Top 5 Books to Read Before the End of the Year

     Many people told me I would have considerably less time to read once I started college. Much to my dismay, they were right. The amount of time I was able to read for enjoyment dropped much too low for my liking. Because of this, I found myself in need of prioritizing the books I want to read right away and the ones that can wait in line on my shelf a little longer.

     King’s Cage

      When I first saw the cover for War Storm, the final book in the Red Queen series, I was pumped to read it. My sister got me a copy for my birthday only adding to my excitement. There is one problem, however. To get to War Storm I need to finish King’s Cage first. I have no excuse for not yet finishing King’s Cage because I also own it, another present from my sister. The truth is I was too afraid to read it as I realized the book has the perspectives of other characters when the previous books only had one narrator. I began to fear character death, but I think my desire to finish the series has now overridden my horror of something bad happening to my babies. 

Siren’s Song

     Storm Siren is one of my favorite fantasy books. The world feels so fleshed out and the character’s so 3-dimensional. However, I’ve only finished the first three books in this trilogy. I also own all three books so I don’t exactly have any other excuse for not finishing it yet other than laziness. Do I have the energy to scan my eyes over a page? Apparently not. 

     

     The Mirror King

     I own this book since two Christmases ago. I enjoyed its predecessor. So why haven’t I read it? I think it’s too long, yet I have read books with hundreds of more pages than this one since I got it. I am a confusing creature. Part of it might be I find it much more exciting to start a brand-new series than finish an old one I have been working on. However, I don’t think anything can really beat the feeling of finishing a long-running book series for the first time. Which brings me to the next book on this list.

     

Viva Jacquelina

     This is number ten of a dozen books.  I faithfully read one Jacky Faber book a month since I started my senior year of high school. However, I broke the cycle when I started my first college semester. The problem is I still have a special place in my heart for Jacky Faber. I need to know if she will get what she’s been wishing for this entire time. I need to know how her story ends, and the last three books, including Viva Jacquelina, are relatively shorter when compared to the earlier ones. Also, they are all at my library so it's not like I don't have any access to them. 

     

       Witch and Wizard

     Because my book club is part of campus activities, we don’t exactly have meetings during summer vacation. However, we always vote on a book to work on during the summer so we have something to discuss when classes start up again. This year we decided on Witch and Wizard. My goal for finishing this book is much closer than the end of the year. I want to have this one done by the end of the summer. Otherwise, I will go to our first meeting in September and I will have to admit to not finishing the book, and I don’t think my pride will be able to handle that. 

Where are the Older Adults?

Note: this article is dedicated to the man who inspired it, who is probably waiting for me at the pearly gates with a pot of kale soup. 

     June 15^this Elder abuse awareness day! As a student whose dream job is a nursing home social worker, I try to be up to date on issues involving the grayer population. Originally, I planned to discuss books tackling the subject of elder abuse. However, I racked my brain for examples and realized none of my books, except for textbooks, mentioned elder abuse. In fact, very few even portrayed older adults in a positive light (if they featured any characters over 55 at all). At first, I thought there was some logic to this because most of the books I’ve read are children’s and Young Adult. I started to search through films and adult books and found a shocking lack of older adults in those as well. This isn’t only my personal observation either. Older adults are snubbed in Mainstream Media. 

       Movies don’t have to portray things accurately. If things worked the way they do in real life it would be boring. Fiction doesn’t have to be realistic, and I would argue it shouldn’t be, but it does need to be believable. If a piece of media has a world, greatly resembling ours, where no one ages past 50, and nobody ages slower than the average human, but nothing is said about the majority of people dying before they can claim social security, I think there is a problem.  A little less than 20% of America’s population is 60 years or older. However, few older adults, especially older women, are present in mainstream media, about less than 2% of all characters in prime-time television. Disney’s Up was the first full-length-featured-animated film to star a senior citizen. 

     In children’s books, negative words are often used to describe the appearances of older characters. Worlds like withered, crone, ugly, and toothless are very common. Although many people are passed he/her prime, older adults take a varying level of pride in their appearances. Just like middle-aged, and/or young people. However, this emphasis on the negative consequences aging has on the body, pales in the light of how the personality of those over 50 is portrayed. On the personal level, older-adults are often presented as sweet and childlike. They are frail and cannot possibly look after themselves. If there is a crime committed they are often the victim. Those who don’t follow this stereotype are treated as deviants and are almost always comic reliefs. However older-adults have a range of personality traits and abilities. Some may be child-like, while others may not. Vulnerability and independence also varies from person to person as well. 

     From all the YA books I have read, the only human older character was Cassia’s grandfather from Matched. *Spoilers* he dies not less than halfway through the book *End of Spoilers* Friendly older men are a rarity in fiction, but they are much easier to come by than their female counterparts. I found a handful of older women who aren’t mad at the world in adult fiction, but none in YA. In this category of literature, older female characters are old fashion, but this isn’t them having nostalgia for their youth and trying to get their granddaughters to act classy and ladylike (politeness is never out of style). Oh no, they think the good old days are the way it is supposed to be and a woman’s place is in the kitchen. 

      In Red Queen Mare is given two instructors who are both middle-aged and older. Her male teacher, Julian, is supportive of Mare and wants change. He becomes her friend and confidant, and I love his character. However, Mare’s female teacher, Lady Blonos, is a wrinkly-petty devil. She is impossible to please and clearly doesn’t want to teach Mare. The scary part of this is that Lady Blonos is one of the many older women written like this! Who fought for woman’s rights in the first place? From the way, older women are portrayed in fiction, you’d think Title 9 fell from the sky because politicians were bored one day. These fictional women’s real-life counterparts went through hell to get their granddaughters to where they are now. 

      Many older characters are treated like they are set in their ways and it is impossible to change them. Lia from The Kiss of Deception is very against tradition, particularly arraigned marriage. I don’t fault her for not liking the inability to have a say in who she marries, but older characters who weren’t okay with, not only arraigned marriage but other traditions, were presented as good people but those who followed tradition weren’t so kind. These backward-old men were simply relics of their times just like their traditions. But, older adults aren’t from another time. Although they were born decades ago, older adults are alive and part of the now. They take care of themselves, their homes, their families, communities, and many are still very politically active. The present doesn’t belong to only one generation. We are all together in a community whether we took our first breath this morning or 85 years ago.

      Sources: 

http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/ct-older-people-underrepresented-in-film-survey-20160912-story.html

https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=3468&context=etd

http://www.agingwatch.com/?p=439

The Importance of Book Covers

    The phrase, “Don’t judge a book by its cover,” is a cliché, and a rather old one at that. One of the oldest print recordings of the phrase is from the June 1867 issue of a newspaper called, Piqua Democrat. To sum up what was said the article stated not to judge a man by his appearance because he could have many skills underneath. Not so bad because it would be wrong for me to look at a stranger in the checkout line and decide everything there is to know about that person. However, books are not people. (Shocking, right?) A books cover is often the first thing someone notices while browsing through shelves at a library, bookstore, or a personal collection. Book covers matter and most people, myself included, do speculate about the content of the book by looking at the cover. The phrase, “don’t judge a book by a cover,” wouldn’t exist if this didn’t happen.

      A good book cover is good marketing. Publishing companies know the first thing a potential buyer notices about a book is the cover. Because of this they have developed ways to make covers that will attract their target audience. Hopefully if the cover is intriguing enough for someone to take it from the shelf he/she might read the synopsis, and maybe the first few pages. The goal is to eventually sell the book. Book covers are the bait used to lure readers in. However, it would be wrong for me to say it is all about marketing. Designing books covers is an art that involves capturing the feel of the words written inside. 

      For a cover to be successful it doesn’t exactly need to be attractive. I know of some very ugly covers that I don’t like to look at, but they do fit the story very well.  Red Queen by Victory Aveyard has an upside-down crown that is covered in blood. I like blood inside people’s body, where it belongs, not on a book cover. However, it is professionally done. The main character, Mare, is only pretending to be a noble lady as her life depends on it, but blood is a huge deal in the story. A person’s blood not only determines who is related to whom, but a person’s class and his/her ability. Although I don’t like looking at a book cover that is dripping blood, that isn’t to say it doesn’t play into the themes of the story.     

      Sometimes a cover can be absolutely beautiful, but make zero sense. The first edition cover for Shatter Me by Tahereh Mafi was  gorgeous. It shows the main character in a fancy white dress standing against a shattered wall. It isn’t displeasing to the eye, but it doesn’t represent the book well. At no point does this girl has the opportunity to wear such a dress. The new covers, while some people think they still don’t make much sense, I think they fit better and it is a good change. The eye on the cover is the main character’s eye. It’s like her window to the world. Although this cover is a little eerie looking, I think it fits much better. 

       A good book cover is one that fits the book and gives the reader a hint of what lies ahead. The cover doesn’t need to be pretty, but it should be professional. If a book cover is amateurish then it is easy to brush it off as an armature story. That is why the most common advice I hear for people looking to self-publish is to hire a professional graphic designer to make the cover of the book. This is also important because a professional is likely to know some tricks that make a cover work. Such as what colors, shapes, and positioning of objects will invoke certain emotions in the viewer. A designer ,also, needs to consider how a cover will look when scaled down because a person looking for a book online will only see a small thumbnail image of the cover. 

     Does this mean it is okay to "Judge a book by its cover"? Of course not! Although a taste of the story inside is presented in the cover, a good cover is still only a window to what a reader will find once he/she opens it up. I know it’s been said a picture is worth a thousand words, but no cover image is going to reveal exactly what was written inside. The best way to know what stories and worlds a book holds is to read it. 

Sources:

https://www.writtenwordmedia.com/2015/09/30/4-ways-hack-book-cover-design-science/

https://www.draft2digital.com/blog/the-psychology-of-a-good-book-cover/

http://writerunboxed.com/2017/09/17/the-psychology-behind-good-book-cover-design/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hek_bJARjEg

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/happiness-in-world/201208/judging-book-its-cover

https://tcnjjournal.pages.tcnj.edu/2013/03/24/why-you-bought-that-book-the-psychology-behind-book-hunting/

https://www.knowyourphrase.com/you-cant-judge-a-book-by-its-cover