20 August 2006
Reading
It never ceases to amaze me when I read something really good. When something is written really well, no matter what it is, it seems like "I can relate to this". When you read something (book, poem, story, etc) and afterwards, you just sit there and think about what you just read, or when you try to put what you feel about it into words, and can't; that feeling is also nameless. I find that one of the most challenging things to do at various online writing sites is to tell someone who wrote something like that just how you feel about it. It's really not an easy task.
But also, it's the feeling you get when you sit in one spot for hours and just read. Not necessarily because you can't stop reading, but for any reason. I decided a few days ago that I would finish the Mayor Of Casterbridge which I had to read for school. I had, oh, half the book left. I sat for hours and just worked on that one goal of finishing it. And I have to say, I enjoyed the book more than I had been before.
It's not so much that the book is bad, because it's not. But many of the references and expressions made aren't common knowledge like they used to be.
The feeling of reading a lot in a short time rather than over a longer time span is such that, you perceive the way time passes for the story differently. While I was in New York this summer, I read a book, Phantom, that was 900 or so pages. And I read it as unceasingly as I could (Does that make sense?), so I finished it in 2 days.
The first half of the book took place over the course of only a few days. But if I'd read it in bits and pieces, the feelings that I took away from the book would have been different because of it.
I've always found that interesting.
Going back to my original point, there's nothing quite like reading a really good piece of writing. A lot of the things I've read have been by kids around my age too. Maybe it's because I relate to them better, but I don't think so.
The idea that something that comes out of one person's mind can impress another that much is what makes writing so interesting. Mainly, to think that it's possible for one person to write something like that and affect another.
Well anyway, I have no idea where that came from.....
13 August 2006
Template Change
I'm going to be changing the template around for a while.
I like this one. It took me forever to decide what I wanted to do with the animation on that header...