Halloween Reads: Dracula

Major players: (visual aids used where appropriate)

Dracula: Totally evil vampire

Not to be mistaken for the evil vampire who can get away with anything by making this face:

Oh Klaus, why can’t I quit you? 

Jonathan Harker: Loveable dummy. Ultimately useless.

Mina Harker: Wife of Jonathan Harker. Everybody loves her for little obvious reason. Dracula wants to turn her into a vampire.

All Elena Gilbert related mean-ness comes from a place of love, I swear.

Van Helsing: Vampire hunter from Amsterdam. Feels in debt to Dr Seward over some vague incident in which he was poisoned and Seward saved him. We never learn the details. Has a Bertha Mason situation happening in his home life and is weirdly obsessed with Mina.

Dr John Seward, ‘Jack’ to his friends: Psychiatrist and wannabe vampire hunter.

Quincey Morris: American. Says everything ‘laconically’. Is also obsessed with guns and has a habit of shooting at nearby wildlife without warning.

Arthur Holmwood/Lord Godalming: Fiance of the late Lucy Westenra. His only use to the plot is financing and name dropping so far as I could tell.

Lucy Westenra: The first sexy lady to go all vamp on us. Fiancee to Arthur. Rejected proposals from Dr Seward and Quicey Morris. Best friend to Mina Harker.

Dracula, by Bram Stoker is a collection of diary entries, letters and telegrams all reliving the tale of how six people attempt to bring down a vampire.

The story begins with Jonathan Harker, lawyer, travelling to Transylvania in order to facilitate one Count Dracula’s move to England. The count lives in a castle out in the middle of nowhere, and during his journey, whenever Jonathan tells locals where he’s travelling to, they cross themselves and start to pray. Jonathan just assumes this is typical ‘foreigner’ behaviour. That is until he gets to the castle and Dracula refuses to let him leave. When he discovers that Dracula sleeps in a coffin, leaves the castle by crawling, Spiderman style down the walls and feeds babies to his three vampire girlfriends, Jonathan realises that perhaps the locals had a point.

Meanwhile Jonathan’s fiancée, Mina Murray is staying with her best friend, Lucy in the seaside town of Whitby. Lucy has recently gotten engaged to one Arthur Holmwood. Unfortunately for Arthur, Lucy is about the become Dracula’s first victim because unfortunately for Whitby, it happens to be the town in which Dracula’s ship from Transylvania docks. Not that anybody knows that at this point, seeing as everybody on the ship was dead when it arrived and the only passenger anybody saw on board was a large black dog (Dracula: Sirius Black style).

This is Whitby. I took this photo when I was there in September. Pretty, right?

Seeing Lucy’s mysteriously declining health, her recently rejected admirer Dr Seward steps in to save the day. He brings in his mysterious colleague Dr Van Helsing to help. Despite all their efforts, Lucy dies. Once she becomes a vampire, Van Helsing recruits Dr Seward, Arthur and Quincey (the other guy who proposed to Lucy) as trainee vampire hunters.

Meanwhile Dr Seward is increasingly realising that his favourite patient, Renfield may also be in Dracula’s thrall. Renfield is locked in a lunatic asylum because of his desire to ‘consume life’. He spends his days tempting flies into his room. Once he has enough he feeds the many flies to a few spiders, then the few spiders to some sparrows. When Dr Seward refuses to buy him a cat, Renfield eats the sparrows himself. Yes, it’s called Dracula, but the highest creep factor in the book has to go to Renfield.

Once Mina realises that her best friend’s death and her husband’s recent experience in Transylvania may in fact be related, she and Jonathan join the vampire hunters and together they form Team Kill Dracula. Dracula then tries to turn Mina into a vampire which only makes everybody more determined to kill him. I think this is because Mina is the ideal 19^th century woman. She is educated, but submissive, maternal yet weirdly sexless. Such an ideal of womanhood cannot possibly be lost to sexy wanton vampirism.

(You can tell this was written by a 19^th century man).

But is she? You’d have to read it to find out.

This is Whitby Abbey. Apparently it inspired Bram Stoker to write Dracula. Mina and Lucy hang out up here quite a lot. They spend a lot of time in the graveyard just down the road chatting with sailors. 

Happy Halloween!

Top Ten Tuesday: Halloween Special

The Bloody Chamber – Angela Carter

You know the story of Bluebeard, right? When he isn’t looking, his innocent new wife stumbles into the one room in their house he keeps locked – his make-shift tomb, filled with the bodies of his murdered lovers.

Moral of the story: If your new husband has a locked room in his house/ship that he’s weirdly evasive about, run away.

John Dies @ the End – David Wong

I know I’ve mentioned this one before. But it’s one of my favourite books ever. It makes sense that it would come up a lot.

‘STOP

You should not have touched this book with your bare hands.

No, don’t put it down. It’s too late.

They’re watching you.

My name is David Wong. My best friend is John. Those names are fake. You might want to change yours. You may not want to know about the things you’ll read on those pages, about the sauce, about Korrock, about the invasion, and the future. But it’s too late. You touched the book. You’re in the game. You’re under the eye.

The only defense is knowledge. You need to read this book, to the end. Even the part with the bratwurst. Why? You just have to trust me.’

This was a random bookshop find for me. You get why I had to buy it, right?

This Book is Made of Spiders – David Wong

‘Warning: You may have a huge, invisible spider living inside your skull. This is not a metaphor.

You will dismiss this as ridiculous fearmongering. Dismissing things as ridiculous fearmongering is, in fact, the first symptom of parasitic spider infection – the creature secretes a chemical into the brain to stimulate scepticism, in order to prevent you from seeking a cure. That’s just as well, since the “cure” involves learning what a chainsaw tastes like.’

Frankenstein – Mary Shelley

This book is a manifestation of all the Victorian fears around scientific and technological progress. Mary Shelley wants us to consider the idea that someone, somewhere has probably built a man from the parts of various dead men, and that he’s feeling pretty murderous about it.

Lot No. 249 – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

A student at Oxford University reanimates an ancient Egyptian mummy. It runs around the city murdering anyone it can get its hands on.

This story serves to answer the question we’ve all wondered: What are the weird noises we can hear in the flat upstairs? A reanimated ancient Egyptian mummy, of course.

Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime – Oscar Wilde

During a dinner party at a friend’s house, Lord Arthur is informed by a famed psychic that it is his destiny to become a murderer.  Lord Arthur is horrified by the revelation, and resolves to get the awful deed out of the way as soon as possible in order than he can marry the woman he loves (it is not right, in his mind, to marry before so horrible but inevitable a task is completed). As such he sets about attempting to commit a murder. However, killing someone is not as simple a business as he would have imagined.

Until it is.

One night on his way home from work, Arthur sees the psychic who caused him all these problems leaning on a bridge, staring down into the water. One quick push later, Arthur has achieved his task and is now free to marry his girlfriend, Sybil.

Dracula – Bram Stoker

A vampire invades London, frightening its men and corrupting the innocence of its good 19^th century ladies.

Reading this book you can’t help but wonder if Bram Stoker’s real fear isn’t the monster he describes, but instead the possibility of female sexuality. When one of the female characters turns into a vampire she becomes an overtly sexual being. The men’s reaction? Cut her head off.

Grasshopper Jungle – Andrew Smith

‘In the small town of Ealing, Iowa, Austin and his best friend Robby have accidentally unleashed an unstoppable army. An army of horny, hungry, six-foot-tall praying mantises that only want to do two things.

This is the truth. This is history.

It’s the end of the world.

And nobody knows anything about it.’

Warm Bodies – Isaac Marion

In this book a zombie falls in love with a girl and gradually starts become human again. It’s one of the only zombie-related stories I have ever read.

It’s in this list because cute romance or not, the zombie apocalypse terrifies me. I have decided that were it to happen, I would rather go early. I would rather be a happy brainless zombie than live in that world as a human. This fatalistic attitude may have sprung from the fact that I live right down the road from a graveyard, so if the zombie apocalypse were to go down, I would be totally screwed.

The Name of the Star – Maureen Johnson

This book is about ghosts. Specifically, the ghost of Jack the Ripper. You can imagine what he must be up to. It’s the job of Rory and her gang of ghost hunters to bring the murderer down. Hopefully for good, this time.

Is It Just Me? Audiobook

Miranda Hart helps me to sleep. I have mentioned before that I use audiobooks as a largely-effective insomnia deterrent. I realise as I write this that it sounds like an insult to say that a book really helps me to sleep, but it is not intended that way at all. When I say that Is It Just Me? Miranda Hart’s hilarious memoir has me snoozing by 1am at the latest, I mean it as a compliment. I mean that Miranda’s funny stories soothe my anxieties enough that I am able to sleep.

We’re all had cause to wonder is it just me? Life is full of inopportune moments waiting to be handled poorly: Foot in the mouth moments, toilet roll on your shoe moments, accidentally assaulting a guitar player with a wayward maraca moments (maybe not that one).

Miranda Hart navigates them with the right amount of humour and self-awareness. She embraces the silliness of it all rather than allowing herself to be defeated by embarrassment.

Throughout, Miranda also tackles the difficulties of handling the life you planned versus the life that you actually have. She does this through conversations with her eighteen-year-old self. Suffice to say the world that she inhabits now is not the one that she pictured for herself at school. Her younger self imagined an adulthood complete with husband, children and a high flying political career that had blossomed by the age of twenty-five. Instead she is single and has an amazing career in comedy, which has forged a meaningful connection between herself and thousands of people. That career had not, however, flourished by the time she turned twenty-five.

Each chapter left me with the strong impression of a woman comfortable being exactly who she is. I loved it.

Six of Crows

Kaz Brekker plans to do the impossible: He’s going to break into the Ice Court, a prison famed for its impenetrability. With thirty million kruge at stake, he reckons he and his gang of criminals, The Dregs can pull it off.

Kaz: Notorious criminal mastermind. He controls vast areas of Ketterdam at only seventeen.

Inej: Also known as the Wraith. Silent as a ghost, she can scale any surface. You never know when she might be nearby, listening.

Jesper: A crack shot with a weakness for the card tables.

Nina: Grisha. A heartrender who can choke a man at twenty paces.

Matthias: A lost fjerdan with a weakness for a certain Grisha.

Wylan: A merchant’s son looking for adventure in all the wrong places.

Six of Crows, by Leigh Bardugo is so much fun. It’s a classic heist, told from the perspective of five of the six participants. The cast of characters are diverse, coming from all areas of the land of Grisha familiar to us from the previous books in the series. They are of differing backgrounds, abilities, sexualities and motivations, and yet the group gelled straight away. The changes in perspective that came with each new chapter really added to the coherency of the gang. For much of the novel, we knew how they felt about each other even when the characters themselves were unable to see it. Experiencing each character in such an immersive way made the novel a totally absorbing experience. Now that I’ve finished reading, I actually miss these imaginary people and – in a way that is highly out of character for me – I can’t wait for the sequel.

Like I’ve mentioned, getting both characters thoughts on a relationship – as well as the judgements of everybody else in the group – meant that we were really allowed to experience all the complexities of the feelings everybody had about each other. What this also meant, is that this book is simmering with potential romance. And I’m not referring to cringe-ey instalove either. Sometimes I worried that the weight of all that sexual tension might sink the boat before they even made it to the Ice Court. We get some forbidden love, complicated bad boy love and the slowly emerging crush that comes from flirty, shipboard banter.

I also loved the scenes exploring Inej and Nina’s friendship. There are few moments where it is only the two of them, and fleeting as they are, I was the left with a concrete sense of how much these two girls cared for each other. They are totally different people – Inej is quiet and reserved where Nina tends toward the loud and dramatic, but rather than conflict they seem to draw mutual strength from their differences. I have read so many adventure stories where the only two girls involved totally hate each other, so it was refreshing to see such a deep friendship that had not emerged from a place of aggression. Plus it leads to my favourite exchange in the book, between Inej and Matthias:

“Are you worried about Nina being out there?” Inej asked.

“No.”

“She’s very good at this, you know. She’s a natural actress.”

“I’m aware,” he said grimly. “She can be anything to anyone.”

“She’s best when she’s Nina.”

“And who is that?”

“I suspect you know better than any of us.”

He crossed his huge arms. “She’s brave,” he said, grudgingly.

“And funny.”

“Foolish. Every last thing needn’t be a joke.”

“Bold,” Inej said.

“Loud.”

“So why do your eyes keep searching the crowd for her?”

“They do not,” Matthias protested. She had to laugh at the ferocity of his scowl. He drew a finger through a pile of crumbs, “Nina is everything you say. It’s too much.”

“Mmm,” Inej murmured, taking a sip from her mug. “Maybe you’re just not enough.”

I don’t think I need much further evidence to prove that Inej is the best.

Obviously, I can’t end this review without talking about the heist. I love a good heist. Even in my sort-of adulthood, I still daydream about getting caught up in some ridiculous scheme. The adventure Leigh Bardugo takes us on does not disappoint. Kaz’s primary heist technique is pretty much to be as vague as possible. No one can wreck the plan, he supposes, if they don’t quite know what it is. This philosophy has varying levels of success. The Dregs simply have to believe that Kaz always knows what he’s doing. I’m not going to lie – their trust in this definitely wavers. I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that some serious shit goes down. There was not a moment where I didn’t feel like everything was about to go catastrophically wrong. Again, the shift is perspective did a fantastic job of maintaining this. So many times Bardugo would end a chapter with someone in peril, before starting a new one from a different perspective and place. Reading it was the best kind of pain.

This book grabs you by the shoulders and drags you ever forwards. Sometimes you’re running to keep up. No matter the circumstances, for me at least, I was simply happy to be there.

5 Ways to Spend Your Cold Autumnal Evenings (On Netflix)

The Vampire Diaries

One day Stefan and Damon Salvatore, vampire brothers show up in Mystic Falls. Over the following 6 years, pretty much everybody who lives there dies. Most of them are vampires now. Nobody in Mystic Falls especially minds, because Stefan, Damon and all their vampire buddies are super hot. And the people who do mind? Well, they rarely survive longer than a season, so we don’t worry about them too much.

Watching this show has made me worryingly nonchalant about seeing people’s heads fall off.

Fringe

Sometimes evil corporations start messing with parallel universes, and somebody has to do something about it. In this case that someone is Olivia Dunham, secret agent. Working with her, is recently un-institutionalised genius Walter Bishop, and his son, the blackmailed-by-Olivia-to-help conman/genius Peter Bishop.

I have not yet finished watching this. I binge watched the first 3 seasons last summer. I got way too emotionally involved with it though, and had to stop watching when the story took a turn I didn’t like. I also got frustrated with the continuous failure of the writers to explain what Peter’s deal is. That said, watching it is still one of my top obsessive moments of the past couple years, so that’s why it made the list.

Firefly

A merry band of criminals travel through space together conning, stealing and when appropriate, saving the odd community from the villain they we were working for in the first place. All of this takes place with many a witty aside, and occasional games with plastic dinosaurs.

I find Firely to be deeply comforting. It makes me feel like everything is going to be okay. I think it can do the same for you too. There’s a reason everyone is still so obsessed with it.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer

This show does a really good job of describing itself. Buffy is a vampire slayer, living in Sunnydale, a small American town that just happens to be on a hell mouth.

Buffy is a show about growing up. Season 4 was a great example of this, though I know a lot of people don’t like it so much (I want to make clear, despite my pro-season 4 stance, that I hate Riley as much as any sane person should). It was the season when Buffy and Willow went to university, and Xander went to work. Spike lost his ability to be a vampire, in the traditional sense (eating people). Everything that happened in that season was a really perfect example of what happens when you got to university – everything changes. Your relationship with your friends is different because you don’t see them at school every day, your parents and guardians aren’t responsible for you anymore (a newness that is weird to you and them), and in some cases, you find that the driving factor in your life isn’t the same any more. That, plus fighting the supernatural equals awesomeness.

Community

A man makes a study group to sleep with a girl and ends up with a group of friends he never wanted! Hilarity ensues. Except for season 4, which sucked, but we don’t talk about the gas leak year.

In this show, flawed humans meet ridiculous humans and talk about pop culture. Also a young girl has a thing with a guy inappropriately older than her. Essentially it’s everything I ever wanted in a show.

Books I Read At University

Emma- Jane Austen

Emma is a match-maker and a control freak. She bores easily. At least as far as her family are concerned, she’s always the smartest person in the room. She’s a massive snob. Such attributes may not make a likeable protagonist, but they do make for a pretty great story.

Her life is highly restricted. After her mother’s death her father’s life became completely ruled by his anxieties. The thought of Emma leaving home is unbearable to him, so Emma has decided she never will.

But that’s fine with her. In the small community around which her life revolves, Emma is Queen Bee.

I wrote a project arguing that Jane Fairfax is actually the main character is this novel. I said that Emma only hates her so much because in Jane she sees her own inevitable future: a life of passivity and little to no self-determination. I spent almost an entire semester reading feminist literary writing about Jane Austen and it was wonderful.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland- Lewis Carroll

One day Alice chased a rabbit down an endless hole and found herself in Wonderland. Madness ensues.

Reading children’s book as a grown up is a really eye opening experience. I highly recommend it.

Nights at the Circus- Angela Carter

This is the story of a woman with wings. Nobody knows her origin. Journalist, Jack Walser is determined to discover it, even if he has to travel across Europe with a magical circus in order to uncover her secrets.

I read this during my first year of university. It was the first time I had read any magical realism. Needless to say, I fell in the love.

Lolita- Vladimir Nabokov

Humbert Humbert, grown man, falls in love with Lolita, a twelve year old girl. In order to be close to her, he gets with her mother. After her death, he steals Lolita away on a road trip across America.

This book is horrific. It’s totally disturbing and weirdly funny. It is the height of unreliable narration. The writing is incredible. It got a group of first year students seriously riled during a 9am class. For anyone in doubt, let me assure you, that never happens.

We studied this book in order to learn about post-modernism. What I learned is that post-modern is a name we stick on seriously weird shit.

Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem- Peter Ackroyd

Someone is ripping people to shreds in Limehouse. The papers are referring to the murderer as a golem, a horrific creature from whom nobody is safe. Meanwhile retired actress Elizabeth Cree is facing trial for the poisoning of her husband. With her lie the secrets at the heart of the murders. Unfortunately is likely she’ll be hanged before anyone can discover them.

This book is historical fiction at its best. Set in the 19^th century, against the backdrop of the Jack the Ripper and Ratcliff Highway murders, it weaves its way through the darkest parts of London. Ackroyd does an amazing job of blending fact and fiction. Along with the fictional Elizabeth Cree, we see real historical figures such as Dan Leno and George Gissing (whose novel New Grub Street nearly made this list, incidentally). It also has one of the best plot twists I have ever read.

Mrs Dalloway – Virginia Woolf

Woolf presents us with a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, a high society lady knee-deep in depression, regret and party preparations.

We also meet Septimus Warren Smith, an ex-solider losing his battle with post-traumatic stress disorder.

In this module we began by reading a realist text (New Grub Street), we then read through all the writing styles that emerged in protest of it. Woolf, a modernist, was a pretty vocal anti-realist. Realist texts, she felt, failed to get to the heart of what it is to be a person. She felt their preoccupation with houses and landscape was to the detriment of the representation of real human experience.

I tended to agree.

What were your favourite books that you read in school or university?

Asking For It

Trigger warning: The following post contains discussion of rape and sexual assault.

Emma O’Donovan is the most beautiful girl in school. And she knows it. Everyone wants to be her friend, or more if they are able. She sees a bright future ahead of her. Then one night there’s a party. There are drugs and alcohol. When Emma wakes up the next day, dumped on her porch without her underwear, she finds she can’t remember a thing from the night before. It isn’t until school on Monday that she learns of the horrifying truth. She was raped by four boys, and the whole night has been broadcast to everyone she knows through the deeply disturbing photographs her attackers posted on Facebook.

In the months that follow, everywhere she goes, Emma is called a liar and a slut. Local people blame her for ruining the lives of her attackers. Meanwhile, online she is invited to share her story on feminist blogs, and #IBelieveBallinatoomGirl is always trending.

Asking For It, by Louise O’Neill, is probably the most important young adult novel to come out in a long time. Louise O’Neill fearlessly tackles the issue of sexual consent, victim-blaming and rape culture.

‘Our society may not appear to support sexual violence, but you don’t need to look very far past the surface to see how we trivialise rape and sexual assault. Sexual assault (from unwanted touching to rape) is so common that we almost see it as an inevitability for women. We teach our girls how not to get raped with a sense of doom, a sense that we are fighting a losing battle.’ – Louise O’Neill.

Emma is not a likeable girl. She is, however, a product of a society in which we tell girls that their sexuality is their only currency. Emma’s thoughts are consumed with her own attractiveness. She constantly compares her own physical appearance to that of her friends. But it’s what she has been taught to do by every single person who has ever told her that she’s beautiful with the implication that’s all she ever need be. Which is pretty much everyone in her life, by the way. Creating Emma as this vain and arrogant person only served to increase the intense sense of disconnection with her body she experienced after her rape. We see Emma transformed from someone wanting to be the centre of attention to a girl who can’t leave the house, who sees her body only as a thing to which her darkest experience occurred. Before the rape she spent endless time caring for her body, smoothing creams over her skin to moisturise it and protect it from the sun, afterwards, she doesn’t even shower because she can’t bear to see herself naked. Her body is a vessel that carries her sadness from room to room, but it is not her own anymore.

The victim blaming that Emma suffers made me want to start tearing my hair out, I was so angry. Not only local people, but journalists and television presenters, couldn’t wait to tell everyone that Emma’s attack was her own fault because of the way that she was dressed, because she was under the influence of alcohol and drugs, because she had a promiscuous reputation anyway. All these awful words only confirmed to Emma what her mind would not stop telling her: It was her own fault.

To be clear: a short dress is not a justification for rape. A girl being under the influence is not a justification for rape. The responsibility for rape lies with the attacker, not the victim. I don’t understand why our society makes something so simple seem so complicated. Emma is clearly unconscious in the photos circulated online and yet her town seems immune to the implications of this fact, namely that there was no consent. And sex without consent is rape.

Louise O’Neill examines in excruciating detail the experience of a rape victim. The endless wait for the legal battle to even reach court and the knowledge that even if it does, in Ireland at least, the conviction rate for rape is 1%. She takes us through the horror of having to see your attackers when you attempt to simply go to the shop, and the endless torture via social media. She shows how a world can shrink to nothing when you know deep in your heart that even your closest loved ones don’t believe in you, that even they think what happened is your own fault. Reading about Emma was almost physically painful in its reality.

I know educated people of my age who are guilty of victim-blaming. Last year a lecturer at my university was convicted of the sexual assault of a sixteen-year-old girl. He pled guilty. And yet still the prevailing conversation around my university campus – even now – is that the girl shouldn’t have put herself in the position in the first place, she shouldn’t have been drinking and shouldn’t have been alone with him. A lot of people are saying she probably made it up. Even though he has pled guilty and been convicted, the community still absolves him of any responsibility. It’s disgusting.  

Read this book. It’ll tear your heart out and leave you hopeless, but it sparks a conversation we desperately need to have.

‘We need to talk about rape. We need to talk about consent. We need to talk about victim-blaming and slut-shaming and the double standards we place upon our young men and women.

We need to talk and talk and talk until the Emmas of this world feel supported and understood. Until they feel like they are believed.’ – Louise O’Neill.

Books I Read As An Actual Teen

In slightly under a month, I will be 23 years old. Despite this, I still pretty much exclusively read young adult fiction. The tumultuousness of it all appeals to me, I guess. My obsession with YA, however, began when I was still an actual teenager. I felt like it was time to celebrate some of the books that made me into the obsessive reader I am today.

The Princess Diaries – Meg Cabot

I have been celebrating my love of this book series with my Rereading the Princess Diaries segment. Mia is an anxious nerd who’s bad at maths. She’s also very tall. She has to deal with the awkwardness of her mum’s dating life. This pretty much described my experience as a teenager. I latched on to Mia, and to this day I haven’t let her go.

Angus, Thongs and Full Frontal-Snogging – Louise Rennison

These books are about as ridiculous as they sound. The whole series made me laugh harder than any others ever have. Georgia Nicholson does just about every embarrassing thing you can think of. She shaves off her eyebrows (this was pre Delevinge days, you have to understand. Big eyebrows used to be something we worried about) and fights a continuous battle with her fringe while attempting to make out with pretty much any hot guy she can get her hands on. When I read through my teenage diaries, (a hilarious exercise. I recommend it) it’s 90% about boys. The crucial difference between Georgia and I however, is that she actually managed to date, a feat I did not accomplish in high school. (anxious nerd, remember?)

Forever – Judy Bloom

Surely everybody read this book as a teenager?  Forever is about a girl who meets a boy, falls in love, has sex, breaks up and nothing terrible happens. It’s just life. But in a market saturated (at the time) with books in which sex resulted in swift and brutal punishment (pregnancy/death/having to walk around with a big red A on your chest for the rest of your life), this was a pretty revolutionary book.

Looking For Alaska – John Green

Also known as Blowjobs: The Complete Guide. I kid. That’s just one scene.

I became aware of John Green when I was about 15, and I can honestly say his books have changed the way that I read, write and operate as a person. I had never read a book like Looking for Alaska. It’s about love and growing up and grief. It’s about famous last words and the absence of last words. It’s about friendship.

I hope they find a girl as good at being Alaska as Cara Delevinge was at being Margo for the movie.

(Why do I keep talking about Cara Delevinge?)

(Why are you even asking me that?)

I wonder who Nat Wolff will play…

Digression: I resent Nat Wolff. I liked him in TFIOS, and during Paper Towns I decided that he was actually pretty cute. When I got home, I googled him, only to discover he is younger than me. That has never happened to me before. My own relative adulthood was suddenly thrust in my face. I don’t know whether I will ever be able to forgive him. Unfortunately the only person around at the time was my mother, who was not at all sympathetic.

Journey to the River Sea – Eva Ibbotson

It was difficult for me to pick an Iva Ibbotson novel, but I knew I had to include her in this list. I spent a lot of time at our local library as a kid. We did not have much money and it was a place my mum could take my brother and I to hang out for free. They did not have the best children’s section in the world, but what they did have was an almost endless supply of Iva Ibbotson. So many of her novels shaped my reading life from when I was a kid to my teenage years. Journey to the River Sea however, has to be my favourite. Everybody loves a story about a plucky orphan who travels down the amazon. It also had a hint of romance in it. It never went anywhere because everybody was too young, but it used to make me crazy in a good way.

Lair of Dreams

After bringing down the supernatural evil, John Hobbes, only to be faced with Uncle Will’s plans to eject her from New York and back to Ohio, Evie makes the decision to share her diviner powers with the world. The resulting fame and fortune provides her with all the independence she ever wanted. She has a radio show on which she demonstrates her object-reading powers and her fame is growing fast.

Meanwhile a mysterious and deadly sleeping sickness is spreading through Chinatown. People go to sleep and never wake up. Mysterious burns spread across victims’ bodies as they slumber, and after a few days, they die.

It’s quite difficult to write an accurate synopsis for Lair of Dreams, the second book in Libba Bray’s Diviners series. There are a lot of characters to keep track of, and some who were very visible in the first book play a much smaller role in the latest offering. Jericho and Mabel, Memphis and Isiah, and even to an extent Sam and Evie, are much less central to the narrative of the sequel.

This was not totally okay with me. I fell in love with Evie’s character completely during book one, and her relatively small role in the sequel was something I found frustrating at times. I definitely wanted more from her story than I got.

We spend much of the book with Henry and a new character, Ling. Ling is a dream walker, like Henry. She lives in Chinatown with her Chinese father and her Irish mother. She’s recently recovered from infant paralysis, which has left her having to wear leg braces to walk. When she dream walks her body is as it was before her illness, so dream walking is how she spends a lot of her time. Even dreams however, become tainted when her best friend George falls victim to the sleeping sickness.

This series is the set in 1920s New York, the time of the Chinese Exclusion Act. This act made it pretty much impossible for labour workers from China to travel to America. It was a time in which immigrants were blamed for high levels of unemployment and incidence of racist hate crime was high (I don’t know why I’m even talking about this like it’s past tense behaviour. It is depressing how times don’t change). Chinese immigrants had to carry their visas with them at all times, as the police were big on spot arrests. The rise of the sleeping sickness only serves to make the situation worse, to the point where Ling is often no longer safe on the street.

I really love how well researched this series is. In the first book we were given a sense of the flapper lifestyle as a retaliation against the previous generation. They established themselves in direct conflict with the values they grew up with, because, as they saw it, those values led to the death and destruction of the First World War. In Lair of Dreams, the focus zooms out, away from flappers, to study of the experience first generation immigrant kids have navigating a world hostile to their very existence.

Overall, Libba Bray does a really good job of representing diversity of experience in her characters. From Evie the hedonistic flapper, to Ling the well behaved child of immigrants, to Memphis, numbers runner from Harlem living under his aunt’s restrictive conservatism, points of view within the novel are vastly different. It is refreshing to read a YA novel with such a diverse cast of characters.

Speaking of difference life experiences, watching Ling and Henry’s friendship develop was one of the greatest joys of the novel. I’m talking about Henry the wannabe musician who plays piano at raunchy dance shows. Henry, who has been searching in dreams for his long lost boyfriend, Louis. Ling and Henry’s bond is unlikely to say the least. Ling isn’t interested in Henry’s humour and she doesn’t approve of the flapper lifestyle he leads or the recklessness that comes along with it. Watching Henry work his way under Ling’s skin is a lot of fun. However, I did find that the very long dream walking sections of the book began to drag. It took a long time for the Ling/Henry storyline to meet up with the sleeping sickness thread, and during some chapters I found myself wondering what exactly the point of their meetings were.

I hate saying this because of how much I loved the first book, but for much of Lair of Dreams I found myself wondering when the action was going to start. There are so many characters in the world now and each of their stories took time to build to the point that by the end of the book, most had hardly achieved anything. I know that it’s a series, and presumably as such all my questions will at some point be answered, but Libba Bray began a lot of threads in this book that by the end hadn’t really gone anywhere.

That said, Lair of Dreams kept and even expanded on many of the elements that made me fall in love with the series in the first place. I remain quietly hopeful about the next book in the series.

Totally Didn’t… Book Tag

Thanks Jenna @ Reading with Jenna for tagging me!

Totally didn’t… need sequels

I feel this way about a lot of books, as I am highly susceptible to YA series burnout. A series is generally where most of the tropes that I get so sick of in YA fiction are floating around, so these days I largely stick to standalones. It takes a very compelling protagonist to tempt me into reading book two.*

If you too are experiencing the symptoms of YA series burnout (rolling eyes, involuntary sighing and the intense and almost irresistible urge to fling paperbacks from windows), I recommend the following:

More Than This – Patrick Ness

  

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian – Sherman Alexie

Just Listen – Sarah Dessen

Totally didn’t… need more than one point of view

Lair of Dreams, by Libba Bray, the second book in the Diviners series. I actually really like that this series comes from multiple viewpoints, but with the introduction of new characters in the sequel, I felt the focus moved around a little too much. I will talk more about feelings on Lair of Dreams in my review, coming tomorrow.

Totally didn’t… need to change the cover art half way through a series

Any time a publisher does this.

Totally didn’t… need a love triangle

My feelings about love triangles are similar to my feelings about series. I’m not a massive fan. I get tired of the whole thing really quickly and usually end up disliking the object of the triangle. Rather than rooting for a particular person, I usually want both of them to move on to someone more decisive.

I think this makes my point nicely.

Totally didn’t… deserve my time

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Trust me on this one.

I tag… anyone who feels like it!

*For anyone whose interested, series I am currently reading include:

Shades of London – Maureen Johnson

The Diviners – Libba Bray

The Grisha Trilogy – Leigh Bardugo (I just started Six of Crows this morning!)