It’s Just About Finding That Balance

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Guillermo del Toro wins Golden Lion for The Shape of Water at the 74th Venice Film Festival

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This was George. He was a 9 year old Jack Russell who lived in the small town of Manaia, New Zealand. On April 29, 2007 he jumped into a losing fight with two Pit Bulls to protect two young children. According to witnesses he fought as hard as he could, but he never stood a chance and was severely mauled as the children were pulled to safety. George died from his wounds that afternoon at the vet.

You are probably going to be a very successful computer person. But you’re going to go through life thinking that girls don’t like you because you’re a nerd. And I want you to know, from the bottom of my heart, that that won’t be true. It’ll be because you’re an asshole. 

The Social Network (2010) dir. David Fincher

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I’m not really sure how script-writing works. Do writers leave certain reactions from characters out of the script in order to maintain mystery? Like on the script we don’t get to see much of Bellamy’s feelings/thoughts while walking towards Clarke since it’s mostly in her POV, but from Bob’s acting we can tell he’s really emotional. For scenes like that, when certain feelings aren’t yet canon, do writers purposely leave out any potential hints to them and tell the actors how to act it out?

Well, I’m not a script writer either, but I’ve been around a lot of actors, and I’ve studied it a little bit. The thing about plays or tv or movies? They’re a collaborative art.

As a novelist, I write the whole thing and then the reader finishes the story in their brain.

With a screen play. The writer writes the  basic scaffolding, the dialogue and the stage directions, then the director figures out the direction to go, then the actor adds in their humanity and artistry, the costumers and set designers create the world the characters go through, the cinematographer captures the best images to tell the story, the editor cuts it and puts it together to sculpt the story, the composer adds the music to give emotion to it all,

So. what you see is all those people working together to tell the story. Each artist puts their touch to create this larger world, and ALL of them contribute to the thoughts and feelings you have when you watch.

We see the actors faces and hear the writer’s words, but it all goes into it. If there’s something that they want the actors to act towards, I’m sure the show runner or director will talk to them about it. But there’s been a lot of emotion that we’ve seen on screen already, and the actors are building on all those character choices they’ve already made. For all we know, Bob’s already gotten the direction that Bellamy’s in love with Clarke. It didn’t have to be in that scene. It could have been another, or not in the stage directions at all, but spoken to him by JR or another director. The scripts aren’t for us at all. They are behind the scenes.

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Opinion on "ignorance is bliss"?

It’s the cowards creed, an irrational sentiment harnessed by those succumbing to the traumatic insecurity that lies in relinquishing deceptive childhood fantasy’s; so they opt instead for a kind of optimistic denial that demonizes knowledge as a defense mechanism to remain complacent in their delusions.

The fate of these individuals then, lies in the will of those brave enough to endure the tribulations of educating and empowering themselves. At best, these individuals are destined to live as parasites; at worst, they will have their ignorance utilized by ambitious deceivers to enslave or destroy them.

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Hello! So I want to get more into literature, like the eras and classics I should read. (I like to write so I want to educate myself) Where should I start? Or maybe could u give me a list of good ones? (If this is in ur FAQ I'm so so so sorry I don't know how to access it on my phone and I don't have a computer I can get to!) thanks so much if u respond!!! :) love ur blog!

Well, first of all, thank you! And secondly: oh my, an essentials guide to all literature? Since I’m rather narrow in my interests and I haven’t studied literature in any capacity other than in high school (I’m graduating this summer), I can’t guarantee this will be as objective or thorough as it should be, but I’ll give it my best shot. 

This is going to be mostly European literature and listed chronologically era-wise (era as in historical, not literary) but probably not author-wise, the former because the education system where I live is focused on European literature and history, and the latter because I list these as they come to me.

Another thing to note is some of these are works you should know about and not absolute must-reads, as they can be very long and hard to read, but are crucial to know because they’ve been historically influential and/or have inspired countless other works.

A third note: certain… 20th century parts of this list don’t reflect my personal preferences at all. Take from that what you will.

Right then, this introduction has taken long enough… here we go.

WESTERN LITERATURE: A MASTERLIST (of sorts)

CLASSICAL

Subdivision: Greek 

my existing rec list here

Aeschylus. Oresteia.

Aristophanes. Lysistrata.

Plato. The Republic.

Subdivision: Latin

Cicero. Catiline Orations.

Julius Caesar. Commentaries on the Gallic War.

Virgil. The Aeneid.

Ovid. Metamorphoses.

Seneca the Younger. Epistles.

Apuleius. Metamorphoses (which is sometimes known as The Golden Ass).

MEDIEVAL

Dante Alighieri. The Divine Comedy.

Petrarca. Song Book.

Boccaccio. Decameron.

Geoffrey Chaucer. The Canterbury Tales.

Elder Edda.

Sir Thomas Malory. Le Morte d’Arthur.

Subdivision: epic poems

Beowulf.

Poem of the Cid.

The Song of the Nibelungs.

The Song of Roland.

The Tale of Igor’s Campaign.

EARLY MODERN

Subdivision: Shakespeare.

Romeo & Juliet. 

Hamlet. 

A Midsummer Night’s Dream. 

Othello. 

Julius Caesar.

King Lear.

Much Ado About Nothing.

Molière. Tartuffe. || Don Juan. || The Misanthropist. 

Cervantes. Don Quixote.

Christopher Marlowe. Doctor Faustus.

John Donne. The Canonization.

John Milton. Paradise Lost.

EDIT: didyouknowflaubert suggested in addition:

François Rabelais. The Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel.

Michel de Montaigne. various essays.

18th CENTURY

Daniel Defoe. Robinson Crusoe. || Moll Flanders.

Eliza Haywood. Love in Excess.

Voltaire. Candide. || Micromégas.

Rousseau. Émile.

Frances Burney. Evelina.

René Descartes. Meditations on First Philosophy.

19th CENTURY

Subdivision: Romanticism

my existing rec list here.

Charles Dickens. Bleak House. || A Tale of Two Cities. || Great Expectations. || Oliver Twist.

William Makepeace Thackeray. Vanity Fair.

Charlotte Brontë. Jane Eyre.

Emily Brontë. Wuthering Heights.

Anne Brontë. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.

Thomas Hardy. Tess of the d’Urbervilles. || Far from the Madding Crowd.

Emily Dickinson. various poetry.

Nathaniel Hawthorne. The Scarlet Letter.

Mark Twain. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. || The Prince and the Pauper.

Walt Whitman. Leaves of Grass.

Oscar Wilde. The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Robert Louis Stevenson. Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Crime and Punishment. || The Idiot.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Faust. || The Sorrows of Young Werther.

Victor Hugo. Les Misérables. || The Hunchback of Notre-Dame.

Jane Austen. Pride and Prejudice. || Emma. || Northanger Abbey.

Anton Chekhov. Three Sisters. || The Cherry Orchard. || various short stories.

Thomas Babington Macaulay. Critical and Historical Essays.

Leo Tolstoy. War and Peace. || Anna Karenina.

H. G. Wells. The Time Machine. || The War of the Worlds.

Gustave Flaubert. Madame Bovary.

Guy de Maupassant. Bel-Ami. || Mont-Oriol. || various short stories.

Aldous Huxley. Brave New World.

Bram Stoker. Dracula. 

20th CENTURY

E. M. Forster. A Room with a View.

W. B. Yeats. various poetry.

Maurice Maeterlinck. The Blue Bird.

Franz Kafka. The Metamorphosis.

Virginia Woolf. Between the Acts. || Mrs Dalloway.

T. S. Eliot. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.

James Joyce. Ulysses.

Hermann Hesse. Steppenwolf.

F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Great Gatsby.

Ernest Hemingway. For Whom The Bell Tolls. || The Sun Also Rises.

H. P. Lovecraft. The Call of Cthulhu.

Erich Maria Remarque. All Quiet on the Western Front. || Arc de Triomphe.

Evelyn Waugh. Brideshead Revisited.

Vladimir Nabokov. Lolita.

John Steinbeck. Of Mice and Men. || East of Eden.

J. R. R. Tolkien. The Hobbit. || The Lord of the Rings.

Daphne du Maurier. Rebecca.

George Orwell. 1984. || Animal Farm.

Margaret Mitchell. Gone with the Wind.

Anne Frank. The Diary of a Young Girl.

Harper Lee. To Kill a Mockingbird.

William Golding. Lord of the Flies.

Ray Bradbury. Fahrenheit 451.

Allen Ginsberg. Howl and Other Poems.

Jack Kerouac. On the Road.

J. D. Salinger. The Catcher in the Rye.

Kurt Vonnegut. Slaughterhouse-Five.  

Sylvia Plath. The Bell Jar.

Gabriel García Márquez. One Hundred Years of Solitude. || Love in the Time of Cholera.

Mikhail Bulgakov. The Master and Margarita.

Thomas Harris. The Red Dragon.

Michael Ondaatje. The English Patient.

Neil Gaiman. Stardust.

Bret Easton Ellis. American Psycho.

Donna Tartt. The Secret History.

Chuck Palahniuk. Fight Club.

Stephen King. Carrie. || The Shining. || The Dark Tower.

Shirley Jackson. We Have Always Lived in the Castle. || The Lottery.

Tom Stoppard. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.

Simone de Beauvoir. The Second Sex.

Jorge Luis Borges. Book of Imaginary Beings. || various short stories.

Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman. Good Omens.

21st CENTURY

Haruki Murakami. Kafka on the Shore. || 1Q84.

Suzanne Collins. The Hunger Games.

Neil Gaiman. American Gods.

Ian McEwan. Atonement.

Jeffrey Eugenides. Middlesex.

Kazuo Ishiguro. Never Let Me Go.

J. K. Rowling. Harry Potter.

Khaled Hosseini. The Kite Runner. || A Thousand Splendid Suns.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón. The Shadow of the Wind.

Gillian Flynn. Sharp Objects. || Gone Girl. 

Elizabeth Kostova. The Historian.

Cormac McCarthy. No Country for Old Men.

Richard Siken. Crush.

Mark Z. Danielewski. House of Leaves.

Donna Tartt. The Little Friend. || The Goldfinch.

Elizabeth Wein. Code Name Verity.

Warsan Shire. Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth.

Catherynne M. Valente. Deathless.

Sofi Oksanen. The Purge.

This is more or less all I’ve got… for now. 

Good luck!

xx

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Even billionaires understand the struggle

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“The highest and most beautiful things in life are not to be heard about, nor read about, nor seen, but, if one will, are to be lived.”

— Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or

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