuss.

Dr Seuss was born in 1902 and no his surname is not Seuss and his first name isn’t Dr. He was born as Theodor Geisel but how did he become the famous Seuss? Well he, as most aspiring young literature lovers do, worked as a student journalist for a college magazine called Jack-o-lantern. One day however he and some friends were bust drinking which was quite a bad thing at the time considering that alcohol was prohibited by law so he got kicked off the magazine but he was after all in the making of becoming the incredible writer we know today and whoever ran the magazine noticed this and so he allowed Theodor Geisel to still write but under a pseudonym and Geisel chose his middle name Seuss.

This was the start of an incredible career of writing through which Mr Geisel decided to stick with the pen name rather than his own.

I won’t tell you every detail of his career except that it took him a while to find himself both as a writer and of course an illustrator and to gather the momentum that his fame has today but at around the end of world war two his career started really moving and he started publishing children’s books. He did some incredible things. One of his most famous books and a turning point in his career was the publication of The Cat In the Hat. He wrote this in response to an article that criticised children’s reading levels. This book was written with over 220 different words to help improve children’s vocabulary. After this he took a new more educational approach to writing to try and help children while entertaining them.

A book that always stuck out for me and that even today I find myself reaching to when I feel over worked or underappreciated is If I ran the circus. Seuss wrote it for his father and I used to make my own dad read it to me almost every week. It is about a boy who wants to start a circus, the Circus McGurkus. He spends the whole book dreaming of it starting from where he will put it to what it will contain and as you turn the pages the acts get crazier and the animals get weirder and it gets more and more stoo-pendous. The stuff that he has displayed, the “many surprises, You’d never see half it if you had forty eyses”. What a circus it was. And in true Seuss fashion every page was chocabloc full of incredible illustrations. I used to sit wide eyed and fascinated. Before I could read I would just open the book and take in the pictures. That alone was enough to inspire a little girl’s imagination. I think today the fact that I read so much and always have this itch in my very soul to be creative is due to this remarkable writer.

In Oh the Places you’ll go he writes “You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose. You’re on your own. And you know what you know. And YOU are the one who’ll decide where to go…” Dr Seuss strove to inspire children and in this quote and in fact the book it comes from he challenges readers to take their own initiative and move forward. There are hundreds of brilliant authors out there but I for one would never be able to appreciate any of them if Dr Seuss had not laid the ground work.

Children’s authors are the creators of readers. Whether they be Raold Dahll or Beatrice Potter but for me it was Dr Seuss and it always will be. No matter where I go, where I live or how the big book shelf in my house is I will always own at least one Dr Seuss.

(Still not quite sure how referencing works here so the header picture is from http://desmoinesparent.com/celebrate-dr-seusss-birthday/)

 

The Fault in Our Stars.

This is a review but not a book review per say rather a review of a movements which has followed a story in this case the huge success which has come from The Fault in Our Stars, both the movie and the book. Now I have read the book last December and I enjoyed it. I read it in a couple of hours while curled up in a camping chair in the middle of the Kruger National Park. I thought it was sweet and reasonable as far as a story goes but that was it. It didn’t make a lasting impression on me. It was just a book. Now this may be that I am cold-hearted but I think it might be because I have quite an extensive reading history and so it’s not that John Green isn’t a fantastic writer but rather that I have been exposed to such a variety or incredible writing and fascinating stories that The Fault in Our Stars just came a little bit late (plus my heart has never swooned at idealistic teenage romance – which does help in this kind of book).

About two months after I had read it (and I’m sure many others noticed this) the book really hit off steam in South Africa. It could be seen in the hands of even people who don’t enjoy reading (yes there sadly are people who don’t understand the pleasure of being lost in a good book) and I must applaud John Green for he re-enlightened my teenager fellows, even if it was just for a moment, into the love of reading (the last time this happened was Twilight and The Fault in Our Stars is definitely a step up)

Of course when the movie came out we had to watch it. Some of my friends hadn’t read the book and so were curious of what the big fuss was about. We watched. By the end of the movie I was handing out tissues to all four of my 18/almost 18-year-old friends who had come to watch. Me? I didn’t shed a tear. Some people don’t believe me. But I’m not a romantic and I’d already read the book (plus we had a bet about crying which I had to win). I’m not cruel or evil or cold-hearted I just found it hard to believe. I found it hard to believe that these children had come so close to death and were now travelling the world and seriously? their relationship is not realistic at all. The movie was well made and the actors were decent but I couldn’t connect with them. It was sensationalized and kind of obvious… (this is probably because I’ve read the book though). It was just a movie.

I have mixed feelings when it comes to the huge fandom which now exists for this book. Now I am not saying that Mr Green does not deserve it (although I wish that Markus Zusak or Khaled Hosseini received this kind of support from people my age) but it always makes me feel sad when people support books just because it’s popular and not because they love it. I am an idealist when it comes to reading and I always hoped (yes in a slightly snobbish manner) that reading was above that following-the-crowd nonsense but alas that is not true and one way or another I will have to deal with this. Another thing which disappoints me slightly is the view which many readers of the book have. Now I do realise that I am going to sound full of my self and hypocritical with what I say and please understand that I do believe that everyone’s opinion matters and everyone has a different experience when reading a book but it is far too much of common trend between teenage girls to ignore and this trend is: to only look at the Romance of the book. Now obviously it is a major part but there is depth beyond that to the book. The romance is idealistic, unrealistic and a bit over the top (although much better than the usual teenage romance and I must admit if I found a boy like Augustus Waters I wouldn’t ever let go) but the point is the romance is the thing with the least depth of the whole book and that’s what the majority of teenage fault-in-our-stars-fangirls talk about. I mean just go ahead and embrace the stereotype! I wish that with this new-found book-love came some bookish features. The least they could do is focus on how Augustus and Hazel bond over a love of reading rather than Champaighn-that-tastes-like-stars. But maybe I am asking too much. Maybe I just need to wait and if I’m lucky a generation of book worms will blossom.

I know this is unlikely but a girl can hope.

Housekeeping

What is this blog going to be about? You probably want to know what you are getting into, right? The thing is that I am young and still finding out who I am so I have a lot of interests and a lot of things which I want to discuss but I will list a few of my top passions.

Firstly (which you will have gathered from my first blog entry) I love to read so this means that when the moment strikes me and when I have managed to tear my eyes away from a good book I will write about books that I have read, stories I’ve enjoyed, things that just shout to me from the very shelves that they sit on and numerous other things that a good bookworm must know.

I will also write (and this will have accompanying pictures –YAY!) about Fashion and my style. See I don’t want just a fashion blog because I feel like these are becoming a go-to thing for teenagers and I’d probably be more likely to drown, never to be found again, in the blogging world if I focussed solely on fashion but I still really love the idea of fashion and creating an individual style plus it’s a part of who I am so it must be included.

Then there is art. I am an art student. In fact I am head of art at my school. I am not the most talented artist or the most creative but it does grab deep inside my soul. I love the inspiration and brilliance that can be achieved through art and the peace that I get to feel when I have a pencil or paintbrush in my hand and when I have writers block this will be an excellent thing to put on my blog.

I am also going to write about South Africa because it is my home and I have this verging on unhealthy patriotism, not necessarily to the ever changing leaders but to the people, the culture and the land itself. Sometimes I don’t think I can truly express in words the beauty of this country but I’ll try because that is the least I can do.

I will write about the environment because I’ve been brought up to respect it and take care of it and I only wish to share that, to share ideas on how to help on the environment and to discuss its beauty because what are we without it.

Then there is food because we can’t live without it (and the procrastinating teen writing to you certainly can’t live without it).

I will also discuss social issues and current affairs when they are on my mind, in my face or topical because what happens in the world around us is important.

And (because I haven’t listed everything that exists in the whole wide world) I will discuss the interesting ins and outs of my life and my world.

I think I should come up with a catchy phrase to end each blog with. Anyone have any ideas?

A short introduction

How does one start a blog? Well I suppose and I know this isn’t original but probably at the beginning. Right now it feels like I am writing into the big abyss that is the internet but hopefully this will change as I get used to being a blogger.

So I should probably introduce myself. I am an almost-18 year old living in South Africa. My name is Jemma and for the most part I don’t have a well known nickname so Jemma it is going to have to be. I come from a rather average middle class family made of extraordinary people and here I am about to start a new journey (oh isn’t that a clichéd metaphor)… I am going on an adventure… No still not right… Ah! I am going on a grand exploration of the blogging world. Why? Well I am the type of girl who owns more books than clothing (and I’m sure you will soon find out my huge love of fashion so this is saying a lot). Books have always been my friends and they have nurtured inside of me a love of writing and expressing myself and my ideas and there seems to be no better place, short of writing an autobiography, than a blog to express everything that I am to the modern world.

I look forward to what this has to offer and maybe what I can offer in return.