Let’s talk about Twilight

Yes I know, it’s been 10 years since Twilight came out, it might be a bit late to be posting about it. But I just re-read the books, and now I have some things I want to say. So here goes.

I read Twilight when I was 13 years old, one year after it was published. The movie came out in 2008, three years after the book was published. During those two years, it felt like I had the book to myself. I loved it when I first read it – what 13-year-old wouldn’t? But when I tried to tell people how good it was, they looked at me like I was mad. I remember standing in front of my grade 8 class, doing a book review oral on Twilight. I had found it in the library and was the third person to ever take it out, even though it had been on the shelf for a year. I tried to tell my class that the vampire wasn’t the bad guy, that he didn’t drink blood or kill people. He could go out during the day and didn’t sleep in a coffin, but it was all a foreign concept back then – the idea of a vampire being good, or sexy. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get my point across. So I gave up, I stopped talking about it, bought myself a copy (which is a super old hardcover that has a different cover from the red apple we’re all used to), which still sits on my bookshelf today, just a tad bit tatty.

Sadly I’m not home, otherwise I would have put a pic of my copy, but for now this will have to do. Pic sourced from here.

Zoo is un-bear-able (ha ha get it? Animal puns!)

Recently, a new TV show called Zoo premiered in the US. It is based on the James Patterson and Michael Ledwidge book of the same name. I have been somewhat hooked on the show, despite the fact that I find it wildly unlikely that anything like its plot line would ever happen. So I decided to read the book and see if it could give me more clarity on the apocalypse-by-animal angle.

The answer is no. I was not convinced. Actually, I think I’m enjoying the show more than the book; which is saying something since so far the only similarities I’ve managed to find are the main character’s name and a lion attack in Botswana. Aside from that, the show has done it’s own thing completely (so far).

This might turn into a rant, so prepare yourselves for spoilers.

Image sourced from here.

Not your average mystery novel

Christmas is always my favorite time of the year because it means I can add to my book collection without subtracting from my bank account. This year one of the books high up on my Christmas list was Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn. To be honest, I had never heard of this book until all of the hurrah about the highly rated movie appeared on my Facebook page. I knew that I couldn’t go see the movie until I had read the book, so I couldn’t wait to get my hands on it.

I spent Christmas with family in Cape Town and we were very busy most of the time, but I did eventually have a chance to sit down and start this book. I settled on a super comfortable couch on the verandah of my aunt’s house. It had a perfect view of both mountains and forest, which was absolutely beautiful. However, I was soon too engrossed in the book to even consider glancing at the stunning scenery around me.

I was drawn into the world of Nick and Amy Dunne and their seemingly perfect marriage. A marriage that is shattered on the day of their fifth wedding anniversary when Amy suddenly disappears. I want to really talk about this book so I think this is going to be more of an opinion piece than a review, and it is going to contain a hell of a lot of *SPOILERS*.

Image taken from:
http://images6.fanpop.com/image/photos/37400000/Gone-Girl-by-Gillian-Flynn-gone-girl-37441442-1181-1810.jpg

Taming the dragon in me

This semester I tamed a dragon. By doing so, I gained something that I had never had before. I gained confidence in myself and in my writing.

When the semester began, I was feeling both pessimistic and unsure of myself. I did not like the work that I was producing and at many points during the semester I felt strong links to the inchworm that Dillard speaks of in the first chapter of The Writing Life. Like the inchworm, I was spending my days in constant panic. I spent my time stressing, weighed down by what felt like a furious dragon pacing in my chest cavity. I worried how I was going to get all my work done, and filled the time that I should have spent working with anxiety instead.

Despite my myriad of personal doubts, I still feel the one hundred percent conviction that I love writing. I believe that I fall under author George Orwell’s Aesthetic Enthusiasm motive for writing. I don’t write to show my cleverness. I don’t write to find out or store up true facts. I most definitely do not write with a political purpose. I simply want to write about things that make me happy. For me, what makes me happy is literature. So ideally, I want to write about my passion for books. I have what Orwell describes as the desire to share an experience that I feel is valuable and ought not to be missed. When I love a book, I want other people to know about it, so that they can read it and share my feelings.

I am in complete agreement with writer Joan Didion when she says, “I am not in the least an intellectual, which is not to say that when I hear the word ‘intellectual’ I reach for my gun, but only to say that I do not think in abstracts.” I do not think of myself as a very academic person. I failed my way through high school maths and when I reached university, I very strategically picked subjects that were more creative and personally gratifying than they were specifically academic. I do not struggle with subjects that I enjoy, because I do not feel as intellectually inferior as I do in subjects that I cannot understand. Didion claimed that all she knew before she found writing was what she couldn’t do. I felt the same before I discovered writing and editing. The feeling of inadequacy followed me through high school and right through university until this semester. Until I realised that I had possibly found something that I could do for the rest of my life. Something that I was actually good at. Although I had to get through my personal insecurities first.

There’s a story behind every photo

This is somewhat unrelated to my usual theme, but I feel like it is worth a mention. I have always know that, in addition to my passion for books, I also have a great love for photography.  A few months ago, I entered a few photos into a competition that was held by iPhoneography South Africa. The photos had to be taken and edited on an iPhone and all entrants had to be from South Africa.

I was ecstatic (and a little surprised) when they emailed me to say that one of my photos had been selected and was going to be displayed in the biggest iStore in Johannesburg as part of the iPhoneography exhibition. I was so excited to be included in this exhibition; although I was pretty disappointed that I would not be able to see the photo in person. I’m studying in Grahamstown until the end of November, so I completely missed the two week exhibition window (which was from 1-14 October). However, my parents (and brother) cheered me up by Skyping me from the opening of the exhibition and showing me my photo and everything that was going on at the event, which looked pretty snazzy.

My photo was taken in March of this year when I was on my Easter holidays in Johannesburg. I tagged along to one of my brother’s rugby games. He had just made the First Team; the excitement was palpable amongst the boys and pride was radiating from the parents (and me). We had all be sitting patiently through the matches of the younger grades and were on the edge of our seats (I was actually on the grass because there was no space left on the seats) when the First Team made their grand entrance. There was much cheering and yelled advice emanating from the side-lines as the game began and the boys sprang into action. When the final whistle blew, it was my brother’s team that had come out top. I could see the joy on the faces of these boys, many of whom were playing First Team for the first time, just like my brother.

In a moment of sisterly pride, I decided I’d take a photo of my brother’s first win as a First Team player. I pulled out my phone and snapped a pic right as the teams were giving each other the compulsory ‘well-played’ handshake. As it turns out, my brother is slap bang in the middle of the photo, just extending his hand towards the approaching player from the other team. I took the photo in black and white – which is otherwise known as the Noir setting on the iPhone – and did not do any other editing to it; I liked it the way it was. I love my photo for a number of reasons, partially the feeling of being proud of my brother because it gives me flashbacks to that day, and partially pride in myself. I feel a sense of accomplishment when I look at it, like I created something kind of beautiful, which is something I don’t often feel about myself, so it makes a good change.

The exhibition has now closed and the iPhoneography people have put all of the photos onto their website. They have opened a Community Choice option, which means that anyone can take a scroll through the photos and vote for their favourite. I have been looking through all of the photos that were included in the exhibition and I’m amazed at the level of talent in South Africa’s photography community. Never mind the fact that every photo was taken with an iPhone! It’s incredibly impressive.

Voting can be done from anywhere in the world. So if you’re reading this (yes you), I’d love it if you could give my photo a look and if you like it, maybe vote for me. It’s called Team Solidarity (on page 4) and my name is Sarah Beningfield.

The link to the page is here.

Thanks!

Live Tweeting The Book Thief

Last night I decided to watch the movie of The Book Thief. The movie came out at the end of last year, based on the book by author Markus Zusak. The book is one of my all time favourites; it is written beautifully and the story line is captivating from beginning to end. To be honest, it is an absolutely heart-breaking book and I remember crying heavily towards the end. The movie manages to portray the tragic events in a tasteful and emotional way, but as I have said before, the book is always better than the movie.

I live tweeted throughout the movie, at first I intended to make constant comparisons, but in the end I mostly tweeted about the movie. I really enjoyed it and had very few comparisons to make.

My tweets can be found here. Enjoy!

Amortentia – my love for Harry Potter

People with a love for books will often speak of a specific book from their youth that has affected them in a profound way. For Njabulo S Ndebele it was No Longer At Ease by Chinua Achebe and for J.K. Rowling it was Emma by Jane Austen. For me, the book that shaped me in my teenage years was Harry Potter.

It sounds like exactly what you would expect from a teen of my generation, but that’s what I like best about it. I’m part of the only generation that had the opportunity to read the Harry Potter series as they were written and released. There will never again be lines of hundreds of fans all around the world waiting all night outside their local bookstores for the clocks to hit twelve and the doors to swing open. The next generations will not experience the exhilarating torment of waiting an entire year to find out what happens to the characters that they love in the same way that they love their best friend.

They will experience the instant gratification of being able to immediately read one after the other, but they will miss out on the feeling that has you close to tears, shaking with excitement as you wait to buy your copy. And then staying up all night because there is no way you are going to wait until morning to jump back in and immerse yourself in your favourite fictional world. However, the worst thing that the generations after me will not experience is the feeling that I felt when I was reading the last book. That bittersweet notion of wanting to race towards the end and find out what will happen to Harry, Ron and Hermione, but also being constantly aware of the fact that it is the last time you will ever be reading a Harry Potter book for the first time.

Why am I so afraid of failure?

*Discliamer – this is another writing assignment, but please go ahead and read it anyway – you might find it interesting*

“It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all, in which case you have failed by default.” – J.K. Rowling

Failure. This is something I think about every single day. As a young, goal-driven woman, failure is prevalent to my life. If I didn’t think about, and fear, failure, then I wouldn’t work as hard as I do to succeed.

Maths was the bane of my existence in high school. By my final year, I was working at it for over eight hours every week and I still could not pass. I felt like a failure when I was incapable of learning these equations that everyone around me seemed to understand. By the end of Matric, I had grown accustomed to the fact that I was not going to pass Maths and I even celebrated when I managed to achieve a mark that was technically a fail, but that would still allow me to be admitted to Rhodes University for a Bachelor of Journalism. I had learned by this time to comfort myself with the idea that Maths was not my thing. Reading and writing are my things, and I learned to accept that it is not possible to be good at everything.

As I moved out of high school and into university, my understanding of failure changed again. I realised quickly that when you fail something at university, the odds of a second chance are slim to none (unless your parents are happy to pay for a repeated year of study – which mine were not). This realisation put a lot more pressure on my shoulders. I knew how much money my parents were putting into my course fees and my res fees and the multiple flights between Port Elizabeth and Johannesburg and I really didn’t want to let them down. 

Being A Writer

*Quick side note – this post was an assignment for my Journalism Writing and Editing class. I do still feel like it is relevant to this blog though so I am happy to post it here.*

“Being A Writer” is a topic that I find personally challenging. Do I want to be a writer? What do I want to do with my life? It turns into some cosmic question that I’m not sure I know the answer to yet.

There are a couple of things that I know for sure. One is that I love books. My absolute favourite thing to do is hide away somewhere with a good book and stay there until I’ve read it from beginning to end. I have always known that I want to go into a career that would allow me to read. Who wouldn’t want to make a career of the thing that makes them happiest? What I was, and still am, less sure about is exactly how to do that.

It sounds unbelievable but I finally got the idea of exactly what I wanted to be by watching the movie ‘The Proposal’. The movie is about a book publisher and how she manages to fall in love throughout the course of the hour and a half long film. The publisher (Margaret) is a horrible person at the beginning; she is malicious, rude and downright scary, and yet I still wanted to be like her. After much consideration, I realised that the reason I loved the movie so much because of how incredible her job looked. She seemed to be rich and successful and by the end she’s clearly happy and in love too. Sounds pretty great to me.

 

The Sword in the Anvil (in a Stone in a Churchyard)

I can honestly say that I absolutely adored T.H. White’s ‘The Sword in the Stone’. I read it over the weekend as a requirement for my British Modern Fantasy (more on this later) course for English, and by the end I was amazed that I had not read it before!

In hindsight, it is probably better that I only read it now, because it meant that I could understand a large amount of the references – which are clearly aimed at adults for the most part. I think if I had read it at a younger age, I would not have understood how completely hilarious parts of this book are. The personalities of the characters – such as Merlyn and (for me) King Pellinore – made the book constantly entertaining. Some of what happens is so ridiculous that you cannot help but smile.

King Pellinore was by far my favorite character. At first I thought he was incredibly strange (which he is), but he soon started to grow on me. I found myself actually laughing out loud in the scene where Pellinore comes across his Beast while out with the hunting party on Boxing Day. His life goal is to complete his Quest by finding and ‘slaying’ this beast, but he had become distracted over Christmas and had taken a break from the Quest. When they are hunting he finds the Beast very ill and close to death. He comes to the immediate (and correct) conclusion that the Beast was pining away without having him there to chase it. He proceeds to go on a rant about how it was all his fault for not living a regular life.

 

“Before, it was all right. We got up at the same time and quested for regular hours, and went to bed at half-past ten. Now look at it. It’s gone to pieces altogether , and it will be your fault if it dies. You and your hummocky bed.”

 

Pellinore follows this by nursing the Questing Beast back to health by using “kindliness and bread and milk” and was soon back on his happy Quest to kill the thing. He is later saved by the Beast after he has been captured and taken prisoner by a Giant.