Australian Literature VS English Literature

I love Australia. I love the weather, the buildings, the people and just the life here. Although both my parents were born in Greece, I was born here, and so therefore I'll always consider myself as Australia and proud despite my Greek background. On the other hand, if you make me read a paragraph of Australian literature, whether it be a poem, story or anything else, I assure you i'll be asleep by the end of the first sentence. There is just something about Australian literature that bores me to death! And i'm sure that im not the only one.

Having said that, there are many people out there absolutely despises English literature ( I shudder at the thought). When it comes to the battle (if there even is one) between Australian and English literature, I believe English Lit dominates Australian Lit.

So what exactly is the difference between the two apart from of course the country of origin?

Well, Australian literature was first introduced after the Europeans came to the country, therefore, many of the different themes that are explosed in it include settler identity, alienation and exile. Novelists and poets were able to give valuable insights into thecolonies which helped form the country and also the early rural settlements. Another huge part of Australian literature is the indigenous community (The Aborigines). Here's a bit of trivia:

Australia’s first novel was called 'Quintus Servinton: A Tale founded upon Incidents of Real Occurrence' and was written and published in Tasmania in 1831. Pretty sweet huh?

Also, In 1838 the first book published by a woman in Sydney was called 'The Guardian:' and was written by Anna Maria Bunn. It was the first Australian novel printed and published in mainland Australia and the first Australian novel written by a woman. It is a Gothic romance (o0o0oh...who doesnt love gothic romances?)

English Literature on the other hand refers to literature written in the English language, including literature composed in English by writers not necessarily from England. For e.g. Edgar Allan Poe was American (and is one of my favorite poets of all time!)

Wikipedia describes English literature as "diverse as the varieties and dialects of English spoken around the world" and I couldn't agree more.

The way English Literature has evolved could be seen by several different stages:

Old English, Middle English literature, Renaissance literature, Early Modern period (Elizabethan Era), Jacobean literature, Caroline and Cromwellian literature, Restoration literature, Augustan literature, 18th century, Romanticism, Victorian literature, Modernism, Post-modern literature.

Who knew there could possibly be so many different types of literature over the ages?

If you are still torn between which makes better literature then just think of it this way....If you were given a choice on whether to read Jane Austen or Henry Lawson which would you choose?

Men may shy away from the choice of reading Jane Austen for obvious reasons, but perhaps the sheer intencity of the boredom which surrounds Australian Literature is enough to push them to read 'Pride and Prejudice' no matter how misogynistic they are.

Booktopia

I seem to have discovered a new internet bookstore whilst browsing the internet.......

20 bucks bet everyone else knew about it and im just lagging behind!

Anyway it's called "Booktopia"

Although they are based in Sydney, Australia they sell books all over the world which is pretty cool. They also have ALOT of books, something like over 2 million in their database.

Oh and the best part? They offer every book a discount.

Only crappy thing is that postage is like $6.50 per order anywhere in Australia, which isn't too bad at all, except whatever discount you got pretty much just gets added back on from the cost of postage. Boooooo!

Isn't is comforting to know we can choose books in the vicinity of our own home whilst sitting on our asses eating chocolate ice-cream? Not to mention the sheer convenience!

http://www.booktopia.com.au/

It's never too early when it comes to books

......And now there's proof!

On page 11 of today's Daily Telegraph, there was an article called "Life-Long Hook for babies"

"Babies reading?!" you ask yourself "What has this crazy world come to?"

According to the Australian Literacy Educators Association, the idea is not so shocking or odd at all.

Experts are now encouraging mothers to read to their newborns and from today, babies born at selected hospitals across the country will be given their first book as part of international literay day...which reminds me.......

HAPPY LITERACY DAY!!

So the reason behind this brand new alternative of cracking literacy problems is because of just that exactly...some children still start school having never seen or read a book in their life and thus parents are being encouraged to start reading aloud "beautiful sounding books" to their babies which include rythms and rhymes similar to music.

Wendy Bean, a volunteer at North shore hospital believes that babies that were exposed to books early fell in love with reading.

I personally agree with her and think that this is a fantastic innovation.

One of the best memories of my childhood was listening to my mum reading to me because it then encouraged and influenced me to keep reading on.

Having seen the article in today's paper It's also inspired me to read to my baby niece Paris who was born almost two weeks ago. Not that she'd need it. I'm sure she's gonna grow up to be the smartest little cookie in the world either way....hehe, biased much?

xoxoxoxox

Tearjerkers

We've all heard of movies that make even the machoest of men cry...but what about books that are absolute tearjerkers? you know, the kind that make you want to roll into a ball and never leave your bedroom for the rest of the day.....the kind of tearjerker that keeps you awake at night thinking of the horrific possibility that an ending could be so depressing.



For anyone who doesn't know what a tearjerker is, it's basically a story, song, play, film, or broadcast that moves or is intended to move its audience to tears. But, of course in this case i'm referring to a book......



I'm just one of those horribly emotional people that cry at the drop of a hat so reading a book that's an absolute tearjerker is the worst possible idea ever, especially if im already in an overly-sensitive mood which is something like 95% of the time.

I cried when I read P.S I love you......in the first page........even the first paragraph was able to set me off. Damn hormones!!



So what book makes you cry?



Here's a top 5 list of the books that have made me bawl like a child being refused a toy:

1. P.S I love you


2. The Pact


3. Harry Potter and the deathly hallows


4. New Moon (when Edward left Bella - how could he?! )


5. Almost every single novel written by Nicholas Sparks (The Notebook, The Choice, At First Sight, The wedding, A walk to remember etc)

HOW TRAGIC!!

Anyway, this site I came across is pretty cool so check it out

http://thebookbinge.com/2007/10/our-top-three-tearjerkers.html

Forgotten Bookmarks <---click here!

This is a really cool and funny website! It's run by a person who works at a used book-store and shows a collection of the weird and random things that some people leave behind !

Ladies and gentlemen, introducing you to.....THE KINDLE!

Yes, The Kindle . Now your probably all wondering the same thing, "What the hell is that?". According to the fabulous Wikipedia, the Kindle also known as the "Amazon Kindle", is "a software and hardware platform developed by Amazon.com subsidiary Lab126 for reading e-books and other digital media." In simpler terms, It's basically a new alternative of reading a book. Instead of reading a novel the good old fashioned way, we now have the option of downloading a book off your Iphone or Ipod. But has technology perhaps gone a little too far with this new invention? Well, according to Americans, it hasn't. In fact, Amazons first offering of the Kindle sold out in five and a half hours! But of course, as all shiny new things do, it come's at a tad of a costly price. On May 6, 2009, Amazon announced the Kindle DX, which retails for $489.

The point is, how on earth is it possible that people actually prefer to read text off a screen? Have we really become so relient of technology that we have to download EVERYTHING off the internet? Theres music, movies, videos of people being idiots (another term for youtube) and now books? How does the Kindle even work? I mean, I know if I was forced to use it, I would actually have NO idea how. Luckily for people like me that have absolutely no sense of how to even use a computer without making it blow up, the internet has various websites and even videos on how to use le kindle!

It's not just the issue of the book VS the kindle that has rised in the past few years. In today's issue of the Daily Telegraph there was an article about how notebooks are replacing textbooks across the state and is becoming a fading force in a technlogy revolution. Is this really a technology revolution or a ploy for teachers to do their job half-arsed? Some of the more sensible teachers and principles have "serious misgivings" about the new way children may be learning. Apparantly, the way this new "innovation" works is that the students are asked a question on screen and then fill in the answer and text it to the whiteboard so the teacher and all of the class can see it.

So, in conclusion, what would you prefer? Reading a story off a tiny screen, or reading of paper. Now i'm not normally a conservative type of chick, but there's just something plain creepy and un-natural about reading a book from your i-pod or i-phone. That's just nuts!!

What do you guys think? Would you use the Kindle? Leave me comments!!!!!

A picture is worth a thousand words apparently.........A picture of myself doing what I do best.......reading the latest issue of 'Madison' mag at a family barbecue I attended on Sunday......hehe!

Battle of the booksellers

Now I dont know about you guys but when im in a book-shop I could honestly spend hours browsing and never get bored.

Angus and Robertson, Dymocks, Borders......They are like my second home, which in a way, is quite sad when you think about it ....

Having said that, there is quite a bit of competition between the leading book-stores. Although they are totally different from one another the one thing they have in common is the pricey value of their books.....

An example is this: You want to buy a book, let's just say your getting a little too obsessed with the world of vampires and are thinking of buying the final Twilight book in the series, "Breaking Dawn". So you walk into Angus and Robertson, you see the book, you hold it, you turn it over and sooner than you can say "RIP OFF" you've put the book down again and walked out of the bookstore. Probably towards Target where you can get the book for a cheaper and more reasonable 35% off.

Angus and Roberton retails the book at $25.99 and Dymocks at a slightly higher $29.99. It doesn't seem like much, but the fact is, us book-lovers will go through a novel sooner that it takes for our lazy boyfriends to watch the movie and therefore, we go through books pretty quickly. So we buy more books. Probably an average of two books a month. So when we add it up, by the end of the month we would have spent over 50 dollars on two novels.

But what about the times when we see a novel that catches our eye from a far distance and you just KNOW that it's going to be AWESOME and reading this book will make you COOL (somehow) and you will be filled with knowledge and great conversation starts due to the information that it will feed to your brain.....what about the random splurges you get, when your not actually planning on buying anything but you see this book and just KNOW it will change your life? This happens to me pretty much every time I walk past a book-store......It's like an epiphany.....like i've met my soulmate......like destiny.........

Ok maybe I'm getting carried away....but the point is, people that love books are willing to pay for them even though sometimes we feel that it is a tad of a rip-off. But what are some other alternatives that can enable us to save some money but still manage our doses of literature?

I was lucky enough to discover the answer to this question just a couple of weeks ago when I went shopping with my boyfriend to Newtown. After much pestering and pleading, I finally got him to walk the slightly back-breaking walk all the way to the end of King Street (towards Broadway) to this amazing second hand bookshop that I always used to go into as a younger teenager. (Newtown was quite literally my favorite place in the world as a thirteen year old goth chick).

Now this is book-store is amazing. You can basically find any book you want, and it's HUGE. It's even double story! There are magazines from the 80's with frizzy and perm haired women on the front cover, novels, essays, speeches, enclyclopedias, books on anything from german history to english literature to various breeds of cats and other completely random crap. And the best thing about it............ITS CHEAP! Sure it's second hand but who really gives a shit?

About a month ago I decided I wanted to read the book "Interview with a vampire" (after all this sudden vampire phenomenon who could blame me?) So i walked into Angus and Robertson but was dissapointed at the tag underlining the overly priced cost. So I thought "eh screw it. I'll buy it from K-mart"

But tragedy hit and I soon discovered K-mart didn't stock the book.

My plan B had failed.

When I felt like there was nothing more I could do than simply purchase the book for thirty dollars at A&R I remembered the bookshop in Newtown.

So I found the book, and paid $7.95!! Is that a bargain or is THAT A BARGAIN!!!!!

In conclusion, here is my advice for saving a bit of cash when it comes to buying books..........just go to a second hand store......it prolly has more meaning knowing it was owned by someone else and it has it's own history.......

Heres a list of heaps cool and trendy second hand stores in Sydney:

• Sappho books and cafe - Glebe
• Elizabeth's secondhand Bookshop - Newtown
• Gertrude and Alice Cafe Bookstore - Bondi Beach
• T's Book Shop - Randwick
• Moores Bookshop - Newtown (the place I found my bargain!)
• George ST book and CD Exchange - George ST, Sydney

Movie VS Book

There has always been a huge debate between books that have been turned into movies. 9 out of 10, people's views and opinions would always be the same: "The movie sucked!!","The book is soooo much better", "They missed out on one of the key scenes!" Oh yes, the after-math of viewing the film is sometimes even more dramatic than the actual film itself...so I thought I'd analyze the controversial issue of Book VS Movie, question why novels have been altered to suit the film world as well as find out what people REALLY prefer. And just because I'm so passionate and fanatical about my work, I may as well do some exploring as to what possesses the film industry to attempt to bring the books to life.....more often than not, with failure.

Firstly, I decide to go with the 2008 film that drove all hormonally wild teenage girls even crazier than they already were: Twilight, book one of four books in the series which are written by Stephenie Meyer about a 17 year old girl who moves to the small town of Forks and falls in love with a vampire. When I look up "books v.s movies" in Google search, already there are youtube video links coming up :

* Twilight : Book VS Movie (List of Differences)

* Youtube - Twilight: Book Vs. Movie Changes

One of the most dangerous things about turning a book that has gained so much popularity (not only with the teenagers, middle aged-women are even into it - not to mention the dudes!) into a film, is that there is so much criticism that is to be expected. After watching Twilight with my friend that had never read the book, her opinion about the movie was obviously not even half as open as to what mine was. Throughout the movie I would make small points in my head: "That's not how I imaged him to look like!", "Where the hell did that scene come from?", "They totally changed the line!".
Thankfully, I soon learnt I wasn't the only psycho in the cinema that was analyzing every single detail of the film.
"I was extremely disappointed in the movie, i loved the book. They left out major scenes and i was disappointed in the fact that they didn't follow what happened in the book, things were done out of order or not at all" said an anonymous girl on a yahoo discussion board.
Overall, 95% of the girl's comment's were negative, all of them making points about the acting skills, directing, scenes and change in script.
One girl even went to the trouble of listing every single difference between the novel and the book but then slightly contradicted herself through her last sentence: Overall, i found it very well done". Errr......right.

If you were to ask anyone who has seen the movie version of their favorite novel which they preferred, the answer will usually be, "The book was better." That's because readers of a novel have already made their own perfect movie version. They have visualized it, imagined the locations. They even imagine who would play which character and cast it themselves. So what actually makes a good interpretation in regards to a novel being turned into film?
The thing is, people usually don't have a problem with the setting. It's always more satisfying when your vision and imagination matches the actors/actresses looks, the costumes and depending on the genre of the movie, side effects. People generally hate it when the plot of the book is changed to suit the film, sometimes it's inevitable, but then why change it? Why attempt to make it into something its really not? If the director changes the synopsis entirely but keeps the characters then it's not really a version of the novel is it? So why bother?
On the other hand, although I get severely disappointed if something I enjoyed is left out of a movie, if they left everything in, most book-based movies would be 10-hours long. And unless they change the seats in movie theatres to beds, no-one is going to watch a film that long.

The whole Twilight mania doesn't exactly help things either. Because of it's massive fan base, it's much more open to criticism than any other novel. The same thing goes with the Lord of the Rings Triology, The Notebook, The Da Vinci Code and basically any children's book written by Roald Dahl. At the end of the day people are emotional beings and when we read novels we become attached to the character's. We become somewhat protective over them and when we find out that our favorite novel is being turned into a film we freak out majorly because we have simply invested too many feelings into the novel. Any adaption or version results in something new, so people get custodial and automatically call it shit because it's being compared to the original.

So what type of qualities does a book need to possess in order to be made into a film? According to website Superfastreader.com, a book "generally has to have a strong forward-moving plot line, and a premise that you can easily picture on a poster or in a TV ad campaign". However, there are deal killers which includes the story being done before, the concept being too long too explain and can only be done by a best-seller and lastly if the story is small and obstacles seem "easily surmountable".

Perhaps an easier way to see what makes a book film-worthy is to simply look te 2008 list of books that have been turned into movies. According to www.bestsellers.about.com, the number one movie is 'The Reader', followed by 'Slumdog Millionaire', 'The Curious Case of Benjamin' Button, Twilight (surprise) and 'Marley and Me'. Perhaps the website is merely looking at the popularity of the films in regards to the large money they made. But just because something is a blockbuster hit at the cinemas, doesnt mean people still prefer it over the novel.

From the hundreds of films that I have watched over the almost nineteen years of my existence, I've personally learnt that movies are very rarely better than the books they were based on.
Perhaps the best thing to do in this situation is to watch the movie first - and then read the book - that way you have a chance of saving yourself for a let-down and disappointment !

Book Mania!

As many people close to me know, I am a self-confessed book nerd, and seeing as though I dedicate about 97% of my time to reading books, newspapers, magazines (basically anything i can get a hold of) i thought I may as well write about that. As part of an assessment task through t.a.f.e, i've had to start my own blog about a topic that i'm interested in so here it is. Not quite sure what to first write about so I'll just list some of my favorite things to read and possibly suggest some good reading material to broaden the mind for any of you wishing to become as geeky as I am.

1. The Daily Telegraph: As one who is learning the skills of journalism, i believe it is inevitable that I read the newspaper daily, and this one seems to be the easiest to read! haha

2. Shakespeare: Yes as sad as some people find this, I think Shakespeare is awesome! Even when I had to study it for my HSC, I thoroughly enjoyed it. When all my classmates would cry out of sheer boredom, my face would light up with excitement. My favorites would have to be Macbeth, King Lear and Romeo and Juliet. Oh the drama! Oh the madness! Oh the tragedy! I LOOVE it.

3. Jane Austen. Emma, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice.....come on.....you gotta love the classics. And you gotta love Jane Austen. I think the reason why her novels are so popular is because not only are her books funny but they focus on an era where women were so dependent on men in order to get a boost in society...her humor and her subtle comments through her characters give such an "up yours" to all those misogynistic idiots, and its just so refreshing and cool to see this writing style from a woman in the 1800's.

4. Novels - Now this is where I get a little picky - there are just some genre's that I will refuse to read no matter how "amaaaaaaazing" people tell me the book in question is. Under no circumstances will you see me carrying a crime & thriller, sci-fi (fantasy is acceptable but any of that star-trek crap makes me ill), politics or military novel. YUCK! Now things that you would definitely see me proudly carrying around with me include: horror, romance (not including the trashy ones with the muscly man with long blonde hair waving in the wind and his body draped over red satin sheets), self-help (when i get desperate), history, biography, childrens, film-tv-music-drama, and general and literary fiction.

5. Cosmopolitan and Cleo magazine: Where would i get all my fabulous beauty, health, entertainment and other various vital pieces of information? And besides, reading isn't just for feeding your brain knowledge, expanding your vocabulary and becoming an intellectual (your mind has to relax and enjoy itself from time to time, right?

Well, thats all from me for tonight!

"Good night, good night! Parting is such sweet sorrow"

- Romeo and Juliet