Category: Uncategorized

Naming conventions (and a small one called Mittens)

Part of my book goals this year was to diverge from my usual haunt of YA fantasy, YA romance, YA sci fi… and every other iteration of YA that exists. This also includes the offshoot NA, and honestly I kind of consider urban fantasy [romance] included in this category (because rarely does one find an urban fantasy that doesn’t feature a kick-ass/sassy/dare-I-say-selfish-or-mean heroine in a relationship with a dude. It’s basically just a smuttier YA with no fade to black).

But anyways, I might as well try to clean up my to-be-read list by starting chronologically, so here I am making my way through Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen. Does anyone get super tempted to cheat and just watch the movie? There’s one on Netflix that I swear never popped up in my feed until I started reading it. Our devices are definitely listening to us :/

Mini-non-review: I’m not sure if it’s because I’ve been reading Sense and Sensibility on my breaks and on the commute home, but I’ve been getting super confused with the names. I’m not sure if it’s because the writing style is older (obviously, the book came out in 1811), but I keep getting the characters confused. The author will refer to characters as both Mr. LastName and other times as FirstName, but also the father as Mr. LastName… ok maybe that’s not that confusing. I think I should just accept that this is not a commute kind of book, but a sit-and-become-one-with-the-couch kind of book.

Anyone have more understanding on old naming conventions that could enlighten me? Like there’s this moment where Elinor is surprised that Mr. Willoughby uses Marianne’s Christian name, which I thought he had been using the whole time. My understanding is that this is significant because they’re supposed to maintain a certain level of formality. Also, the writing made it sound like her Christian name was different from her actual name, but if she was baptised as a baby, her Christian name would have always been her regular First Name? No?

Also, there should be some kind of rule that two characters can’t have very similar names, like Margaret and Marianne are just too close to one another for me to tell them apart when I’m tired and reading. The number of times I’ve read “Mar” and assumed it’s one or the other is getting a little (a lot!!) ridiculous.

Also, this morning I woke up to this guy:

where Mittens claims his spot from the terrible, wet dishes

Happy Monday Funday! (it’s Family day, so no commute today, yay!)

 

 

And the journey begins (in which I use too many parentheses)

Here we are, a couple (a lot, jeez, where did the time go?) of months after graduating university, and now I’m feeling a little lost in the world. Like there are so many things I want to be accomplishing, and planning it all has been so much fun (there are maps and arrows and lines all over the place).

After spending a couple of hours in ChatTime, then moving over to Second Cup with some friends, it turns out that the longer you wait to do something and the more you think about it, the less inclined you are to actually doing it. It’s easy not to notice time slipping by until your friends are off doing fabulous things like getting their dream job or planning their next amazing trip abroad, and you’re sitting there like… um yeah I learned how to cook soup? And do other basic skills like care for my cats? I can now trim their nails!

So now we’ve come to the part of actually DOING. Yes, actually getting things done, instead of dreaming it all (and hoping that’ll be enough to make it real).

I’ve always wanted to blog (does reblogging on Tumblr all the time count?) but never stuck with it beyond a couple of bad poems…anyways. Here we are, in a space where I can discuss my love of reading and other little parts of my life.

So I realize from all the parentheses that if I could figure out how to use footnotes in blogging, my posts would be full of them. Since I don’t know yet… well they’ll just have to be left in for now, because my mind veers in way too many directions.