Asterix and Obelix's Birthday: The Golden Book

I am uber excited about the forthcoming 34th album featuring the ever-endearing Asterix the Gaul. This year is Asterix's 50th birthday. I have been reading these comics since I was a little girl, and love them still!

The book is due out November 12 in Australia, at an RRP of $35.

For those of you unfamiliar with the lovable French village which just refuses to surrender to the Romans, a thorn in Ceasar's side, find out more about the collection here.

The secret of the resistant Gauls is a magic strength potion brewed by their druid, Getafix. You can't help but love the characters and the the endless wordplay.

These are a Few of My Favourite Characters

I’m a bit baffled to see Harry Potter at the top of the list of UK children’s favourite book characters. Seriously, Harry? Hermione, sure. Ron, even. The Weasley twins, Hagrid, Luna. But not Harry. He’s such a whiney ass.

I was, however, quite pleased to see Charlie and Lola in the list.

You can see the whole list here.

Anyway, it got me thinking. Who are my favourite characters?

1. Emily Byrd Starr – the Emily series, L.M. Montgomery

2. Nuuskamuikkunen (pictured) – Moomintroll books, Tove Jansson

3. Inigo Montoya – The Princess Bride, William Goldman

4. Fitzwilliam Darcy – Pride & Prejudice, the divine Ms. Austen
5. Peregrin “Pippin” Took – The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
6. Althea Vestrit – The Liveship Traders trilogy, Robin Hobb
7. Wintrow Vestrit – The Liveship Traders trilogy, Robin Hobb
8. Professor McGonagall – The Harry Potter series, J.K. Rowling
9. Mr. Bennet – Pride & Prejudice, Jane Austen
10. Mr. Carpenter – the Emily series, L.M. Montgomery

I wonder if it says anything about me that only three of my ten are female? Narrowly missing the cut are Teddy Kent, also from L.M. Montgomery’s Emily series, and Maurice, the streetwise, smart-talking alley cat from Terry Pratchett’s The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents.

It's also interesting that a few of my favourite characters are from books that wouldn't even rate in my favourite books/series (e.g. Harry Potter), whilst other books which I adore (e.g. The Last Battle by C.S. Lewis) don't have any especially endearing (to me, anyway) characters.

Please leave your own lists in the comments section- I’d love to see them!

Voiceworks #78 - Fluid

The team at Express Media have really outdone themselves with the latest edition of Voiceworks. The non-fiction is especially worth a look. It's very encouraging to see other young writers engaging with serious issues, and producing interesting articles unfettered by academic writing styles. (This is especially close to my heart, as it's the kind of writing I most enjoy producing myself!)

The RRP is only $8, so do yourself a favour and buy a copy. As the issue doesn't yet appear to be available for purchase online, I can only direct you to a list of stockists here.

I especially recommend Kate Goldworthy's exploration of the nature of sexuality in 'Our Permeable Walls', and Adolfo Aranjuez's 'Panopticon 2.0', an interesting thought-starter regarding gatekeeping and the internet.

The Divine Ms. Austen

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Jane Austen was a satirical genius.

If you’re an intelligent reader of Austen’s novels, you’ll find any romantic “I-wish-I-lived-in-times-of-gentlemen-and-high-society” notions quickly supplanted by the more realistic impression that we can certainly be glad we no longer need to conform to the social pressures of Austen’s time.

Her novels are characterized by:
• the inescapable interference of well-meaning but overly-nosy family friends
• awkward encounters with past crushes
• lots of faked civility and pretending to be friends
• the obligation to ‘be seen’
• and the public broadcasting of relationship status.

Thank God we don’t endure any of that anymore!

Hang on a minute, did I just describe facebook?

Fantasy and Philosophy

It happened when I was six. It was lunchtime at school, and we were acting out the narrative of a story we all knew (I can't remember what it was anymore), and this one boy just would not get his part right. I distinctly remember my frustration. I hit him over the head with the book (the one we were acting out), and thought 'I'd rather be reading The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe anyway.'

After that, I spent a lot of lunchtimes reading the Narnia chronicles. I was too young to understand that this was social outcast behaviour; I just genuinely preferred to be reading them and that was that.

I was six when I fell in love with fantasy.

I did, however, fervently deny being a fantasy buff until I was twenty. I was at university, taking a unit about fantasy fiction when it eventually clicked: You know, fantasy is a lot like philosophy.

The wonderful, the amazing thing about philosophy is that it's about clarity. Pick a topic, the kind of topic that is hugely important but which most people are vague about (when pressed, they will mumble something about gut feelings and 'just knowing' or 'everybody knows'). There are philosophers who have wrestled with it, separating concepts which most people conflate, applying logic, exposing fallacies, pinning down what we mean by certain terms, laying bare what it is that we really think. Clarity.

Beautiful. Clear. Complex, but sensical.

When you apply philosophy properly, you address old, familiar, confusing issues with clean, crisp, ordered thoughts and the issues become as clear as if they were brand new. Philosophy has a way of sweeping away the muck of familiarity and mistaken associations.

Then there's fantasy fiction. Any fiction, really, but especially fantasy fiction. Fantasy is always about the hugely-important-but-difficult-to-define things, but it deals with them through narrative. It presents them in all their muddled complexity, it acknowledges the human impossibility of understanding. It provides little paradigms, dancing around the real issues by presenting us with the points of view of flawed and limited characters. It involves messy and mistaken actions and prods at the big consequences of these.

But it does all of this in a way so unfamiliar, in a world so unlike ours, that in the confusion we see with clarity issues and ideas which, in our own lives, are obscured by their familiarity, their uncomfortable closeness to ourselves. Fantasy has a way of sweeping away the muck of familiarity and mistaken associations.

Now, I am unashamed to call myself a fantasy buff.

It's not about gaining a level of great enlightenment. It's about always understanding just a little better. It can be as hard-won as a difficult philosophical proof, or as easy as getting carried away by a story.

A Fairytale Ending <3

With all the talk about vampires and how vampire fiction is all about sex and violence, I naturally started thinking about fairytales. (I really must decide whether to write that as one word or two, and stick with it.) The thing about fairytales is... they're about sex and violence.

As mentioned previously, The Guardian has a brilliant fairytale series going at the moment, which you can get here.

A blog found therein discusses of one of the little-remembered facts of history: fairytales were never designed for children. The 'Disneyfication' of fairytales "has put into most people's minds a primary-coloured world of beautiful people facing dastardly villains and apparently insurmountable obstacles on their path to a life of happiness alongside Mr or Mrs (or, more likely, HRH) Right," writes David Barnett. But this is a modern idea of the fairytale- the real thing is much more grisly and interesting.

You can read the whole blog here.

Barnett mentions Angela Carter, among other writers, as a contemporary writer who puts the sex and violence back into fairytales. I'm currently reading her The Bloody Chamber, and, yes, loving it. I will most certainly post more on that when I've finished it!

Hopelessly lame book alternatives

Laura Miller's discussion of video-book hybrids, found here, made me laugh. Her summary of the critiquing of new 'book' technologies is pretty accurate:

"Someone is called upon to say the sky is falling and to scold book publishers for being behind the times ... Then someone stuffier is summoned to detect the imminent fall of Western Civilization presaged by people's unwillingness to read great literature anymore. ... And, finally, the geek punditocracy steps in to sniffily announce that although printed books are indeed doomed, this particular alternative is hopelessly lame, created by clueless print-oriented geezers who can't see that the real future lies in some yet-to-be-imagined, fantastically entertaining fusion of emerging media that our poor, reeling, post-adolescent brains can't hope to conceptualize."

She also makes a good point about the Twilight saga: it appears that 'digital natives' are quite capable of reading good, old-fashioned printed text if the story is appealing enough to them.

Lost in Austen

I came a little late to Lost in Austen (coming late to TV shows is a deliberate habit of mine- I prefer them on recommendation and on DVD), but when I finally popped the first disc into the player and settled back with the thought 'I'll just watch one episode,' I found myself compelled to watch the next... and the next... and the last.

The show follows Amanda Price, a modern girl who inadvertently swaps places with Elizabeth Bennet, finding herself in the world of Pride & Prejudice, right at the beginning of Austen's classic story. From there, everything starts to go wrong and Amanda desperately tries to make events follow the book (most of the time, she only makes things worse).

I've never been a purist when it comes to film and TV adaptions of books (after all, what's interesting on the page is so often boring on the screen) and the series is probably best avoided by those who think the role of an adapted screenplay is to slavishly copy every detail of the original text. Pride & Prejudice is one of my absolute favourite books, but nonetheless I am unashamed to admit that I enjoyed every moment of this adaption, which works to honour the book as well as highlight the irony of modern girls daydreaming about a 'romantic' world in which most of their liberties would be removed.

Some favourite moments: Amanda's 'postmodern moment' (pictured), and the vindication of Mrs. Bennet. If you're planning on watching the series, watch out for these!

Some observations: it's interesting that the show, like many readers, seems to conflate the BBC series with the book. It has always mystified me that the literary buffs, usually so nit-picky when it comes to screen adaptions, embrace the Colin Firth version so readily. It seems that Colin Firth's Darcy is Darcy (forget Austen's Darcy who, dare I say, was somewhat different). I suspect this has something to do with the fact that many readers saw the series first. It is a bit of a shame that it seems to be a job requirement of all screen Darcys since (and probably all that will follow) that they look very much like Colin Firth.

Nevertheless, Elliot Cowan is a wonderful Darcy. If I were in Amanda Price's shoes, I'd spend less time worrying about getting the plot right and more time trying to steal Darcy.

A word about cheese

My favourite way to read is with a good, soft cheese and wafer-thin crackers. No wine necessary.

Cheese is one of life's little indulgences, the kind we can afford but still think of as decadent. It makes the reading experience richer, it turns what I'm reading into a piece of culture. Eating cheese reminds me to savour what I'm reading.

I especially love eating cheese whilst reading philosophy. It reminds me that I am not just reading my homework, I am reading great and fascinating works, pieces that have shaped the world. Cheese is that kind of thing. It's impossible to eat it and feel begrudging at the same time.

Yes, cheese can do all that.

Juliet, Naked

Last night I finished reading Nick Hornby's Juliet, Naked. I actually read the last 200 pages of it (and there are only 250) in one sitting.

I'm tempted to say it's not the masterpiece that is About a Boy, but then Hornby seems to be daring reviewers to say he's getting soft in his middle-age. The book is, after all, an exploration of what makes art valuable and to compare it to his earlier works would be to miss the point entirely. It was a brilliant book, and I suspect that in twenty years or so, experiencing the decisions and revisions of middle-age, I might pick it up again and understand the characters better.

Hornby's work is always incredibly character-driven, and this time we meet an obsessive fan, a critical reviewer and a fallen artist. The story revolves around cult rock musician Tucker Crowe, silent and reclusive for the last twenty years. Scoring a demo version of Crowe's most famous album, die-hard fan Duncan is sent into a spin and his long-term partner Annie writes (horror of horrors) a bad review. Her review reveals the fractures in their relationship, but it also captures Crowe's attention.

I was fascinated by the exploration of the nature of art. The reader is confronted with the paralysis experienced by an artist who has produced, for once and for all, his 'masterpiece' and doesn't know where to go from there. There are also questions about the lies we tell to make sense of things, and the way we rely on other people's art to illuminate our own lives.

For an interview with Hornby about the book, click the 'Nick Hornby' label which appears at the bottom of this post, and the page will display an earlier blog with a link to said interview.

Speaking of quotations...

"Words are loaded pistols."

-Jean-Paul Sartre

"Great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors."

-Milan Kundera

If you love quotations as much as I do, check out Advanced Banter, one of the best quote collections I've seen for a long time.

The joys of a new notebook

I've mentioned my love of notebooks before, but I don't think I made it quite clear how much I love notebooks! In the absence of a diary, my notebooks are the quiet carriers of my day to day thoughts and inspirations. I use notebooks for everything.

I have notebooks for:

• Lists (what to pack, what to do today, people to call, things that are bugging me, things to buy, etc.) - these are my mongrel notebooks, the ugliest, most functional ones which end up with random addresses, phone numbers, mathematical calculations and automatically allocated internet passwords scrawled into them.


• Ambitions - well, I only have one of these. I write down my most important ambitions, just for a place to keep them. (Go to Egypt; Learn to bake bread; Become a good essayist; etc.) This one is a lovely, cloth bound notebook with a silk tie. It lives on my desk.


• Thoughts on books - of course. The larger kind of notebook, pretty but functional.


• Random venting - for those times I wish I kept a diary. I hope that when I'm gone, somebody does me the service of burning these because most of the time, I only write down the things that aren't worth remembering. This is the only use I have for large notebooks.


• Quotations - I have a quotation fetish. I collect them. And for this, I reserve the tiniest, most beautiful notebooks I own.

Paperblanks makes gorgeous notebooks. I also picked up one today by a new Australian brand called Rasberry- keep an eye out for them.

The strangest thing about my notebook obsession is that I never finish using one. The last quarter or so is always blank. I think this is because they're so personal, so attached to my day-to-day life that when I move to a new place mentally, I can't stand to keep using the same old notebooks.

No two I own are the same.