All My Friends Are Superheroes.

"What kind of love are we interested in today?" he asked.
"What kind do you have?"
"Well," he said. He stood up. "I've got the love you want, the love you think you want, the love you think you want but don't when you finally get it…"
"That must be very popular."
"It is."

You know where I want to live? I want to live here, in this world. I want to live in Toronto with 249 superheroes and no spandex.

This book is adorable. It’s a proper little gem of a story that I read in an hour last Wednesday and that just left me feeling happy.

The premise is fabulously quirky: Tom is the only non-superhero of his friends, but the superpowers they possess aren’t the ability to fly or inhuman strength or X-Ray vision; they’re more just exaggerations of their quirkier personality traits. I love that, I think it’s genius.

There's The FrogKisser for example who is blessed with the ability to transform geeks into winners, yet cursed with the reality that once she enables this transformation, the origin of her initial attraction is gone. Amazing. Or, or or or “MR OPPORTUNITY: He knocks on doors and stands there. You'd be surprised how few doors get answered.” Or even Mistress Cleanasyougo – “…the most powerful superhero of all, the one everyone wishes they were... at the end of the day, she folds her clothes. She never leaves scissors on the table, pens with no ink are thrown in the trash, wet towels are always hung up, dishes are washed directly after dinner and nothing is left unsaid…” Tell me any of that’s not GENIUS.

Tom is married to a superhero, ‘The Perfectionist,’ but he has a problem: he has been invisible but only to her since their wedding night and he only has the duration of the flight she is making to start her life over, without him, to make her see him.

This is a book about the human condition. It’s about unrequited love, and about confidence, about feeling invisible and that the people around you are somehow more than you are, that you are just you and everybody around you is somehow ‘a superhero,’ it’s about the good and the bad and the ugly that's inside everybody. This story, to me, is like a metaphor for life and it’s a wonderful study on human relationships and their complexities.

Above all though, It’s a clever, witty, poignant tribute to True Love and the bonus? It’s never saccharine.

IT’S SO BEAUTIFUL!!!!

I wish I’d read it sooner. I really wish I’d not done all my Christmas shopping because I want to gift this book TO THE WORLD. It’s precious.

We accept the love we think we deserve.

"Sometimes, I look outside, and I think that a lot of other people have seen this snow before. Just like I think that a lot of other people have read those books before. And listened to those songs.
I wonder how they feel tonight."

"The Perks Of Being A Wallflower" is one of those books that I've been meaning to read for ages. One of those books that I've heard about and that people have told me I should read but that I've just never gotten round to picking up because there's always something else that catches my eye and in all honesty I doubted it would live up to the hype.

"The Perks Of Being A Wallflower" is one of those books that I really really wish I'd read sooner. I loved it. I read it wanting to see what all the fuss was about. Now I know. & I want to read it again.

I've read a lot of good books this year, I think I've said that before. I've read a lot of books that have made me think and that have stayed with me but this one, it's different. It's a couple of weeks now since I finished it and I still can't get it out of my head, I can't stop thinking about it; there are quotes, lines and passages that keep coming back to me and making me feel like a heavy weight has settled somewhere in the middle of my chest. It's a beautiful beautiful book: the characters are beautiful, the language is beautiful, the message is beautiful and I just...loved it.

In a nutshell, it's the story of a fifteen year old boy, Charlie. It follows him through a year in his life, through a series of letters he writes to an somebdoy whose identity is never revealed.

Charlie is all kinds of wonderful. He doesn't want to let go of his childhood but at the same time he wants to grow up; he's caught in that no-mans land that we all go through at some point, balancing on the cusp of adulthood and knowing that when you finally jump nothing will ever be the same again.
He's clever and compassionate and senstive and massively messed up and he has this unique way of expressing himself that at times made me wonder, particularly at the start of the book, whether he was autistic; whether at the very least he was suffering from a high-functioning form of Asperger's because he seemed like a very young, very naive 15 year old. I never was and have never met a 15 year old like Charlie, he is absolutely not your average teenage boy yet (and this is part of the magic) at the same time he really is.
We follow him through a world of suicide and bullying and first love and lost love and friendship and a depression that breaks your heart and as I read I fell in love with this slightly damaged kid a little bit, a lot, because despite the fact that Chobsky's narrative style and the way Charlie's peers react to him make him seem more like a kid of 12 at times, he also has this maturity that makes him seem older than his years, this outlook on life that's like a smack in the face sometimes.

There's no convuluted vocab, no over-complicated plot, no complex descriptions, it's all so so simple and the way Charlie's thoughts are juxtaposed against his actions; his ability to look so much deeper than what he first sees or hears alongside his struggle to fit in with the people he wants to call his friends, shows who he is so effectively.

I'm really not making any sense am I? This is probably the crappest most garbled review I ever wrote. I blame the lack of coffee in my life today for my inability to be coherent.

I think my point is, when I was doing that OU course the other year ago my tutor was very big on 'show don't tell.' It was like her mantra or something and she was right because to as a writer, a good writer, you have no tool more powerful than the ability to show and not tell.
'The Perks Of Being A Wallflower' is one of the best examples of showing and not telling that I have ever come across.

You know what else I keep thinking? I really really wish I'd read this book when I was fifteen. Not because my high school experience was like Charlie's, much, but because, I don't know because it made me feel things differently and it would have been good I think, to have felt these things back then.

Again with the no sense.

It's like....it's like I'm 28 and I'm about to read this book about a 15 year old American school boy and I'm thinking there's no way I'm going to be able to relate to this story and then I actually read it and Charlie makes all these observations and I find myself just knowing somehow exactly where he's at. It's like sitting down and having a talk with a friend that you didn't know you needed until you realised things seemed better and I just think it's one of those books that I love now but that would have made a difference back then & whilst it's hardcore: drama after drama after drama, angst following angst following angst, the tone of this novel is absolutely spot on. It never felt deep and heavy and depressing. It's so frigging beautiful too. There were so many parts of it that I just wanted to quote, that I wanted to read aloud, that I wanted everybody in the world to share.

& I am so tempted to just delete this entire post and come back another time when I am caffeinated and able to do it justice but I've written it now. Besides, there's always the chance that this is garbled and nonsensical because I am garbled and nonsensical and if that's the case then this might be the best I can do *shrug*
If you haven't already then go read this book and then get a teensy bit excited about the film (starring Emma Watson) because that's just what I did.

I'm going to put the kettle on......

Miami Slice

Friday, Friday, Friday.

I don't have a lot to say today, except my usual 'hurrah for the weekend.'

Ian and I will have been together for 4 years on Wednesday next week so we're off out for a curry tonight to celebrate, the very same curry house where we went on our first date. Romantic, huh? It will be a very yummy and very nice time.

The rest of the weekend will be spent getting my eyes checked, visiting friends and catching up on Dexter and House.
Dexter is getting very exciting right about now and I am itching to go and snuggle up on the sofa with some Ben and Jerry's and find out what happens. How did Jordan Chase know it was Lumen on the phone? What will Liddy do with the photo's of Dexter? Will Deb ever eat that much needed cheeseburger? (Yes, that is my jealous talking. Don't we all want a washboard stomach? She's so thin she looks like she'd blow over in a breeze. Bitch.) Anyway, yes, it's all very exciting in the world of our favourite serial killer and my sofa is calling to me so loudly I swear I can hear it from here.

It's rare that I watch tv without a bowl of ice cream; my usual Ben & Jerry's flavour of choice is Cookie Dough whereas Ian goes for Phish food every time.Wwe go through so much that it's a good job it's on offer at the supermarket,!! Imagine if this week's Friday Photo was a real life actual Ben and Jerry's flavour (sadly it's not, it's just a promo for Season 6 which I believe will be airing in the States very soon) but still, that would be amazing wouldn't it? I would forskae my cookie dough for a bowl of Miami Slice for sure. Ha.

Around the world in a week and a half....

Sadly, my brain is currently too fried to give Michael Palin's 'Around the World in 80 Days' the credit it probably deserves; I think it probably deserves more than the 3 stars I gave it on my Goodreads account. The problem is, that I read this book over the last week and a half when my job has been so high pressure that I've been coming home, collapsing on the sofa and resembling somebody who has recently undergone a full frontal lobotomy. I haven't been able to concentrate for more than 2 minutes at a time because the second I get home and am no longer been paid to think my brain has been going into shutdown and refusing to do anything until the next day. I think I read days 25-30 of Palin's journey three times because the words just weren't sinking in and I can't remember enough about it to be able to tell you much about what happened other than Palin travelled the world in 80 days. Insightful, right?

That said, it was probably the perfect book to read last week because it didn't require much commitment, or concentration. I could dip into it at will and the diary format meant that if I had to put it down after 2 pages then it really didn't matter. I really liked Palin's writing style too: there's no over the top descriptions here, or long and convuluted explanations of every grain of sand he saw on his travels instead he is concise and to the point; he tells you just enough to keep you interested and somehow in the space of just a few lines he paints a picture of the places he visits and the people he meets so clear that you can really imagine it. I wanted all of the people he talks about to be my friends, and I felt so sad at the end of every leg of the journey when he had to say goodbye. All of this has been touched with the trademark Python humour: there were several times despite my extreme grumpiness that this book made me laugh out loud.

I have another 4 of Michael Palin's books in a set: Himalya, Pole to Pole, Sahara and another one. I might not pick them up for a while but I feel somehow comforted to know that they're there.

Day 20 - Book that makes you laugh out loud:

The James Herriot series.
I’d all but forgotten about these books really, until I unearthed them on an enforced clear out of my parents attic. You know the type, the old “you moved out 11 years ago, get your stuff out of our house” type clear out. Mum and I sat on the attic floor surrounded by books whilst Ian tore out his hair downstairs, occasionally yelling up a ‘please Jo….no more books….’ We had two piles: a ‘send to the mobile library’ and a ‘take home with me’ and much to Ian’s despair the take home pile was winning. It was Mum’s fault “ooohhhh looooooook, it’s Stig of the Dump. You used to love that….*gasp* the family from one end street! *chuckle* pardon me your stepping on my eyeball, remember how much you loved that. Oh no love, you can’t throw away your Enid Blytons….’ And, in the back of the cupboard were my charity shop copies of the James Herriot books. I read them about 14 years ago, when I was I my mid teens and I just remember points where I laughed so hard I could barely read. James Herriot is a country vet and the books are basically his true life account of the animals (and people) he encounters. They can be sad at times, they can be hilariously funny at others and they’re consistently well-written – or so I remember anyway – with the characters being so well drawn that you can picture every little detail so clearly.