13 Plays For 2013

Happy New Year!

May 2013 be a wonderful reading year to everyone.

I had a great reading year in 2012. I completed my 50 books challenge and not to brag but I actually exceeded that number by two books. Oh yeah. Therefore, for 2013 I'm bumping up the number to 52 books, so one book per week. I'm excited already!

Apart from that, I'm also going to be doing another reading challenge called 13 Plays For 2013 where I have to read 13 plays for 2013. Simple enough. Only one rule: no more than one play for each playwright. Without further ado here are the thirteen classic plays I'm going to be devouring this year (may be subject to change):

Greek drama, family feuds, power, disillusionment, existentialism and life. Should be wonderful and confronting reads!

Banners are designed by me using various photographs of stage adaptations

Jekk Reads on YouTube

I've been spending a lot of time lately watching book review videos and even book hauls (these are strangely addictive) and so I thought I would contribute to the Booktuber community and start my very own channel.

So here's my first video. Enjoy!

Sports and beauty

I'm finally branching out and trying a genre I've never really had any interest on: sports biography. Maybe it's because of the upcoming Olympics or the 'athletic chic' fashion trend or maybe my mind's way of subconsciously telling me to start exercising but I'm really getting into sports and fitness lately. I'm actually annoyed at the fact that we don't have a sports channel.

So I'm just making do with reading sports biographies. Starting with Nadal: My Story. How could I possibly resist that cover. I'm really enjoying it so far. Nadal has always been one of those athletes that fascinated me. He just looks like one of those public figures who actually has a compelling story to tell, one that exists beyond the fame and what we see in the media.

I've recently formed a book club with some friends and our read of the month is Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. I've attempted to read this before but I found it to be such a bore but now that I have matured (I hope) I've found it wildly funny. The characters are brilliant and the lines that come out of their mouths are just delicious. No wonder quotes from the book seem to appear all the time on my Tumblr news feed.

The Passage by Justin Cronin

This book is a whale. Almost a thousand pages! With my Generation Y symptom, the 'low attention span', this took a while to read. There's also a lot of characters and I'm not good with names. The book's timeline spans decades and of course, the world is in peril.

All of this spells out one thing. The Passage by Justin Cronin is an epic. With a capital E. Epic. Actually no, in caps lock. EPIC. Add an exclamation.

EPIC!

It's also a vampire novel. I can hear you groaning. I can assure you this is no Twilight. The vampires here aren't covered in pretty sparkles. They're covered in human viscera. Actually, the 'virals' I pictured more as a zombie/vampire hybrid and they're more vicious and more horrifying than any vampire or zombie I've come across in a novel. These things are ruthless. 

It's quite hard to describe the plot because there's a lot going on here but all you need to know is that there's a central character. She's a little girl named Amy. The reason she's so special I won't give away here but in the first part of the book we read about where she came from and how the virus spread throughout the world. 

It then becomes a post-apocalyptic story and the story shifts and focuses on what's called the first colony. We don't exactly know what has happened with the rest of the world because the colonies have isolated themselves as a form of protection from the virals. The problem is they can't isolate themselves for much long. 

The first part of the book is outstanding. Cronin sets up the characters and the story really well here. Even though the premise is familiar (it reminded me of I Am Legend) and certainly not new (virus outbreak) it was still very electrifying and I was eager to know what was going to happen next.

All of a sudden the story is fast-forwarded by almost a century. The thrill of the previous part quickly wanes because of we're suddenly introduced to a different world and new characters. I hated that. I felt like I was just getting to know the previous characters and here I am suddenly being introduced to new people. It was like becoming popular at school then all of a sudden you're moved to another one.

The middle is the weakest for me. I can't even remember what happened for the most part because it was so uninteresting. I was ready to give up halfway through until I started to warm up to the newer characters. The story then starts to really get exciting. That was what I wanted from this novel all along: the thrill of a post-apocalyptic story with vampires. I was reading more literary books before this one and I was craving for lots of action and I was finally getting it. 

The Passage ends in a cliffhanger (or rather, CLIFFHANGER!) and I don't care if the next instalment is the size of War and Peace, I'm itching to read it. I'm just hoping we don't get introduced to a million new characters.

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Book 'poster' was created and edited by me. Book cover from here.

We Have Always Lived In The Castle by Shirley Jackson

I've always been interested in stories about a small community traumatised and scarred by a singular event, either past or present - from Camus' The Plague to Miller's terrifying play The Crucible - there's something about mass hysteria or mob tyranny that I find so fascinating and admittedly, a little bit exciting.

What Shirley Jackson does best in her novel We Have Always Lived In The Castle is how in the beginning she contained the hysteria and suppressed the mob making the inevitable panic (occurring later on) to spread as fiercely as a bushfire and as damaging as cancer. 

The novel is written from the perspective of Katherine Blackwood, who at eighteen years old is the youngest in the Blackwood family, or rather what's left of the family. Both Blackwood parents died as well as an aunt and a younger brother when arsenic was mixed with the sugar and then sprinkled on their blackberries. Constance, the older sister was blamed because she was the only one who did not put sugar on her blackberries. The uncle survived the poisoning and Katherine skipped the meal.

Only three are left to reside in the Blackwood residence and they live in near isolation from the rest of the town after being casted away after the incident.

The novel moves like a slow, seductive and deliciously disturbing dance and everything feels dark. I only experienced a slight glimmer of light from the tender relationship between the two sisters. But even their relationship had its dark moments.

Everyone is cruel to everyone. The townspeople are frightening. The Blackwood family are cheerlessly bizarre. I don't recall the weather being mentioned in the book but it felt like every passing day had a dark grey hovering above it, with an occasional downpour with no promise of sunshine.

The characters are beautifully complex and enigmatic and the reveal at the end felt like a sudden chilly breeze: abrupt, disconcerting at first but then it all makes sense.

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Book 'poster' was created and edited by me. Book cover from here.

The Magicians by Lev Grossman

You know that post-Harry Potter depression you went through after you saw the last Harry Potter movie? 

I may have found a fix. The Magicians by Lev Grossman is like a mish mash of the worlds of Hogwarts, Narnia and Middle Earth. It's like postmodern fantasy novel with actual references from famous fantasy stories. 

It starts when our main character, Quentin, stumbles into a magical school and is forced to take a bizarre examination before being allowed entry. THe difference between Hogwarts and Brakebills is that in the latter, magic learning is extremely serious. I don't want to explain the whole process with how the magic works there but it's a lot more complicated than a simple swish and flick! It's more realistic and the entire novel examines the real psychological and emotional impact of being a wizard within the context of the real non-magical world.

Despite going to a magical college most of the characters are depressed and unsatisfied. I would recommend this to any undergraduate students because that feeling of having absolutely no idea what you're going to do with your life is probably the primary theme of the novel and it is so familiar. The thrill and anxiety of an unknown future ahead.

Unlike the Harry Potter books with a whole school year dedicated to one book. Grossman only uses half of the novel to narrate their entire magical education. It instead focuses on what happens after, which the Harry Potter books didn't. 

I'm reading the second novel now, The Magician King and I can't wait until he writes a third one.

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Image edited by me from this original image. Second image from my Instagram @jesuevalle.

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar was written in the first person and it couldn't have been written in any other way. The immediacy  and urgency of the words allows the readers to feel exactly what she is feeling. Most books allows its readers to sympathise and relate to the characters they describe but this managed to make you feel like you are the character. So when she was descending into madness you felt like your mind was slowly eroding as well. When she doesn't sleep you suddenly felt lethargic. This is a dangerous book to read but it is well worth that risk.

The very first sentence mentions the Rosenbergs, a couple sentenced to death by electric chair for passing on sensitive information to the Soviets. It sets the scene perfectly. Historically, it reminded readers of the post-war ennui, the paranoia, the simmering panic brought upon a looming nuclear war. The image of the electric chair foreshadows the shock treatments Esther, the protagonist, undergoes. The execution, an untimely death, seems fitting for the story of a woman faced with the recourse of self-execution. 

The writing is what you would expect from a poet. Heavy use of imagery and emotive language but there is a plainness and frankness to it that made the prose complex without being overly rich. Plath's voice is strong and unique. I have not come across a narrator or a character like her but one thing that caught me by surprise was the humour she managed to inject into it. At times she was incredibly witty and darkly funny. Her sense of humour added another layer to her character I was not expecting and fortunately it did not disrupt the heavy, dire tone of the novel.

This is a hard book to recommend but it's one of those books everyone should read at least once in their life.

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Top image was edited by me. Bottom image is owned by me.