TV, books, religion, pandas.
Woman Goes Without Makeup For One Year
“I did what a man would do. Put on deodorant. Put on a little gel and head out the door. Maybe I can approximate that. The makeup would go, the jewelry would go.”
Minus the “little gel”, I’ve been living like this for 26 years. I assure you, it hasn’t killed me yet, and I don’t think I’m worthy of having a news story written about me.
Beauty Queens by Libba Bray. Scholastic Press, 405pp.
I should have hated this book.
I have a very low tolerance for “funny” books with wacky characters and thinly veiled parodies of real people and pop culture. I don’t like books that think they are movies, and I get frustrated when there are too many characters to follow. It grates on me when YA books get preachy and heavy handed.
Beauty Queens was all of these things, and also delved into a particular genre that infuriates me above all else. And yet, I loved every wacky, over-the-top, preachy bit of it.
Beauty Queens is about a group of teen pageant contestants whose plane crashes on an island. The few survivors work together to stay alive, and try to find a way to get back home.
The characters are, at first glance, well-worn stereotypes: the ditzy blonde who’s been in pageants since birth, the tough, sarcastic one who’s afraid to let people in, and the sweet Miss Congeniality contender with a double-barrel name from a farm in Nebraska. But it soon becomes apparent that not one of them (well, at least not one of the eight main characters) is what she seems, and each girl’s individual struggles become a launching pad for a lesson on feminism. That sounds pretty cringe-worthy, but it is executed perfectly, and I think that for a young reader who had not had much exposure to feminist thought, this book would be an excellent introduction.
It all gets a bit crazy at the end, and, to be honest, I’d say I probably would have given up if not for the charm of the author’s performance on the audiobook version. It’s all tied up pretty nicely though, and worth plodding through the arduous third act.
I would strongly recommend the audiobook version of Beauty Queens, as it’s one of the most well-produced and -performed audiobooks I have ever listened to. The author obviously knows her characters better than anyone else, and they come alive with her impressive voice acting skills. Sound effects and music bring the whole thing to life in a way that perfectly complements the book’s movie-written-down vibe.
One of the things I liked best about this book, as an aspiring YA author, is that, despite being published by Scholastic, it had a healthy dose of coarse language, sex and adult themes. Nothing that would be a shock to a young reader, but something that is more often than not shied away from in YA literature, at the expense of realism. It reminded me that, in writing my own novel-in-progress, I should stop worrying about that stuff, at least in the first draft.
I have never read anything by Libba Bray before, but I’ll certainly be back, once I get to the end of my formidable reading list.
JonBenét: Inside the Ramsey Murder Investigation by Steve Thomas and Don Davis. St Martins Press, 380pp. (Kindle version)
When JonBenét Ramsey was murdered on Christmas day, 1996, I was ten years old and lived in a house without a TV. Not surprisingly, I was fairly out of touch with world news. I vaguely remember adults talking about it in hushed tones, and, of all things, her photo appearing on the cover of Who magazine, but I never knew much about the case. Spurred on by a discussion on an Internet forum, I decided to buy this book and finally catch up on what sounded like it could be a fairly interesting real life mystery.
For the next few days, I was a zombie. When not sleeping, working or walking, I was reading this book. In fact, after getting the Kindle app set up on my phone, I even found myself reading it while walking if the path was straight enough and not too crowded. As someone who started reading two books that I quite enjoyed around six months ago and still hasn’t finished them, I don’t have the greatest attention span when it comes to finishing books (or movies, or TV series). With this book, I felt like I was under a spell, and couldn’t move on with my life until I had finished it. The last book to hook me so completely was The Fault in Our Stars by John Green, and I ended up abandoning a re-read of that book in favour of finishing JonBenét. So, yeah. I guess you could say it was fairly interesting.
The author, Steve Thomas, was a detective on the JonBenét Ramsey case, and gives the facts while also providing a very personal account of the case and life in Boulder at the time of the investigation. He is upfront about who he believes killed the little girl (her mother) and gives exhausting evidence for why he has come to this conclusion. I remembered seeing one star reviews on Amazon in which the author was aggressively attacked for bias and accused of slander, so I resolved to keep an open mind and consider his position critically. While I intend to do further research on the case, now that this book has piqued my interest, Thomas’s arguments certainly seemed sound to me, and he devotes a considerable portion of the book to critically evaluating all other theories, in a way that seemed to be very fair and logical.
The miscarriage of justice that this book depicts is utterly heartbreaking. Thomas does not explicitly state it, but it is clear that this is a story of how the promise of money can make people overlook even murder. That so many people could be compliant in letting a killer walk free is astounding and incredibly depressing. Not a great endorsement for a book, I know, but I assure you that it makes for a riveting read, and is well worth your time.
So as is my habit at this time of year, I planned to write a post about my first impressions of the new TV shows soon to debut, and then follow up with a review of each show’s pilot. I did some research on the season’s new shows, and was struck by a disappointing realisation: there are no new shows that I have any interest in watching.
I think this is a first for me. For as long as I have had the ability to follow the US TV schedule, and even before that, in a more belated fashion, I have keenly anticipated each round of new shows, wondering if one of the many will be a new love of my life. For the past few years, there has always been at least one:
In 2012? Not one of the new shows looks like it will make it to that list, and that kind of breaks my heart.
Still, I will give a handful of them a go, and hope for a miracle.
I would love to see Duke Silver do a cover of this.
I could literally spend all day talking about how great Parks and Recreation is, but I don’t have time for that today. Why? Because it’s back! The first episode of Parks and Rec, season 5, will be airing approximately 37 minutes from the time I am writing this.
I plan to write a very lengthy post about why you should be watching the amazingness that is Parks and Recreation, but for now, to celebrate its return to our screens, hearts, and minds, here are three of my favourite moments from my favourite TV show ever.
Ben’s claymation
Leslie’s ice rink campaign stop
All the bacon and eggs
I think that last one was the moment when I went from being ridiculously in love with and obsessed with this show to seeing it as the closest thing I have to a religion.
Church is in session, 27 minutes from now… or a little later for those of us who aren’t lucky enough to live in North America. Sigh. I’ll be just sitting here, passing the time by reading my copy of Pawnee: The Greatest Town in America by Leslie Knope.
So, I’ve decided to start a new blog.
I’ve been writing my former blog for a couple of years now, with varying degrees of frequency. It had a modest but respectable following, and I was, more or less, proud of most of what I published there. It fulfilled its purpose, which was to encourage me to write and to allow me to feel the confidence that comes with the completion of something: when working on a novel or a feature length screenplay, those feelings don’t come all too frequently, and it can be a little disheartening.
But now, I feel like I need to move on from that blog, mainly because it was far too integrated with the rest of my life. My real name was there for a time, and probably still available on archived versions. I ended up using the title of the blog as a username on a forum, which I have now come to regret. All of this stems from my deeply-held insecurity about others reading what I have written – a fairly serious problem for a writer. The main purpose in starting my previous blog was to help me overcome that fear. But if the fear is holding me back from writing at all, then I’ve failed myself in two ways. So for now, I am going to concentrate on the absolute basics: the writing. I will write anonymously, and I will write from the heart. And at some point in the future, I will reevaluate and consider putting my name to all that has been written here.
But for now, I shall write.
With my former blog, I struggled to find an over-arching theme. It was kind of just about everything that interested me, and I think it probably needs more structure than that if it is to stand out of the crowd. For now, I’m going with a theme of TV, books, religion and pandas, because these are four things that interest me above pretty much all else. I’d add video games to that list but I don’t want to bore you too much and anyway, it’s not like the Internet has any shortage of blogs about that particular topic. I reserve the right to make a handful of well-dispersed posts updating you on the lives of my Sims though. Apologies in advance.
I have added a handful of my old posts to this blog, retroactively publishing them on the dates they were originally published. This will probably make it easier for web detectives to find me but hey, if you have the ability and motivation to find my identity that way, I’m not going to begrudge you that!
Since I’m not sharing this blog with any family or friends for the time being, I’m not sure who you are, how you found this blog or why you’re still reading. But I’m glad to have you as a reader and I hope you’ll stick around. Let me know which of my posts interest you and which bore you to tears. Tell me when I make heinous grammatical or factual errors. Tell me about yourself. I can’t wait to hear from you, and I hope I and my little blog don’t disappoint.
