Alexandra García Galván's Blog, page 8

Para Priscila

Priscila:

   Es bien sabido que en libros románticos de antes, las bodas eran ese exquisito "y vivieron felices para siempre", ese que todos anhelamos tener. Sin embargo, esto ya no es un libro clásico, por lo que ahora nos concentraremos en un "hermoso comienzo".
   Ahora, Paco y tú van a escribir el prólogo de lo que será el libro más cursi de la historia de la humanidad (la exagerada no vino), y si no me equivoco, esto ya es una saga, si es que consideramos Novios como el primer libro, Prometidos como el segundo y este que inicia, Casados (apuesto a que tú tendrás mejores títulos); conociéndote, sé que lo que viene será intenso.
   Ya sabes que soy muy mala para decir las cosas estando frente a alguien, así que por suerte mis palabras no me están fallando, por lo que aprovecho para darte las gracias por dejarme ser parte de un pequeño extracto de tu libro de vida, gracias por compartir tus bellas palabras con el mundo y por dejarme conocer a una partícula revoltosa, a la cual admiro.
 Te desearía lo mejor, Dragona... pero creo que si eres extraordinariamente feliz ahora, entonces ya lo tienes. No me queda entonces más que desearte un par de extras: que este nuevo libro se vuelva un best seller para ambos y que un Nobel se les quede corto.
   No sé hasta cuándo te veré (GDL ahorita se ve algo lejano, ugh), pero te mando un abrazo virtual por ahora ;)
   Te quiero mucho.
Alexandra

Book Review: Blindness by José Saramago

Previously posted on Goodreads!
I don't even remember how I got this book, I just suddenly remember me reading it, and the most surprising thing is that I REALLY LOVED IT! I had my doubts, because even that I have another book from Saramago in my "to read list" I know that it's not the kind of genre I usually read, and I'm so pleased about this one.

One of the things that it is important about this text it's its structure, at least in Spanish, everything is writing without pauses or with commas in weird places, with no paragraph divisions, sometimes it even starts to confuse you because for a moment you don't know who's talking. At first I found it annoying, maybe because I didn't know this, but then I realized that it was OK to be written like this because there are spaces with a lot of dialogues and that would've been even worse to see lots of quotation marks (or em dashes in Spanish), these even enhances the desperation of the characters.

The plot it's about an epidemic (and white) blindness that at first affects to a small number of people, which are sent to an asylum in order to contain it. The thing is that you see what would happen to us in a situation like this, we learn here how much people are willing to pay in order to survive, even if it means to become a slave, a murderer, or as weird as it sounds, a mother.

Book Review: Children of a Broken Sky by Adam J. Nicolai

Different kinds of faith. 
Different kinds of heroes. Only one enemy in common.
Children of a Broken Sky is a book that exceeded my expectations. I wasn't sure to read it because the main theme is religion (this one reminds me of Catholic Church -a lot) and I'm not fond of reading something like that... but with Nicolai's book now I'm totally looking forward for the next instance.
I think that what it made it so interesting was the fact that its characters, even that they're friends since childhood, are very different from each other, what makes the situations even more difficult. There's a point that you even think that someone is going to betray the other in some point, that's why I think the book is pretty unpredictable (and more because they actually not have plans, everything is done according to the situation, you even start to think in what would it happen if... I mean, you start to feel that you are in their situation and you need desperately to help them).
This book is definitely worth reading and I'm sure that I won't be the only one praying to Akir for the next one ;)

Book Review: Lady Midnight by Cassandra Clare

DAMN, CASSIE! BACK AT IT AGAIN WITH THE ANGSTY BOOKS! Just when I thought that I had read ALL from this woman... AND I can't get over the "Why lie?" line, UGH!
Lady Midnight is the story about Emma Carstairs and the Blackthorn family. We who have read TMI met them in City of Heavenly Fire and already knew about their story in the Dark War. We already had the idea of how their lives were doing but I'm sure we were totally wrong in our assumptions.
It is obvious to think "what else can happen in this world?" "We’ve read enough of this, Cassie should be writing something else or nothing at all", "she wants more money"... (I even though of it when I heard she'd release this), OH GUYS, YOU HAVE NO IDEA! I was talking with my sister the other night about her, I don't understand how she can get all those shiny new ideas for her stories, for her characters, none of them are the same, they may be related but they're definitely not the same. Is the Shadowhunter World exploitable? Yes, if you know how to do it (and I'm still talking about exploiting it as a story). Cassandra has like… spell instructions in her head to make everything work (maybe she's a warlock, I don't know), and I think that she's been kind enough to share her world.
Why 4 stars? Well, I didn't enjoy the pace at the beginning of the book. Unlike TID and TMI, the main character didn't have millions of questions about the Shadow World, she already belonged there, therefore, the questions that the new readers may had, were answered with a lot of things fans we already know, like who are Clary and Jace, and such. But as always, once you reach the high point, you can't go back from reading. Also, one of the things that I've always loved about her books it's the inclusion she's given her characters and Lady Midnight is not the exception. How many authors can do that? 
Thank you, Cassie!
P.S. I ship Mark with everybody. Bye.

Book Review: Scrappy Little Nobody by Anna Kendrick

Previously posted on Goodreads!
This is the first time I read and listened to an audiobook. I wanted to take advantage of those 3 credits you get in Audible and because this book was new I decided to get it. And it was a great idea! Fortunately Anna read her own book, she was a pleasure to listen and read. Her tone is unique and sincere, and makes you have a good time.


Anna may not agree, but I believe she is a very good writer. She could transport me to those events in her life without a joint (I don't do drugs but you get the idea)! I don't follow her movies, I've seen them but not with the idea that she's in them, so I didn't know what kind of artist is she in the terrible Hollywood. She describes herself in some points as childish but that's not what I mean. I found that she's a very down to earth and talented woman that really knows what she wants and who she is, a VERY difficult process in life, by the way. How many of us, in our middle twenties, really know what we want in life? How many of us are still hidding under our sheets and never face any existential crisis? She has faced and accepted things and that's a very good example for teenagers and new adults like me.


Yup, this book was a trip. In an aspect she made me see that even small details of your life can be great if you know how to take advantage or deal with them.


You better hurry up and become 70, Anna! I can't wait to read the next one!

Book Review: Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell

Previously posted on Goodreads!
I had a lot of unfulfilled expectations, specially after one of my friends started to send me some excerpts BUT ALSO got surprised in some aspects, like FOR REAL!
Apart from being a book that talks about being a fangirl, this books also tell us the part of a life of someone with social anxiety. Maybe, some readers (that don't know the term) just read about a girl being paranoic about everything, so, how did I recognize the term? Because I have it, so I can tell the difference. I felt identified with Cath all the book along, I've also found shelter in my sister and in fandoms, I can count my friends just with my fingers, I find alcohol and drugs repulsive... the list can go on.
Even if you don't feel identified with that, you can also read, and learn, about a MAN with a bipolar disorder, you know that mental disorders are just entitled to women, so this is big; read about early alcoholism... even read about writer's block! (BTW, this is a thing I've been fighting for ages, literally! It was like getting a slap!)
Why 3.5? Its pace and its structure.
For me, it was really slow at the beginning, perfect in the middle, disastrous at the end. Specially the end. The author was like "oops, I'm gonna reach page 433, I need to finish it now, no matter if it ends with half a statement" (ok, I'm overreacting a bit, but that's how I felt when I read the end). Why include excerpts of Simon Snow's books, and fanfics? I know Simon Snow's are based on Harry Potter's, that made me feel like paying a visit to my childhood-teenage years, but REALLY! It wasn't necessary to read them! Specially the fanfic parts because Cath was supposed to be an AMAZING writer but I didn't believe it.
But I enjoy Rowell's writing in general, I couldn't have read this or Eleanor & Park otherwise. 

Book Review: Room by Emma Donoghue

Previously posted on Goodreads!
"The wide of the walls is the same as wide as the wide of Floor!"

I don't do this regularly, but I saw the movie first :O so I knew I was going to read this from Jack's perspective. THAT is what makes the book so interesting, but I guess if I hadn't seen the movie before I would've been lost in some parts. That's something I didn't like, to be honest. But now, let's separate the book from the movie:


Jack is a little boy that, despite his situation, is a very happy boy that has had a great childhood thanks to his Ma (and from my point of view, from TV, his only "window" to the world). His entire world is Room, and the things there are persons for him, they're their friends. 

For a moment I thought his vocabulary was inaccurate for a boy his age, but later on the author explains where he's learned all of this, since Ma's games weren't just about having fun. So the author definitely sounds like a child, and not because of the misspellings of verbs, but because you can read a five-year-old boy who has infinite questions, who takes everything literally, who has tantrums, and that even when this boy is outside Room, he still lives in a world of his own (and Ma's). 
You can feel Ma's anger through Jack, her desperation, her hopelessness, even when Jack can't express it with words. He knows how to interpret her perfectly, and the thing that shocked me the most while reading was precisely that, that Jack in some points doesn't act like a son but a parent. Jack, aside from being Ma's hero, is her anchor, her reason to survive in Room but not in Outside. Jack's is reborn and Ma doesn't, at first. She thought everything would be alright but she is still a kid. She spent an eternity in Room and she remembers the world in a very different way… and this world is so big and so terrifying that she doesn't know what to do anymore. She collapses while Jack is learning about everything so fast that he even says that he's seen enough of this world and that now he's tired. 
And you get tired too; you start feeling like Jack because everything is overwhelming. Everything changed so fast that I even felt a bit dizzy. 
This book is so well written that maybe you ask “why 4 stars (well it’s more like a 4.5) instead of 5?” well, because of its triggers. It’s a difficult book to read if you’ve been in a situation like this (I’m not saying I have), but you can see depression, suicide attempts, rape, lots of nightmares some topics that can be difficult for some readers.
For a moment I thought that it would’ve been awesome to read from Ma’s point of view but at the end I was more like “nope, that’s enough.”

Alexandra, The Dorky Writer - Chapter 2

This entry was originally posted on my Goodreads blog on February 2nd.
One evening, the Dorky Writer went to a book presentation of a very good friend of hers, The Dragon Writer. Apart from being absolutely proud of seeing her friend flying up to reach out the stars and come back with not one but two of them, she couldn't help herself to feel nostalgic about writing.
Unfortunately, that nostalgia transformed into a heavy, yet invisible monster: Anxiety.
Some years ago, when I was in high school, one of my teachers asked my class to write a story based on the insecurity the city had in that time. I wrote about a girl that had lost her father because of a confrontation between a drug cartel and police. Very cheesy, very Mexican soap opera.
But the teacher loved it and I got a 100 for that month. He even believed that that story had happened to me, but my dad still lives, and breathes, and works... and not as a policeman.
The thing is that that encouraged me a lot when he asked us again to write another thing. I dared and I wrote an even more stupid thing: a play. He didn't like it, by the way. I don't even remember exactly what the story was about, but I do remember the characters' names because they haunted me long enough to the point I decided to write an original story with them. The story had a lot of changes and turns throughout the years. It started as a contemporary young adult story and at the end it became a fantasy one. And the characters' names? Their personality? Still there.
I wrote snippets of that story, edited them, read, rewrote, for around 7 years. It all ended, as a cataclysm though, when I watched Avatar: The Last Airbender on Netflix. I discovered that the idea that I thought was original actually had some similar parts in that magnificent show. I couldn't continue. For God's sake! I'd even divided my book series (of course it was a book series) in 5 parts! Water, Earth, Fire, Air, and a still-not-named-book. I thought if someone read it sometime, they would accuse me of plagiarism or would tell me that the story, which didn't have an Aang or a Toph precisely there, wasn't original.
Time passed and I started to rewrite for the 1,000,000,000th time. I had to get rid of a lot of things that reminded me of ATLA. And the story changed completely again. This time, the story was actually getting somewhere and I didn't even think about it as a book series, just a single story, so that was good. The bad part is that it just started to happen in my head and couldn't reach a piece of paper, a Scrivener or Word document.
BOOM: WRITER'S BLOCK.
And it hasn't really left my side.
You could say: "Eh, YOU'RE WRITTING NOW!" But I'm a very stubborn person, so I would say: "I'm not writing what I really want and need to."
All of these memories collided and I ended up having a crisis. I told my boyfriend about this and he gave me very good reasons why I could have this problem: "You're holding down, basically, a full time job, going to school yourself, taking care of the house... none of that is gonna be inspirational, so is not gonna flow and you're not gonna have anything to write because you're busy thinking about the other things you do in life." The thing is that, ok, I do have to worry about all of that now, but back then? And then, of course, he said: "You're one of the most self-critical people I've ever met in my life." Good thing you don't live with me yet, handsome ;)
I didn't take that as bad criticism. It was actually a reminder of what a therapist told me years ago. I NEED TO GET MY SH*T TOGETHER AND DO NOT AIM FOR PERFECTION.
"Don't write a book, write effectively a comic but without the pictures. Write other things and just get your creative juices flowing from something else and maybe that will help you with what you actually want to write about," said the handsome wizard. Of course I'm having a handsome wizard as a boyfriend instead of a prince! Once a Potterhead, forever a Potterhead.
Well, I'm not writing a comic, but I've come back to a blog. Y A Y !
And now I need to stop procrastinating and do my homework.
End of Chapter 2.

Alexandra, The Dorky Writer - Chapter 2

One evening, the Dorky Writer went to a book presentation of a very good friend of hers, The Dragon Writer. Apart from being absolutely proud of seeing her friend flying up to reach out the stars and come back with not one but two of them, she couldn't help herself to feel nostalgic about writing.

Unfortunately, that nostalgia transformed into a heavy, yet invisible, monster: Anxiety.

Some years ago, when I was in high school, one of my teachers asked my class to write a story based on the insecurity the city had in that time. I wrote about a girl that had lost her father because of a confrontation between a drug cartel and police. Very cheesy, very Mexican soap opera.

But the teacher loved it and I got a 100 for that month. He even believed that that story had happened to me, but my dad still lives, and breathes, and works... and not as a policeman.

The thing is that that encouraged me a lot when he asked us again to write another thing. I dared and I wrote an even more stupid thing: a play. He didn't like it, by the way. I don't even remember exactly what the story was about, but I do remember the characters' names because they haunted me long enough to the point I decided to write an original story with them. The story had a lot of changes and turns throughout the years. It started as a contemporary young adult story and at the end it became a fantasy one. And the characters' names? Their personality? Still there.

I wrote snippets of that story, edited them, read, rewrote, for around 7 years. It all ended, as a cataclysm though, when I watched Avatar: The Last Airbender on Netflix. I discovered that the idea that I thought was original actually had some similar parts in that magnificent show. I couldn't continue. For God's sake! I'd even divided my book series (of course it was a book series) in 5 parts! Water, Earth, Fire, Air, and a still-not-named-book. I thought if someone read it sometime, they would accuse me of plagiarism or would tell me that the story, which didn't have an Aang or a Toph precisely there, wasn't original.

Time passed and I started to rewrite for the 1,000,000,000th time. I had to get rid of a lot of things that reminded me of ATLA. And the story changed completely again. This time, the story was actually getting somewhere and I didn't even think about it as a book series, just a single story, so that was good. The bad part is that it just started to happen in my head and couldn't reach a piece of paper, a Scrivener or Word document.

BOOM: WRITER'S BLOCK.

And it hasn't really left my side.

You could say: "Eh, YOU'RE WRITTING NOW!" But I'm a very stubborn person, so I would say: "I'm not writing what I really want and need to."

All of these memories collided and I ended up having a crisis. I told my boyfriend about this and he gave me very good reasons why I could have this problem: "You're holding down, basically, a full time job, going to school yourself, taking care of the house... none of that is gonna be inspirational, so is not gonna flow and you're not gonna have anything to write because you're busy thinking about the other things you do in life." The thing is that, ok, I do have to worry about all of that now, but back then? And then, of course, he said: "You're one of the most self-critical people I've ever met in my life." Good thing you don't live with me yet, handsome ;)

I didn't take that as bad criticism. It was actually a reminder of what a therapist told me years ago. I NEED TO GET MY SH*T TOGETHER AND DO NOT AIM FOR PERFECTION.

"Don't write a book, write effectively a comic but without the pictures. Write other things and just get your creative juices flowing from something else and maybe that will help you with what you actually want to write about," said the handsome wizard. Of course I'm having a handsome wizard as a boyfriend instead of a prince! Once a Potterhead, forever a Potterhead.

Well, I'm not writing a comic, but I've come back to a blog. Y A Y !

And now I need to stop procrastinating and do my homework.

End of Chapter 2.

Alexandra, the Dorky Writer - Chapter 1

Hey, everyone! I normally don't post ANYTHING here, but that's something I intend to change because I don't want to be alone in this, because the Goodreads community seems to be extraordinary, and because it's time for my social anxiety to get out of the way... for now... I don't know how much this is gonna last, to be completely honest! (I have the feeling no one's gonna read this, so this might work as a diary).

Let me tell you a sad story:

Once upon a time, this dorky and amateur writer collided with the biggest writer's block in existence, so in a way to defeat this ferocious evil, she decided to return to school and get a Master's Degree in Writing Culture. This ferocious evil, whose name she's still searching, proved to be the biggest challenge, academically speaking, for this angsty translator, and even though she faced great monsters, she was acceptably victorious and started to write a tiny bit again, nothing extraordinary, but enough to keep her sane...

But no one had prepared her at all for the biggest obstacle of all: The Mighty Thesis.

Obviously the story hasn't reached its end.

So, the real adventure begins. Even though I can't take the thesis seminars yet, I need to dive in and read a lot. The thesis' main route right now is the study of women's memoirs and their differences in different cultures (The Complete Persepolis inspired me). The problem is that I don't know what would be good to read next, so if you are reading, by any chance, and know about a good memoir, please recommend it to me and I'll give it a look at its Goodreads page and users' comments too!

End of Chapter 1.