Top Ten Tuesday: Characters I'd Like in My Fictional Family

Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by The Broke and the Bookish!

1. Jo March: Role-  Big sister

I'm still upset at her for not swiping up Laurie when she had the chance. Jo is a wonderful literary character that I have spent my entire life looking up to her. She is fearless, she goes against the crowd, she's not ashamed of who she is, and she had the courage to completely leave home to try to accomplish her dreams. Not many people can say that, especially a woman in the 1860's. 

2. Anne Shirley: Role - Little sister

She's so pure of heart that I just want to protect her, but she's so stubborn she won't let me. I talk her feelings out with her involving Gilbert and tell her she's stupid for not accepting him sooner, but since she's Anne of course, she has to figure it out in her own time. Anne is another person who you think is absolutely fearless, but in a different way. The way she views the world gives her courage and the life she has lived makes her grounded... with the best imagination I have ever seen.

3. Molly and Arthur Weasley: Role - Parents

They made it through seven kids and two wars. I want parents who are this bad a**. They're fantastic and throughout it all, you know that they just just really want to protect their kids.

4.Holly Golightly: Role - Crazy Aunt

Just look at that picture. Her couch is a bathtub. This is only one of the many reasons why I love Holly Golightly, but I think she would be my crazy Aunt that my parents always are concerned about. I would find her life fascinating and marvelous, and they would lock me in my room or something. The Truman Capote Holly is just a bit different than our movie heiress, but the main points are accurate. She's just looking for love while refusing to belong to anyone... and she wants money.

5. Sherlock and Watson: Role - Uncles

Now, I don't ship the Sherlock and Watson relationship, but you can take this however you want. I do think that you can't have one without the other, so they are my uncles. They can be married, I don't judge, or just brothers who have to coexist, however you see them, they are wonderful and amazing and constantly trying to get Holly in check.

That just about rounds out my fictional family! Who do you have in your family tree?

Harry Potter, the Fun Stuff

I'm still not over the end of Harry Potter.

I'm actually not sure if I will ever be completely "over" Harry Potter as I credit it to making me who I am. Not completely of course, Harry Potter didn't make me cheat on my math test in second grade, or cause me to get that speeding ticket when I was sixteen, but Harry Potter did do some other things in my life.

Because of Harry Potter, I became a reader. I have said it before, but I really do think Harry Potter inspired my generation to do more than just read, we believed in magic again which is something we were lacking in a world filled with The Backstreet Boys and Brittany Spears because they were the people kids were looking up to.

Until we met a little boy with a scar.

So, I take this opportunity to stop my sappiness, and move onto other things.

These are some of the best Harry Potter related images I have found on the internet so far, I have done enough talking about exactly what Harry Potter means to me to fill several posts, so this one I just want to make fun.

Here they are. Enjoy.

Lolz!

Lol, Spidey...


I don't think this was a waste of five dollars...

No offense Twilight, I loved you as well... it's just not the same thing. lol

And finally...

It's over guys, and I never did get my hogwarts letter...

Guest Post: Harry Potter and the Gift of Reading

Todays guest post is from Jill at Owl For YA! It's all about how Harry Potter has shaped the way kids read today. :)

It feels like I can’t remember a time in my teaching career without Harry Potter. They have become such an engrained part of being a 7th grade English teacher. Each year new kids decide to pick them up, and each year more kids fall in love with Hogwarts, Harry, Hagrid and the thought of having their own wand. I am one of the mass that love Harry Potter now, but when he first came on the scene you would’ve never thought I would be.

I have never been a big fantasy fan. Books like The Lord of the Rings never interested me. I didn’t like the idea that I had to learn a whole new world beyond my own. I found it confusing and frustrating so I never got very far. This was even true for the Chronicles of Narnia series because so much of it was spent in that “other” world so different from our own. When so many of my students were reading the Harry Potter books I thought there was no way I was ever going to read them. But, after awhile I knew I should at least attempt the first one, so I would know what my students were talking about. With that I picked up book one.

By the time Harry meet Hagrid I was back at the story buying all the other books. I was in love with Harry Potter. Buy why? What did Harry Potter have that all those other fantasy books didn’t? There are two things I can think of. One: the “fantasy” world doesn’t start right away. I get to know Harry without having to get to know a whole new world at the same time. And that whole new world is still a part of the world I knew. I didn’t have to learning everything new. Two: Harry. How could you not fall in love with Harry? His poor little life made me just feel for him, and I wanted to keep reading because I knew it would get better. I was rooting for him, and I couldn’t quit reading until I knew his life was better.

So I continued reading. I laughed with Harry and Ron. Rolled my eyes at Hermione. Smiled when Harry “saw” Ginny for the first time. Worried about all characters as they battled to save what they loved. And saddest of all, cried when Dumbledore died. Harry Potter is a part of my life and a part of the lives of my students. I am thankful for those books because I know they have created a love of reading in students who might have never found it. What a gift to give to me and to generations of children.

Guest Post: Why Harry Potter is a Fantasy Classic

I'm Alison of Alison Can Read. I've been blogging for 5 months. I review mostly young adult literature with some middle grade books and manga.

I read my first Harry Potter book in the summer of 2000, when I was 18 years old. Up to that point, I hated the fantasy genre. Madeline L'Engle's A Wrinkle In Time was confusing and boring. I had no desire to read C.S. Lewis. There were a few exceptions, of course. I loved Roald Dahl's Matilda and Lois Lowry's The Giver. But for the most part I stuck solely to historical fiction, contemporary fiction, or historical non-fiction.

From the moment, I picked up Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, I was entranced with the series, immersed into the world of Harry and Hogwarts. I immediately picked up the second and third books and actually worked at Barnes & Noble the night of the midnight release of the fourth book in July 2000. For the next seven years, I waited with bated breath for the remaining three books to be published and now re-read the entire series every year. Since reading my first Harry Potter book, I've given fantasy a fair shot. And to my surprise I love it! Now, paranormal romance, high fantasy, and urban fantasy comprise a good percentage of my reading material.

Why is the Harry Potter series such a good introduction to the fantasy genre? Harry Potter exemplifies the best of the genre. Fantasy can transport you to another world. And I mean that almost literally. When I'm reading Harry Potter, I am immersed in the world of wizardry. Everything around me fades away. Part of me truly believes that this world actually exists. It seems entirely logical. Rowling does an incredible job of building a world that seem very much like our own, in a way. There is school, family, sports, bureaucracy. The parts that are unfamiliar are explained so well, with such detail, history, and symbolism, that the fantastical is on equal par with reality.

Fantasy is an excellent vessel for themes that are hard to get across in realistic fiction without insulting someone, or sounding extreme, depressing, or preachy. For example, government corruption is a strong theme throughout the series, yet no particular government or political party can legitimately claim the book is attacking it, since the Ministry Of Magic is not real. Deathly Hallows practically hits the reader on the head with a Christian allegory, yet it is presented in a way that doesn't make you feel as though you were reading a sermon.

In the best fantasy novels, the reader really relates to the characters, knows them as well or better than he/she knows people in real life. This is crucial to any novel, of course, but particularly important for the fantasy genre, where the characters are naturally harder to understand because they live in a world where the reader does not. The author has to work extra hard to make the characters feel just as human, just as three-dimensional as the reader. This is where J.K. Rowling truly excels. Every one of her characters are complex, flawed, real people. Harry Potter is brave, loyal, and selfless, yet also has a horrible temper, isn't unusually bright, and makes rash conclusions. Dumbledore, one of the series' heroes, is wise, brilliant, and caring, but is also cold, calculating, and arrogant. Lucius and Narcissa Malfoy seem like heartless villains, yet their love for their son ultimately saves Harry's life and thwarts Voldemort. Snape turns out to be incredibly brave, loyal, and an eternal romantic, but he is a resentful, bitter, and heartlessly cruel man

Classic good versus evil tales work better in fantasy than in realistic fiction. The stories can be more extreme than reality allows - evil is elevated to a higher level when the supernatural is involved and the hero is endowed with extra skills to defeat the bad guy. This is certainly the case in Harry Potter. With a single swipe of their wands and an incantation, the villains and the heroes can fly, torture, and kill. Mere muggle battles simply cannot compare. Rowling also does a marvelous job of showing that good versus evil is not a black and white world, something that is difficult to do in any kind of novel. In my opinion, the two most evil characters in the series are Voldemort and Delores Umbridge, and they are on different sides of the Dark Arts battle line (Bellatrix Lestrange gives Umbridge a very good run for her money, but even she has a human weakness - she's in love with Voldemort). The fantasy world reflects the very human reality that people who are arguably on the "good side" can be just as evil and cruel as the villains.

Harry Potter has earned a spot aside such venerable classics as The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia. It is a marvelously complex tale that manages to be fun and heartwarming at the same time. The series certainly worked it's magic upon me and opened my eyes to a whole new world of literary possibilities.

Censorship and Why It Sucks.

I have been a victim of book banning.

Just like every single one of us.

Book banning makes my skin curl, and leaves me looking for my pitch fork to go fight off this form of censorship. This week is Book Banning week and I am going to share with you a bit about my banning and censorship experiences.

My first ever experience with book banning came when I was around ten years old. I had just read the first Harry Potter book and inside I was absolutely consumed with this joy I'm still not sure I can ever feel again. Finally, something makes sense, finally life seems like more than this average world around me, and finally, I have read and loved a story. While I was on this high of greatness, something I didn't understand happened. Everyone started telling me how horrible I was for loving it.

I have a religious family, and live in a fairly conservative part of the country, and all of a sudden I am being told that this new thing that I love and never want to let go of is wrong, and that even God is angry at me for it.

This was a horrible thing for little ten year old me to accept. I never did accept it.

Instead of accepting this and raising my pitch fork towards the direction of the Harry Potter lovers, I instead thought of argument after argument that tried to prove, at least in my mind, that I was not crazy, and that this thing I adored was not bad. I thought, "How different is Harry Potter really than The Wizard of Oz? They both use magic, and if that is your argument, than lets ban that too." and, "Harry Potter is essentially Good vs. Evil. What is wrong with that?"

However many arguments I tried to come up with, I was young, and my opinion on this matter was deemed unimportant to those around me. I had parents who thankfully, did agree with me on these points, but still my resolve was essentially shattered. I didn't want to go to Hell for something I loved... and I truly was afraid that that would happen for a while.

When I was in high school I also had several experiences with banning that left me chilled on the inside by how crazy and ridiculous some of them were. At this point in time I had long since stood my ground with the Harry Potter issue and had since become extremely concerned with every type of censorship I saw. A lot of these issues were just teachers telling me things after they'd read books, sometimes these things involved sexual situations, drugs, alcohol, cussing, etc...

More times than not, once these people reached these parts they stopped reading, and then complained about how awful it was, and how teens should not be exposed to these things.

Ummm... have you been to high school?

I promise you that every single day I was exposed to every single thing that was complained about and more. These books should be given to Teens because we need them! There seems to be a misconception that within these books these authors are encouraging us to partake in these things and that is simply not the case. If they actually finished or read the books they are banning they might see that.

Teens need these books because sometimes that's the only form of encouragement we have. These books have the potential to say, "Hey, you're not alone," to every Teen across the country. Only people who have read a book and instantly felt that connection and change in themselves understand what that can mean.

My school librarian my senior year of High School used to skim books that came in for the YA fiction section. We'd had an amazing librarian the year before, so this action completely stunned me. She would look for key words, mainly cussing, drinking, drugs, etc... and I remember feeling nothing but a complete outrage at this action. She did it quietly, no one knew she did it, and she'd just take the book off the shelf.

No reading of it, no asking of opinions, nothing. If she saw words that she deemed, "Unacceptable," it was gone. I watched as Looking For Alaska by John Green, Just Listen by Sarah Dessen, Crank by Ellen Hopkins, and Forever by Judy Blume were all taken from shelves and no matter how many times I asked her about it or tried to stop it, there was absolutely nothing I could do.

I was just a Teen who's opinion didn't matter.

I just wish that these people who take books from shelves would realize that what they are doing is not changing our idea on the book. All of those people who told me all of that stuff about Harry Potter did not in any way, shape, or form make me love the book any less. All they did was outrage me and make me want to do everything I could to stop them. It changed my view of them as people, and they can't get that back. By banning a book you're not making it go away, you're just outraging the people who love it into expressing how much they love it. You just end up bringing us anti book banners together, and believe me, you don't want that to happen.

I just wish people would stop being afraid. Teens need these books because, I know my life has been influenced by a piece of fiction, and I can't imagine who I'd be now if someone had taken that book from the shelves.

No one should be able to decide what you should and shouldn't read. Think for yourself and read what YOU want, and if it's been banned, it's probably a really, really good book.

*I'm sorry this is so ridiculously long, if you read it all I applaud you!*

YouTube Monday [1]

Mondays always seem to be a strange day for me, simply because Mondays are my back to school days and they tend to be hectic.

So, to fix this Monday problem I have decided to post a bookish video from YouTube every Monday.

My first video is one of my absolute favorite videos from John and Hank Green, also known as the Vlogbrothers. This video makes me smile every time I watch it. It was made right before Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows came out and Part 1 of the movie comes out in November, so we need to prepare. If you've never heard of Vlogbrothers or read anything by John Green I recommend you do that pronto.

I hope you love it as much as I do. :)



Let me know what you guys think!

Now, I'm off to do homework. DFTBA.

DFTBA = Don't forget to be awesome.