Bookish Horizons

One or two of you may have already noticed something...I created a new blog.

Here's the deal. As you can probably tell, I love books and I read all the time. Since I've starting learning to speed read, I can read faster than I've ever been able to before, which means I've been reading more books.

So lately, with my new-found speed-reading super power, I've been drawn once again to the enticing possibility of joining The Classics Club. I learned about the Club a few months ago, and ever since I've wished I could join. But there are too many other things to worry about in life, I decided. Things like school and having a social life. I couldn't possibly decide to read 50 books outside of school--I already do enough reading in school!

Well, I've been having a lot of epiphanies lately about life, my life in particular. I'm not doing myself any favors by allowing school to take over my life, especially as I'm about to get married. Eventually school is going to be over, and then what? Will I be a shell of a human being? Yes, I love school, but what I really love is learning. If I allow school to get in the way of my learning, then I'm totally missing the point. Whether I got an A or a B isn't going to matter in 50 years; what I learned and internalized from the class, and how I applied it to other things in my life, is going to matter.

And now that I've learned to speed read, I'm even more ready to take my learning to a whole new level. I know there are so many classics I haven't read and always wanted to. And not just classics, but thousands of other books that could potentially change me as a person.

Photo by Rodrigo Galindez

And of course, what's better than joining a community of people that are all trying to do the same thing I am? I have the chance to motivate myself to read great books, respond to them, and join in a community of discussion with hundreds of other people who are reading the same or similar books.

But I realized something...the Classics Club is for bloggers. To join, you need to review the books on a blog. But my blog? It's not a book blog. I've written about books on here before, but book reviews just don't seem to have much of a place here. Pass the Chocolate is a writing blog, not a reading blog. As dear as it is to me, it can't fit that purpose.

I used to see blogging as a one-blog thing. A true blogger has one blog where they write whatever they want to write. And that's it. But I've learned from other bloggers that it only makes sense to have different blogs for different purposes. And once they outlive their purpose, it's time to move on to a different blog.

So, has Pass the Chocolate outlived its purpose?! ...No! Of course not! I enjoy the randominity of this blog. And I also enjoy the coziness. I welcome new readers, of course, but I enjoy having only a few, most of which know me personally. I like not feeling like I have to impress everyone. This blog is here to stay.

But if you want to check out my new blog (including my list of more than 50 classics I'm going to read over the next five years), here's the link: http://classicsandbeyond.blogspot.com/. I'm sort of falling in love with it. Join me in my book blogging journey!

A Literary Halloween

Okay, I'm going to be honest. Normally, Halloween isn't my favorite holiday. But this Halloween is different! Special! Exciting! Frightening! Bloody! Gory! Ghastly! Ghostly! Ghouly! Literary!

Literary?

As any writer, reader, or English major knows, the best way to improve a holiday is to literar-ize it. I mean, look at Christmas. You have Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol. Look at Valentine's Day. You have stupid rhymes written on hearts posing as gifts. Look at Thanksgiving. Those lame paragraphs about a fantasy land of pilgrims and Indians loving each other (aka great fiction) that you had to read in grade school.

And out of all these wonderfully literarized holidays, you get Halloween, which, if you can believe it, is exponentially more literary.

Dracula. Frankenstein. Edgar Allen Poe. Wuthering Heights. Twilight.

(What? No--Twilight isn't on there because it's about vampires. It's on there because it's frightening how rich Stephenie Meyer is for such horrific writing.)

(Har, har. English major joke. If you like Twilight, no offense was meant.)

Anyway, I decided to "literarize" my Halloween by reading Frankenstein! I've heard so many great things about it, and I'm excited to read this classic piece of literature for the first time.

Also, even more fun, I have written two zombie haiku. Here they are, for your reading pleasure, so you can literarize your Halloween!

The invitation
said "Please bring finger foods." Guess
what the zombies brought. 

This one is dedicated to my fiance:

He likes me for my 
Brains, not my body. I knew
he was a zombie!

Happy Halloween!

A New Direction

So, for once in my life I am actually going to write a post that I told you I was going to write. Like I wrote in my last post, I am thinking of going a different way with my writing.

Disclaimer: I haven't actually decided on this idea. It's sort of like breaking up. Yes, maybe you think a certain other person is attractive, but you're not actually leaving your boyfriend/girlfriend for that other person. You're breaking up because the relationship itself isn't working out, not because you fell in love with someone else.

Photo by hashmil on Flickr

I'm not sure that analogy made sense, but basically, I'm not "leaving" travel writing because I'm infatuated with another genre. I'm leaving it because it's not right for me. And now I'm dating around in other genres, and there is one that particularly intrigues me.

Biographies.

If you're a student (or possibly if you're not a student), that one word alone might be enough to make you drowsy. Your immediate reaction? Boring. My immediate reaction to your immediate reaction? Exactly. 

Letting Go of a Dream

I am stepping away from my dream of being a travel writer.

Wait. Hear me out.

This is not a "boo-hoo-poor-me" post. Far from it. I've been asking myself some hard questions and reevaluating my long- and short-term goals. I've been asking myself what I really want.

When I was single, the idea of being a travel writer seemed practically perfect in every way. I knew I wanted to write, and I knew I wanted to travel. What else did I need to know? I could get paid to travel! What more could I possibly want???

I Have a Confession.

I love chick flicks.

I'm also listening to Christmas music. Yes, in September.

I also spent at least an hour searching the Internet for recipes with pumpkin in them. My love of fall has carried over to an obsession with pumpkin.

And today I made beignets for the first time, and I've already eaten about 15 of them.

Okay, I'm getting carried away with the confessions. Back to the original one.

I love chick flicks. Even the most ridiculously corny ones, like that one with Amy Adams where she goes to Ireland. (Okay, I liked it except for the ending.)

I guess what I should really say is that I love watching chick flicks, which is very different. I am not the sort of person who recommends my favorite chick flicks to everyone I know, including guys. I am not the sort of person to analyze each one as though it were a great work of film. (And conclude with dramatic sighing that the incredibly complex characters have reached a beautiful, if flawed, kind of love, which only the most enlightened can appreciate.) Actually, I'm sort of a closet chick flick addict. I don't go around telling people.

Falling Into Fall

Oh, autumn. Finally.

Well, okay. Autumn isn't really officially here, I admit. The leaves haven't really changed yet...the weather hasn't gotten that much colder...but you know what? I say it's autumn, so it's autumn.

And since it's autumn, it's only fitting that I be sitting here on my sofa, wrapped up in a blanket, blogging, and drinking hot cocoa. (And I am.)

Photo by dtaylorcreative on Flickr

I've always thought of myself as a sort of any-season kind of person. There are good things to like about every season, I always told myself. ...Then again, I grew up in San Diego, where seasons don't exist. It wasn't until this year--the first time I have ever actually lived through all four seasons in a row--that I realized I love the colder seasons the best. Fall and winter.

Not to knock spring and summer. There are lots of things to love about spring and summer. I'm just not really a warm-weather kind of person. I'm not very outdoorsy, I don't like swimming, I don't like wearing shorts, and I really don't like heat.

What I do love is going back to warm, hearty foods like potatoes and squash. Chili and soup. I love finding ways to incorporate pumpkin into everything. Adding a generous helping of cinnamon, nutmeg, or cloves to cookies, cupcakes, even brownies, anything I can think of to bake. I love just turning on the oven again!

Changes in Life...but Not the Blog

Seeing as it's been exactly a month since I last posted, I decided to get back here and write again.

For once, I actually have a really good reason to have temporarily ignored my blog. I got engaged. And since then, my life has been rather a whirlwind.

I started thinking about the way I've been using my blog. Since I've gotten engaged, I've gotten way more into stuff I wasn't quite so interested in before. I always liked cooking, but now I cook four times a week, at least. I clean a lot more. And I'm actually interested in all those little crafty projects and little fix-it tips. I have no problem with this. I'm glad I'm starting to become genuinely interested in all the domestic things I never really cared about before. But as soon as I thought about that with reference to my blogging, I had to cringe. Is that what would happen to my blog? It would be lost in the blogosphere as just another domestic "mommy blog," with endlessly cheery anecdotes about kids, homemade decorations, and "delicious yet oh-so-easy and only 60 calories!" recipes? Would I have to resign myself to more than three exclamation points per post? (Or whatever the rule is.) Would my blog--without me even bearing children--end up just another...mommy blog?! (There goes my first allotted exclamation point.)