Man the best feeling is being able to sit quietly by yourself and drink your coffee without having to be anywhere.
So relaxing.
(via physics-and-fitness)
24 Classic Books' Original Titles
Yesterday, we came across this awesome piece that Book Riot did of 5 classic books with awful original titles (CAN YOU BELIEVE THAT FAULKNER’S THE SOUND AND THE FURY WAS ORIGINALLY NAMED TWILIGHT?! THIS MIGHT BE A VERY DIFFERENT WORLD IF THAT HAD ACTUALLY HAPPENED), and that got us thinking: what other working book titles did classic books have?Have you ever wondered what the original name of classics were?
The War of the Ring? I know there isn’t a huge difference butit sounds so weird to say. Oh dear, I do think “our” titles are better. Even if I do like some of them, but mostly for books I haven’t read yet so I don’t really know if they really fit. And see how many there are for The Great Gatsby? I find so funnyThere is a great humorous non fiction book about 50 classics and there original/ alternative names called Why not catch 21? by Gary Dexter, (it includes the many maybe names of The Great Gatsy) its a great read that I would really recommend.
(The goodreads page: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2054752.Why_Not_Catch_21_?ac=1)
"[F]or the first several years the SAT was offered, males scored higher than females on the Math section but females achieved higher scores on the Verbal section. ETS policy-makers determined that the Verbal test needed to be “balanced” more in favor of males, and added questions pertaining to politics, business and sports to the Verbal portion. Since that time, males have outscored females on both the Math and Verbal sections. Dwyer notes that no similar effort has been made to “balance” the Math section, and concludes that, “It could be done, but it has not been, and I believe that probably an unconscious form of sexism underlies this pattern. When females show the superior performance, ‘balancing’ is required; when males show the superior performance, no adjustments are necessary.” "
-
“Gender Bias in College Admissions Tests”, FairTest.org
And then people urge me everything is fine, of course it is, when you’re ignoring statistics that is.
(via cwnl)
(via becauseiamawoman)
Never let me go
Odyssey
"Reinterpreting myths, fairy tales, and folk tales is way more than a cottage industry—a castle industry?—in publishing these days. From literary fiction (The Tiger’s Wife) to YA (Robin McKinley’s books, Runemarks) to graphic novels (the Fable series, The Sigh) to humor (Gods Behaving Badly), authors are picking up and reimagining bits and pieces from millennia of human story-telling. This is, of course, not entirely new; as long as there have been stories there have been reinterpretations of them. But the purposefulness and the politics do seem to have shifted in interesting ways over the past several decades, as feminist and LGBT/queer authors rethink these stories for a new world."
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Reimagining Folk and Fairy Tales (with Kink, Joy, Nudity)
Feminist and Queer interpretations of fairy tales are some of my favourite books, I’d recommend The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter and Kissing the Witch by Emma Donoghue.
If you have any more recommendations for me please leave them in my ask :)
(via susanandherbooks)
Black Easter
Anonymous
Honestly, I haven’t really listened to music since I was in high school. I’m not terribly inclined towards music. That territory is dominated by my older brother, who is a music teacher and professional clarinet player. He was born with all the good auditory taste while I was left with the dregs.
90% of my mp3 player is filled with NPR podcasts: Radio Lab, Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, This American Life, and Ask Me Another. The remaining 10% is made up of music from actual CDs that I’ve bought over the years: lots of Broadway original cast recordings, They Might be Giants, The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Coltrane, Modest Mouse, Weezer, and Joni Mitchell.
I want to read a really heart breaking story where it doesn’t end well.
- “Flowers for Algernon” by Daniel Keyes
- “The Picture of Dorian Grey” by Oscar Wilde
- “A Widow’s Story” by Joyce Carol Oates
- “Islands in the Stream” by Ernest Hemingway
- “Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?” by Lorrie Moore
- “Where the Red Fern Grows” by Wilson Rawls (This was the first book to ever make me cry)
- “The Fault in Our Stars” by John Green (Not one of my personal favorites, but it’ll tug at your heart strings)
"
But the biggest surprise of “Aschenputtel” [Grimm brothers version of the Cinderella story] is that it’s not about landing the prince. It is about the girl herself: her strength, her perseverance, her cleverness. It is a story, really, about her evolution from child to woman.
It is Cinderella herself who plants the magic tree and requests the finery for the ball (which is celebrated over the course of three days). She walks to the party each night rather than traveling by enchanted coach. She leaves not because she has some arbitrarily imposed curfew but because she has danced enough. Then she escapes both the pursuing prince and her own father by hiding in a dovecote or nimbly scaling a tree.
When the prince finally comes a-calling, shoe in hand, Cinderella greets him in her sooty rags. He may be looking for the beauty with the dainty foot, but, as Joan Gould, the author of Spinning Straw into Gold, notes, she demands that he witness the woman she has been, dirt and all, not just the one she will become. So while he provides the occasion for her transformation, he is not the one responsible for it— she can only do that for herself.
"- from Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture by Peggy Orenstein. (via feminishblog)
(via becauseiamawoman)
