Avarinne.net

I’ve come North this week for some time with my parents and a chilled week in their lovely home.

They live in Aberdeenshire - a good forty minutes outside of Aberdeen.  And, because this is Scotland, this means that we are right in the countryside.  Contrary to popular belief, we do have gas and electricity and there are (perhaps sadly) many streetlights.  However, I have been woken up by mooing cows in the field by my house, there are hills and fields for miles in every direction once you get out of the towns and the air here is like nothing else. Read the rest of this entry »

So now that I have waxed liberal about how amazing it was, here are some of the things that we did with a few choice pictures (apologies if they take a while to load) and they really don’t at all do it justice.

First off, I should point out that we went to Luxor and Luxor alone.  We didn’t make the trip to Cairo and we didn’t see the pyramids.  However, we did see Karnak Temple, Luxor Temple, the Valley of the Kings, the Valley of the Nobles, Medinat Habu and the Colossi of Memnon.

There are no pictures of the tombs themselves as you can’t take pictures inside.  This is understandable, as it is protect the beautiful paintings in the tombs which are already being damaged by so many visitors.

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So Omar and I very recently went on our first ever holiday together (after nearly four bloody years), and we went out to Luxor in Egypt.  It was truly one of the most incredible and enjoyable holidays I’ve had, so much so that I really don’t think I’m going to do it justice in writing about it.  But I’m going to give it a try.

Just to warn you, this is either going to turn into an extrememly long entry or a series of slightly less long entries.  But there will (I hope) be pictures.

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I was about to post about what a beautiful sunny day it was, but it just clouded over.  Hmm.

Anyway, not to despair.  I’m having a disgracefully lazy day and I’m still in my pyjamas so it’s not about to affect me anyway.

The reason for this excessive laziness is: it is summer.  I’m finished.  My final exam (of two) was on Tuesday.

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Today has been a day of ridiculous headaches, lying on the sofa irritating my boyfriend while he tried to work and watching Johnathon Ross and QI on the TV.

I got vaguely annoyed with myself and said I’d wasted the day, to which Omar said ‘a day wasted is never a wasted day,’ which is true enough with regard to yesterday - I certainly had a few too many - but it’s kind of true of today too, in a non-alcohol related way.

We wasted the day, after having to come in to the West End for the doctor, by getting soup in Naked Soup, wandering down Great Western Road and investigating a Deli, eating flapjack, wandering round an art gallery with gorgeous, happy, warm Mediterranean paintings, going to the (not so) newly wonderful Cherubini’s - which has music in the tables - for tea and hot chocolate, talked about people and writing and walked into town.  Now we’re drinking coffee and killing time until we go to the cinema.

I love wasting days.

Book Review 5: ‘The Book Thief’ by Markus Zusak

This book I truly did buy on a complete whim simpy because it was in the best sellers section of Borders.  A dangerous game to play, considering what other books lurk dangerously in the shadows of the best sellers section.  But I picked it up and its cover looked like an old, worn book, stained and much loved.  On it is a picture of a girl dancing with a robed skeleton, who I could only assume was Death.  It was a good size too, which in my cheapness often persuades me of the worthiness of a book.

This book is narrated by Death.  Appropriate for a book set during World War II.  Death is a tired, overworked character who likes colours and tries to use them to distract himself from humans.  Sometimes, however, he fails, and can’t help but notice the people he leaves behind - one of those people was the Book Thief and the book is her story.

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Book Review 4: ‘World War Z’

I’m starting to wish I’d read some crap books this year, just to give these reviews some variation. As it is, I keep reading excellent books. This is another of them.

Brooks immediately sets the tone of the book with a prologue written in the form of a foreward from the author - or more accurately, the collector of the interviews that make up the ‘factual’ account of World War Z or the Zombie Wars.

I approached this book with trepidation. Zombies are silly and amusing, belonging in silly horror movies, not in books. And worse than that - here was someone taking them very seriously. Surely this was a recipe for disaster?sony pcg-z1 sony televisions lg 26lc2r
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I love creative writing.  I’ve been doing it for pretty much as long as I can remember.  For fun.  For school.  Mainly because I loved it, but perhaps a little because there was always a very small voice in the back of my mind which said ‘hey, maybe you could get published some day.’

I wrote.  I started with silly stories, with finishing or writing sequels to things I liked.

I then I took a plunge - ‘hey, I can write a novel.  One of my own.  With my own ideas.’

First came two short-ish stories.  Both more like video game plots than books.  Both horrific and filled with angst.  In the first one, the day is saved with gusto and prolific cheese.  In the second, everyone died horribly.

Then came the real effort.  A few months, a lot of skipped homework and many hours of writing obsessively into the night, I wrote it.  330 shining pages of A. S. Campbell original.  Or so I thought at the time.  In actuality, it was a (very very very poor not-even-a-shadow-of-it) rewrite of ‘The Lord of the Rings’ just with more elves, less hobbits (and less singing, languages, depth… and really anything good) a load of teenage angst and a Big Bad with a different name.

Disheartened, I picked myself back up and thought ‘No fear.  This time I will write the book.  It will be original.  It will be different.  It will be a masterpiece.’

Mistake Number One

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‘The Alchemist’ Book Review

Obviously, ‘The Alchemist’ is an excessively famous book by Paulo Coelho and most people reading this (if any do) will have read it already. For those of you who have, this is my opinion. For those that haven’t, go read it.

As usual, I’m going to start by being excessively shallow. The cover is gorgeous - it’s a rich orange red with a single horseman riding across the desert. It also doesn’t give anything away. The quote from Madonna saying how much she liked it almost put me off it (Yes I am that shallow) but I guess you can’t blame them for cashing in on that. On the downside of the scale of oh-so-shallow, it’s quite a short book.

Anyway, shallow aside. It’s a beautiful story about a young shepard following his destiny - but you knew that already (I think it says that on the cover). What makes this story really interesting is how closely tied that theme is to Coelho’s desire to write and how he persued it, even in the face of truly quite horrific adversary. I’d recommend checking out a little about the author before reading it. Read the rest of this entry »

‘American Gods’ by Neil Gaiman.

Well I’d be lying if I said I’d never encountered things by Neil Gaiman before (he seems to get around).  The first thing I saw by Neil Gaiman was ‘MirrorMask.’  I love this movie so much for so many reasons (which I probably shouldn’t go into because this is a book review).  I also have the book of the film which contains the storyboards.  My very favourite thing about that book is the e-mails in the back between Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean.  Maybe it’s because I like to write and it was exciting to see the process behind something I love, or maybe it’s because it was all so down to Earth and achievable.  I loved hearing about the things they came up against, like Neil Gaiman wanting to do a scene in a school but them not being able to afford enough extras.  But Dave McKean reassured him by saying that they could make the whole world screw up like a piece of paper for pretty much no money at all.  How wonderful is that?

I also saw Stardust, which was a lot more professional but no less lovely, and I’d read a couple of short stories on the internet.

Apart from that, I know a lot of people who are massive fans and who had been constantly telling me to read his books.

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