Tag: Influential

Book Review, Uncategorized

The Bear and the Nightingale

‘The snow fell thrice, deep and solid, after midwinter, and after the last snowfall came a great blue frost, when men felt their breath stop in their nostrils and weak things grew apt to die in the night.’

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The Bear and the Nightingale By Katherine Arden invites its readers to be entranced by Russian fairytales and traditional folklore. The Bear and the Nightingale is about a young girl called Vasilisa and her journey to adulthood. Vasilisa however is bound for greatness, something in which her stepmother, Anna wants for her own daughter. Once Vasilisa’s father remarries, incidents begin to occur that threatens her village and her home. It is best described as a coming of age novel that is encased in fairy tales.

screen-shot-2016-09-13-at-15-43-27The language that Arden has used is descriptive when it needs to be and lyrical, throughout. The lyrical prose blends itself well to the voice of Vasilisa as it expresses a sense of naivety and purity. The description in the novel appears very similar to that of Jessie Burton’s The Miniaturist. Both texts describe with their senses and it was rather refreshing to read about the winter-king in the peak of summer. Arden’s language also demonstrates her extensive research into Russian fairytales and traditional folklore. It is for this reason that this piece could be described as authentic. Each page oozes droplets of Russian culture whilst allowing the reader to breeze through the novel.

The plot itself mirrors the structure of sheet music. Every scene, discussion and description is needed to carry the reader deep into the novel. Arden’s novel is fluid and grips the reader from the very start. The Bear and the Nightingale is a great book to read for escapism and provides its readers with a warm log fire to cosy up to, even in the summer!

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this novel and have found it an honour in reading it as a proof copy. I believe that this book is for anyone and can be read whatever the time of year. I would urge anyone to buy or pre-order this book  here as I feel that your money would definitely not be wasted. A great read and a great gift to give.

Book Review, Uncategorized

The Help

The Help by Kathryn Stockett, 2010, paperback, ISBN: 0399155341, £7.99.

I was a little hesitant at reading this book as I thought the subject matter may have been a difficult read. However The Help discusses how black maids are trusted within a household with some form of lightness. The Help is about a woman called Miss Skeeter, who wishes to give black maids a voice. All of the main characters are strong women that have potential to be strong within society. Stockett’s novel is well written and also touches upon community as well as a controversial subject, from an angle that makes it easy to discuss. I laughed and cried with this book and felt like no matter what part I put the book down on, I would always be excited to read it again. For this reason I believe it to be a timeless piece and in my eyes, a classic.
Stockett’s writing style is extremely fluent and oozes her characters personalities. The writing also highlights the character’s voices: without making it difficult to read, this  adds a sense of authenticity. The character’s stride past the author in this book and put their mark on what the reader sees. The descriptions of Jackson, Mississippi add to the originality of this book as the location sometimes can feel like a character in itself. At times I felt as if I could almost feel the warm Mississippi air on my face.

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So quick summary– If anyone is looking for a quality read with strong main characters and is interested in American history or post-colonialism, then this type of book would be a great read. Lighter than post-colonialism, it is a fun read that seems guaranteed to be enjoyed. The book follows Minny and Aibileen on their journey of living as the Help within a white household. Miss Skeeter longs for her old maid Constantine and sees the help differently than her other friends do. The Help follows Minny, Aibileen and Skeeter on their relationship with each other and their freedom. A journey not to be missed.

articles, Uncategorized, Writing

How Much Reading Qualifies Quality Writing?

How Much Reading Qualifies Quality Writing?

We’ve all wondered and perhaps researched how to get better at writing. However why is it that we are told to read more to become a better writer? I suppose you may have heard of advice such as ‘just write’ too? Writing to become a better writer is easier to make sense of; it’s possible to understand that writing regularly will help with keeping a writing routine. It may even help with your creativity and ideas. Yet why is it that when we look to our favourite authors for help, we are always told to read more? I mean you might read ten books a day; the truth is, they don’t know how much you read. So how do you know if your reading is effective? This post hopes to discover what people mean when they say that reading improves your writing.

So, what is considered ‘reading’? This could have many different meanings to everyone. For some, reading may imply reading fiction, to others it may mean reading articles and newspapers. It could even mean reading another’s body language! My point, is that although there are many forms of ‘reading,’ they all have something in common. The common ground between the meanings I have displayed is awareness. If for example, you were wanting to write a romance novel, then being aware of different styles and plots within that genre will help you to write better. If you were wanting to write a piece on culture and society, then articles and newspapers will make you more aware of societal views and thus make your writing better. So please, don’t just read a book for the sake of it. Find out what it is you need to be more aware of (styles, genres etc) and read with this in mind. Your writing will be better before you know it!

Okay so now the big question- how much reading is too much reading? I suppose you never really can have done enough reading, however if you’re reading  all day, then when would you find the time to write? This may sound very clichéd but… whenever you’re ready. I don’t know about you but even I find it difficult to read a book and then continue to write. I find my new ideas that I think are genius, are really just a different version of the book I am reading. Sound familiar? Whereas if you are reading to learn more about a writing style or genre, then once you feel like an expert in that field, should you write. It may not be perfect at first but this is where that other famous piece of writing advice comes in. Write more. The best way to find if you’re ready to write is, pardon the pun, to write it down. The ‘it’ however referring to your knowledge. If you think of reading as a form of research, write down anything that you believe is valuable to your writing. Once you have collected all of that information, ask yourself, have you done enough reading?

ReadyourSurroundings

We always knew that reading and writing would equate to quality writing. Only now I hope that it is a little easier to understand. Please feel free to comment below as I’d love to hear everyone’s thoughts on the subject.

articles, Uncategorized, Writing

Why People are Scared of Self-Publishing

It’s sadly true that some people are just plain scared of self-publishing. I mean really when you think about it, who to best sell your book than… well… you?

Although self-publishing has been on the rise for the past few years, titles and genres have been blurred so much that sometimes it can be hard to look or even, be original. With this I’m referring to ebooks; when you scroll down amazon or the book store on iTunes, you begin to notice how similar all of the books look. After scrolling to page 16, well, I don’t know about you but I sometimes feel like the first page is just repeating itself. It’s because of this that it can seem daunting to self-publish.

I mean lets face it, the person that knows your novel the best is you right? So why is it that many of us want agents or publishing houses to help get our novel noticed?

Expertise? Of your own novel?

Now let that just sink in… you want an expert in your novel that you wrote…

A lot of the time we know the truth but we are too scared to make the first move. We can market our book the best but ultimately, we leave it for someone else to do because we doubt ourselves.

If we believed that we could deliver good marketing techniques to our book to give it great sales and publicity, would we do it? Absoloutely. Dare we try it? Not a chance.

I partly think that we all think like this because of two reasons. We either:

A: Want an agent or publisher to tell us that they think it’s good enough to publish (aka, tell us our writing is good!)

or

B: Are scared to put our all into marketing our book because we don’t want to fail in either marketing or writing.

Yes it can be a tough one to call sometimes, but the best advice I can give is to think of all that hard work you’ve done. Do you really not want to share it with the world?

If you don’t attempt to get it seen then it never will be.

This concept is something that I’ve been battling with for quite a while. However after much deliberation and looking for a publisher, I have decided that I could do a better job. I know that I believe in my piece and want the world to read it. Whether people pay for it, is another question, but I would love for people to see how much hard work I’ve put in to it.

So without further ado, I’m going into self-publishing… are you?

This post was originally published on my Medium page. Check it out here.

articles, Uncategorized, Writing

The Myth of Quality Literature

Myth of Quality

Ever went into a bookshop and wanted to read quality fiction? Others may describe it as high literature, but similar to what you call it, it differs from person to person. Sometimes even the pressure of writing quality fiction can be enough to make them put the pen down and walk away. So why is it that we want to read quality fiction? Is it to strengthen our knowledge and understanding of a particular field, to challenge ourselves or to simply help us write quality fiction ourselves?

I must admit I like to read quality fiction. However what I think is ground-breaking stuff, you may think is rubbish. My tutor at university once gave me a method to discoing ‘high literature.’ He believed that to have a quality piece of work it must have direct, indirect and free indirect discourse/speech (i.e. “stop it,” she said, she said stop it, she shook her head, stop it.) He argued if this was balanced throughout the novel it would be a quality piece. However, he also believed if the book was slightly bigger than A5 paperback or was printed only in hardback, then it was quality fiction.

My interpretation on the other hand, is that any novel that challenges societal values or ideologies should be considered as quality fiction. My reason being that the book would have a purpose and the plot would seem more original. However as I have previously mentioned, this is my interpretation.

The Beauty...

Like the saying, ‘Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder,’ it works with literature. What you might hate, others may love. With this in mind, the concept of quality literature is a myth. Not everyone will agree with what depicts a novel as quality fiction and that’s fine. I therefore urge you to keep writing your novel and/or keep reading what you enjoy. After all, if you enjoy a piece of writing, why not call it a quality piece of fiction?

articles, Uncategorized, Writing

Feminist Dystopias within Science Fiction

‘Only by considering dystopia as a warning can we as readers hope to escape such a dark future.’

This post will explore the depiction of feminist dystopias within the science fiction genre. Margaret Atwoods’ Oryx & Crake (2003), The Handmaid’s Tale (1986) and Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1979) question whether a feminist dystopia will provoke change in contemporary society.

A utopia is an ideal place that could be described as a haven. It is created from people’s perspectives of what could warrant an ideal place. This includes ideal laws and politics, which result in a perfect society. A dystopia however, perceives the opposite of a utopia and could therefore include a place of oppression and inequality. In relation to a feminist dystopia, M. Keith Booker states in Woman on the Edge of a Genre: Feminist Dystopias of Marge Piercy that,

‘feminist visions of the future tended in general to show a dark turn in the 1980s, probably due to political reverses that damped the feminist optimism of the 1970s.’

Booker’s assumptions of why feminist writers had taken to writing dystopias instead of utopias proves to be a theme within critiques of the science fiction genre. Raffaella Baccolini in The Persistence of Hope in Dystopian Science Fiction states that the term utopia, has lost its value as ‘it has been conflated with materialist satisfaction and thus commodifed’ within society. Thus it is because critiques were noticing a turn from a feminist utopia towards dystopian fiction that the term feminist dystopia was created.

A feminist dystopia critiques contemporary society by extrapolating patriarchal ideologies in the future. Thus feminist writers display patriarchal societies as a dystopia by the oppression of women and the internalisation of patriarchal ideologies. Although this post focuses on this issue in relation to science fiction, there are many other genres that these texts suit. All of the texts display the qualities that can be found in speculative fiction. Oryx & Crake is post-apocalyptic, The society in The Handmaid’s Tale is a result of the assasination of the president and Woman on the Edge of Time debates how neurosurgery could lead to a dystopia. As the dystopian worlds have been extrapolated from contemporary society, the texts could also relate to fantasy and dystopian fiction. Anne Cranny-Francis in Feminist Fiction critiques the fantasy genre as a way of changing contemporary society. She states that,

‘the contradictions concealed by realist conventions are highlighted in fantasy literature, […] fantasy thereby shows the fragmentation of the real, revealing the real as a negotiation of conflicting discourses.’

This supports a feminist dystopia as a feminist dystopia critiques the flaws within the real so that the reader can negotiate other ideologies for society. Although Cranny-Francis is critiquing fantasy literature, her concept is still relevant to a feminist dystopia. Baccolini supports this by claiming that genres are ‘culturally constructed’ and ‘it is the science fiction genre that will able feminist criticism to deconstruct the genres that fit contemporary society’. Therefore with Atwood and Piercy critiquing contemporary society through science fiction, the readers are able to glimmer into a possible reality. Thus the readers reluctance to live in such a world will help change contemporary society.

This post was originally posted on my Medium account. To see what else I’ve posted click here.

Book Review

The Little Book of Clarity

The Little Book of Clarity by Jamie Smart

Capstone £9.99, USA $16.00, CAN $19.00

‘Imagine what you could achieve if you had a clear head.’

It is amazing how a very simple sentence can instantly get your mind running over the possibilities. Less stress, quicker results and better results for that matter. After reading this sentence on the blurb, I was instantly intrigued. I originally stumbled upon this book by accident at Waterstones. Although The Little Book of Clarity is considered as a self-help book, Jamie Smart explains how his book is different to other self-help books. ‘Most business and personal development books aim at giving you the things to think, change and do so you “act” in a certain way to get the results you want.’ Smart explains this concept to having a cold appose to acting like you have one. Acting like you have a cold is hard and at times, unconvincing.  However, ‘when you catch a cold, the symptoms emerge effortlessly because they’re real. This book is designed so that you can “catch” an understanding that results in the “symptoms” of increasing clarity, resilience and peace of mind.’ Therefore because everyone already has clarity, the results of the book will come naturally.

At first I was a little skeptical too. How can this book know my way of thinking? After reflecting onIMG_2543 my university grades, commenting that I lacked clarity, I decided to give it a go. I can honestly say that this was one of the best decisions I had made. As I read the book I could feel the ‘a-ha’ moments appearing more regularly. After reading the first part of the book I decided to edit some of my essays for university. When I looked back at them I was confused. How had I wrote such rubbish! I could not believe that I could not understand my previous trail of thought. The changes however didn’t stop there. I started to realise that I didn’t comfort eat anymore. I learnt the difference between association happiness with an object, in this circumstance, food.

Each chapter contains a thought exercise or experiment for the reader to partake in. This really helps with understanding the process of this book and I would recommend doing these exercises, before pursuing with the next chapter. Although The Little Book of Clarity, is as it suggests, little, it does not scrape on content. Each chapter also has a web link for additional material incase the reader may want a deeper understanding. Furthermore the book is also available as an e-book. It truly is as handy as it suggests. This is the first time that I have reviewed a non-fiction book and a self-help book at that, which suggests how useful I found this book. So to any students that may have been in my situation, or to anyone who wants to get better results and peace of mind. I urge you to read this book. I can guarantee you will not be disappointed.

Literature Events

Jo Colley’s Book Launch of ‘Bones of Birds’

Bones of Birds by Jo Colley

Smokestack Books £7.95  ISBN: 978 0 9929581 1 4

On Tuesday 24th Februrary, The University of Teesside were proud to host Jo Colley’s book launch of her new anthology Bones of Birds. The evening at The University of TeessidIMG_2375e kick started with Andy  Croft, founder of Smokestack Books, describing Jo Colley’s latest anthology Bones of Birds as “a beautiful book inside and out” and “extraordinarily original.” After such a warm welcome, Jo Colley began to read several of her poems out of her anthology, to help lure the audience into her way of seeing the world.

 Bones of Birds is about flying and falling from one extreme to the other. The anthology describes the act of flying and falling physically as well as describing the highs and lows of everyday life and dreaming into the abyss.

Throughout the night Jo Colley explains her influences for each poem, so that her audience can understand the relation between the two. After discussing several of her poems, a Q and A session took place, to learn more detail of why she had created the collection and what it meant to her for the anthology to be published. Colley explains that her work focuses on escapism. With her father being in the RAF, she was brought up around planes and even wanted to be an air hostess at one point. Everyone laughed in nostalgia, I mean who wouldn’t want to be an air hostess? With escapism coming naturally to her when thinking about flying, it was well suited that she decided to write Bones of Birds. With this, the crowd listened intently on her further readings of her anthology, applauding each piece along the way.

 Each poem that was read at the book launch of Bones of Birds was written effortlessly, as if the wording was at ease upon the ears. The storytelling performance of the poems helped intrigue the audience and rightly did so. Not a word or sound escaped the audience as they fell in trance to another one of Colley’s mesmerising pieces.

Towards the end of the night, refreshments were given and people were able to buy their IMG_2370copy of Colley’s anthology, followed by a signing of the book. Everyone was in high spirits as laughter filled the room and discussions of the poems followed into the night. This event was organised by Andy Willoughby and Bob Beagrie, founders of Ek Zuban and senior lecturers in Creative Writing at The University of Teesside. If anyone would like to learn more about Jo Colley’s Bones of Birds, visit http://smokestack-books.co.uk/book.php?book=103 were you are able to purchase the book and read some of the sample poems that were performed at the launch.