Reading Resolutions

2013 is almost done and it’s that time for resolutions for the New Year! I am both going to make separate blog about writing and reading resolutions. This one is going to be about reading. But first, before I begin, it might be interesting to have a small conclusion about 2013 in books:

•  I have read 47 books this year, 20 more than last year
•   The best book I’ve read was The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
•    I started 10 new series and finished one of them. Out of those series, there is one I’m not going to continue and another I’m not yet certain about.
• The books with the prettiest cover I bought this year are Green Rider series by Kirsten Britain, The Fall of Arthur by J.R.R. Tolkien, Burial Rites by Hannah Kent and the 10 year anniversary edition of Eragon by Christopher Paolini.

Here you can find all the books I read last year!

The resolutions:

•    Read 55 books
•   Buy less books and keep track of how many books I buy
•   Finish more series
•    Read The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien in English. I have read the series almost ten years ago in Dutch.
•   Read more about mythology, which includes reading The Kalevala.
• Try to keep the to-read list to a minimum. I have 334 books on my Goodreads to-read list which is a bit overwhelming. I’m going to try to bring to remove the books I’m not super eager to read and keep it at around 100 or less.
•   Read more indie/self-published books.  Now that I have a Kindle, it is easier to get my hands on self-published books. I haven’t read any of them so far, though I have a couple on my Kindle that are waiting to be read.

These resolutions shouldn’t be too difficult to accomplish. The 55 books will depend a bit of how much time I have besides school and writing. Although I consider reading a part of the writer’s job.

I hope to get the writing resolutions blog up soon as well, but right now I’m studying for exams. It will be up at the latest at the end of January! Happy New Year everyone! May there be a lot of reading and writing waiting for you in 2014.

Gift a Book!

The season of gifts is coming up, and hopefully it comes with snow. While Christmas should not be all about gifts, we spend a lot of time picking out the right gift for the people we love. I made it fairly simple for myself: I am going to give a book to everyone.

I believe that there is a book for everyone. It is, however, not always easy to find a book that will get you into reading and of course, reading requires some effort and time. While I do not want to force my love for reading on to someone, I want to make gift giving easy for me this year. A book does not have to be a novel. It can be a non-fiction book as well: a cookbook or a travel guide or a beautiful photography books. A lot of choices!

All my friends and close family know I love reading, but barely anyone gifts me a book. I have gotten a gift card and my boyfriend lets me pick out some books and he pays for it, but it is not the same. I suspect that people are afraid that they will buy me a book that I will not like or have read already. My Goodreads to-read list should be helpful to bypass that problem!

Source: Google Images

The reason I would love to be gifted a book, preferably a novel, is that books hold memories between the pages. Some books hold more memories than others. For example, I can still remember very clearly where I read Harry Potter and the Halfblood Prince for the first time, because it was such an unusual location. On my holiday to Helsinki I bought a couple of books and I read one of those while I was there, and every time I see it, it transports me back to that beautiful September afternoon were I was lying in the grass enjoying the sun and reading, more relax than I had been for quite a long time.

If you gift me a book, you will be between its pages for ever. Every time I will pick up that book or just look at it, I will be reminded of you. If I loved the books, I will think a lot about you since I often stand in front of my bookcase looking at those books that gave me a wonderful time. Gift me a book, and you will gift magic.

Let Your Characters Make Their Own Decisions

Characters are the soul of the story. They are born out your imagination and ought to grow beyond it. Let them become more than ink and paper. Let them come to life! Unless you have Frankenstein like ambitions, they will never be made out of flesh and blood. But as a writer, you have the prefect excuse to have imaginary friends. It would be a shame not to use it!

Get to know your characters well. Go to a bar with them, take them with you on a walk through the woods or play truth or dare with them. It does not matter how you get the know them, but it is important that you do. Your whole story will be spun around them. The characters that stay with us long after we finished a book. 

When you know your characters, you will know what drives them and what choices they will make. This is very important if you start building your plot. You cannot force your character to take a certain decision that will be more favourable for the plot. They have a mind of their own and they are driven by their own motivations. That is why it is important to create the plot around the characters and let them influence the plot by their choices. Do not bend the characters in such a way that they fit into the plot, but bend the plot. 

source: Google Images

That is why I barely plan the plot ahead. I know what the main conflict in the story will be and I have an idea of how it is going to end, but what happens on the journey is something I have yet to discover. While writing I come up with events that can happen during the stories and while I am looking forward to write them, they might not end up in the story because of a certain decision a character makes. 
I spend a lot of time writing a certain scene that was  supposed to be pivotal in the healing process of one of my characters. The scene would give him insight of what had happened to him and how he could continue on living his life. I knew exactly how the scene was going to be. I pictured every detail in my head. Unfortunately the scene did not fit the character. It would have this enlightening effect that it was supposed to have. 

When I start writing a story, I know where it will begin and I have an idea about how it will end. Sometimes I have ideas about events that can take place throughout the journey the characters make. When I write I get into the head of my characters. I discover most of the story while I travel with them through it. This makes it very easy for me to respect my characters and accept the choices they made; even when that means that very cool event I was dying to write will not happen. On the contrary, it would damage the character even more unless I would force him to think a certain way and perceive certain things in a different way. It would be very out-of-character for him. It was a tough decision the scrap the scene because I already put quite some effort and time in it. It was for the greater good. 

Getting to know your characters well will take a while. You will never know them as well as you think you do and that is great. Nothing is as thrilling as discovering something surprising about your characters. Let them be born out of your imagination, let them grow beyond the page and give them their own voice, thoughts and emotions. Respect them and never force them to do things they would not do. If you want your character to do something uncharacteristic, make sure you have a good reason for it. Maybe another character forces him/her to do it or perhaps he/she will lose something/someone very dear to them if they do not do it.

Review: The Fault in our Stars by John Green

Life is full of experiences that can changes us or our views on something. Sometimes in a positive way, other times it is more negative. But we never forget these experiences. Reading The Fault in our Stars was such an experience for me.

I won't tell a lot about the the contents of the book. The only thing you might want to know is that it is about a girl called Hazel who suffers from cancer. The book offers us a view into a part of her life wherein she explored; and now I will quote the blurb, 'the funny, thrilling, and tragic business of being alive and falling in love.' It sounds very cheesy, but the book is all but cheesy. I bought the book after seeing and reading very passionate reviews about it. I actually felt like I was the only person who had not read it yet. I wanted to know what made it so remarkable and why it appeared time and time again in best books lists.

Now I know why. I started to read the book only yesterday. The book is narrated by Hazel through a first person perspective. Normally I am not so keen to read books in that perspective because I have the feeling it creates a distance between the reader and the narrating character, but this was so wonderfully done that I had no problem to relate to Hazel even though what she was experiencing was alien to me.

I absolutely love John Green's writing. I was immediately pulled into the story and could not get wholly out of it until I finished it. I have to admit that I was scared to read it. Scared that it was going to end badly but me not finishing it, was not an option. I enjoyed the whole book. The story is fast paced and reads very fluently. It is filled with interesting thoughts and good humour to lighten up the mood. The book is filled with so many different emotions, which are brilliantly brought to page, that I felt like I was riding the emotional roller-coaster together with the characters. I enjoyed this from the very first sentence until the very last.

While I have heard the name John Green before, I never read any of his books until now. I will, however, read all his other books as well because I want to know if they are just as good. If they are, J.K. Rowling might be knocked of the my-favourite-author-position by Mr. Green.

Reading habits

The last couple of weeks I have been reading a lot more than I usually do. This probably has something to do with the fact that I don't game as often any more and that I have no school right now (though I should be studying for resits). While reading I have discovered some reading habits of mine and I decided to share them.

1.  Whenever I am in a book store, on-line or not, I always end up at the fantasy section because it is my favourite genre. While I keep an open mind for other genres as well, it never has been very effective until now. Thanks to the booktube (vloggers who talk about books) community on youtube, I have discovered a whole bunch of books of other genres I really want to read.
   
   
2.  When I am reading a series and I do not have the next book in it, I just start to read a new series. Which inevitable leads to a lot of unfinished series. I currently have 15 unfinished series on my bookshelves. I am not going to finish all of them because the first book from two of them are not good enough to want me to finish the series. Some series are not wholly published yet so I cannot continue them just yet. I have, however, decided not to start any new series until I have finished the once I have started with exception of Percy Jackson and the Olympians. I ordered the boxed set a couple of days ago since I want to see the next film and want to have read the book before I do that.
   
   
3. I always tell myself to remember certain passages or quotes from books, but I never do. So I decided to use sticky-notes to mark those passages. I do not get why I never thought of this before since it is so simple but efficient. I ought to do it with books I read for school as well! I heard of some people writing and marking stuff in their books, but I would feel bet for doing that. I only do that in my school textbooks.
   
    
4.  I cannot read on public transport except for the train (I have no clue about planes, but I will find that out in September when I will fly for the very first time). I spend quite some time on the bus and I would be able to read so much more if I was able to read on it, but I get sick when I do. Sometimes I even get sick without reading.
   
   
5. I can read in almost any situation. When I wait for the bus, I read often while standing up. I can read in a café, at home or even during lectures at school. I almost always carry a book around with me, but as soon as I get distracted, I have a hard time focusing on my book again. That's the reason why I prefer to read somewhere were there are not a lot of people since I like to listen to their conversations or just watch them. I suppose that it is caused by the part of me that is always looking for interesting stories. 

Have you any interesting reading or book habits? Feel free to share them in the comments because I would love to know them! I plan to do a similar blog like this one on writing habits in the future! 

Wanderers' Tale

In December my friend and I decided to write a round-robin fan fiction. We decided not to discuss the plot and see where we would end up. Three of the four main characters are singers of famous bands and the other is an original character. As the story progressed, we tumbled into the fantasy genre and noticed that the plot was quite interesting. Eventually we decided to finish of the fan fiction and than start to reform it into an original story.

Now that the fan fiction is coming towards it's end, we started planning the original story which got the working title Wanderers' Tale. It's going to be a series since too much is going to happen to be able to tell in one book. Now we have the idea of for books in our mind, though that can still change. While a lot of people think it isn't wise for a first time writer to start with a series, we will do it anyway. I know it is going to be hard to find a publisher, especially because series from unknown authors are risky. But if we cannot find a publisher, we might as well publish it ourselves as an e-book. That part is, however, still far away since we still have to write the first book. What makes the writing process perhaps a bit harder, is the fact that we are not writing it in our native language Dutch, as the title suggest, but in English. Perhaps studying English linguistics and literature at University will come in handy to write these books.

The series will be about four people who get lost in the woods due a storm. Getting out of the woods, however, is a lot harder than they thought, especially with the mysterious events that start taking place. More I cannot say (yet).

I am going to use this blog to post updates about the story but you can also follow the progress on Facebook and Twitter.

Books: hardback vs paperback

I always find it very hard to pick a certain edition from a book, especially when I am ordering them from the internet. There is so much choice! Especially with very popular books like those of Tolkien and classics like Jane Austen or Charles Dickens. While I have a very weak spot for beautiful covers, I tend mostly tend to pick the less expensive ones so I can buy more books.

The most common decision you have to make while buying books is the choice between hardback or paperback. I absolutely love hardback books and have a couple of them. They look great on my bookshelves and they don't get damaged as easily as a paperback. There is, however, a downside. Hardbacks are heavy and more expensive. If I'm reading at home, the weight isn't such an issue, but I always try to take a book with me where ever I go and than it because an issue, especially if I have more things with me. So if I start reading a hardback, I mostly have a take-with-me-book as well. It is annoying sometimes, because if the take-with-me-book is more interesting, I might read it as home as well instead of reading the hardback.
Another issue is the price. Hardbacks cost more (and sometimes a lot more) than paperbacks. This is actually the main reason why I mostly buy paperbacks. The downside of paperbacks is that they are damaged more easily. While I am very careful with my books, I have some that are damaged. It isn't rare that the plastic thingy that protects the cover comes loose or you get creases on the spine.

Beside hardback or paperback, you can sometimes chose between buying the works of a certain author collected in one book or all in different books. I prefer to buy it all in different books because it is a lot easier to read and to take along. I have a few collected works (all from the Wordsworth Library Collection) because I found them for very little money. It is not very practical to read though. The books are huge and heavy so i won't be able to take them out.


My bookcase is mostly filled with pocket paperbacks with here and there a bigger hardback and a collected works. What kind of books do you prefer to buy and why?