IT ALL ENDS HERE...in one week

As a Harry Potter fan, now that everything is going to end in a few days, I want you to share your experience with the saga, both the books and the movies. You can tell me here directly or at:

-my twitter account

-my facebook page

Waiting for your answers eagerly!

"The Help" by Kathryn Stockett

I just finished reading Kathryn Stockett's The Help, 460 pages in less than two weeks (in English, not my mother tongue, remember), so you can imagine how hooked I was. It was a wonderful experience and mostly expected since it deals with two of my favourite topics: the 60s and civil rights (for black people, I mean). Narrated in first person by three women (two black, one white) it tells us the adventures these ladies had while trying to write a book about black maids in white Mississippi households. And I'm not telling more since I don't want to spoil it. If you are lazy to read it (I'm sure you're not) you will be able to watch the movie from August in the States and, unfortunatelly, October in Spain and UK. Here I leave you the trailer and two quotations from the book that depict its two dominant moods: happiness/hope and anger/disgust. 

Quotes:

• If chocolate was a sound, it would've been Constantine's voice singing. If singing was a color, it would've been the color of that chocolate.
• "You cannot leave a Negro and  Nigra together unchaperoned," Mother'd whispered to me a long time ago. "It's not their fault, they just can't help it."

And now, let's begin with Tokyo Blues by Murakami. Somebody read it?

E. M. Forster's "The Machine Stops"

I just finished reading the best-known short story by the author of "Passage to India" and found it beautiful and disturbing at the same time. It is very similar to "1984" but it was written years before, so Forster's is not a mere copy. Vashti and Kuno (mother and son) live in a post-apocalyptic era in which the Machine controls everything. And that's all I can tell without spoiling it. Here you have the best quotations I took from the book:

Something ‘good enough’ had long since been accepted by our race.

By her side, on the little reading-desk, was a survival from the ages of litter –one book.

Those funny old days, when men went for change of air instead of changing the air of their rooms.

Man’s feet are the measure for distance, his hands are the measure for ownership, his body is the measure for all that is lovable and desirable and strong.

The Machine develops –but not on our lines. The Machine proceeds –but not to our goal. We only exist as the blood corpuscles that course through its arteries, and if it could work without us, it would let us die.

I was surrounded by artificial air, artificial light, artificial peace.

Man, the flower of all flesh, the noblest of all creatures visible, man who had once made god in his image, and had mirrored his strength on the constellations, beautiful naked man was dying, strangled in the garments that he had woven.

Apparently, there's a short movie based on the book. You can watch it here.

Toni Morrison's "Beloved"

I re-post myself from my other blog on Black arts:

Well, I finally finished reading Toni Morrison's "Beloved" and, as it is my custom, here I'm gonna leave some of the best quotations of the book (believe me, there were many many more). I promise not to spoil anything as I expect you to read it someday. It's a fantastic book and a must if you like black arts (as I guess you do cause you're following this blog). Feel free to tell me which quote you liked the most:

For a used-to-be-slave woman to love anything that much was dangerous, especially if it was her children she had settled on to love. The best thing […] was to love just a little bit; everything, just a little bit, so when they broke its back, or shoved it in a croaker sack, well, maybe you’d have a little love left over for the next one. (Such a sad thought)

Then, with the sun straight up over their heads, they trotted off, leaving the sheriff behind among the damnedest bunch of coons they’d ever seen. All testimony to the results of a little so-called freedom imposed on people who needed every care and guidance in the world to keep them from the cannibal life they preferred. (Hi, sarcasm, nice to meet you)

Some new whitefolks with the Look just rode in. The righteous Look every Negro learned to recognize along with his ma’am’s tit. Like a flag hoisted, this righteousness telegraphed and announced the faggot, the whip, the fist, the lie, long before it went public. (Scary)

Eighteen seventy-four and whitefolks were still on the loose. Whole towns wiped clean of Negroes; eighty-seven lynchings in one year alone in Kentucky; four colored schools burned to the ground; grown men whipped like children; children whipped like adults; black women raped by the crew; property taken, necks broken. He smelled skin, skin and hot blood. The skin was one thing, but human blood cooked in a lynch fire was a whole other thing. (Summary of Negro history in a few lines. Perfectly expressed)

Whatever is going on outside my door ain’t for me. The world is in this room. This here’s all there is and all there needs to be. (Something I also feel from time to time)

Work well; work poorly. Work a little; work not at all. Make sense; make none. Sleep, wake up; like somebody, dislike others. It didn’t seem much of a way to live and it brought him no satisfaction.

If I hadn’t killed her she would have died and that is something I could not bear to happen to her. (This feeling is more developed in the book, but I found this sentence so fascinating and frightening at the same time)

When she wasn’t smiling she smiled, and I never saw her own smile. (Just love this use of words)

Ghosts without skin stuck their fingers in her and said beloved in the dark and bitch in the light. (One of the best quotes in the book)

He can’t put his finger on it, but it seems, for a moment, that just beyond his knowing is the glare of an outside thing that embraces while it accuses.

“She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all in the right order. It’s good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.” (What love is)

“Me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow.” (Best final sentence ever)

The Blind Assassin (who took my heart)

I just finished reading Margaret Atwood’s “The Blind Assassin”. To be honest, I felt it quite boring at the beginning but as I kept on reading I discovered one of the best books ever, 637 pages of pure beauty. I have a defect: my books are a disaster as I love underline interesting quotations. And this one is full of them, so let me share some with you. No spoilers, I promise.

He had never known a woman to bruise so easily. It came from being so young and delicate.

He favoured thighs, where it wouldn’t show. Anything overt might get in the way of his ambitions.

I sometimes felt as if these marks on my body were a kind of code, which blossomed, then faded, like invisible ink held to a candle. But if they were a code, who held the key to it?

I was sand, I was snow – written on, rewritten, smoothed over.

An odd thing, souvenir-hunting: now becomes then even while it is still now. You don’t really believe you’re there, and so you nick the proof, or something you mistake for it.(This is for you, Andrea)

 

A fist is more than the sum of its fingers.

Should is a futile word. It’s about what didn’t happen. It belongs in a parallel universe. It belongs in another dimension of space.

 

But who knows where they get those things [organs for transplants]? Street children in Latin America is my guess; or so goes the most paranoid rumour. Stolen hearts, black-market hearts, wrenched from between broken ribs, warm and bleeding, offered up to the false god. What is the false god? We are. Us and our money. That’s what Laura would say. Don’t touch that money, Reenie would say. You don’t know where it’s been.

Happiness is a garden walled with glass: there’s no way in or out. In Paradise there are no stories, because there are no journeys. It’s loss and regret and misery and yearning that drive the story forward, along its twisted road.

I’ll cry a few tears, but only a few, because the eyes of the elderly are arid.

2010: Books I read

Yeah, yeah, I'm not really original, cause both Andrea and Mary Lou already made a post about this, but at risk of humiliating myself, I'm going to share with you those books I remember I read last year. I guess there aren't as many as I'd like to because I was abroad mainly having other kind of fun, bad excuse, I know. To be honest, some of them (two or three, no more) were not finished but that's one of my worst defects. There's a lot of poetry, you'll see, and I'm sure you'll distinguish the summer readings from real literature...hehe. The (R) is for re-reading. The (*) are those I really enjoyed. To this list, I should add some african-american, film and religion books I had to read for my essays but I don't really remember now.

-"Selected Poems" by Langston Hughes (R)

-"The Complete Poems" by Stephen Crane (R)

-"Atonement" by Ian McEwan

-"Pride and Prejudice" by Jane Austen

-"The Tempest" by William Shakespeare

-"The Bible: The New Testament" by....several authors? (*)

-"The Carrie Diaries" by Candace Bushnell

-"World Without End" by Ken Follet (*)

-"Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" by J.K. Rowling (*)

-"Ensayo sobre la ceguera" by José Saramago (*)

-"1984" by George Orwell (*)

-"Of Mice and Men" by John Steinbeck

-"Film History" by Paul Granger et Al. (*)

-"Imagist Poetry"

-"Antología bilingüe" by William Carlos Williams

-"Caroling Dusk" by Countee Cullen (ed.)

-"Love Letters of Great Men"

And I have a loooooooooot to read this year. Right now I'm with Margaret Atwood and Philip Larkin, but these are some I already have and want to read as soon as I finish the 800 pages of The Blind Assassin.

Favorite Poems I just bought it and it's such an amazing discovery! It's a big book full of great poems and poets, designed for boys and girls, but before I read them to my children and create little monsters their classmates will hate, I want to enjoy it. It has great authors like John Keats, William Carlos Williams, Shakespeare, William Blake, Emily Dickinson and my beloved Langston Hughes. It even has the lyrics of the USA national anthem! This is just a couple of lines I extracted:

A word fitly spoken
Is like apples of gold in pictures of silver.

Wanna know where is it from? THE BIBLE. Lol.

My Favourite Book

I've never read anything from Stephen King...apart from what I consider to be my favourite book. I know many of you would kill me for this, but before cleaning your guns I'll tell you that this book has nothing to do with the rest of King's horror fiction. The Eyes of the Dragon was published in 1987, the year I was born, so I guess it's not coincidence I like it. The Spanish edition was given to me by one of my mom's friends and years later I bought it in English. I've read it several times and it brings me good memories cause I used to re-read it every spring for several consecutive years while eating medlar sitting in my terrace.
It was written for his children so even the style is different. The Eyes of the Dragon tells the story of the kingdom of Delain in the style of Arthur's tales, with magicians, treachery, suffering and love. If you want to know more about the plot click here and if you want some spoilers, here.
I strongly recommend it if you feel like having a good time. I even dare to say that you'll fall in love not only with the book but also with the characters, particularly Peter and his dollhouse.
Come on! Buy it know! It's just 0,01 pounds on amazon! (This is the edition I have, with beautiful drawings inside)

Yes, I'm a Fan and I'm Proud!

Oh, Lord (not Voldemort), how am I going to wait 8 more months?!?
This afternoon I went to the movies to see "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I" in English, which is quite difficult considering I live in Spain, a country where everything is dubbed -at least, that's changing. But that's another story. My point today is to vindicate that we Harry Potter fans deserve some respect. YES, I LOVE HARRY POTTER AND I'M PROUD! I've read all the books at least twice, both in English and Spanish, I have all the DVDs, I have almost every book that has been published about Rowling's universe...and yes, I feel excited when I hear something about it. So you can imagine how nervous I was today, well, and the last two days, cause for the very first time I didn't watch the movie the first day it was released. But it was worthy. I don't want to spoil it but I feel the need to share my fascination about two particular scenes. First, and keep in mind is not a real thing, it's just Ron's imagination, Harry and Hermione kissing NAKED. Why the face???? Then, one of the movie quotes that should be part of film history. When hermione is trying to read the story of The Three Brothers:

Hermione: It happened at twilight...
Ron: Midnight, my mom used to say midnight. Well, twilight is cool, it's even better.

Thank you, scriptwriter, for that moment!

So that's my enthusiastic review of the movie. One last thing though, if you can't wait to know the ending, wait till the second part is released. Hope you like it too!