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.

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.’ ”

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/)

 

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.