divided by blue

Three weeks for Dreamwidth: Which book was the toughest for you to get through?

This would be "The Well at the World's End” by William Morris published in 1896. The story itself isn’t complicated, but it’s written in an archaic style. Since I read it in English, which isn’t my native language, this was quite hard to get through. Thankfully, I read it on an e-reader (Project Gutenberg has the ebook for free, since it’s in the public domain), and so my e-reader could instantly translate a lot of words. A notable observation was that many older English words I encountered seemed to be linked to older Dutch words, which was interesting.

I knew of the book because we discussed it in a design course in school. Not the story itself, but the beautiful design of the pages with the Illustrations by Edward Burne-Jones. I sometimes wonder if they made reprints of the book as it was with the original illustrations, or if the only way to see this is at a museum. This is what a page looks like:



I decided to read it when, at a certain moment, I heard that this book might have influenced Tolkien for his Lord of the Rings series, and that intrigued me and made me decide to give it a go. I wasn’t aware of the archaic style. When I started reading it, I was puzzled. I assumed I must have been mistaken about the publication date, thinking that the book was way older than I believed it to be. I looked it up and discovered it was just written in an older style. Nevertheless, I decided to continue reading it and I finished the book. Apart from being hard for me to read, I enjoyed it, it’s a nice fantasy story.

Three weeks for Dreamwidth: What was your favorite childhood book?

My favorite book as a child was the Dutch book ‘Eefje Donkerblauw’ (Little Eve Darkblue). It is a wonderful story with beautiful illustrations, and it’s about fascination for colors, and love. The book in essence, explains how color mixing works in the most adorable way.

Eefje loves dark blue, and everything in her life is dark blue. Teapots, chairs, bed,… Everything. Then, at a moment on the beach, she meets Koning Goudgeel (King Goldenyellow), who adores yellow. She becomes enchanted by him, and as her fascination for him grows, she starts to incorporate yellow into her life. She paints yellow flowers on her blue teapots, mixes bits of yellow in her clothing. When she meets the king again, he has done the same thing to his world, but then with blue. They fall in love and ultimately start a family. All of their children love green.

It is a charming tale, and apart from the color information, it also beautifully explains that loving someone and adding someone to your life also means adding pieces of her/him/them to your life, so your life becomes fuller and deeper.

This book, sadly isn’t translated into English to my knowledge

Three weeks for Dreamwidth: Name three books (or book series) that had an impact on you

I’m going to answer that only considering fiction books, no non fiction.

Robin Hobb, Farseer series

I read these books in my youth, and I think this fantasy series got me into really enjoying reading. For school, we got these lists of books to read, and I often didn’t connect with those books, especially not the young adult books they advised us to read. They were frequently full of drama, and I already had a difficult situation to cope with at home, so I didn’t want to read things that were depressing as well.

I found this book series in a bookstore, read the description about a young man growing up in a castle full of intrigue, training to be an assassin, though he didn’t want to be one. He also had an extraordinary magical gift to communicate with animals. I hadn’t read any reviews on this series, but I really liked the description and bought the first book. I loved it, read the whole first trilogy. I saw there were (at the time) two more trilogies following this story, so I read them as well. I have very fond memories of this, staying up late to discover what was going to happen. I started reading other fantasy books after that, as well as classic seventies speculative fiction that my father had on his bookshelf and that he had read when he was young.

Terry Moore - Strangers in Paradise

This comic book series is about Katchoo, a young woman growing up and being in love with her best friend Francine - who keeps dating men who were mostly bad for her. It starts as just a fun growing-up tale, with plenty of humor, but it evolves further to incorporate aspects of the crime and thriller genres.

I read the book while in college, studying economics, but what I really wanted to do was to study art or take art courses. Katchoo grew up to be an artist, and the book showed me parts of a life I liked to have: learning about art and taking life drawing courses. Being an artist. She also was a badass, taking no shit from anyone. I admired her, wanted to be more like her in some ways. I loved reading about her, and I think this is one of the few books I reread years later. It was again a wonderful experience.

Milan Kundera - The Unbearable Lightness of Being

This was a mandatory read for a college course about literature. I remember being intimidated by the title. I thought this would be a tough book to read and connect with, but I was very wrong. It read really nicely, and told the story about two people who had an entirely different way of seeing life and about what life should be. One chooses security, planning everything out, wanting security, and for instance, a steady romantic relationship. These were things that other protagonists saw as ‘heavy’, as she wanted a life that was light and free of responsibilities, taking everything one day at a time, and just having fleeting flings with people. The ultimate question this book raises is, what kind of life is ‘light’ and ‘heavy’; and I find myself often thinking back to how the novel dealt with these questions, frequently posing myself the same ones as I go through life. Not many books linger in my mind like that.