April 2012
81 posts
“Isn’t it odd how much fatter a book gets when you’ve read it several times?” Mo had said…”As if something were left between the pages every time you read it. Feelings, thoughts, sounds, smells…and then, when you look at the book again many years later, you find yourself there, too, a slightly younger self, slightly different, as if the book had preserved you like a pressed flower…both strange and familiar.”
—Cornelia Funke (via amandaonwriting)
“It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people.”
— Neil Gaiman (via amandaonwriting)
“I want to be magic. I want to touch the heart of the world and make it smile. I want to be a friend of elves and live in a tree. Or under a hill. I want to marry a moonbeam and hear the stars sing. I don’t want to pretend at magic anymore. I want to be magic.”
—Charles de Lint (via danseurs)
“
The problem that needs to be fixed is not kick all the girls out of YA, it’s teach boys that stories featuring female protagonists or written by female authors also apply to them. Boys fall in love. Boys want to be important. Boys have hopes and fears and dreams and ambitions. What boys also have is a sexist society in which they are belittled for “liking girl stuff.” Male is neutral, female is specific.
I heard someone mention that Sarah Rees Brennan’s THE DEMON’S LEXICON would be great for boys, but they’d never read it with that cover. Friends, then the problem is NOT with the book. It’s with the society that’s raising that boy. It’s with the community who inculcated that boy with the idea that he can’t read a book with an attractive guy on the cover.
Here’s how we solve the OMG SO MANY GIRLS IN YA problem: quit treating women like secondary appendages. Quit treating women’s art like it’s a niche, novelty creation only for girls. Quit teaching boys to fear the feminine, quit insisting that it’s a hardship for men to have to relate to anything that doesn’t specifically cater to them.
Because if I can watch Raiders of the Lost Ark and want to grow up to be an archaeologist, there’s no reason at all that a boy shouldn’t be able to read THE DEMON’S LEXICON with its cover on. My friends, sexism doesn’t just hurt women, and our young men’s abysmal rate of attraction to literacy is the proof of it.
” —The Problem is Not the Books by Saundra Mitchell (via albinwonderland)
(I thought it would be fun to reblog this, since I wrote it in the first place. :D Man, I love tumblr! -SM)
(I was shy about reblogging it since it mentions my book, but what the hey. And of course, I’ll add that Demon’s Lexicon having a boy protagonist did mean that people were like ‘good for boys, yes’ while the next two books having lady protagonists meant people were like ‘oh no, suddenly, girl cooties’ even though there was no diminishing of duels and demons and so forth. SO. Fearing the feminine, all over everywhere.)
The Night is dark and full of wolves: THIS POST IS BEAUTIFUL →
thenorthwind-howling.tumblr.com
ok lets see if that thing with glasses chicks suddenly becoming super weird feminine when they whip off their glasses works
woop
well that was anticlimatic wait
wait
WHAT THE HELL IS…
