My Literary Secrets. Or. Amy and the truth bomb that went off and hurt all the feelings

People get rather attached to their literary heroes and heroines. The first time I suggested that Oliver Wilde could use a full stop or two, I got brutally murdered stares of disgust and keen hatred from my literary peers.  As a result. I love to rip on all the authors and humans in the world for almost anything. With love of course.

The Broke and The Bookish came up with this splendid idea of Top Ten Tuesday to join all the bookish bloggers together. While I don’t participate every Tuesday, this week’s theme caught my eye: Top Ten Blogging Confessions. What better way to get all shouty about things of relatively no value than to blame it on a theme? Here are my top ten literary based confessions:

1. Reading makes me not pay bills. Explanation? I do not own a bookmark. I have attempted owning bookmarks. I am very unrestrained by physics when it comes to taking them out of books and placing them somewhere I will find again. So generally ‘bookmark’ is a liberal term for me. I will use whatever is closest. My phone, a tissue, the corner of the bed sheet, and one time; my electricity bill. Lost that bad boy for a week.

2. I judge potential employers on what they read. In job interviews they ask me what I like to do. I respond with the classic: “I like to read”. They respond with something like, “oh do you read Dan Brown?!” “Fifty shades right?” “My son loves Matthey Riley.” No. I read better shit than that. This the equivalent of asking a classical guitarist if they like Rhianna. Authors that bang out some abysmal, made for cinema plot with jazzy character names, twice a year are pop-authors. Books you like are pop fiction. You have terrible taste in literature. Of course in any interview scenario I say something like: “Oh yeah, I loved The Davinci Code. Inspired.”

3. I still do love pop-authors. I read the Hunger Games in one sitting. I’m an absolute sucker for a great imagination. If you can make this boring ol’ world into a magical place with monsters and magic, I will love you. If I get to be a Shadowhunter for the afternoon you will get approval, no matter how quickly you pump it out. No matter the grammatical errors and change in voice a third of the way through the book.

4. I hate it when characters describe what they look like in the least subtle way possible. I don’t care if you are only just realising what you look like as you sit in front of a mirror at age 17.  I don’t want to know that your hair is chocolate brown and goes down to your nipples and always needs brushing out of your face by <insert male lead here>.  Similar goes for the ugly protagonist. I don’t want to picture you as a brick shit house. Please don’t describe how ugly you are to me.  If I want to see ugly, I’ll watch the finding-dead-body scenes on Bones.

5. I despise shock tactics. Saying god-awful things and claiming it as ‘raw’. Think: nails on a chalkboard but in a book. It’s a cheap way to get a reader’s attention. Or to get some sort of acclaim for ‘going there’. So all I have to do to get a Man-Booker Prize is open with a man with a needle in his eye? Cormac McCarthy and his ‘sodomising of dying men’? You are a sell-out sir.

6. I love to read in noisy places. I grew up in your average home, with 4+ children at any given time. You learn to fear the quiet. This usually means youngest sister is spraying the furniture with bleach. It is a magical moment when you get into the zone and you can block everything else out, the Zen moment. It’s when you stop reading and you start living in the book. This can still be acquired in quiet places, but it just doesn’t give you the same sense of achievement and enlightenment.

7. I’m not a fan of Jane Austen.

8. I can’t read on the beach. Man do I dislike the beach. Sand gets in between the pages of my book, it’s like getting sand in my soul. Fuck off sand. Other reasons: no place for creative body movement; critical to reading process, wind blows my pages around, and it is so bright. I spent my entire life reading in semi darkness so mum couldn’t see that I was reading when I was meant to be sleeping. Don’t give me all this light now. I don’t know what to do with it.

9. When I have to get through a book that I know will be a struggling I take it on the plane. The only thing more irritating than reading Emma, is talking to the people next to me on the plane. This had worked well for the majority of the books I struggle to get through. Namely every one of Austen’s books. If I am to dislike her, I must at least be educated about it. On the same thread, if I am reading a popular book at the time I will not read it on the plane because someone will inevitably say, “oh my god, how good is it! I love blah blah blah when he blah blah spoiler spoiler spoiler.” Thanks fellow human. Not only am I so impressed that you too can read, but now you have saved me the trouble of reading it.

1. You know when books get made into a movie and everyone is excited and angry at the same time. No one wants to see their favourite book immortalised on cinematic foolery. Filmmakers must walk a delicate line of budget and plot lines to achieve box office success. My confession is this: It irks me more when they change the hair colour of the main character more than missing out key parts of the book. What the hell does hair colour have to do with anything? Is a red head more expensive than a brunette? Do the raven-haired take longer to say their lines than blondes? MAKE ME UNDERSTAND!

I’m now going to go find a kindred spirit with the other bloggers and when they say, “you know what, Jane Austen is only okay”, I will respond with “Right! RIGHT!”