When your book BFF and you disagree over a book...

Yup so Epic Reads on youtube is my most favourite thing ever! The two girls are exactly like my book bff and I and it's hilarious to watch their videos and be like "this is us" and so on.

Every reader and their bff have a book, author and/or series that they disagree on which at the time is shocking and just makes you, like the video, tear up your friendship contract or whatever you have to prove this friendship. However though it's a common thing this happens, for instance Louise lent me Kat Zhang's Whats Left of Me and I loved it. She on the otherhand hated it and I got to keep the book. She also lent me Inside Out by Maria V Snyder, an author who I adore (commonly known for the Poison Study and Magic series) but I could not share my love for that series. It was just too bland. Or maybe I was used to her magical lands with wonderful creatures and characters.

But you will get past this small bump in the rolercoaster that is the life of a reader and disccover new books and worlds that will captivate you and your book bff. Just remember whilst these worlds end, characters might die but your friend will always understand your emotional outbursts at midnight or whatever time you send her a message like "I hate Veronica Roth. WHY, WHY?" especially when your friend told you the big spoiler (Hate you louise for doing this).

Love. Austen vs the world!

So this has been on my mind for a while.

The notion of love is complex. Not to sound completely stupid and naive but I honestly thought by now I'd have met someone and everything would be okay and dandy and yeah. Obviously that isn't to be which doesn't actually bother my nineteen year old self because I am happy at this moment in time. Yes there are the occasional moments where I think it'd be nice to have someone but honestly right now I love my friends, my books and just how my life is that way.

I recall a moment where I turned around to someone and said I wanted to be married by 25 and they didn't understand my reasons behind that. Well mainly it's because through novels I've been shown that love almost always has a happy ending by that age (minus a few aka Jane Eyre). I've not really had that moment where I met the one. Do I believe in that? I'm not sure I guess. Miranda in The Tempest is a girl who never seeing another man in her life falls quickly and although everything works out in the end, I don't think I could do that. Maybe my love would be like Elizabeth and Darcy, a slow turnaround where the passion fuels the love or like Austen's Sense and Sensibility where Elinor knows she has a love but cannot have him or Marianne who realises he's been there all along helping her. Maybe this is just ramblings of a english student but it's something that crosses my mind a lot.

My friend Louise recently mentioned my love of Austen, but the reason I personally love Austen is because I grew up reading her books from a very young age. From the age of ten I wanted to be Elizabeth (Everyone does, it's a moment of being lost in Austen) and then I would love to be Catherine and eventually Marianne. Yes Marianne even if she is very foolish in love. But they're all strong women who have their way of being loyal, remarkable women who work (in that Georgian way) to get their chance of happiness, a historical fact that was rare to have. Is it truly so bad to want to be loved? Of course in the modern society, we marry for love and so the work of our ancestors have been forgotten...Is it obvious I'm very old-fashioned?

But last year I read Anna Karenina where I was immediately swept into the forbidden romance but the idea of soulmates standing so clear against the blurry russian world. A quote stands out so well in that novel, it's just how they compare love to an illness and I do believe it could be true.

"It's like scarlet fever, one has to get over it"
"Then one should invent a way of innoculating love, like vaccination"

For some reason they are the first words I think of when I hear someone be "Lovesick". But books are to blame with their never-ending words of romance and how they make you feel emotions you don't expect to feel.

An example could be the recently film-adapted The Fault In Our Stars by John Green. I was in tears reading it on an ebook. Then I thought I'd been cheated of my money and had to buy the paperback (Turns out the end actually is the end c'est tragique!) but that was a book that stepped up my idea of romance. Maybe girls want flowers and chocolate or to be told I love you endlessly but Hazel-Grace and Augustus had their Okay? Okay and that wasn't okay with me. I cried like a newborn at their beautifully tragic lovestory, but now I can say it made me realise that even the smallest touches and words are everything, that Augustus remains in all of our hearts and minds not because he's a dreamboat but because he knew he was dying but he still gave Hazel his wish and he still made sure she was put before his own health and I don't know how I could not love someone so selfless.

But when I figure this big complex mess, I'll try to write about it.