My top 5 books of 2010

I didn't read a whole lot in 2010, but there were a bunch of books that I fell in love with. I can't narrow it down to 10 but the top five are very clear, I LOVE these books. (These were books I read in 2010, not necessarily published this year but I think most of them were.)

5. Incarceron by Catherine Fisher

Completely fell into this world, it's so complex and dark and the characters are awesome. It was very fast paced and engrossing.

4. How to Say Goodbye in Robot by Natalie Standiford

This is a hard one to describe, but I think the biggest thing I loved was that it was about a friendship. A complicated and messy and painful and amazing friendship, that was as real as all of mine are. I loved the characters and the writing style and the ending.

3. Before I Fall by Lauren Oliver

A very very powerful book, you saw the main character change so much. The way the plot elements wove together from day to day was amazing, the little glimpses of feelings in each character mattered so much. It is one of the only books I've read with completely real and understandable, if not likable, popular mean girls. I felt so hopeful at the end, it left me with such a good feeling.

2. Stolen by Lucy Christopher

I wrote a review for it already on this blog which is here http://toliveinarainbow.blogspot.com/2010/09/stolen-by-lucy-christopher.html and I'm not going to repeat myself, so I'll just say, WOW. What an amazing book.

1. Jellicoe Road by Melina Marchetta

Stolen fought with this one for number one, but Jellicoe Road eventually won. Not because Stolen is any less good, but this one is a bit less painful and I can remember it without being so sad. Pretty much this is an incredible book. Complicated, emotional, characters and a crazy haphazard plot that weaves together perfectly and just purely beautiful writing. I fell in love with it from the first page (and the characters! All of them! Are amazing!) and it's definitely one I'm going to be rereading lots, I just read through a page of quotes from it to find one to put here and it's just making me want to read it again. And I can't choose one.

So those are my favorite books of 2010, what are yours?

Kelia

Just had to post this...

Because it is so awesome I couldn't resist. I'm sure there are many quotes that say the same thing, but this is just so simple and true. Pretty much why I love music.

Guess what?

I FINISHED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I cannot believe Nanowrimo is over. This month has been full of surprises! But I finished at last, my crazy insane plot-stuck-in-on-the-second-to-last-day novel is done. Not really since it ended SUPER abruptly but it's done for now, I'm not looking at it again. I already started a new story. NOT because I don't want to EDIT my novel or anything, it's because I made a goal to keep writing and to write 500 words a day for the foreseeable future so I had to! But I also don't really want to edit it.

Anyways: nano. You know that plot I was so glad I finally figured out one month ago exactly? Yeah. First day of nano I wrote 300 words and decided to switch. I was going to take a risk and face the unknown and all that stuff. I'm actually really glad I did, because while my story is not very good (it's just SO light compared to my past novels and I'm not sure how I feel about that) it was super fun to write, and mostly the funness was how risky and unknown everything was. I've always been a planner and I decided to be a pantser for a month. Partly it was really fun, I had some crazy amazing days where I put off writing all day and then would sit down and BOOM something unexpected and awesome would happen, but I also had days where I just did not. know. what. to. do. The story that I ended up with would never be here if I hadn't done it like that, three quarters would not exist pretty much. A whole character who I LOVE would never have appeared, because he was something random I did for words that turned into the rest of the book pretty much. And that was the best thing, setting out at the beginning of the month with a vague idea of what the book would be and having it be SO different and awful in parts but amazing in other parts.

I will definitely have to see how I feel about it in another month, because while I like it I don't have this love for it like I do the last book I wrote. And most of the time it felt like I was writing a practice novel so I'll have to see if in a while I think there's things I can salvage or not. But either way I'm going to keep writing, and also, I wrote 9 poems in November! Compared to 1 in October, so that makes me happy.

First sentence of nano 2010: The sea was green that day, on top of everything else.

And I just want to say, congratulations to everyone else who did nanowrimo! It's a crazy thing to attempt and like they say, no matter how many words you wrote that's that many more words than you'd have if you hadn't tried. And this video is awesome, it pretty much sums it up. http://blog.lettersandlight.org/post/2053755708/nanotoons-a-farewell

Goodbye nanowrimo, till next year!

This month has been insane

Things I Have Now that I Didn't Have A Month Ago:

My permit (I can drive! It's kind of scary but pretty great, and I needed to get it.)

A plot (Finally. I really like my plot, but I also have a sinking feeling that I'm going to fail nanowrimo this year. We'll see...)

A good stash of candy for nano (I have to have candy, if I get my quota every day I get a piece!)

No time (Driver's ed took up most of it, plus I had to do so much piano because of this sonata festival I was in. This week has been the only semi-non-busy week of the month, and then tomorrow Nano starts.)

The ability to cry onstage (I love acting class, it's amazing.)

The LAST performance of Thumbelina coming up (It's going to be so sad... In a way it really needs to be over since we've been doing spaced apart performances since June, but I love this cast to death and I'm going to miss them so much!)

An obsession with the PBS miniseries of Sherlock Holmes (I'm in love with it *grin* It's so fantastic. They only have the first episode so far on the website but I'll get to see the second tomorrow! That'll be my reward if I write 1,667 words and don't immediately rewrite them.)

And that's all for now. I can't believe Nanowrimo starts tomorrow.

Kelia

Randomness

I don't think I have the right kind of brain for keeping a blog, every time I try to write a post it ends up either boring me, or I have no idea what I'm trying to say. So whatever! This'll be short and choppy.

It's fall! I love trees in the fall, but when they lose all their leaves it makes me sad. Right now I'm just trying to enjoy the red and yellow and orange and not think about snow.

It's the last day of September, which means that Nanowrimo is one day and one month away. I am not much farther in having a plot, though I think I've given up on the idea of writing a non-fantasy. The ones I have come up with are definitely fantasy, and I have to decide on one soon and start fleshing out the characters. But I actually finished my first story since last nano! It's very short, about a page, and very dark and sad but I love it.

I've read three books since Stolen. I reread The Blue Sword by Robin McKinley (third time if I count it being read aloud to me) which I adore, and I read The Replacement by Brenna Yovanoff which was awesome, and How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff which was so good! How I Live Now had a fantastic character voice, it felt like the character was talking to me the whole time. It was the first book where sentences a paragraph long didn't annoy me, they were just like run-on sentences people use all the time while talking.

Tomorrow is Friday which I'm very excited about, almost all of my favorite shows air Thursday night so I watch them tomorrow on Hulu. A good thing about September is all the shows start again!

I haven't written as many poems as I should have this month but here is the latest, the 5th.

A sound is whooshing overhead

the dark is seeping through the walls

and rain surrounds this house

this lonely house amidst the storm.

It's really random, it isn't even raining. Oh well! Tomorrow is October...

Stolen by Lucy Christopher

So. Stolen. I think this is the first book that's made me cry (really sob, not just eyes watering) since I read Each Little Bird That Sings by Deborah Wiles, which I read 3 or 4 or 5 years ago. This book really got to me. It was such an emotional book, everything that Gemma felt was portrayed so well and so truly.

Stolen is a letter written by Gemma to the man who kidnaps her out of an airport and takes her to The Middle of Nowhere, Australia. Her time there is terrifying and awful, and yet the more she delves into the mind of her captor the more she realizes that nothing is simple, not even hate.

I loved the writing in this book, it was so fluid and natural, told from after but never giving away what happens next. And I loved Gemma, she was so relateable and she never gave up. Everything she was thinking and feeling made sense, which was good because it would have ruined the book if the narrator was annoying. And Ty-- Ty was a real person, not just some evil kidnapper. At the end of the book my thoughts about him were almost as complicated as Gemma's. This is definitely a book that will stay with me for a while--more than anything I know I'll remember the beautiful description of the Australian desert (and the heat) and how frightening, and sad and overwhelmingly real it was.

NaNoWriMo ramblings and books

I finished Mockingjay a few days ago, which I'm not going to say anything about other than everyone is going to have their own opinion of it and no one is going to read it the same way. But a really good review of it is here which I agree with, but warning: VERY spoilery.

I also read Incarceron, which was awesome!! The world felt real and I loved the characters, and the plot was really complex and it had me skimming to see what happened next. I was completely engaged from the beginning, and even though the world and their situation was dark it never felt like a very dark book (though that might have been because I had just read Mockingjay). I canNOT wait for the second, which comes out in the U.S. in December but came out in Great Britian in 2008.

Incarceron is about a boy named Finn, who lives inside the vast metal prison Incarceron. But Finn is different than the other prisoners there; he believes he came from Outside, and he wants to escape. Claudia lives Outside and is the daughter of the Warden of Incarceron, as

she tries to untangle the web of mysteries that surround her she helps Finn because she knows he can help her too...

In other news, it's the beginning of September (strange) so that means NaNoWriMo is less than two months away! I have no idea what I'm going to do for a story. I have one plot I could do, but it really doesn't excite me. I think I might actually not do straight-up fantasy, which would be interesting! The only non-fantasy stories I've written have been short. But I think that two things I definitely want to do this year is have it be more of a character driven story, since the last two nano's were lacking in that, and have the season and place be a part of the story. Like summer by the sea, or autumn in an old house in the woods, or winter in a city. I probably won't be able to resist having some kind of supernatural twist to the story but I do want it to be modern I think.

One of the things I hate the most about nano is the first sentence. I want to get it perfect, but I will sit there forever staring at the page and deleting attempts if I let myself, so I have to just pick a sentence and go with it.

Nanowrimo 05's first sentence was spectacularly bad: After my parents died, my whole world started coming apart. *shudder*

And Nano 06's was just plain blocky: Epsilon looked down at the earth.

Nano 07's was alright: The school bus dropped me off in front of the library, and I hurried inside.

Nano 08's was in a dream but that doesn't quite excuse it: I gazed up at the sky, my smile growing till I felt like it would tip me over.

And Nano 09's (which was a rewrite of my 08 novel) was very short: She was running.

Oy. Hopefully this year's will turn out decent. Also I've been really bad this year about writing in general, since last year's nano (other than poems) I've probably only written about 10,000 words. And it's all snippets of stuff, random scenes and starts of stories that never got more than a few hundreds words on them. I think I'll have to try and write a short story between now and nano to get my gears running, I know how awful it is to jump into nano and not even be used to writing 500 words a day.

Now I have to go think of a plot!

kelia