The Slanted Shelf

The Selection

2014-05-28T21:59:00.000-04:00

When I picked up Kiera Cass's novel The Selection on a spontaneous visit to Half Price Books (that just happened to be during their big 20% off sale), I looked at the cover, read the small blurb at the top "35 girls. 1 crown. The competition of a lifetime," looked at my best friend Hannah and told her that it sounded interesting so I was going to get it, along with the other 3 books I had in my hands.

I wasn't planning on starting The Selection right away because I'm currently 40% of the way through Diana Galbadon's Outlander. While at Half Price Books, I saw the other two books on the shelf, but being the broke college student that I am, I decided to hold off on buying them. Well, I got bored watching The Tudors and what else could possibly be sitting right next to me, but The Selection. I finished it in 3 hours. I skipped eating dinner because I was so enthralled (and because no one was home to remind me that it was dinner time) but reading my brilliant-book-find so quickly turned out to be a huge mistake. It was Sunday night, Half Price Books was closed, and Monday was Memorial Day so I didn't know if the store was open (luckily, it was!) I haven't been so anxious to read the next book in a series that I didn't have since Harry Potter. I seriously considered sitting outside of HPB like I used to wait for midnight book releases!

Needless to say, I convinced my dad to stop at the store before going to a family cookout, and I had The Elite finished by the end of the evening. I finished The One last night. Luckily, it didn't have a very disappointing ending (although it was still a little sad.) I guess I should explain what the Selection series is about, shouldn't I? Without giving too much away, it takes place in a very different, future America, now called Illea, which is ruled by a monarchy and caste system. When a prince comes of age, there is a "selection" of random women, one of whom the prince will marry. Throw in feisty lead woman America Singer, handsome Prince Maxon, and dangerous King Clarkson, and there's the formula for a really great trilogy. (Anthony Head from Merlin would make a great King Clarkson, btw)

I'm now left awaiting my next paycheck so I can buy Cass's short Selection novellas, The Prince and The Guard. I'm sure I'll eat those up in about a day as soon as I have them. I'll be left waiting until December, when a prequel, The Queen, is released. Until then I guess I'll just have to imagine the rest of my dream cast for the inevitable Selection movies (or tv show, I guess.) *sigh*

This is a great series to add to the top of your summer reading list! If you're anything like me, you'll get through them all very quickly!

My First Lecture

2014-05-10T13:14:00.001-04:00

I recently finished reading The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch, Professor of Computer Science, for my Expository and Critical Writing class. Pausch was asked by Carnegie Mellon to present for a lecture series in which the idea is "if you only have time to give one last lecture, what would it be about?" Shortly after being asked to present, Pausch discovered he had pancreatic cancer and was given a diagnosis of 4 months of good health left, meaning this would likely be his actual last lecture.

After reading and listening to Pausch's lecture, we were given the assignment of writing our own First Lecture. I can't described to you how much I struggled with this assignment. I honestly felt and still feel that I am too young to try and give any advice to my classmates, who I had to present my lecture to. After struggling for about 3 weeks with a topic, I finally decided to give my lecture on responsibility. I'm actually pretty happy with how it turned out.

My professor told me that reading Pausch's book would give us inspiration for writing our own lecture, but it took me long time to find mine. It was when I remembered the moment in The Last Lecture when Pausch gives a small piece of advice: “We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand,” that I found my inspiration.

I realized that by saying we can only change how we play the hand, we really mean we must take responsibility for our decisions. For me, responsibility can be owning up to mistakes and finding solutions for them, making difficult decisions when no one else will, or making the best of every opportunity that comes your way.

Well, I made the best of my small spark of inspiration and wrote my lecture. It turned out pretty well, though it was only about 3 minutes long. I think it's actually better at the length I left it at. After all, I don't have much more to say about responsibility because I'm only 21 years old. I still have a lot to learn about the topic myself.

Schedules and Hounds

2014-04-23T11:24:00.000-04:00

Do you know how difficult it is to stay on a schedule when you're really not thinking about the schedule you set up for yourself? That's how I really feel about blogging sometimes. I don't remember until a couple days later that I totally missed a day, which makes me think I should switch some things around. Or maybe not. I don't know. It's like keeping on a reading schedule for class.

There are some days I'm reading that I get really into a book and read past what I'm supposed to, which creates the problem of knowing what's coming when everyone else in the class doesn't. Then there's the days, like this past Monday, where I just can't get into the book I'm reading (currently The Hounds of the Baskervilles. I know, I know. That's Doyle's best Sherlock novel, but still). I just can't get into that book and I don't quite hit the reading mark and then everyone else knows what's going on and I don't. Everyone has those days, right?

Really, to me, The Hounds of the Baskervilles is disappointing. I'm seven chapters in and I feel like nothing is happening. Some guy is getting his shoes stolen one at a time, and another guy is pretending to be Sherlock Holmes to throw the real Sherlock off the trail. That is honestly the only interesting thing that has happened so far, I think. Well, besides this creepy supernatural dog that just happens to be running around killing people. Oh, and the place in the moor that's sucking ponies up. That's pretty crazy.

I was told by a couple other people that it gets a lot better. I really should trust them since it's their second time reading the novel, but still. I just don't get where this is going. I know it's bad to compare a book to a tv show, especially the BBC production Sherlock because it's so modernized, but it's hard not to. "The Hounds of Baskerville" is intense! Right away there's a great mystery that seems like Sherlock is finally going to have to face the supernatural. Somehow I don't see that happening at the end of the novel. I guess I'll just have to wait and see.

The Return of Holmes

2014-04-14T00:42:00.000-04:00

After a "Great Hiatus" I'm returning in a similar fashion to the brilliant Sherlock Holmes! Only I didn't fake my death after taking out the biggest criminal in London. I just spaced blogging because my little brother came to visit me here at Manchester for the weekend. Oh, and then the season four premiere of Game of Thrones was on Sunday, so I had a pretty distracted weekend.

This past week I've been busy with new papers and research and such. But this past week I also read of the glorious return of Sherlock Holmes (after spending about two weeks reading Dracula) in "The Empty House." It's really hard to not compare reading Conan Doyle's stories to what happened in season three of BBC's Sherlock, especially since I watched Sherlock before I read anything of Conan Doyle's.

After the drama and brilliance of Sherlock's return in "The Empty Hearse" (can I just point out how clever they are to rework the titles?) I was pretty disappointed about how nonchalant Sherlock was when he revealed himself to John in "The Empty House." I mean he was in a very clever disguise, but he basically just walked in and told John how he fooled him. With "The Empty Hearse" on the other hand, you're never quite sure how Sherlock deceived everyone. Even when he tells Anderson how he supposedly got away with it, you're still not sure if he was just playing.

After at least three weeks without Sherlock in my life, I've been thrown in full swing. I've read"The Blue Carbuncle," "The Six Napoleons," "The Solitary Cyclist," "The Man with the Twisted Lip," "The Dancing Men," and "The Musgrave Ritual" in the span of two days. With all this exposure to Sherlock's methods in these stories and with The Hound of the Baskervilles coming up this week, I have a pretty big question in my mind: how on earth do I still not catch all these details that Sherlock does?!

(An even more important question might be: when is season four coming out??)

The Smallest Victories Count the Most

2014-03-29T23:14:00.000-04:00

I’m feeling a little bit like Manchester University’s Innovator of the Year today. A bit of background info: every year Manchester honors a person who recognizes a problem and develops an innovative solution. Just last month, the 2012-2013 Innovator of the year, Temple Grandin, came to campus to speak.

I’m not quite up to par with Temple, but I did have a couple small innovative victories today. I have this cute little robo-dwarf hamster named Khaleesi (after a Game of Thrones character). Khaleesi is a runner. She’s on her wheel non-stop. It’s one of those metal wheels, and since it’s been about six months since we got her the wheel all the paint has worn off the axles. Every time she gets on the wheel it squeaks. Actually, I’m understating how loud and annoying that wheel has been. It was worse than scraping a metal fork on a ceramic plate.

I’m proud to say that today I found a solution! I’ve tried a couple things before. I got one of those “silent” wheels, but immediately discovered that wouldn’t work. I couldn’t get the wheel to sit up on the fluffy bottom of her cage, but mostly it wouldn’t work because it grossed me out that it didn’t have the convenient spaces that the metal one did so when she pooped while she ran it would just fall out. After that, I thought about putting WD 40 on it but was too afraid because I didn’t want to put something in her cage that could make her sick. Today, after someone begging me to take her wheel out, I thought to myself, “Hey! Why not try vegetable oil? Surely that can’t hurt her if she can even get to it.” And it works! I can see her running her little heart out, but can’t hear a thing! Amazing!

That was probably my best idea of the day, especially since the only other idea I had was to play Minecraft instead of working ahead on homework or reading more of Dracula. Minecraft is where I found my other innovative spark today. As a child, I always wanted a horse (like almost every other little girl at some point in childhood) but never even got the chance to ride one. I found horses on the Minecraft world I was playing on on today and thought to myself, “Hey! You’ve never ridden a horse in real life, why not try it on the computer?” I got a bunch of materials together, made a lead and a saddle, and tamed a horse so I could ride it! And it was actually kind of fun since I had to put in a lot of work to be able to do so.

Though my innovations were small and only really affected me, I felt pretty good. I’ve never had the chance to ride a horse so I invented a new (digital) way for me to do so, and I didn’t want to make my hamster sick so I used resources available to me to come up with a new way to grease her wheel. I would say that under the circumstances, I was pretty innovative. Maybe MU could start offering students small awards for small accomplishments like that? I think an ice cream cone would suffice.

Ok, So Dracula Is Actually Scary

2014-03-25T22:40:00.000-04:00

Well, it has been a very busy past few weeks! I feel really bad that I haven't written since before I went on spring break, but Spectrum (literary arts magazine) is in the final stages before being published, and a lot of professors are throwing mid-term papers at us. I was always told that junior year is the hardest and I haven’t been let down yet. Reading is a really good counterbalance to the all the writing and projects.

At the moment I’m reading Dracula by Bram Stoker, and might I say wow! Do you ever have those books that just effect your mood while you’re reading them? Only three chapters in I’ve discovered that Dracula is one of those books for me. Spending time in that giant castle in Transylvania just seems to make me paranoid in real life.

I’m actually really surprised with myself that I haven’t read Dracula before. But now that I’ve started I’ve found that it’s pretty hard to put down. I’ve seen images of the count in pop culture growing up. Count Chocula, NBC’s Dracula (who is played by John Rhys Meyers), and countless portrayals of vampires in books and tv have really impacted my inner-picture of Count Dracula. (I don’t think I’ve ever seen an old Dracula movie.) When I read the actual description of Dracula, I was completely shocked. If you don’t know, he’s described as older, aquiline, and, even more impressively, has a white moustache.

Did anyone else ever picture the brooding, terrifying Dracula having white moustache?! I sure didn’t. And it kind of ruined my picture of him as some kind of monster. Like, yeah, the pointed ears and reddish eyes are scary, but the moustache just makes me think of him as a frail old man. Granted, the farther I read and more active Dracula becomes in Jonathon Harker’s story, the more evil he becomes. But why is it always that pop culture images I have of the classic stories never fit in with the author’s actual picture? (This same thing happened when I read Frankenstein last year) It really beats me why people change these amazing literary creations so much that when people read the novel, it’s hard to recognize. But true to my English major heart, I think the books are better than any recreation I have seen.

Crunch Time

2014-03-08T19:21:00.000-05:00

I wish I had a time turner. Not because I want to go back in time and change something, but because I want to go back in time and get all of my work done and still make it to all my classes and work and meetings and convocations and maybe have time to relax and watch an episode of Dexter every night. Or maybe so I could sit in on those classes that sound interesting but I don’t have time for. Or read one of the 20 books I have sitting on my shelf that I keep meaning to get to. That’d be so nice.

As a self-proclaimed Harry Potter nerd, I know Hermione would be proud of me for wanting to use a time turner to go back and do school work and take extra classes. I mean I’m pretty proud of myself. I never would have thought I was capable of saying I want to get all of my work done because I like my classes so much.

Unfortunately for me, being in all upper-level classes now means professors give a lot more homework than I can handle. And having four of those upper-level classes means my homework piles up for days. Not to mention studying for the tests that they decide need to be given in the crunch time right before spring break. Ahh, spring break. That sounds nice. It sounds like a time to sleep in and catch up on any reading I don’t have done yet. But somehow, that never happens does it. Why is that? (If anyone has a magic formula to not be lazy and do absolutely nothing on breaks, please let me know!)

I guess that after 14.5 or so years of being in school, I should know that teachers and professors rush to squeeze things in before a week off. Apparently I haven’t learned my lesson yet. Man, now that I’m thinking about the time turner and Hermione, I really want to watch Harry Potter. Because I definitely don’t have time to read it!

A Word to Ponder

2014-02-24T19:09:00.001-05:00

Have you ever thought about what a word that you use possibly every day really means? One of my professors brought this idea up to the class today as we were discussing Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret. The passage we were reading said "The over-arching trees stretched their leafless brances abouve his head, bare and weird in the dusky light." Weird. What does weird mean? I asked some of my friends this after class and they could only describe the word as "weird is just weird."

He gave us a condensed history lesson on the word, which stems from the Old English wyrd meaning fate. The word started to change when Shakespeare wrote Macbeth's Weird Sisters. Now, I've never read Macbeth, but I learned the whole "double, double, toil and trouble/ fire burn and cauldron bubble" from watching Mary Kate & Ashley when I was little and watching Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, so I've heard of the witches. What I learned about the Weird Sisters today is that they are seers and they can see fate.

Our professor skipped over a pretty long period of time then and just asked my class what we think weird means now. We started with the thought that weird is a person that is non-conforming to societies standards. But weird does not just apply to people. It can also apply to sounds, hair, behavior, etc. Finally we settled on the idea that weird is something that is slightly different. Weird was in the back of my mind all day. I kept trying to come up with my own meaning for it, but I really couldn’t think of the right thing. So looking it up in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary and finding that it just means “unusual or strange” really made me feel weird.

Even though the idea of a word not meaning what I thought it meant stayed in my head all day, I really love the classes that make me think. I especially love that such a weird conversation came from such a singular line in a 447 page novel. And now, for the next week, I’m going to think about the word weird every single time I say it. What can I say, college is great.

A Big Step for A Non-Writer

2014-02-15T19:47:00.000-05:00

I guess I shouldn't call my self a non-writer, especially since I'm working on an English degree with a writing concentration. But it's true. I've never been a big writer and sometimes it's difficult to think of things to write about without a prompt. Going into college at the beautiful Manchester University (in Indiana, USA, not England), I decided to build a career around English because I love reading and want to be an editor.

To my dismay, my professors thought that I should focus on writing. I confess at first I was a little bitter about being pushed in the writing direction, but Manchester puts a very large emphasis on writing and I have grown to have an appreciation for great writing. As a current junior, one of the things I have to complete is a writing internship. My freshman year, I was terrified at the thought of finding one, but just yesterday I met the woman I will be working with for the next semester and my nervousness turned into excitement (much like the large population of squirrels that occupies my campus is now excited that the snow is melting).

I'm going to be blogging for my internship with published author Karla Akins, author of The Pastor's Wife Wears Biker Boots, Oh Canada! Her Story, and biographies for middle school age children. She's currently working on an interactive ebook about Marco Polo. I've never been a consistent writer, so I think one post a week for now will be a big step. Hopefully once I get the hang of this, it'll be easier to continue writing after this amazing experience!

Besides blogging about my work and experiences with her, I might be writing about life in college and my thoughts on the books I'm reading in class (I don't have a lot of time to read outside, unfortunately).

I would love to hear back from you via comments! (Especially if it's about a book I review; I love a good discussion)