Call Me Ishmael

Sadly, the title of this post does not mean that I am going to review Moby Dick. I have not actually read it, although I would like to.

This post is about a new website and Youtube Channel called Call Me Ishmael. It is quite a genius concept and I loved it from the first video I watched. The general idea is that someone has created a voicemail system and people can call the number, listen to the answering machine message left by “Ishmael” and then leave a voicemail message. This message is supposed to be about a book the caller has read and a story they have lived that is about, or relates to, that book.

Each voicemail is then listened to by “Ishmael” and he chooses at least two to transcribe and post each week. The calls are completely anonymous and the stories that people tell are personal and moving. There is a great variation in the books that people choose to talk about and it is touching to hear the emotion in the voices of the callers.

The site hasn’t been running for very long, so there are only a few pages of videos, but each one is unique and definitely worth listening to. My favorite of what is there so far is the caller who spoke about a book called Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese. I hadn’t heard of the book before, but I definitely want to read it now. The caller’s voicemail was interesting and showed how books can connect people. I thought it was a perfect example of what is great about this site.

Reading to the blind

Today I went for my first session as a volunteer at the South African Library for the Blind. My job as a volunteer is that I get to go into a recording studio for a few hours each week and read from a specific book until I finish it. The audio file is then catalogued and made into an audio book that the blind or visually handicapped members can then take out from the library.

I really enjoyed learning how to work the equipment and then starting my first book. I realised pretty quickly that I am completely useless at reading without making mistakes, so it’s a good thing that they make it easy to jump back to the part where you mess up so that you can rerecord from that line onwards.

They didn’t have a very varied selection of books for me to choose from (apparently the new stock hasn’t come in yet), so I made the best of what I could get my hands on. I was given a chance to choose a book and found myself staring at a shelf of self-help and technology books until the book on the very end caught my eye. It’s called Scary Monsters and Super Creeps by Dom Joly. I’d never heard of it, but it wasn’t ‘How to Express Commitment to Your Significant Other’ (which was my second choice), so I took my chances.

Kendall and Kylie Jenner “wrote” a book

So the big news in the celebrity world today is that Kendall and Kylie Jenner’s Young Adult, Dystopian novel has been released. The book is called Rebels: City of Indra: The Story of Lex and Livia.

I really didn’t know what to think this morning when I heard that this book is an actual thing. My first thoughts were to wonder about when these teen girls had time to write a whole novel, what with their extremely busy schedules of shopping, modeling and getting their nails done. This led to fairly natural assumptions that they did not in fact write this book. Apparently they had a ‘co-writer’ by the name of Maya Sloan. Instead of ‘co-writer’ I’m going to choose to read ‘person who actually wrote the book while Jenner sisters played on their cellphones and pretended to help’.

With that said, I went and read the preview of the novel, which includes the first two chapters, and I have to admit that it wasn’t altogether terrible. The idea is unique and interesting, and by the time I got to the end of the second chapter I found that I wanted to read more. Some of the paragraphs are poorly set out and the wording isn’t the greatest, which made me think maybe the Jenner’s had some involvement, but then there would be a word thrown in that I KNOW those girls have never used in their lives (‘hellion’, ‘dissonant’, ‘underprivileged’) and I went back to the belief that they did not contribute much.

It is possible that the girls came up with some of the general plot outline and simply had someone else put what may have been their idea onto paper. This is still cheating though, and their ‘co-writer’ is not even credited on the cover of the book. The whole thing is probably a money making, popularity scheme for a family that really doesn’t need any more money or fame.

However, I don’t know the real story behind this book – maybe they did write it and it was just (very) heavily edited. And I am not one to judge a book by it’s cover. I’ll wait until I can get my hands on the whole thing and pass my full judgement once I have read the book.

If you want to read the aforementioned preview, you can find it here.

(Really) Blood(y) Meridian

The second book that I have been reading this weekend, and have yet to finish because it causes me serious mental turmoil every time I pick it up for more than half an hour, is Blood Meridian. Cormac McCarthy is a famous American author, and this book is part of my course on American Literature, so I can see the merits as to why I should read it. I wont lie and say that he doesn’t have a really beautiful way of writing; I just don’t understand WHY he chose to write such a graphic and horrifying novel.

Maybe it’s a girl thing that I don’t like this novel, although I’m really not ok with that whole stereotype on ‘this book is for girls’ and ‘this book is for boys’. I would literally read anything I could get my hands on as I was growing up. In this case though, I have to say that it could be my serious aversion to blood and gore that has made me want to throw up while reading this novel. When I heard the general overview of the book I was like, “Oh cool, Cowboys and Indians, I could get down with that”. But I was sadly mistaken. Within about 10 pages I realised that those old Western movies (*cough* Toy Story) were maybe not entirely accurate on what it was really like during that time.

Dem Books

A few of the books I’m reading for my upcoming exam. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles and Anne Sexton’s Complete Poems.

The French Lieutenant’s Ho

So I’ve spent my weekend struggling through a couple of books for my English 3 course. The one thing about being an English Major is that it means reading books that you wouldn’t usually choose to read on your own. To me, this can be both good and bad.

One of the books I read in the last week was called The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles. All the lectures were about Existentialism and Freedom and a bunch of stuff I reaaally didn’t understand or want to learn about at all (I would have taken Philosophy if I wanted to know about ‘the will of life’ thanks), so I had pretty low expectations when I opened the book. However, I was soon surprised by how much I actually got into it. It’s a romance set in the 1800’s but written in the 1970’s by an author who puts himself into the book, and often comments on his story as he writes it. He brings up events that had yet to happen at the time that the story is being told. It was a technique that I’d never seen used before and it made the book much more interesting. I also loved seeing how society worked in those days. I find it quite hilarious how people got so worked up and horrified over things like sex and break ups, which are considered so normal in society today.