Some days, it is hard to remember that there is good in the world, that all this—people dying, too much wine, no money in your bank account, disappointing sandwiches, bumbling through phone calls, dramatic altercations with pigeons on sidewalks—is really worth it. Other days, there’s this picture of Robert Redford and Paul Newman playing ping pong without shirts on.
…I reflected wearily that it was not easy to be a Woman in these stirring times. I said it then and I say it now: it just isn’t our century.The Dud Avocado, Elaine Dundy
Hey guys, have you added my book on Goodreads yet? Maybe think about doing that, if you’re into reading and also MY FRIENDSHIP.
I just wrote the words
“She lives in San Francisco with her husband. This is her first novel.” About myself. Now I am going to eat some bread.
I can’t stop laughing at Harry running the fuck away, the boy who lived ladies and gentlemen.
….You realize, of course, that Hermione Granger lit a teacher on fire when she was eleven, and kept a person alive in a jar for a year when she was fourteen, and studies dark and forbidden magics for kicks, and is one of the brightest and strongest witches of her era. If she came at me, even wandless, I would apparate to Neptune to get away from her.
Hermione Granger also:
- punched Draco Malfoy in the nose for being an idiot
- purposefully performed a confundus charm on whatshsface WHILE HE WAS FLYING just so Ron would win (omfg that is so fucking dangerous)
- literally pulled a fucking Bourne Identity on her parents and managed to set them up in fucking Australia (jesus christ she literally made it so that she NEVER EXISTED wtf that’s so fucking 007)
- Convinced the Ministry of Magic to give her an incredibly dangerous and volatile device that allowed her to ALTER TIMELINES COMPLETELY (just because she was so smart, literally, that is the reason, her “potential”)
- Has enough basic survival skills and badass magic to literally disappear to the middle of nowhere and flourish AND figure out Voldemort’s plot with Harry
- Hermione also figures out not only what Voldemort’s plan is, but generally how to beat it, WAY BEFORE VOLDEMORT EVER DOES. Why? because she is just that much smarter and better at magic than everybody else
in conclusion: Voldemort wishes he could be as awesome as Hermione, that’s why he wants to kill her so bad.
Can we rehave this series with hermione as the protagonist.
Hermione Granger and “That Time I Used the Power of Research and Deductive Reasoning to Make Sure Harry Didn’t Die”
Hermione Granger and “That time I figured shit out and literally ended up petrified for the cause and it took my friends weeks to figure out that I had the research on me”
Hermione Granger and “That Time I Was a Time Lord”
Hermione Granger and “That Time I Realized I was Hot and Smart and Saved Harry’s Ass with Research. Again. All the Time. Really, He Would Have Died Without Me.”
Hermione Granger and “That time Harry was too emo to actually do shit so I did shit in his name because I am the power behind the throne clearly also PS fought evil deatheaters and won”
Hermione Granger and “That Time I told Harry about the Dangers of Copying off Somebody’s else’s work that wasn’t mine and OH LOOK I WAS RIGHT”
Hermione Granger and “That Time I let Harry Decide Where to Go and What To do and we ended up wandering the forests of dean for like 5 months before saving his ass at Hogwarts”
For Katie Coyle, and also everyone.
How can I not reblog this epic Hermione Granger appreciation post?
(Source: fallforwatson)
This is just a quick public service announcement: if you’ve never read Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle—and why haven’t you, by the way? I guess you just hate yourself and joy?—you should take this upcoming summer as an opportunity to experience its dizzying charms. Savor it slowly and carefully in the sun, on a beach or in the grass, drinking lemonade; be transported back as if by magic to that time when you were a teenager falling in love for the first time in the 1930s English countryside. You won’t regret it, until the moment you finish and realize you can never read it for the first time ever again.
Right now I’m feeling the existential sadness of having already read this wonderful book. I just took another of Smith’s novels, The New Moon with the Old, out of the library, but the internet tells me it won’t be the same.
What I Read This Month: April 2013
- This Is Not Your City, Caitlin Horrocks. I will never write a paragraph as good as this one.
- Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion. I read the title essay while on Haight Street waiting for a bus, and that shit’s still so grim, dudes. I wish that in my teenage years, when I unironically wore lovebeads I bought at thrift shops and hung posters of John Lennon on my bedroom wall and legitimately spent hours of my time wondering when time travel would be invented and would it be soon enough for me to appeal to circa 1967 Michael Nesmith as a bride, someone had handed me this book. I probably would have ignored it or whatever, but still.
- Starstruck, Rachel Shukert. This should be a lesson for internet writers everywhere: if your recaps of Smash are balls-out insane and hilarious enough, people will read your YA novel. Anyway, as a former theater kid and a lover of Old Hollywood, I really enjoyed this. I’m excited that someone is finally conveying to the youths of today some of the most important trivia I know, i.e. Loretta Young had Clark Gable’s baby and pretended she’d adopted it and that’s insaaaaane!!!!!!!!!!!!
- Ghost World, Daniel Clowes. Very obviously relevant to my interests.
There are people who respond to other people having fun in ways that are alien to them with inexplicable rage and contempt. This is, honestly, one of the worst things you can do to yourself as a person of something resembling character. I kind of do it around things like Burning Man, which is silly. Obviously, if people really love Burning Man then they should just burn their little hearts out with great joy and abandon. And we should remember that other people probably feel this way about things we like. If you’re a Doctor Who fan, and you’ve ever tried to show someone an episode of Doctor Who, and it’s been a dismal failure, and they’ve tried to get YOU to align yourself with their vaguely snide amusement by saying things like ‘so, I assume the special effects are deliberately bad on purpose, right?’ or ‘wait, how many of these have you SEEN?’ or, worst of all ‘how does anyone stand the Doctor?’ then you should know better. Perhaps the single greatest summation of this concept being ‘don’t yuck on someone else’s yums.’
Nicole Cliffe just wrote a very nice thing about subcultures at The Hairpin, something I am thinking about a lot lately because I would like to write a novel about fandoms. “Can my novel about fandoms include a story-within-a-story, said story being the novel-length Monkees fan fiction I wrote as a teenager?” These are the sorts of questions with which I am now beginning to wrestle.
Also, I’ve had exactly this experience with showing loved ones Doctor Who. It was, to put it simply, utterly devastating.
The publisher’s description of WHY WE NEVER TALK ABOUT SUGAR warns, ‘These are not your mother’s bedtime stories.’ But, to my mind, of course they are—women have always been the weavers of weird tales, the sorts of fantastic stories that contain brutal truths about what it means to be a person. It was from women that the Brothers Grimm collected their fairy tales, and it is women now who most excel at the sort of weird fiction to which I am most drawn—writers like Aimee Bender, Kelly Link, and Karen Russell. It’s not that these writers are wading into such very uncharted territory…it’s just that, to my mind, women writing the surreal have more at stake. It feels to me like they ask more of the reader, to open their minds not only to what fiction can do, but what women can do.
The Female Gaze: WHY WE NEVER TALK ABOUT SUGAR by Aubrey Hirsch
I reviewed Aubrey Hirsch’s debut story collection at The Female Gaze. You can and should read my favorite piece, the title story, here.
“I think a lot about what makes a strong female character. You know, movies and TV shows, these things have influence, my own website. So I think the question of “What makes a strong female character?”, often goes misinterpreted. And instead we get these two-dimensional superwomen, who maybe have one quality that’s played up a lot. Like, you know, a Catwoman type, or she plays her sexuality up a lot and it’s seen as power. But they’re not strong characters who happen to be female, they’re completely flat and they’re basically cardboard characters.
The problem with this is that then people expect women to be that easy to understand, and women are mad at themselves for not being that simple. When in actuality, women are complicated. Women are multifaceted. Not because women are crazy, but because people are crazy. And women happen to be people!”-Tavi Gevinson for TEDTalks [x]
(Source: dohertypeter, via charlottesweb)
