Here We Are, 2013.

I had originally sat and written a post for today, stating how I had a couple of blogging resolutions and such, but I deleted it. Towards the end of 2012 my blogging started to slip – I kept forgetting to write reviews, I hardly wrote anything and at times even my reading pace dipped. There were many reasons for this, Black Dogs and time being the most forefront. But another issue kept raising its head and it was only last night that I made a decision.

In 2012, I kept trying to ensure that I would always be reading newer titles – that I would be on the cusp of the publishing industry releases. And while that certainly had its positives, I felt as if by giving myself deadlines and pushing certain books to the top of the pile, I was turning both reading and blogging into a bit of a chore. In the post that I deleted I’d ruminated plans for the forth coming year and how I would form my reading path. I’d also stated that I wouldn’t be joining in with any reading challenges, then I found THIS.

For those too lazy to click the link, it is a blog post from Heather (An avid follower of my blog and good book friend, too). She has decided that 2013 be the year of “Reading Whatever the F*ck I Want” and I think that sounds like a brilliant idea. In 2012, some of my favourite reads were books that I pulled off of the TBR on a whim. Any time I shook off the constraints of Keeping Up With The Jones’ I had more fun, I enjoyed reading more than ever.

So, I will this year be joining in with #YoRWtFIW. This doesn’t mean I won’t still read some newer titles – I will still be receiving review copies, I’m sure. However I will pick and choose a little more carefully, I will only read what I’m gagging to read. This year is about many other things that come from “real life” or “off the blog” and my reading time will become a little more precious than ever, so this idea makes sense to me. (If you want to join in, head over to their blog post and let them know, too!)

So, no reading challenges (let’s be honest, I fail them because shiny things steal my attention) and no readalongs. I have joined an online book group (more in the future) that is dedicated to reading more classic titles, as this is something I want to do. This year I will also tweak my review template a little to create more time to write, so that I can keep up with reviewing the titles I love. This blogging lark started to feel less like a hobby and the fun was dripping out of it. Well, balls to that!

Reading and blogging gives me something special and I never want that to end. I started to feel down on myself because I wasn’t always reading the most intellectual reads and my blogging quality was slumping. It’s intimidating when you read the thoughts on John Self, Ben Johncock and the like because these are articulate people and often I stare at the little blinking cursor on the screen and want to strangle it as my thoughts won’t reach the page how I want them to. This year? Who cares!? I respect the hell out of those guys, but I’m me – I have my own voice and my own thoughts/opinions.

I know some will read this and say “Well, isn’t that what blogging is anyway?” and they’re right. I just lost sight of that. I suppose it’s best to say that 2013 is going to be a carefree year as while things “off the blog” are a little tougher and a bit more frantic, this needs to be my fun retreat. Here’s to 2013 and here’s to the 260 books on my TBR crying for attention – Happy New Year to you all.

Me and My Black Dog

I dislike referring to depression with its correct term. Depression is such an ugly word, it’s one that people are scared of despite some being quick to use it. I’ve suffered from depression or, as I prefer to call it, “the black dog” for years now (You can also add Anxiety disorder and OCD too). It was intensified to monumental proportions in 2007 when my three year old daughter passed away after a car accident. Things happen in life that test us, we all know that, but I never expected my life to take such a turn.

For me it was an ordinary day at work when a phone call came out of the blue to tell me my family had been in a car accident. The car was t-boned, my father in law was pronounced dead at the scene and my daughter was rushed to a local hospital with head injuries. Later that day she was sent to Great Ormond Street Hospital where she stayed for five days before we needed to turn off her life support after finding that 80% of her brain had died.

For a 24 year old couple (now 30), my wife and I were devastated and left reeling from something no parent could expect. Of course it didn’t take long for the black dog to arrive and it has stayed with me ever since. He comes and goes but predominantly he follows me through life making everyday actions awkward and difficult. I hit the bottom on a specific dark day of my life (the less said, the better) and now I find myself on the up.

So, why am I writing about this? Well, depression has appeared a lot in my Twitter timeline recently including mentions of suicide. Depression is such a secret illness and unless the sufferer speaks out most will never know until it is too late – Nobody wants to suffer a breakdown or find their solution at the end of a rope or razorblade.

I wanted to share my experience to say that there is no need to hide how you feel from the world. There is no shame in finding someone to talk to or going to the doctor and taking a pill to help with the everyday. Find a friend to tell, write it in a journal… Just get it out. One thing that helped me greatly was finding people to chat with through Twitter. Sometimes I’d find myself chatting endlessly and even found some others with their own black dogs in tow.

I generally fight with my black dog on a daily basis, most of the time I’m winning through support from various places. But, and the main reason I’m talking about this here, books are the thing that saved me. If it wasn’t for the ability to sit and immerse myself in different worlds, I’d constantly stew in my own. However it isn’t just escapism from my problems where books helped, some even helped to understand the illness and allowed me to realise I wasn’t alone. It was reading certain fiction titles that gave me the boost that I needed to face the lingering darkness. Most cleared my vision and let me see myself how others saw me.

Books that have helped me have ranged from fiction such as ‘Mr Chartwell’ or ‘Archipelago’ to Self help books like ‘I had a Black Dog’ which is a picture book for adults dealing with depression. They all helped in various ways and even though I still suffer, reading books is a very rewarding exercise.

Take The Bell Jar as an example. Sylvia Plath will always be known for her semi autobiographical novel about a young cosmopolitan woman who is suddenly struck with depression. Plath’s depictions are realistic to the point of terror and yet it can help the depressed person immensely. One of the biggest issues regarding mental health is the stigma that is often attached to it. Books such as Plath’s allows sufferers to know that there are people out there just like them. Depression is such an isolating disorder and many sufferers don’t want to reach out to others, sometimes in fear of embarrassment or sometimes because they don’t want to be judged.

Rebecca Hunt’s take on depression is one of the more approachable. In her novel, Mr Chartwell, she tells the story of Winston Churchill’s notorious fight with the disorder. She uses an actual black dog to depict the depression that weighs down an individual. In one scene we see Churchill sitting in his study as the black dog crunches on rocks, slobbers on the rug and badmouths Churchill. While the scene itself is relatively surreal and outlandish the actual act of frustration and the feeling of being downtrodden by something external is awfully similar to how many feel on a “bad day”.

I also wanted to write this to explain why the blog is rather sporadic at times. Sometimes it takes a lot of strength just to get out of bed, let alone get my brain in gear to write about books. It feels great to have written this. Over the last five years I’ve suffered so much in life, depression knocked my confidence for six and I never wanted to be around people or talk to anyone. Now, that is changing. Feel free to suggest other books or your own stories of depression in the comments.

NOTE: I’m not writing this to say “this is the best way to cure depression” or “that will help most” – I just wanted to tell my story. I know of people who found help in exercise, some who get by with baking and of course there are plenty of people writing. Books do it for me, as did finding help from friends and family. One day I hope to find that my black dog has run away from home.

The best website I ever found to help with my problems was Dancing With The Black Dog.

Bit of an update…

So, over the last few weeks the blog has been very quiet. This is a combination of several things including a holiday and illness. Sadly I’ve fallen behind on my reviews and projects as a result. I’m still reading, of course, but getting onto the PC to update everything is a little tough right now. Fingers crossed that with the use of the WordPress app on my Nexus, I may be able to catch up.

The thing is, blogging can be a difficult thing when you get into a slump. The reading is the easy part but sometimes summing up your thoughts no matter how good can lead to frustration. Particularly when under the stress of illness. Hopefully over the next month I will be back to blogging more regularly, but we’ll see, eh?!

On the subject of falling behind, you may have noticed that my participation in my very own Atwood Project has also slipped. The main reason for this is the range of new titles fighting for attention but also the fact that to read an Atwood you need to be 100% dedicated and recently I haven’t been. So, what does this mean? Well, from January I will start the project where I left off and read them without deadline. I think one of the things I realised recently is that blogging was beginning to feel like a chore and it should be fun!

Also, a change in reading habits is on the cards for 2013. Next year I’m hoping to concentrate on older titles more often as so many greats have passed me by.

There’s a lot going on this end, so I do hope you stick around with me while I get through this brick wall.

Kisses.

Blog Tour: The Assassin’s Curse

Today I’m very lucky to have the author of The Assassin’s Curse (Review tomorrow!) – Cassandra Rose Clarke – stop by the blog and talk about Pirates. As they feature heavily in the novel, they’re quite the talking point. Thank you to Cassie for taking time to tell us about her favourite pirates.

A lot of people seem taken with the pirate aspect of The Assassin’s Curse, something I didn’t quite expect when I wrote the book. I’ve talked on the blog tour already about why historical pirates interested me, so I thought here I could touch on what makes fictional pirates so interesting. And I thought I’d do it by listing my five favorite fictional pirates, in no particular order.

1. Long John Silver: Even before he lent his name to a chain of fast food seafood restaurants, Long John Silver was the fictional pirate. Robert Louis Stevenson’s depiction of him in Treasure Island has arguably had the most influence on how we, in the twenty-first century, think about pirates. Peg legs? Shoulder parrots? X marks the spot? All those pirate trappings were borne of Treasure Island. We can thank Long John Silver, along with Peter Pan’s Captain Hook, for turning pirates into bad guys (even though Long John Silver actually possesses a fair amount of moral ambiguity in the original story).

There are many depictions of Long John Silver across the media, but I want to give a shout-out to the most wonderful and bizarre of them all, a 2002 Disney movie called Treasure Planet. Look it up, seriously. There are pre-Avatar cat aliens and space ships that look and work like sailing ships. Long John Silver is a cyborg. It’s magnificent.

2. Captain Jack Sparrow: I have a feeling that Jack Sparrow may give Long John Silver a bit of competition in the “most influential fictional pirate” category, at least in the long term. I mean, I’ve been to Renaissance festivals since the release of the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie nine years ago. I’ve seen the Jack Sparrows stumbling around. I can imagine that in one hundred years, scraggly braided beards will replace the peg leg as the most infamous pirate signifier.

Really, though, what I like most about Captain Jack Sparrow is that he captures one of things that’s fascinating about pirates for me, which is their slipperiness. Jack Sparrow is so slippery in his wheeling-and-dealing that about halfway through the second movie nothing makes sense any more. Yeah, okay, maybe that’s just a flaw with the movie’s script, but deep down I like to imagine it’s because Jack Sparrow’s trickiness is so finely-tuned that a non-pirate like myself simply can’t follow it.

3. Han Solo: Yes, space pirates count as pirates.

Honestly, I think Han Solo (not to mention his subsequent popularity) was more of an influence on Captain Jack Sparrow’s character than Long John Silver. You have that same quasi-moral ambiguity — Han Solo is clearly a good guy in the movies, but there’s a reason everyone went into a tizzy when George Lucas ensured that he didn’t shoot first. Everyone loves a rogue! For me, pirates’ roguishness is another big reason for my fascination with them. I love morally ambiguous characters, and pirates are always a great vehicle for exploring moral grey areas. Han Solo lives outside the law, more or less, but during the course of the Star Wars trilogy he comes to fight for the common good.

4. Smee (from the movie Hook): I picked this guy because I like the idea that not all pirates are badasses. I’ll be honest: I’ve never read the Peter Pan play, and it’s been about a million years since I saw the Disney animated film, so I really don’t know what the original Smee was like. But in the movie Hook (which, in case you’ve forgotten, was a ridiculous, over-the-top, adultified version of Peter Pan), Smee’s character was this smarmy bureaucrat who convinces Hook to manipulate Peter’s children against him. There’s more than one way to be a pirate.

5. I really wanted at least one fictional pirate on this list to be a woman, but the only two I could think of were Elizabeth Swann and Angelica, both characters from the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. Of the two of them, I have more of a fondness for Angelica (she was in the most recent movie, as Blackbeard’s daughter) since she’s basically the female counterpart to Captain Jack Sparrow in terms of trickiness.

It actually surprises me that no one’s yet bothered to make a movie about a pair of real-life lady pirates, Anne Bonny and Mary Read. I really don’t have room here to tell you even a summarized version of their story, but rest assured that it involves crossdressing, mistaken identities, love affairs, and, of course, lots and lots of piracy. Get on it, Hollywood!

Wait… where are you going? There’s more! Would you like to win an exclusive, one of a kind annotated version of The Assassin’s Curse? Of course you do, it features sketches, deleted scenes and lots more about the characters. Each blog that has taken part in the tour will pick one winner and that person will go into a hat, the winner drawn at that stage wins the book. It is an International giveaway and all you need to do is leave a comment below!

 

Atwood Adjustment

For those of you who are following my Margaret Atwood project, I’d like to apologise for the lack of a blog post in August. There are many reasons as to why it didn’t appear, but chiefly it’s because the book for August was a short story collection.

Upon reflection short story books don’t really hold my attention – they are books to dip in and out of. I can think of only one collection that I’ve read cover to cover in one go and that’s Diving Belles by Lucy Wood. That was predominantly because they all centered around a particular theme. Dancing Girls, the Atwood book for August visits many different ideas and themes so I struggled to read it in time.

I have, therefore, decided to change my Atwood plan a little. As of now the only books on my list will be her novels and they will take priority. However, I still plan to read the short story collections, but they will appear on the blog as and when I’ve read them. I plan to read a story whenever I fancy one or am stuck as a passenger in the car.

I will adjust the list in the sidebar of the blog later today. The book this month will still be Life Before Man.