I’m home again! Stockholm was exhausting, but so worth it. I’ll probably be stuck inside for a week or a month or God knows how long, but it was nice. Exhausting, but nice.

It’s so hard to describe to people how much energy it takes to act “normal”. Not flinch when people come too close or – even worse – touch me. Not back myself up against a wall to have at least SOME sense of stability. Smile. Chat. Be at least somewhat interesting, which, I’m telling you, isn’t easy when you get out as little as I do. Not stare at people who manage all of the above without any effort whatsoever.

It takes so much energy, and after three days around other people non-stop – even if one of those days basically was laying in a heap with my siblings, hung over and eating junk food – I was just about to break down. This happened on the train back home. There were too many people, on all sides of me. Behind me, to my right and to my left, and when the person in the chair in front of me leaned his back rest down towards me about two inches I flew out of my chair and found myself another seat. This of course meant that I could get kicked out of it at any time, seeing as it might’ve belonged to somebody else, but I’m glad to report that they did not.

It wasn’t a fun ride home, but after a couple of hours the crowd eased up and I could pull out my computer and get some editing done.

I suppose I should talk about the trip for a bit, because it was pretty awesome. I’ll start with saying that all pics in this post save the last one is from the inside of my sister’s new shiny apartment. It has an awesome vintage theme to it. So sad I’m too lazy for that sort of thing.

Anyway, on Friday she and her roommate had a party to celebrate their new flat, which is ALLTHEIRS. It’s a rental, but their names are on the lease, which is not anything to take for granted in Stockholm. Most apartments there are to-buy, and when they’re not you have to save up queue time for decades to get a decent one, so of course people hold on to them forever, subletting them and a lot of the time you have to move several times a year because of this AWESOME situation. So they’re excited about this place, and it’s very cute, although out in the suburbs. Then again, suburbs are seriously underrated.

I was nervous that it would be a big party, but it wasn’t huge or anything. Twenty or so people, most boys, for some reason, and all very nice. I talked about knitting with this gay boy for some time, and I can say that it was when he started talking about what shades of pink that was acceptable on a bloke that I decided that he was in fact not straight. Stereotypical, yes, but I was totally right.

This was, I think, the first party since I was 19 that I wasn’t tempted to bum a smoke from someone, which is all kinds of awesome, actually.

The two youngest attendants, my brother and the brother of A’s roommate, babies at the young age of 23 and 24, passed out in a corner, and I kept having to go poke one of them to see that he was still alive. Because, yes, my dear brother didn’t move or make a noise for like four hours, and I got all mum-like worried about him. The other one was snoring, so I didn’t worry so much about him.

The night ended at about 4 am, when A. and I fell into her bed and promptly fell asleep, but not until she, who has extreme phobia of vomit bent over the edge of the bed and threw up. She wasn’t even upset about it, which I guess proves just how drunk she was.

I’m so too old for this stuff.

Saturday we went and bought chips, crisps, bacon, hot dogs, chocolate and litre upon litre of Pepsi and consumed it all laying down. I was the least hung over, I believe, and actually got some writing done while the rest of them moaned and complained and watched bad movies.

There’s an awesome film clip from the party, which starts with one of the guys talking into the camera, all serious, before skipping off to the next room over, the camera pans out and shows the whole party dancing madly. It looks like it’s arranged and from a music video or something, but it so wasn’t. Am sad that the guy refused to let us upload it, after having watched it the next day.

On Sunday we had lunch with A. at a small thai place. The staff looked kind of panicked when I asked for something with “no flour, no soy sauce, no coconut milk”, because they didn’t even know what gluten WAS despite their advertising saying that they had gluten free options, but actually scrounged something up. It was glass noodles with vegetables and chicken (because glass noodles with just vegetables and salt sounded too damn depressing), and I put some sweet chili sauce on it and it was delicious, despite sounding boring as hell.

I was worried about cross contamination, but I didn’t get sick, so I think they managed it, which made me very, very happy. I didn’t have such luck on Friday, when I ate all of three chips that had been fried in oil that “may or may not” have been used to fry chicken nuggets in as well. THREE.

Which I guess goes to show that I am really sensitive, and maybe that will shut my Mum up when she thinks I’m overreacting…

After A. went to work I dragged E. with me to various yarn and book shops. The haul was this. I have no idea what the blue yarn is, but it feels exclusive and was kind of expensive. Kind of in the same vein as Manos or Malabrigo. It was in a bargain bin without tags and I forgot to ask, because I was a little stressed out.

Then we went to the sci-fi-book shop in Gamla Stan, which is very cute and old, all cobble stone streets and old houses, some dating back to the 14th century. It’s a massive tourist attraction, but fortunately it’s not summer yet, so it wasn’t too bad. The bookshop was really big and awesome. It had huge amounts of books in English, so many that I didn’t even bother going to The English Bookshop, as I had planned. I wandered back and forth for probably an hour, looking for names I recognised. I ended up buying the Modern Faerie Tale books by Holly Black, Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman (because people won’t shut up about it) and on a whim, an anthology called Love Is Hell, which sounds cheesy but is actually pretty awesome. So far I’ve only read two of the stories, but I really love the one by Scott Westerfeld. He builds up this whole world where humans have done away with all inconvenient things, like sleep, illnesses, hormones, and so on, and then, the kids in it get as a school project to try to live with these things again, and find that it is pretty awesome.

The best part about this was probably that I asked this girl who worked there (who by the way was awesome, chatting to me about how great it is with anthologies and finding new authors that way, and understanding the importance of matching sets of books) if they’d gotten in White Cat by Holly Black yet. I knew it was a recent release, but not exactly how recent. As in, the release date is May 4th and I was asking for it on May 3rd.

The awesome part, however, was that they’d gotten a few copies in, and already sold it out. The day before it was supposed to his the stores! And when I tweeted this Holly Black replied to it, which made me squee because I’m such a fan girl for YA authors.

PS. Tansy, if you look really close you can see Siren Beat in A’s bookcase! I let her borrow it, convinced that it will be the perfect introduction to urban fantasy. She hasn’t read it yet, though, the wench.

Ah, yes. Here we go again.

I love Maureen Johnson. I really, really do. She is a somewhat, um, special twitterer, and her blog is awesome too (and when people say “prove it!” I link them to this post).

So, one might say I’m a fangirl, despite only having read two of her books, of which one has been successfully banned from libraries and such things. When I read it I went “… bnuh?” because it’s the fluffiest little piece of fluff ever written. I couldn’t for my life understand why it would’ve been banned. Except, you know, for the fact that it was about two girls falling in love.

Fast forward to yesterday when she wrote an almost serious post about how to write to an author. Very funny, very informative, but what really hit me was her telling the story of one e-mail she got. It was a librarian who had bought her book Let It Snow (it’s three shorter stories, one by Maureen, one by John Green and one by Lauren Myracle), read the first few pages and found it horrifying and awful with strippers and pole dancers, oh my! So, the librarian promptly threw the five copies she’d bought into the trash and wrote Maureen a rather weird e-mail, telling her she didn’t CARE about the lily white minds of children.

(Insert WILL SOMEBODY PLEASE THINK ABOUT THE CHILDREN here.)

Thing is, she also provided the text that said librarian found so objectionable. I’m going to share it now, because some people are just crazycakes, and I found it very interesting what Maureen said about it:

Here’s the entire pole dancing mention she’s referring to–it’s in the fifth paragraph, on the first page: “I realize Jubilee is a bit of a stripper name. You probably think I have heard the call of the pole. But no. If you saw me, you’d get the idea pretty quickly that I’m not a stripper.” That’s it. That’s the reason five books went in the trash.

Note that a librarian throwing a book in the trash isn’t banning. Banning is when a parent takes offense to a certain book, petitions to have it removed and may or may not succeed. Often, I have to say, the librarians are pretty awesome and fight to keep the books around, but such is not the case here.

So, yeah. I thought this one fit nicely with my previous post of the banning of Anne Frank’s Diary, although I may need a tag to find all these posts if I’m going to keep writing about it…

Other than that I don’t have much to say. Except that I finally feel like my book isn’t kicking me like a schoolyard bully. I might actually have beaten it into submission, hooray!

So, I bought books. Again. I had some crazy idea of not buying any until the sequel to The Demon’s Lexicon comes out, but then I realised that’s not until late MAY, and I, um, promptly went and bought these books. Plus a sixth that I couldn’t find a pic of that was bigger than 200 pixels tall, and that is just not on.

Four in English, two in Swedish, three fiction, two non-fiction, one biography.

Magic Under Glass by Jaclyn Dolamore. This is a book I normally wouldn’t have bought, but after the white-washing drama I felt the need to support the author. Even though I ended up buying the UK edition, which wasn’t involved in that particular shit storm at all.

Ash by Malinda Lo. A lesbian retelling of Cinderella. Say no more. And also? This cover is STUNNING. I could stare at it all day. I actually entered a contest to win this book, but I never win contests so I bought it anyway. I guess if I should for some reason win this one I’ll have a book give away or something. Don’t hold your breath, though, my shitty luck is legendary!

Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld. I am kind of sad I didn’t get the pretty American cover for this one, but it was oh so much cheaper. I also thought the title was spelled “Levithian” until I went to google for pics. And I’m vainly hoping that the illustrations are the same on the inside as in the American edition because they are absolutely gorgeous.

I Don’t Want to Be Crazy by Samantha Schutz. I’m not entirely sure why I bought this book, because it’s written on verse. I just hope it won’t rhyme. It does seem interesting, though, because it’s about a girl who was physically incapicated by anxiety attacks, which I recognise myself in. We shall see what I think of this one.

Fettpaniken by Marie Carlsson. This one is in Swedish. I got it from the library, and am about halfway through it now. I looked back at all the page numbers I’ve written down to take notes from, and um, I realised that I’ve pretty much written down every second or third page. So I bought it. Plus it was only 44 SEK. Only book of this batch that was actually on sale. (We have huge book sales specials all through February and March in Sweden, people buy books like mad.)

And the sixth, not pictured, is kind of boring. It’s a lexicon of ingredients with gluten in them, because I feel reactions from things I shouldn’t, like for example coconut milk. There’s an E-number-whatsitcalled in it, and I’m curious if there’s gluten in that, or if I’m just imagining things. This one is constantly checked out from the library so I just went and bought it instead.

In all, I’m not happy with my library’s selection of gluten allergy books, cookbooks and just random non-fiction in all, because the former is either in English and using flours I can’t find here or in Swedish and exclusively for meat eaters, and the latter is hidden in a sea of dieting books that I can’t stomach digging through. So, boo.

I’m really tired. That’s why I’m rambling. Tomorrow I will translate the International Women’s Day post I wrote for my Swedish blog and post it here, even though it’s no longer the 8th…

Oh my God. It’s no wonder I am so good at writing angsty, depressing, outright suicidal type prose. See, over the last few weeks I’ve been reading a lot of library books, and there is only one tiny shelf in English, so mostly I’ve had to make do with Swedish authors, as I hatehatehate reading translated works. And in the last fortnight I’ve read books with the following plots:

1) A bullied girl who kind of by accident ends up at a party with her worst bullies. The highlight of the evening includes four or five drunk teenage boys, an even drunker lonely fifteen-year-old girl, a BROKEN BEER BOTTLE and a secluded bit of forest. That’s all I’m going to say about that one.

2) A boy who, without knowing that his sister, best friend and girlfriend are inside, sets fire to a school. No, none of them make it out alive.

3) A mother with untreated post partum depression, who gets enough, and just drives away from her family. Her daughter is four, so it’s been going on for some time. It also turns out that her mother AND grandmother had similar problems, that her daughter has anger issues and, yes, it’s very much Norén drama over it all. I think. I’ve never seen a Norén play, they seem too depressing.

4) A mostly funny tale of drunken escapades, which involves broken hearts, dramatic turns and um, two suicides. Only one succeesful, though, if that helps.

5) An actually pretty awesome book about a disabled woman and a triangle love drama, but it also includes being kicked out of your home because you’re gay, being put up for adoption because you’re disabled and um, some closet alcoholism.

That is, all these books were good in their own ways, really, but as I’ve given away the plots for them I won’t tell you the titles. Except for #5, which is named Udda, by Sara Löwestam. It’s absolutely brilliant, funny and poignant and the humour makes the sad parts all the more powerful. I absolutely love the character Lelle in this book. So, so much. Any and all Swedes reading this should buy it.

So, yes. I feel the need to read something in English now. I might have to place an order for Suite Scarlett and Scarlett Fever, because I HAVE TO HAVE THEM. I’ve only read #1, though, so I feel justified.

Nevermind that I’m trying to not spend all my money on books. Nevermind that at all…

I meant to write a post and run away, but somehow got sucked into my pages section and… got stuck. For about two hours. Um. What was I going to say again? Oh yes, a few hardly important things, but I suppose after the last few days of marathon posts something short and vague will be a nice change.

First, I bought jeans leggings today. I never in my life would have, but my sister wore them on her ridiculously skinny legs over Christmas, and I got used to the idea. Basically, they’re made up to look like skinny jeans, but there is an ELASTIC WAISTBAND, which is a deity-of-your-choice-sent for people like me, who carry all their weight in their hip area, which means that normal sizing is not your friend.

Oddly, I found them at H&M. Their plus size section may be two racks and three shelves, shuffled into the far back corner, but there was actually three pairs of these contraptions in this small space, one pair which was my size. My Mum tried to tell me they “sat too low” but I am – despite my size – not ready to wear mum style trousers just yet, thank you.

Before we went I put on make-up – foundation, eyeliner, eye shadow and mascara – and felt so damn good about myself that I bought some more eye shadow. One brown and grown up, one crazy blueish green for when I want to look like I am sixteen and emo. (When I was emo I only wore black, but maybe times change, or something.)

Oddly, I also feel the urge to Do Something About My Eyebrows. Is this a sign of my mental state improving? It feels like it!

Then we had to go home because there were so many people and I could feel my anxiety rising. I tried to explain, on the ride home, how I love my family dearly, but with seeing them so very often I have no spoons left for meeting friends and such. I know they are just worried that I’m lonely, and are trying to be supportive rather than suffocating, but um, it’s having the opposite effect.

So instead of going home and having coffee and longwinded conversations about nothing with my parents I asked Mum to drop me off by my flat and I cuddled with kitten and finished two books. Well, I finished one and decided that the other bored me too much to finish – I only had fifty pages or so to go, but it’s non-fiction, so I’m giving myself a pass.

It’s in Swedish, titled I Trygghetsnarkomanernas Land, by David Eberhard. Parts of it was interesting actually, but some was booooring and very full of conservative politics, blaming our former, left wing government for most about the panic the book is about. Because it is about how we are so afraid of everything, how the mentality of our society is pretty much that of a person crippled by social anxiety of the worst kind. It goes through the statistics of awful things happen; it states several times that “the mortality rate of a human being is 100%”, which, you know, is true. Note that it doesn’t actually advocate that you should do these things, it just tells you the risks or chances, if you will.

* It speaks of the idiocy of pregnant women going off antidepressants, because the risk of the baby having difficulty breathing directly after being born going up from 2 to 6-12 cases in 10,000. One would think that the mother being mentally unstable and contemplating suicide being worse for the baby than a condition which usually can be remedied without problems; almost every single child this happens to survives without any physical damage whatsoever.

* It speaks of a Swedish TV-programme (Kalla Fakta) who let a nursing mother drink two glasses of wine, and then express the milk so they could analyse it. The alcohol in the milk after this? Less than what you can find in a carbonated beverage of your choice.

* It states that the chance of dying of the bird flu (the book is old, so it doesn’t talk about swine flu) is 1 in 60 million.

* It shows that the chance of dying in a plane crash if you travel by plane every single day is 1 in 20,000 years.

* It speaks about smoking and the chances of getting lung cancer; it’s roughly 3 in 10,000 people. It also speaks of heart diseases, which smoking is said to cause, and points out that the rate of this illness is lower in countries were over 50% of the population are smokers.

Very interesting reading, if you have the patience to sift through the right wing politics that’s all over the place, despite the author claiming to be politically unbiased.

The other book, though, was absolutely amazing. It’s called What I Was, written by Meg Rosoff, and I now want to read everything she has ever written. It’s very, very British, takes place in some dreary, grey near-the-coast town in 1962. The protagonist – it’s first person, so you never learn his name – is stuck in a private school (public school, the Brits call it, crazy people that they are), one that isn’t famous for great students or even amazing results, but as he’s been kicked out of two schools already this will have to do.

He’s rather indifferent until he meets a boy living in a hut nearby, at which point he suddenly wants to do well enough to be kept in this school, after not giving a damn about the two before. The best thing about this book is that it does NOT go where you expect it to. Rather the opposite, actually, which is always nice to see in a book.

I love the language (very British, very dry, and never shies away from letting the protagonist sound like and act like a total moron), I love the history baked in, and I absolutely adore the setting; it feels very real, with the boring town, the grey weather, the freezing ocean and everything.

I am very fascinated by this book. It’s on the short side, with tiny chapters, and is very economical with words. That is something I’m learning just how hard it is – it’s easy to spend hundreds of words on a description when a single sentence could work just as well, and probably provide a bit of ambigiouity (which I cannot spell to save my life!), which often makes for a better story.

Of course, it’s much, much harder to write this way, which is part of why I love this book so much. It must’ve been absolute hell to write, but it makes for gorgeous prose.

The first two chapters (no more than 1200 words total) can be read at Meg Rosoff’s webpage. Check them out here, and then go buy her books! I know I’m going to hunt the other ones down now…

And now that I have informed the world of these two books I must make popcorn and sit down to do some editing, and of course, play with my new shiny ipod. And NOT sleep as I accidentally napped for three hours today.

(I have a different cover, as seen here, but I love this one more!)

Book 48 on my list for the last six months (only two more to go!) is Deerskin by Robin McKinley. My Australian book fairy sent it to me, as she tends to pick up books that she thinks I would like, or that are relevant to my current writing, and sends them to me in various parcels at outrageous postage costs.

This one was relevant to Eld, which I’ve been writing on for a bit over a year, although possibly not as much as Tender Morsels, which I read this past summer. What the two books have in common is that they are based on fairytales, although reworked and twisted and turned amazing and awful and everything inbetween. As somebody who grew up on Astrid Lindgren tales, I absolutely love fairytales, and enjoyed both these books immensely.

This one is about the daughter of the most beautiful woman in seven kingdoms, princess Lissla Lissar. Or is it Lissar Lissla? No matter, she goes by Lissar for the most part.

The book starts out slow, telling the whole story of how her parents met and how they are so splendid that nobody cares to look twice in Lissar’s direction. Even her nurse maid is enarmoured by her beautiful mother, and when she dies – the reason is rumoured to be an illness that made her less pretty, which is so not acceptable – everyone is grieving her, nobody realising that Lissar has lost her mother.

A prince in a kingdom far, far away sends her a puppy from his best dog to help her through this time (in fact, the only person acknowledging her loss), and while the kingdom mourns Lissar raises the puppy, named Ash, to a loyal, intelligent and of course beautiful dog. They play and she takes an interest in gardening, and things almost seem turn for the better. That is, until her father realises that Lissar, as she grows older, is starting to resemble her mother more and more. In the end Lissar is forced to run from his madness and violence, so traumatised by the ordeal that she has forgotten nearly everything. Indeed, for a good portion of the book she doesn’t even remember her name.

The amnesia is written beautifully; it can’t be an easy thing to write, but McKinley does so in a way that is both agonising and amazing and spot on, and the language she uses for it is very dreamy and yet direct. It’s a beautiful book, in all, and I do want to read more of her stuff. A small snippet of the vagueness:

It was slipping away even as she spoke; she could no longer remember what it was about, only that it had been horrible. The horror welled up again, but no images accompanied it; just blank, unthinking terror and revulsion. She shuddered with the strength of it, and put out a hand to seize a stick of wood, felt the dull prick of its bark against her palm gratefully. She tossed it into the fire and thrust her face so near that her eyes wept with the heat.

Ash sat down again and snuggled up against Lissar’s back, with her head on her shoulder, as she had done before the hearth in their old… “No!” said Lissar. “Whatever it is – it is over with. Ash and I have escaped, and are free.” Her words sounded hollow, but the defiance in them drove the horror back a few paces, and she lay down again and fell into sleep.

It was daylight for a while, and then dark, and then daylight again. And then Lissar began to recognise that she was waking up for good…

In all, it’s a good lesson in the school of “you don’t have to spell everything out, your readers aren’t stupid”. Which is something I need to become better at; trusting that the story carries itself and all that.

Not that I have any readers. Yet.

And now, as promised, I’d like to talk about something else entirely, which I’m sure most of you are happy about (sorry, I’m only this word count obsessed one month out of the year). Over the last few weeks I’ve been reading books of a very specific topic, which is about being fat/overweight/heavy/pick-word-of-your-choice. And that in itself has made me realise (once again!) how fucking obsessed by weight and appearance our society is. Because, okay. I weave. This means I at least once a week have to sit through half an hour of gossiping with the older generation. I’d say the average age in this group is around 70. Some are up towards 85, one is as young as 50-something-odd-years. And you’d think that by that age you would be sure with yourself and stop judging each other by what we eat and when we eat it.

Sadly this is not the case.

Yesterday I came home seething because one of the old ladies had brought the very Swedish baked goods rulltårta. It’s basically a sponge cake, baked in a huge pan so it’s only half an inch or so thick. You spread jam or cream or something on it, roll it up and cut in one inch pieces, getting a ton of thin spiral slices.

I hate rulltårta with a passion. I don’t even know why. Maybe it’s the jam. I’m very particular about jam. I only like blueberry or raspberry jam, and there cannot be any pieces of fruit in it. I don’t particularly like sponge cake either, and could have it or leave it any day of the week. So, when it was served up I politely declined, to which the following conversation happened. And I don’t remember who said what, but there were about eight of us there and they were ALL talking to me at this point, so assume that this isn’t the same person speaking…

“No, thanks, I’m good.”

“There’s no gluten in sponge cake!”

“Oh, of course not, don’t be silly.”

(Um. None of these people apparently know that there is gluten in FLOUR, but as I’m to keep eating it until I’ve done the scary test so it won’t come back negative I let this one slide.)

“Are you sure you don’t want one?”

“Just a little one!”

“No, thanks.”

“Oh, you are so strong!”

“I wish I was that strong.”

“Maybe I don’t want one after all.”

“Maybe we should all put ours back and be as STRONG as Kaia.”

“Are you sure you don’t want one?”

“Yes, I’m sure, thanks.”

It’s so utterly depressing to me that 70-year-old ladies waste their time on this sort of crap. Are we never going to get too old for this? I guess not. It makes me really sad, actually, so I’d like to spend some time writing about the three books I’ve read over the last few weeks, because there needs to be more books like these out there. Because we need to remember that not looking like people do on TV (which, incidentally, only 2% of all women can match without starving themselves half to death, and I’m not knocking those who can, let’s be clear on that) is not a death sentence. And if somebody don’t want a damn cookie it (hopefully) have nothing to do with her inner demons, and all to do with that she doesn’t feel like eating that cookie right then.

Okay, so that is very rarely the case, because we’ve been conditioned to fat shaming, but one can hope, right?

The first book is non-fiction. It’s Lessons From the Fat-O-Sphere: Quit Dieting and Declare a Truce With Your Body, in which Kate Harding and Marianne Kirby, who both run amazing blogs (here and here), debunk some of the most common misconceptions about weight, dieting, and everything that comes with it. Most of the book is written by the two of them, but they have brought in a few contributors with various short pieces, some about stuff like being a fit model (that is, being a perfect size 18 and have clothes sewn to fit you exactly, so that the clothing companies know what a size 18 actually look like), and others with more directly motivational pieces.

In short, there are a lot of good tips in this book, a lot of addresses to websites, a lot of stuff resources, although sadly the clothing stores section I cannot use as I am not in the U.S. I underlined stuff on almost every page (yes, Jenn, I so did), and it’s really hard to find a piece that is short enough to quote here without seriously violating copyright while making you GO OUT THERE and buy your own copy, so let me just say that my favourite bit is the one by Lesley Kinsel, who runs the blog Fatshionista, not to be confused with the LJ community Fatshionista (I’m not sure how on earth they ended up with the same name, but there you go) where she speaks about that thing so many women does – buying clothes too small to “motivate” themselves to lose weight.

In this piece she points out that “… it’s not my body’s responsibility to fit into some frilly container, arbitrarily shaped by someone who doesn’t even know me. It’s not my body’s fault a size 20 won’t fit, it’s the size 20’s fault …” and goes on to speak about how buying a too small dress to guilt yourself into losing weight is awful on so many levels because it assumes that your fat body isn’t worth wearing beautiful clothing. It’s not exactly rocket science, and really, so very obvious, but it’s still amazing to hear it put that simply.

Because come on, how many of us think that fat acceptance is okay for OTHERS, and that we will totally get on that, once we lose twenty pounds? I know I did. Still do, sometimes. And believe me, Kate and Marianne talks sternly to their readers about that, while admitting to themselves that they do still think that from time to time. Because they are not superwomen. They’re human. And that makes this book go from preachy to amazing. At least in my opinion.

Big Fat Manifesto by Susan Vaught is fiction and YA, I think. The main character is seventeen year old Jamie Carcaterra, who is fat. She does drama, writes for the school paper and is active and outgoing and oh, has a boyfriend. In all, she’s nothing like the cliché of a fat person (which is sad, I mean, that we have a stereotype for these people).

It all starts when Jamie starts writing a column for the school paper named Fat Girl. In it she writes about what it’s like to be fat, how difficult it is to find clothing, how she fights against stereotypes and feel the need to be upfront about these things so that people can see what it’s really like.

In one of the first chapters Jamie’s boyfriend Burke decided to undergo gastric by-pass surgery. Jamie doesn’t like it, is convinced that he will die and has a very hard time getting to terms with it when he goes through with it anyway. I really like how Vaught illustrates all the things you don’t get from glossy brochures or five minutes segments on TV, stuff like how big his stomach will be afterwards (the size of a thumb), what the effects of eating a brownie is (nothing you want to remember) and most of all, how he still WANTS the damn food even though he shouldn’t be hungry.

Also, the contrasts between the two of of them is kind of chilling. See, both Jamie and Burke are big, but while he can eat five or six brownies in a sitting and Jamie has a BOX of chocolate bars in her locker to give to him throughout the month, Jamie never eats in front of people. The only exception is in her own home, and even then, if her friends are with her, she’ll only have one bowl even though she hasn’t eaten all day and is really hungry for a lot more. And then he goes on to have an elective surgery because his parents have money, while Jamie’s parents have to research whether their health insurance would even cover such a thing, APOLOGISING to her all the while that they can’t afford to pay out of pocket. Of course, Jamie is against this procedure, but that doesn’t mean she hasn’t thought about it, like every fat person out there.

I really like the minor characters as well, most notably Jamie’s friends, Freddie and NoNo, although the (former) vegan in me is a bit frowny about the stereotype painted of veganism in NoNo, who quite seriously tells her friends that if research comes out to show that plants feel pain when you eat them she’ll just start eating nuts and seeds and fruit that has fallen from trees. She’s, of course, also bone thin. I know it’s for comic relief, but it really grates on you to see these stereotypes, because they’re far from true. I know plenty of vegans and vegetarians that are quite healthy, thank you, and in a book that is all about breaking out of the stereotype for fat people, we are instead served THIS stereotype?

It didn’t sit so well with me, but the rest of the book is brilliant.

Bet Me by Jennifer Crusie is a book I’ve been recommended countless times, so finally I bought it and put it in my to-read-shelf for forever. I really enjoy Jenny’s blog Argh Ink, in which she writes about writing, gives tips about writing and in all, is a lot more meta than most people out there. For example she posted a chapter from a work in progress and asked her readers to tell her what works/what does not work. My favourite post, though is the one about the Don’t Look Down Theory of Writing.

Back to the book.

Bet Me is the story about Minverva Dobbs, who has spent her whole life being utterly practical, extremely ashamed of her weight and refusing to eat carbs. Or trying to refuse them. In the first chapter she’s dumped by a guy she doesn’t like anyway, is about to be the (fat) maid of honour at her (thin) sister’s wedding and a bet is placed, leading to the ridiculously handsome Calvin Morrisey (or is it Morissey?) asking her out.

And, okay, a lot of this book is standard romance novel speak, but what makes it amazing is the way her weight is woven into it. Because Min has to learn not only to eat doughnuts (by the end of the book I wanted to scream OMG THERE ARE MILLIONS OF COOKIES THAT TASTE BETTER), but also that using butter and/or olive oil when you cook is sometimes necessary, that dredging chicken in flour before you cook it isn’t just “to add carbs”, and so on. It’s very powerful, the way she has to learn that eating is necessary and you are not a bad person for requiring food to survive, and more than that, how Cal actually doesn’t see the fat girl shoving food down her throat when he looks at her, he sees, well, a woman who truly enjoys food and if she could only freaking EAT IT she would be feeling so much better about herself.

I’m going to quote the part that actually had me tearing up, because, well, you’ll see. If you sit down and read all of it.

“Rehearsal dinner dress?” Min said. “Why –”

“I found something for you that will be slimming.” Nanette shook her head at her eldest daughter, the disappointment. “Make sure the hem is in the right place. If it cuts at your knees your legs will look like fence posts.”

“Thank you, Mother,” Min said, figuring this was a fight she didn’t care about. She just felt tired.

Her mother stopped and met her eyes. “I know you think I’m awful. But I know how this world works. And it’s not kind to fat people, Min. It’s especially not kind to fat women. I want to see you happy and safe, married to a good man, and it’s not going to happen if you don’t lose that weight.”

“She’s not fat,” Diana said from behind her. “She is NOT FAT.”

“Not your loud voice,” Nanette said, and Diana glared at her.

“Screw my loud voice, stop telling her she’s fat.” Diana stopped, looking as surprised as Nanette and Min that she’d said it. She went on, in a calmer voice. “Leave her alone.”

Nanette shook her head and went forward to grip Min by the upper arms. “I just want you to be happy,” she said, and then stopped and squeezed Min’s arms again. “Have you been lifting those weights the way I told you? Because if your arms aren’t toned, those chiffon sleeves –”

In all, this book had me laughing a lot, being ridiculously pleased that I’m not the only person abusing the italics function to show people being upset and more than that? It made me want to make some kick arse curry. So I think I will.

No NaNo content today. None. That must make some of my readers happy, I’m sure.

So, I want to write about Dairy Queen by Catherine Gilbert Murdock, which is this amazing book that My Australian Book Fairy sent to me, and that I put in my shelf for weeks (or possibly months) before reading it, mostly because it’s about American football and that is the stupidest sport on earth, save baseball. Or so I thought.

I am Swedish, and here the big sports are football (European style), ice hockey and handball. There is softball, but it’s not common and members of the extremely few American football teams are basically scoffed at because, you know, this isn’t the United States. Possibly that’s just in the very small town I’m from, where the general sentiment is “tro inte att du är nåt”, which can be translated to “don’t think you’re something special”.

All small towns are the same.

Anyway. This book is about fifteen-year-old D.J. Schwenk, whose family runs a dairy farm, but they’re also really into football, except for D.J., who is a girl, so obviously she can’t play. So, when her dad hurts his hip she’s the only one who can take care of everything because all her brothers are busy playing, and there’s also a huge rift between her dad and two older brothers, so they’re not coming home anymore.

And then a guy from the next town over is sent to her by her fake-uncle who is a football coach, and they start playing together between the endless farm chores. And then D.J. gets the idea that she can do this too, except that there are numerous obstacles in the way.

In short, there is a lot of football talk, and halfway through the book I found myself going to Wikipedia to look it up, because I wanted to figure out what each of the positions do on the field. In Swedish the word for “defender” is “back”, so the terms “quarter back” and “line back” really confused me.

The best part about it, though, is not the football. It’s how distinct D.J.’s voice is. They’ve kept some of the things that redneck people (for lack of a better term) often say, while tossing some of the more annoying expressions of theirs, and it’s very much… teenage speak.

A small excerpt in case you’re still not convinced:

Now. Let me first of all say that I am not completely unfamiliar with trash talk. For one thing I play basketball with Amber Schneider, who can make a point when she wants to. And I know how rough it can get on the football field. From the stories Bill tells, I’m surprised fights don’t break out all the time. And I know all about getting patted on the butt. Heck, if Dad squeezed Mom like that she’d act like he’d given her flowers. You watch pro ball and those guys spend so much time with their hands on each other’s rear ends, you’d think they were feeling for diamonds or something.

THE WHOLE BOOK IS LIKE THAT.

Seriously, if you read one book this year, this should be it.

The best thing about writing as much as I do right now is that you start reading books in a completely different manner. I think I first realised it when I was reading Tamora Pierce’s Protector of the Small Quartet (also, I can’t figure out if it’s actually a quartet of books called Protector of the Small, or if it’s a quartet of books called Protector of the Small Quartet, and it’s making me twitch). At some point through the third book (I think) a character is killed off and I remember thinking “Wait, what, she killed him off? There better be a good plot reason for that, or it’s just stupid.”

Sadly I have to report that I am still only halfway through the fourth book, so I have no idea if there was a plot reason or if it was a not so great decision in an otherwise pretty damn awesome series of books.

Reading becomes something very different once you use it to see how other writers create characters, how they describe them, how they write dialogue and how they create plot. It’s quite interesting, and I am now unable to read books without taking note of these things. (I also love taking note of editing mistakes, and once noticed that a minor character changed name halfway through a book, from Natalie to Natasha, or possible the other way around, something both the author and the editor had missed.)

One of the things that I find fascinating is unusual forms of narrating. This doesn’t only go for books, I am also a total sucker for movies that consist of cut up pieces that don’t make sense until you’ve seen the whole thing. Or should I say “used to be”? I can’t concentrate on the screen long enough to watch anything over 20 minutes anymore, and mostly find TV to be noise, and not background noise, like music, but grating, screeching, agonising noise that makes me want to kill someone.

Which means that the only TV I watch is The Guild (google it, it’s five minute episodes about a group of role players, featuring Felicia Day and occasionally Wil Wheaton, who apparently got sneakily hot) and How I Met Your Mother. The latter I like just because of the unreliable narrator. An excellent example is this one, although I have to say that I’m sad that I couldn’t find a clip of the episode where he constantly replaces “smoking pot” with “eating a really big sandwich”.

I don’t even own a TV anymore (in fact, I just had a very interesting conversation with Radiotjänst, trying to cancel my TV-license, to which they were very skeptical and ended up wanting to send a person to control that I really don’t have a TV, after asking me repeatedly “but how do you watch TV, then?”), so let’s return to books, shall we?

A while ago I read this awesome blog post with Sarah Rees Brennan. She is the author of the lovely YA urban fantasy novel The Demon’s Lexicon, and her main character is very different from many books that you read about. Far from all, I have to say, since people are writing more and more books which deviate from the usual pattern of the curious narrator who needs every step of every day explained to him (so that the reader knows what’s going on), but okay. Bear with me here.

Nick in The Demon’s Lexicon is nothing like that, which makes for a very awesome book indeed. He’s the sort of boy who keeps his swords under the sink, is no stranger to dumping a body in the river before going home to eat dinner, is constantly annoyed that people talk so much, hates explaining stuff to the newbie hanger-ons that him and his brother acquires and is basically… um, unpleasant. (And disturbingly hot, obviously, as dark, broody boys tend to be, but I think that goes without saying.)

In the blog post I mentioned above Sarah (who I don’t know, but damn, her name is long, so here I go first-naming her anyway) says the following, which made me giggle like a maniac:

High fantasy and urban fantasy and paranormal romance and all the slip-sliding books in between, he’s there: tall, dark, silent and surly, knowing a lot more about everything that’s going on than the hapless protagonist and usually, since to live in a genre novel is to live in interesting times, excellent with any weapon to hand.

He’s become so popular that he’s been watered down: mad, bad and dangerous to know becoming ‘Seems a little mean at first, but on the look-out for love: particularly enjoys long walks on the beach and talking about his feelings!’ On my four hundredth go-round with a book involving Mr Tall, Dark and Diet I thought to myself that someone should bring the original undiluted version back, and really think about what made him compelling and made him tick. And that we shouldn’t be seeing it from the point of view of a girl much taken with the muscular thighs and meanness, or a guy haplessly protagonisting behind Mr Tall and Dark’s sword, but from inside the head of That Guy, to see what he was thinking.

Besides ‘why does everyone else talk so much,’ I mean.

And that post pretty much sums up her writing, both in her books and her blog, by the way. Should you need another blog in your endless RSS feed.

In short, Nick is an interesting narrator, and after reading that one, I have been on a pretty much constant search for more books with quirky, unusual or just inventive sort of narration. So, I’ve been waiting and waiting and WAITING for the publishing of Liar by Justine Larbalestier, which I finally received in the mail a few weeks ago.

There was drama before it came out, because of the whitewashing of the cover, but it has pretty much died down by now. It’s an interesting read though, and I believe I’ve written about it before. At least once.

Anyway.

Micah is a liar. She lies about everything, just because she can. On the very first page she says: “I will tell you my story and I will tell it straight. No lies. No omissions. That’s my promise. This time I truly mean it.”, which pretty much says it all.

I think we’ve all known a teenager like that, and while some seem to find Micah unpleasant, she makes my heart hurt because she reminds me of somebody I used to know.

The whole book is written under the assumption that you cannot trust a word that Micah says, and yet you find yourself believe what she says, over and over and over. Until she starts to admit what wasn’t true. What she’d made up. And even then you can’t be sure that she did lie about that or if she’s just lying about lying.

It’s so very interesting to read, and what’s even more interesting is the spoiler thread over at Justine’s blog. Do not read it unless you’ve read the book, you will regret it, but once you have… go over there and read the theories. They are almost as interesting as the book itself.

I’m not sure if I would have enjoyed these two books as much, had I not been reading them from the point of view of a writer, but as it is I loved the hell out of both of them. And people need to read them already (especially Liar!) so I have somebody to discuss them with. Seriously.