lin·gua·phile

mooncactus:

sexuallyfrustratedfowlandshort:

purplewayfarers:

lightningstrucktower:

reasons my friends are better than yours #3674829.

oh my godf

dfmgfdfh

i am doing this next year

This is amazing not only because of the Harry Potter reference but also because it’s in a Disney princess egg!

luxheroica asked: 1, 15, 22, 34

1. Favorite childhood book?

Before I read Harry Potter and found Young Wizards as a result, my long-time favorite book was The Giver by Lois Lowry.

15. What is your policy on book lending?

If you return it to me in more or less the condition you borrowed it in, you can have it for as long as you need it, provided I don’t also suddenly need it. But the books I lend people most frequently are also typically books for which I possess multiple copies, ex. Young Wizards, so me suddenly needing it will not be an issue, I will have more! I actually have ~4 copies of SYWTBAW and I have a tendency of gifting it to people who I think ought to read it? I brought my omnibus of the first three books with me to New York when I moved, and shortly after lending the whole thing to a friend, I was browsing a bookstore that had a used omnibus of the first five books. Which, of course, I bought.

22. Favorite genre?

I would say, very generally, that my favorite genre is fantasy.  I am less interested in epic fantasy/high fantasy and more interested in modern urban fantasy, but I am also in love with alternate history/alternate universe fantasy-esque novels — particularly those grounded in a specific historical place and period, in which fantastic elements are integrated in a way that’s in keeping with the place/period. And of course, within this, I love YA.

(If I were answering the 18th-century version of this question I would just say my favorite genre is “the novel,” but this is a foregone conclusion today when we talk about books in a way that it simply wasn’t back then.)

34. Most intimidating book you’re too nervous to begin?

Up until recently, the answer to this would have been Middlemarch, but I finally finished it last semester; for a short while after finishing Middlemarch the answer would have been Clarissa, but I’m more than 75% done with that one by now! 

It is quite possible that, at present, the answer is Joyce’s Ulysses, which I have not yet committed to read, but which is on the syllabus for the only course I’d be able to take with a professor who seems really awesome and with whom I’d want the opportunity of working…

The non-academic answer to this might be The Door Into Fire by Diane Duane, which — don’t ask me how, because I have no idea — I have started several times and never actually finished! (Blasphemy!) Though I suspect part of this is that I like the idea of having one of her books “in waiting,” a part of the mental landscape I don’t yet know, which, upon reading, will nonetheless feel like coming home. 

theotherausten:

lololol the fuck is going on here?

#wingardium leviosa???

#those crazy regency folk

Regency wizards. You saw it here first.

(But like seriously can someone tell me what is actually going on here?!)

(Source: historyhair)

kellymariataylor:

Day 87

The problem is how few adults take the time to engage with children’s stories nowadays. I sometimes think that if we didn’t grow out of our childhood reading, the world might actually be a better place because of it.

(via the-eyre-affair)

kira902k:

coralcolored:

caribelle:

pjcalamity:

justmargaret:

Unpopular opinion? I thought this was one of the best scenes in the whole damn movie. If it made you laugh uncomfortably, that was the point. Harry is being goofy to try to break the tension and make Hermione laugh; in other words, he’s being a good friend. How is that not the cutest thing you’ve ever heard of? Their friendship forever.

Thank you. This is my favorite scene too. People who don’t ship Harry/Hermione hate it-but like. That was the whole damn point. Something very obviously could have happened, but there’s no way in hell it would. I friendship this.

Completely agreed.

That expression in the first gif is some of the best acting Emma Watson’s ever done as Hermione, if you ask me.

all of the above.

This scene was beautiful and totally my favorite in the whole movie because of all of the above reasons. Harry and Hermione are friends—in some ways their friendship is a lot less complicated than Ron and Hermione’s because it isn’t ever going to evolve into something romantic, but that simplicity doesn’t mean that it lacks depth.

(Source: bewitchthemind, via theknittingnerd)

I already know which “serious” books I’m reading this winter break (and “serious” is in scare quotes because I don’t really believe in categorizing books like that), but I don’t have any plans for fun reading. 

I am a strange reader. I hardly ever just “like” books. Either I dislike them, or I love them. The middle term is not “like” but rather “am interested in”; there are many books that I’ve read for school which I’m not in love with, but which (for a complex and generally more intellectual set of reasons) I am interested in.

I also don’t love many books anymore, it seems. I want to change that. And this is where you come in! I have found most of the books I love through the recommendations of friends who loved them first, and I’m reaching out to see if anyone else has suggestions for what I should read.

My current favorite books include, in no particular order:

• Diane Duane’s Young Wizards series 
• Scott Westerfeld’s Leviathan series 
• Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen 
• Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte 
• Middlemarch by George Eliot
• Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files series 
• Sabriel by Garth Nix
• The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin
• Heart’s Blood by Robin McKinley
• J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series
• Holly Black’s Curse Workers trilogy-in-progress

In general I’m really interested in books with:

• strong female characters (who have positive relationships with other strong female characters!): note, protagonist need not be female
• interesting emotional relationships between characters, the development of which somehow matters to the plot
• sci-fi that’s more on the anthropological side of things, like LeGuin
• urban fantasy: any time magic coexists with the real world I’m hooked (even if it’s coexisting with a real historical world, or this coexistence has created an alternate world), but to keep me hooked the book has to think about how magic impacts the everyday instead of just allowing characters to escape from it
• a generally positive worldview, or at least a belief in the power of humanity to persist against struggles and create things of beauty (even if those things don’t last)

And it would be really hard to sell me on:

• vampires, fairies, zombies
• anything in which the (probably white, probably male) main character wanders through his ennui, contemplates his place in the world, is dissatisfied with life and his job and his relationships, then discovers (probably via the help of some quasi-spiritual experience that appropriates and/or romanticizes the pain and suffering of less fortunate others, and/or via a manic pixie dream girl) that all this pain and suffering is somehow worth it, man, and we gotta keep movin’ through it
• anything where there isn’t a sense of emotional connection to the characters, or some other kinds of emotional engagement that leads to a feeling of payoff at the end
• anything that doesn’t demonstrate basic knowledge of grammar and style

If for some reason you are really into this and want to know more you could check out my Goodreads account.

Also because this didn’t show up explicitly above, I should mention that I love YA books and I especially love reading them over the holidays because they’re like brain candy compared to the stuff I read for school (and also some of my favorite books of all time are YA).

So, dear followers and people here via the tags: What should I read over break?

(via theknittingnerd)

birdhead:

thedaisiestdaisy:

Sirius Black was too busy being a big queer in love with a werewolf to get married.

now that’s what I call canon.

Friend and I were just discussing this. I think if nothing else it’s a pretty awesome example of the potentially recuperative powers of fandom. I mean, I never specifically read Remus or Sirius as gay until reading Shoebox Project…but this is coming from the girl who didn’t think it was at all strange that two men in their mid-thirties lived in a house together on Long Island with successful careers and a backyard and dogs. (Yes, I just switched fandoms. Deal with it. Young Wizards is relevant to the entirety of my life and existence.)

seeminglysweet asked: How do your characters bond? What do they bond over?

Interesting and difficult question! I think that the basic answer is “mutual interests,” but there are a lot of sub-categories to this.

1. “Oh look, we like the same things, let’s be friends.” This is probably the easiest strategy for me (because it’s most true to things I’ve personally experienced), but also a difficult one in terms of generating a larger plot for a story. Because, as we all know, plot is what happens when people disagree, when they don’t want the same things (or when they want the exact same thing but they can’t all have it). In my head, the consummate model of this kind of bonding is Nita and Kit in So You Want to Be a Wizard by Diane Duane. They’re both wizards, they’re both a little geeky and a little different from everyone else — both outcasts have experienced enough bullying at the hands of the “normal” teenagers they see every day at school. Generally, the “oh look someone else like me!” approach works best when most other people aren’t like the characters in question. For example, a literate woman in late-18th-century France becoming close friends with a man because he loves to read, and in her experience of life, very few people share this trait.

2. “Oh look, we hate the same thing/have a common enemy, I guess we’ll have to work together.” I don’t think I’ve ever explicitly written a story like this, though I do have one in the works where a researcher in paranormal science must team up with (but NOT get back together with!) her werewolf ex-boyfriend in order to stop a splinter group of the scientific community from developing a potentially dangerous anti-lycanthropy vaccine. In this situation, characters are forced to find commonalities in order not to kill each other while working together. It’s not quite the “hate at first sight” model of, oh, Pride and Prejudice, but it does establish an interesting basis for future conflict. I guess this is also how I’d characterize Dairine and Roshaun’s relationship in the Young Wizards books (I am so sorry that everything in my life is related to Young Wizards, but it is). 

3. Trial by Fire/Mountain Troll Theory of Friendship. Named after the scene in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone in which Ron and Harry “save” Hermione from the mountain troll, and end up friends for some unspeakable reason. The idea is that there are some things that will always create a bond between the people who have survived them. Like high school! I mean, if you can stay friends with someone through puberty, you’ve pretty much passed all the friend tests with flying colors. But in fantasy/sci-fi, this is also usually the kind of friendship/bonding that develops through successful completion of a dangerous quest or mission. Nita and Kit start out as people who find each other through mutual interests and experiences, but they’re so tightly bound because of all of the things they have survived together. Dairine and Roshaun may be constantly at loggerheads, but when they save the world together, some of the animosity wears off and they can find the room to respect each other, where they didn’t have that option before.

4. Acts of Out-of-Character Randomness. When characters let themselves be a little silly, let themselves do things they might not usually do, and those things happen with other people, bonding occurs. Or perhaps has already occurred, but the sign of that bond becomes the shared uncharacteristic activity or display. Like a well-dressed businessman running out in the rain in his suit to play with his son.

There are certainly more options that I just can’t think of right now, but these are the ones I use most readily. And I usually use more than one of them at a time, because only 1 and 2 are really mutually exclusive (though I suppose 2 could shift into 1, with a realization that “we aren’t as different as we thought we were, oops”).