Tiny quote cross stitch sampler.

This is my very favorite quote from my very favorite book, The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky. I've been told by some that this is a bit of a depressing quote but I think it's beautiful and true. This little guy now lives propped up on a bookshelf in my living room.

Mockingjay cross stitch sampler.

I stitched this for a friend of mine. Intended to be given as a Secret Santa gift in December 2013 I fell just short of my target due date by putting the finishing touches on it today. Whoops.

Review: The Name of the Wind

"The three boys, one dark, one light, and one--for lack of a better word, fiery--do not notice the night. Perhaps some part of them does, but they are young, and drunk, and busy knowing deep in their hearts that they will never grow old or die. They also know that they are friends, and they share a certain love that will never leave them. The boys know many other things, but none of them seem as important as this. Perhaps they are right."

There is nothing like spinning an epic tale from the warm, golden light of an imaginary inn in an imaginary world to invite me in and make me feel comfortably at home. You give me a powerful being laying hidden in wait and the stark foreshadowing of tragedies to come and I'm yours.

When I finished this book I immediately texted my friend Heather (who recommended it to me and who I burden with my currently-reading-feels no matter the time of day or night) that, after months of trial and error, I was finally done. I'd made it to the end. Upon receiving said text, she asked me how I felt.

It brought me up short. How did I feel?

The answer is... I felt many things. Anxious to start the next book. Daunted by its size. Scared of the long wait for the last book to be published. Saddened by Kvothe's gradual descent into believing himself an innkeeper instead of the precocious and cocky hero that he was. Confused and angry by Bast's plea to Chronicler to leave out and/or direct Kvothe away from the sad parts of his story (No! Give me the sad! Give me ALL THE sad! Don't you know I'm a masochist?).

Yes, it took me a long time to read this book. By my count almost 8 months. Unacceptable, right? Especially considering how much I was enjoying my time in Rothfuss' well-executed world. I know and I'm sorry. It is in no way indicative of my feelings toward this story or its hero. Honest.

Speaking of which... if I have the desire to and can plainly picture myself living in your fictional world, then in my mind you have succeeded as an author. So thank you, Mr. Rothfuss, for providing me another beautiful landscape into which I can escape to daydream.

I love me some tragedy, and Rothfuss handled the series of tragedies that Kvothe experiences with a startlingly subtle brilliance. The slaughter of Kvothe's family... his time spent wandering the woods in stunned grief... the wild and impoverished years in Tarbean that followed... all of it was wonderfully engrossing. To go from living with the warm comfort and camaraderie of the Edema Ruh to the severely cold existence of being an orphan on the streets of a foreign city... it's all an appropriately tragic origin story for the boy who would grow to be one of the world's most powerful arcanists.

I will admit though to a bit of eye-rolling every time I encountered something that Kvothe was immediately exceptional at. However I was always able to forgive Kvothe's more Gary Stu-ish moments because I felt like Rothfuss laid nice groundwork to adequately explain Kvothe's cleverness, not to mention Kvothe makes frequent mentions about how his overconfidence made him a fool. But rest assured that those moments did not go by unnoticed. Also this was a story about the man behind the myth! Myths are not born from the ordinary. Yes, Kvothe is annoyingly the best at everything he does (one of those people that my husband and I joke about and implore to "save some for the rest of us") but this is a tale of heroism and magic! Sometimes the heart wants an indestructible hero even when the mind thinks it is silly.

I loved the outline of the narrative and the shifts between first- and third-person narrators. I even didn't so much mind the thing that I usually despise where people in books or movies say things to each other like "this isn't a story, this is our lives" because come on.

Something that really piqued my interest and endeared me wholeheartedly to this world and the magic system in it was the idea of naming. I hope The Wise Man's Fear goes into more detail with the concept and execution of naming because we really only got a taste of it there at the end but I loved it. I understand clearly how Kvothe could make it the end-all, be-all goal of his life to be like Taborlin the Great and learn the names of all things.

Master Elodin says "Words are pale shadows of forgotten names. As names have power, words have power. Words can light fires in the minds of men. Words can wring tears from the hardest hearts. There are seven words that will make a person love you. There are ten words that will break a strong man's will. But a word is nothing but a painting of a fire. A name is the fire itself."

YES YES YES. Oh, Elodin! I knew you weren't wholly unhelpful!

Overall I enjoyed it immensely. My heart didn't burn with a fiery passion for it, but time and discussion may change that.

Final note?

I hate that god damn Ambrose. He better get some sort of comeuppance for his blatant jackassery or I'm going to be pissed.

My favorite book: The Perks of Being a Wallflower.

This is my favorite book of all time. The above copy is mine. You'll understand the importance of that soon enough.

I've put off reviewing this book for years because, well, how do I? Just calling it my "favorite" book seems like an insult because that description is not good enough, not big enough to encompass the entirety of my feelings and memories and all that it means to me.

This book is the foundation onto which my entire adolescence, and hence my adulthood, were constructed.

There are better books, sure. I've read lots of books that are better than this one. Reading this as an adult for the first time would not be the same as reading it as an adolescent, no matter how imaginative or appreciative you are of coming of age stories. Reading this for the first time as a ninth grader within its first year of publication without the internet to praise it or word-of-mouth to guide me while I was dealing with a very difficult and trying time was one of my life's biggest serendipitous events.

I found this book on the way back from one of my little brother's baseball tournaments in Oklahoma City. It was April 2000. I know that because while we were in Oklahoma City we visited the brand new Oklahoma City National Memorial for the victims of the Murrah Building bombing (a big deal in general but an even bigger deal if you happened to live in Oklahoma as I did). We had already made it back to Tulsa, where I lived close by in the suburb of Broken Arrow with my mother, and my dad decided to stop and buy my brother and sister something to read on their 3-hour drive back home to Wichita. They were already so close to dropping me off that I assumed this bookstore trip wasn't for me and that I wouldn't be getting anything, which I was used to. You know, being the part-time older kid. I understood.

As my brother and sister took their time elsewhere in the store I gravitated to the fiction section.

Keep in mind that at this time in my life I wasn't the biggest reader but my dad's side of the family was, so when I was with them I read because that's what you did. Books were special to them. I enjoyed reading but I didn't get it yet. I hadn't felt the need yet.

I ran my fingers along the shelves of Borders (may it rest in peace) and there on the shelf beneath the library ladder I spotted a small book with a baby blue binding and a long title that I vaguely recognized. I pulled it from the shelf and was immediately spellbound by the bright minimalist cover, the feel of it in my hands, the perfect dimensions, the comfortable bend of it. I turned it over, read the blurb, and my interest was appropriately piqued. Voraciously I opened the cover to reveal not a bunch of reviews or praise, but this first page:

Time was like a stopped breath, that minuscule moment between breathing out and breathing in. I was occupying that fragile space like I never had before. You might think I'm exaggerating, but my fifteen year-old self really did feel like the only person in the world in that extended heartbeat. Suddenly owning this book was the most important thing in the world to me. The desperation that came over me, the intensity of it, to know in my bones that I could not allow myself to leave that bookstore without that book in my hands.

That, that right there, was my first experience with the need to read.

I gripped the book tight to my chest and searched through the aisles for my dad.

"Dad," I said, showing him with the book with sincerity. "Dad, please."

He must have seen it in my face or in my tone. He showed a small amount of trepidation at the price tag (my dad is a very frugal person and this book was $12, more than I had ever paid for a book at the time and twice that of what my brother and sister had chosen) and on top of that I was almost home, I was not in need of entertainment for the drive. He didn't have to do it, but he did. And if he never bought me another gift in my life, he bought me this book, and that is worth everything to me. Not just any copy. My copy.

You see... I love my copy. That picture above is of my copy and if you look closely enough you can see the thin bit of tape between the cover and the binding to hold it all together because I taped both covers back on when they fell off. It's been lost, bent, cried on, stained. I refuse to buy a new one. They don't make them the same anymore. They don't make them with that all-important enchanting first page anymore. My copy is one of a handful of treasures that I will collect in the event that my house ever goes up in flames and I have only a short time to make it out. It is irreplaceable. My favorite thing about my copy is that so many people that I have known over the years have borrowed it. Most of my best friends have read it. I loaned it to the best teacher I have ever had, my ninth grade English teacher Mrs. Camp, who was the Bill to my Charlie. It is a relic of my life.

I took that book home and read the whole thing that very night. Every sentence, every feeling, every everything about it spoke to me and mattered to me. It was the very first time that a book made me realize that I was not alone. Do you know how valuable that was? To know that at least one other person in the whole of humanity understood me and the way that I thought about things? I felt invigorated and justified and comforted and real. Those are powerful emotions for a 15 year-old girl.

I made the One Winter mix tape and listened to it religiously. I read a lot of the books that Bill gives Charlie to read and a lot of them became favorites. I started Secret Santa exchanges with my friends. I wrote in my diary in letter form. I joined newspaper because of Punk Rocky. I decided I wanted to be a writer. It influenced the way I speak and think and react to things. Without this book I would really, actually, truly be a different person today. To my core, I would be different. I know that.

I try not to get too hipster about things but sometimes I can't help it, and this is one of my biggest hipster triggers in that I will staunchly proclaim that I read this book before everyone in the whole world had read this book, that it was my favorite first, that it's mine and private, and that nobody understands. In those moments I am Holden Caulfield and everyone else is a phony and a bandwagoning poser and the Holden in me is sick and disgusted with it. Then Holden recedes into the shadows of my mind a little as Addie comes back out and tries to be very appreciative that at least people are reading it and appreciating it and that should  be enough. It can mean different things to different people, and that's the beauty of literature. Interestingly enough when people talk about this book around me I find myself erupting into a knowing smile but I stay very silent. Internally I am being very loud about it but the last thing I want to do is waste words with people about my favorite book if they're just going to have a light understanding and appreciation of it. I can't reign it in once I start. I don't know how to explain to them that I get it, that I know and that I hope they do too but that I doubt it very much.

I would say that everyone needs to read this book, but truthfully, it's not the same unless you're a lonely ninth grader with a secret and a new family full of crazy people to navigate through without disturbing the delicate waters of harmony in a house that is not your house but it also is and how sad it is when all you want in the world is your mom back and for things to be how they were before.

Rebirth!

Well, here I am again.

I just couldn't stay away. I tried to go Wordpress and the lack of free customizability just ate at me because I like my online things pretty & simple and Wordpress provided me neither. I shed the idea of wanting to live my life without being permanently tracked by Google and decided that, despite my ever-growing fear of Big Brother, Blogger is where I needed to be. I permanently deleted my old Google account a while back so now I can start fresh & clean here. Sorry, pro-Wordpress friends. Maybe in the future if I come into some money I could afford to go premium there so my blog won't look like some embarrassing stain. I want to be proud of this place!

Nowadays we all have so many different social apps & places of our own on the internet that it can be overwhelming. I just want my little corners of the internet to be a little more concise & organized. An internet home rather than a string of internet apartments, if you see what I mean.

I have more than a couple of ideas for this place. As a lifestyle blog it will have many different areas, many of which I am currently brainstorming. I get to use pen & paper for this process and that excites me more than it probably should.

My long-term plan is to open up an etsy shop to sell some fun cross stitch & embroidery pieces I am working on. This idea is in the very beginning stages of planning and as a hardcore perfectionist it could be a while before they see the light of day. But I'm hopeful that even if it's not particularly lucrative it will at the very least be a fun, creative outlet. I have felt the creative part of me grow stagnant recently and I just can't have that.

Here's to new beginnings & never being too cool for anything!