Top Ten Tuesday - Top Ten Characters I'd Like to Switch Places With for 24 Hours

I decided to answer the weekly question hosted by The Broke and the Bookish. This week they're asking us which characters we'd switch places with for 24 hours. Here it goes (without any particular order):

1. Hermione Granger  from the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling - She's one of the smartest students at Hogwarts, an incredibly talented witch, a fierce and loyal friend. Also, we both have messy brown hair. And hey, it's Hogwarts! Who wouldn't want to go there?

2. Dante from Dante's The Divine Comedy - Dante is guided by Virgil and Beatrice through hell, the purgatory and heaven while discovering some of the deepest philosophy known to a man from the Middle Ages. Even if we disregard the philosophy it would be awesome to be a living person who goes through hell and heaven, sees the Devil and God.   

3. Anne Boleyn from The Other Boleyn Girl by Phillipa Gregory - Anne was the toast of the court, the king's sweetheart and an incredibly smart and scheming woman. She wore pretty dresses and conversed with some of the smartest and most educated people of her time. I'd love to be in her shoes for a day, but considering my luck that would be the day she got decapitated.

4. Miranda Tate from the Bard Academy series by Cara Lockwood - Miranda is a spoiled brat who gets sent away to boarding school as a punishment. But what she and her parents don't know is that the school is haunted. Some of Miranda's teachers are Virginia Woolf and Ernest Hemingway. The coolest thing is that Bard Academy is the place where literary characters come to life. I knew it I should have been a brat when I was in high school.

5. Margarita from Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita - She's the woman who loves unconditionally, is the protagonist of one of my favorite books and gets to become a witch, fly all over Russia while riding a broomstick and hosts Satan's ball. What's not to like?

6. Irene Adler from Arthur Conan Doyle's A Scandal in Bohemia - Need I say anything else than that she's the woman who outwits my favorite fictional detective?

7. Scarlett O'Hara from Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind - Scarlett is a girl every man falls in love with and every woman despises. She knows her way around the world, is stubborn, knows what she wants and will do anything to get it.

8. Lyra Belacqua from His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman - She's brave, smart, has a cute daemon and has to save the world. I always thought of her as an excellent role model for young girls. 

9. Sayuri Nitta from Arthur Golden's Memoirs of a Geisha - I've always wondered whether I'd be any good as a geisha. Probably not, but that doesn't change the fact that I find their world incredibly fascinating. To me they're the women who made the best out of a bad situation and were as independent as they could be in a world ruled by men. They were incredibly talented and educated for the time. They could read, write, recite poems, dance. Almost a liberal arts degree. Heck, if I can't be a geisha, may I dress up in a kimono and wear the make up? Just for a day?

10. Lord Henry Wotton from Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray - He's perfectly cynical, an idle lord who makes Dorian into what he became. Leads almost the same life as Dorian does and manages to escape from it without almost any consequences. 

So, there they are. My top ten. It was a lot more difficult than it seemed. I have to give an honorable mention to Wendy from Peter Pan and Beatriz from The Shadow of the Wind.

  

Reading Update

Death with Interruptions by Samarago:

Unfortunately, I haven't moved an inch. 

Living to Tell the Tale by Gabriel Garcia Marquez:

i'm currently at about the middle of the third chapter. The plot isn't chronological, it follows Marquez in the present moment which is the fifties and the second one is him being a child. The first one explores his relationship towards his friends, colleagues and writing. The second one is about his family, brothers and sisters, parents, aunts and uncles. Unfortunately, I had neglected it a bit as I was reading One Day, but i plan to get back to it as soon as possible.

The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas:

I've come to the part where Edmond has rewarded his friends and a thick plan to punish his enemies is just starting. Honestly, I'm not sure I'll be reading it any more. After all, I'm reading it for the second part and I'm losing interest. Some parts are just too naive, some are poorly written (or poorly translated, I can't tell the difference), some are too long without any reason. I remember I was bored by this part when I read it for the first time and that it did become more interesting soon enough, but I don't know whether I want to dedicate myself to reading a book of a thousand pages for a second time and not enjoy it.

If on a Winter's Night a Traveler by Italo Cavino:

I started reading this book in the original Italian. At first I thought that the language might be a bit too much for me, but everything is going well so far. This is a postmodern piece that explores our connection to books, other readers and the meaning of it all. And plenty of other things. More on that later. Right now, I'll just say that I'm enjoying it immensely.

Fifty Shades of Grey - E. L. James

I've never liked giving out bad reviews. I hope one day to become a writer and I think I know how much work and discipline it takes to sit down and write something. It's a full time job. That's why I do admire people who are published and successful. But, E. L. James, come on? This is one of the times I really will write a bad review.

There are so many things that are wrong with this book that I seriously don't know where to start. Brace yourselves, this might be a rant...

So, E. L. James started writing Fifty Shades of Grey as a Twilight fan fiction. Obviously. If you were a pre-teen when Twilight came out, this is the book for you. If not, chances are that you will laugh your ass of. One of the reasons I like to read is because I enjoy beautiful language and most of the time, it's the language, not the plot that will make it or brake it for the book. I can't imagine anyone over he age of twelve that has opened a book once in a while to have such a bad writing style. I know kids who go to elementary school that write better than she does. An even bigger problem considering style is that she's tried writing erotic fiction. You need to write even better in order to write good erotic fiction. This way, most of her book was funny, rather than provocative, and sometimes, it just made me want to tap her on the head and say: Oh, honey...

I'm not a prude, honestly. The guideline I use to judge books is: There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book. Books are either well written or badly written. That is all. (Originally written by Oscar Wilde.) I will read a book that deals with any topic, everyone has the right to write about anything they want. Not every heroine has to be a strong female character. We have the right to read about those who aren't and we don't have the right to attack an author whose female character decides to drop out of school and become a housewife. But we have right to attack badly written books.


Have you ever read Joyce's Letters to Nora? Now, that's how a master does erotic writing. Seriously, check it out and you'll see what I mean. He's provocative, romantic and has made me blush from time to time. Fifty Shades of Grey have also made me blush, but only because I was ashamed instead of E. L. James. I don't want to believe that the only reason that this book got so much publicity is because it's explicit. Anastasia refers to her genital area as down there. Let us applaud to the explicitness! It seems to me that the  the author never goes over the line of acceptable to a conservative housewife. It pains me that we live in the twenty first century and libraries are banning Fifty Shades of Grey because it's too graphic and yet Marquis de Sade published porn novels some three hundred years ago and they often (actually, always) involve things that would be illegal today and were illegal then. How shocking would he be today?

Are Ana and Christian supposed to have a personality? She likes reading English classics,enjoys cuddling next to a fire with a book, doesn't drink coffee, but rather drinks tea. He is a tortured soul and likes obscure music. And yet, you don't have a personality. I can't get over the impression that our hero, Christian Grey, was named after a true hero, Dorian Gray.

One of the most annoying things in this book is the phrase inner goddess. Are you kidding me?! I'm raging as I write this. An inner goddess?! What is that? Some sort of cliched expression taken form a self help book? Every woman is a goddess, circles of wheat, voodoo chanting, etc... I'm sorry, Ana, but you're no goddess. Your a whiny cunt. 

Too bad, because it really had potential. A good writer would have provoked the insides of human psychology. It always makes me mad when an incompetent writer writes about a great idea. The potential to write about human psychology and also explore it was immense. Are BDSM relationships abusive? Why do people enjoy BDSM? What are we prepared to do for a partner? How much a re we willing to change? Should we change at all? Can we really have a long lasting relationship with someone who is so much different from us? Instead, all we got was some five hundred pages of: Christian is beautiful, I want to bite my lip, Christian is a stalker, my inner goddess is talking crap.

One more thing that confuses me about Fifty Shades of Grey is the plagiarism issue. How did this thing get published? I'm no legal expert, but people have gone to court over less. This story is basically the same as Twilight, minus the vampires who sparkle plus the sex. There's the frend José/Jacob, the rich famifly, adoptive children, a klutzy girl that prefers to be called by her nickname, an incompetent mother... At least the Cullens had an excuse for being so beautiful, seeing as they were vampires and all, but what's the Gray's excuse?

The only good thing about Fifty shades of Grey is the beautiful cover art. Why do the worst books always have the best covers? is it intentional, to get us interested in a book we would never consider buying, or is it a personal thing of mine that I just tend to focus more on the covers of bad books? I guess we'll never know. Because these books aren't going up my shelf any time soon. I hope my compulsive personality will give me a brake this time and won't make me read the rest of the trilogy.

Tanya Wexler's Hysteria

This charming, feel good movie brings us a surprisingly historically accurate story of a women's disease hysteria and the methods that were used to cure it. Interestingly enough, this disease seemed to affect mostly rich, idle women. Some of the symptoms are depression, nervousness, sexual frustration, melancholia, anxiety and exhaustion. The generally accepted treatment for hysteria is genital massage that induces paroxysmal convulsions. What the doctor seems to be unaware of is that paroxysmal convulsions are, in fact, orgasms.     

There is nothing vulgar or inappropriate in this movie, but id appears that it ridicules the doctors who treat hysteria and women who claim to suffer from it. A modern day person can't avoid chuckling at some parts. Like when doctor Darlymple says that women aren't capable of pleasure if there isn't a man, when we hear his daughter talk about women's rights or when poor doctor Granville starts suffering from muscle cramps. We can't help but think to ourselves: Weren't these people so charmingly ignorant. 

Charlotte Darlymple is the doctor's older daughter. She is a feminist and believes she should be charitable, believes that a marriage is a union of equals. And doesn't think hysteria is a disease. She's practically a woman fro the twenty first century brought back to the Victorian era. I tried to google her a bit, to see whether or not she was even a real person, but I couldn't find much. In the end, it doesn't even matter. But she proves to be a bit more insightful than her father and his new, young colleague. She realizes that hysteria has nothing to do with being ill and that it's a weir coincidence the the majority of women suffering from it are bored out of their minds. The poor women who she works with aren't ill because, as she states it, they're too busy trying to feed their families. Her father thinks that she suffers from it and that she's a particularly difficult case. She knows what she wants, fights for it, rebels against her father, is opinionated, loud and has a strong sense for social injustice. Why wouldn't she be hysteric? There's obviously something wrong with her if she doesn't want to fit in the usual pattern of a housewife and a mother. 

It seems weird that anyone could confuse sexual frustration with a disease, but imagine how weirded out those women must have been. Even though, all these things about hysteria seem a bit crazy and hard to believe in. What freaks me out the most about this supposed disease is how arbitrary the treatment was. Now, let's be honest, not every woman in history suffering from hysteria had to be sexually frustrated. There's a whole range of symptoms that could be practically anything. Can you imagine how many other psychological conditions have had to go untreated just because the symptoms were attributed to women's hysteria? It shouldn't come as so surprising, seeing as bacteria and germs are still a bit controversial in the medical circles. Why wouldn't there be a hysteria. 

Mortimer Granville is the doctor that absolutely revolutionizes the treatment. He becomes so popular that he can't possibly treat all the women. His condition becomes serious that it threatens to destroy his entire life. Luckily, his rich friend Edmund St. John-Smythe likes to experiment with electricity and Mortimer stumbles upon an electrical fan which helps him ease some cramps in his muscles. And thus, history is born. He produces the world's first vibrator. Of course, here we come again as people from the twenty first century and chuckle at the idea that vibrators were used to spare the doctor's joints. The entire time i was watching it I had to suppress a chuckle of: I know something you don't know. 

This movie has it all, a cast of well known actors, an interesting and provocative plot, is funny and clever.

One Day - David Nicholls

David Nicholls brings us a story that spans over the course of twenty years, but everything happens during just one day. The fifteenth of july, the day Emma and Dexter met and also the day Emma dies.

Dexter and Emma have had to take a long road to become who they needed to be in order to be happy with  each other. In their late twenties, Dexter is the successful one. He's rich, handsome, famous, the star of his very own TV show. Emma is stuck in a dead end job, still wears glasses (even though this is nothing to be ashamed of), can't get herself together to start fulfilling some of her dreams and potentials. 

Our destines are weird that way, because as time goes by their positions and roles are about to change. Emma starts writing, reaches certain fame and success. Dexter is left as a star whose time is gone.

One of the best traits of this novel is that Emma and Dexter are real people. Neither one of them are too perfect, they have real flaws, both physical and psychological, they mess up, they try to redeem themselves. They're two people everyone can identify with and yet have their very own personalities.    

The insight into their friendship was quite interesting. As we all know, the theme of male-female friendships is a never ending one. Could they have been just friends? Or are friendships that start of with lust doomed from the very beginning? In the case of Dexter and Emma, I think that they would be the happiest had they been in their twenties the people who they became in their late thirties and as a couple. Of course, such a thing is impossible, so they had to do the next best thing: they became friends. To me it seemed that their friendship worked. I think they cared so much about the other one that the most important thing for them was to be involved in each other's life, either as a friend, either as a lover. But it can't be denied that they spent almost half of their lives dancing around their feelings. They're people whose lives keep intertwining, but never enough to let them stay together.

I'm wondering about chances and what we were supposed to do. When I finished the book, I felt very, very angry. If they had just done some things a bit differently the day they met, they would have had almost a life time of happiness together. But, then, when I thought more about it. They probably would have ended hating one another. The bookish, nerdy Emma never would have put up with the Dexter who does drugs, who is always out drinking. Not as a lover or a companion. It worked for a while as friendship, but even that ended. But if he had been with her, maybe he never would have gone down that path.

I hate thinking about missed chances. I hate going down the road of what could have been. It makes me sad, makes me anxious about my own future and people in my life. Nothing could have been different, because it isn't. This is all we get. It doesn't do well to think about all the could have beens. Maybe the thing that makes us human is that we can't just stop doing that? They had a pretty decent friendship and a happy marriage. Maybe we should be happy for them that they got to experience some happiness together. But I still think they were almost happy just as friends.

Michel Hazanavicius's The Artist

I have refused to watch The Artist for a long time because I thought that the only reason it got an academy award was that it's a black and white movie made in an era of 3D. I had deemed it bad, boring and ridiculous even before seeing it. Well, what a giant mistake to make. I saw it and I enjoyed it.

One of the first things that struck me while watching was just how much more challenging it is to watch a silent movie. We're so used to having sound that I sometimes just drift of (those aren't my proudest moments) and only listen to the sound instead of watching. Sometimes I wonder why I even bother with movies. Anyway, a silent movie forces you to pay more attention. At least if you want to know what's going on. 


This is the first silent movie I've ever seen, not counting some parts of old black and white movies. What was pretty surprising to me is that you could perfectly understand what was going on, just by mimics, face expression, music. I did enjoy The Artist, but I doubt I'll be seeing any more silent movies any time soon.   


The story is simple and it would have worked even as a talkie. George Valentin, played by Jean Dujardin,  is a big movie star and Peppy Miller is an aspiring new actress. George refuses to start making talkies, he thinks that talkies aren't art and he's an artist. Because he's reluctant to adjust, he loses almost everything. Well, everything except the dog. George is pushed out by a new generation, by the market crash and most importantly sound. I've heard stories of actors who've lost work when talkies became the big thing, but I never really thought about them. I can't even imagine the lives of those people. All of a sudden, you've lost everything you knew. That must have been awful. Losing your job because of slight changes. 


We tend to forget how much watching movies and movies themselves have changed. There are some things like sound, that we take perfectly for granted. I don't like watching movies in 3D, but what if that's the future? What will happen if in the future there are only 3D movies to watch? Nothing, I guess. Nothing much has changed with sound. For us at least. Movies are still made, movies are still seen.  

Reading Update

Ever since I was a little girl I had a habit of reading multiple books at the same time. No matter how many times I've told myself that from now on I will be reading just one book, I've never seemed to be able to do so. In the end, I've just given up and enjoy multiple plots, characters, movements and styles. All at the same time. So, here's an overview of all the books I'm currently reading. 

Death with Interruptions by Saramago:

I started this one quite a long time ago and I think it should be about time I finished it, but I'm only half way in. I picked it up right after Saramago's The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, which was an overwhelming and an amazing book, so I think the timing for Death with Interruptions wasn't good. Other than that, I was enjoying it and I should be finishing it.

The Red and the Black by Stendhal:

I'm well aware that I should be enjoying myself, but I'm just not. I tried and I tried, but nope. I will be finishing it, I have maybe fifty out of five hundred pages left, but it's definitely not going on my all time favorite list. It's interesting at parts, then just tiring without any purpose. Any purpose I could get.

Living to Tell the Tale by Gabriel Garcia Marquez:

This is Garcia Marquez's memoir. I'm only fifty pages or so in, but so far I've been enjoying it and I hope that it continues this way. We get to find out a lot about inspiration for his work. So far, the city of Macondo, some motifs from Love in the Time of Cholera, the photo of Remedios. And some other. So far, so good!

The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas:

Actually, I'm re-reading for the second time. It's a habit I have, each summer, I re-read a book that I've loved in the past to see whether or not it has the same effect on me now as it did then. I can't say that my tastes haven't changed from the time I loved Monte Cristo, but it still has the same ability to keep me reading all through the night.

The Book Thief - Markus Zusak

Markus Zusak's The Book Thief is truly a gem of contemporary fiction and also one of the most beautiful, touching and interesting stories I've read in a long while. 

Zusak brings us a story of an orphan girl, Liesel, during World War II. Liesel has to live with a foster family and cope with things that a lot older people than her can't rally handle. What makes this book so special is that it's narrated by death. Now, it's not science fiction, it's just a book told from death's point of view. The author doesn't deeply analyse  battles, combat, machinery, nor does he bring a scientifically precise depiction of the war. It's just a story about people, normal people, living in times that tend to bring either the worst or the best in people. i believe that by showing us the ordinary life, we are shown the ordinary history.

The main protagonists are Liesel and her friend Rudy. Except for them, there are Liesel's foster parents, Hans and Rosa Hubermann; Max, the Jew they're protecting; Ilsa Hermann, the mayor's wife.

We may not like some of the characters from the beginning (I have a feeling that Zusak didn't want us to like Rosa Huberbann at first, but I did) and despite some of them having obvious inclination towards the Nazis, there are no bad characters, evil is plotted behind the scene. These people are just trying to survive and they're doing the best they can.

No matter how much I think about it, I can't tell whether or not this book has a happy ending. Liesel survives the war, and sometimes that's enough to make us happy, at least content that things aren't worse. But she's lost her entire family. Twice. She's lost Rudy. We don't know if she lost Max. I like to imagine that she didn't, that they found some way to remain close, no matter the distance  between them. War tends to make connections that are difficult to tear. Death implies that Liesel married and lived a long life, it was only then that she came for her, but did she live a happy life? Maybe, I hope so. Not only for the fictional Liesel, but also for thousands of other Liesels who have survived World War II and other wars. If they can't muster happiness, I hope they're at least trying to go on. If there is anything to be learnt from The Book Thief, it's that life goes on, it has to go on, no matter what we do. It doesn't stop after a brother's death, not after a bombing, not after a friend's death. The story is narrated by death, but so are our lives.  

Of course, there's a reason for the title of the book. Liesel is the book thief. Her relationship with books is a love-hate one throughout the book, but in the end I'd say that love wins. When the story begins, Liesel can't read and Hans teaches her letters. The Grave Digger's Handbook is the  first book Liesel reads and owns. Its title goes perfectly with the tone of the book and also with the feeling of  growing up during a war, of being a child of a war who doesn't know any better and finds death a perfectly acceptable part of everyday life. The girl is very poor and she can't afford to buy books. Even if she could I can't possibly imagine where she'd buy them. Her last resort is stealing. Even if The Book thief didn't provide us with a deep war analysis it did provide an analysis of what reading and literature mean. As a way of escapism, of saving yourself and your mental health, of the power of words, of their danger. In one moment, Liesel renounces books and words because of what they've done to Germany and the way they've seduced the country. In the end, she makes her peace both with the books and Ilsa Hermann, the woman she stole them from.

The Book thief has left me with a bitter and yet optimistic feeling and also leaves me wondering, are books really that powerful or do we just want them to be?

I have hated the words and I have loved them, and I hope I have made them right. 

                                                                                                                         - Liesel