Nostalgicity. It’s not even a real word. But in the real world, worlds are constantly being created everyday, and sooner or later we find them integrated into our current vocabulary as if they have always been in existence. One day, I’ll write a book titled “Nostalgicity” and I hope that people will remember that maybe I created the word first. Hah.

Just kidding. But I do want to write a novel one day. I just have no aptitude for it, and I find that my words and imagination often fail me, as I find that I believe I need to know more and more before I can even begin to attempt to write a novel. However, if you think about it, if you visit authors’ sites, isn’t this how they first start off their books? Endless amounts of time spent on research before they ever begin writing one? Maybe, maybe in the future I will have something published. I will tell the world of that time if it ever comes. Until then…

I was opening the door of my room when there was a sudden breeze. I don’t know what it was, but it smelled like home. It wasn’t anything strong or overpowering, like cologne or perfume might be. It was more like someone’s subtle scent, and ahh… just one more week and I’ll be home.

I currently have the first parts of the song Amazing Grace in my head. Something about the slowness of the song that makes me really enjoy it. But I’m listening to it over and over again way too much, so I’ll probably get sick of it soon.

I recently finished Mistborn, the first book in the trilogy of the same name. Although I really liked and enjoyed reading it, I think there were some things that prevented me from going all out crazy on the book. Err, then again, I probably did. Anyways, forgetting that, there are two Main Characters in the first book. Vin and Kelsier. Vin is a street urchin who is eventually saved by Kelsier, who happens to have the same powers that Vin does. Common enough, right? Unfortunately, Brandon Sanderson is wonderful at creating a complex world, and that small description really only begins to line the very bottom of an old and well used bag.

However, I really don’t like Vin too much in this book. I don’t hate her, but for the first 300-400 of the 650 or so pages, I really thought she was quite useless and there wasn’t very much that involved her. In fact, Kelsier outshines Vin through much of this first book, and I really couldn’t have cared less about Vin. Although the trilogy may be centered around Vin, which I’m guessing (it’s probably more than that), this first book was ultimately Kelsier’s story. He was the dynamic character in the story and I loved the idea of him. But that was it, really. I loved the story but I found myself a little distanced from the characters. I liked them but there was something about them that made me unable to go crazy mad obsessed about them. I was incredibly sad to see what happens to Kelsier, but it’s really all well explained, so there’s not much point in thinking about “why?!?!?!” there. `.` Umm, yeah. :’D I just hope that Vin gets better in the next two volumes. >_> I wasn’t very fond of her, but she’s the MC, so… `-`;

What does it matter if another person tells you that although the a book that you’ve just read is magnificent, there were some flaws that could have been focused on and fixed? It shouldn’t matter too much. When you read a book, or when you’re just reading something in general, you should be considering what it means to you. What kind of reactions did you have when you read the book? How did you like it? Did you associate in some kind of way to your life, your beliefs, something that is anchored in you that gives it meaning? The reason why I read is because it’s fun. I enjoy reading books for the story, the characters, and all of the twists and events unfolding. It doesn’t matter if I can’t dissect the writing style of a particular author; whatever you read, you gain something from it, whether it’s knowledge from something particularly enlightening, being inspired something that a character says, or just feeling envious because you wish you could be as brilliantly as the author who penned something that you had just read.

Which is why it sucks to be forced to read something for a class and why I can never work in a job where I have to actually read books to earn a living, I suppose. Although I might enjoy the story in general, just having to analyze it for the purpose of intellectual academic discussion is plain boring. In most cases. Read for fun if you can. I can’t analyze prose and all that, but at least I know how to let myself enjoy a story as I read it.

So, basically, it doesn’t really matter what anyone else thinks. You should wonder about what makes you love, hate, or indifferent to the text you’re reading first before you start drawing from others’ conclusions. Who wants to be told what the meaning behind something is? It totally ruins your own perception when someone claims that there’s a “correct” or “right” way to look at the meaning of something.

Oh, wooow. Ahaha. I just went to the very beginning of my email and looked at some of the stuff I had from 5 years ago when I first opened my email account on Gmail. Gmail was relatively new back then, and the only way that you could do that was if you had an invite from someone who already had an account.

Emails were a big way of distributing manga releases back then, when DDLs and all the access things that we have now wasn’t too common or it was too expensive to support. If my memory doesn’t fail me, the biggest database was… I want to say MangaDatabase, but I’m not sure. >_> It was a group created on Yahoo! Groups, and in there where lists of whole email accounts that had been created just to store manga releases. ^^; The accounts would be listed with its password, and people would be able to go into these emails and forward the releases that were stored in the email’s allowed quota of space to their own. It was quite ingenious, I must say, but obviously there were a lot of problems. There were lots of issues with people changing the passwords of the different accounts, and the admins would have to go through each of the emails to see if the pw had been changed. Then they would have to go through all of the processes of changing the passwords again. I don’t quite remember when it died exactly, but… maybe 2-3 years ago? Mm. Suffice it to say, with all of the online manga viewers and DDLs available, no one is using it anymore.

Anywho, Gmail came into the scene at the peak of (or at the end of that peak?) that giant manga database, because it was offering about 1 Gig of space of storage at the time. Heh. Everyone saw it as an opportunity to store even more manga in each email, and it was convenient. I managed to get an invite, and for a while I think I was even forwarding some releases to others, but eventually that got boring. But kuinni has stuck ever since, and I still have my Gmail account, which is my main email address. :)

But, yeah… Man, the guts I used to have, emailing authors and telling them what I loved about their books. Since when did I stop doing that? xD Maybe it was due to the fact that sometimes authors failed to reply back, but with their own lives and deadlines for their books due, no one can really fault them if they’re too busy to reply back to every mail that they get. :) But yeah, some of the replies I got. xD I was really happy about them! And even when I look back at them now, wow. Ahaha.

I’m going to talk just a little or a lot about The Hidden City by Michelle West today. If you’ve browsed my blog before, you might have noticed me talking about the Cast (officially known as the Chronicles of Elantra) series by Michelle Sagara. They’re the same person. Michelle Sagara West is also her. She goes by different names for her different stories, and probably also the different styles of writing she has for each. Not that I can tell what the difference in her styles are any more. When I first read the Cast series, it irritated me so much I often had to put the books down. But then I got used to it and it’s just a natural part of her stories.

Now, I must say, I am so bitter with the events that lead up to the conclusion of this book. It’s the first book as well as the one that Michelle West herself recommends for the introduction into this world that she has placed this story in. For readers of her other series, I think both of them (check her site yourself for more info), they already know what will partially happen to Jewel in her adult years. In this first book in the House Wars series, she’s 10 years old. Jewel never speaks or acts like a 10-year-old throughout the whole book, no matter how much Michelle West keeps on insisting that she is. Even the depth of her sentences astound me, and I will never expect a child to speak so well, even if she is always surrounded by adults. I may be wrong, but until you read the novel yourself, please don’t think that you can convince me otherwise of children who are known to speak eloquently and fluently in an adult’s version of English, since I firmly believe they usually don’t. In any case, because Michelle West insists that Jewel is 10 years old, I’m even more bitter at what happens at the end. I am curious about how Michelle West will resolve this story, and I hope that after what she’s put the characters through I will be able to feel at peace with it.

In another way, I see why Michelle West might want us to read this series first. It’s probably because of Rath. I liked him a lot. Until the end, when he proved himself to be the biggest fool in the world. How the hell could he let himself do that? Yes, I get what the author’s trying to say, but still. Arrgh. I still like Rath. I just hate him for his decisions, and even the fact that he’s suffering the consequences of his actions doesn’t mollify me.

I’m probably going to read her Sundered series next. I feel like I’ve read the first book before.