Book Stuff: A week in December by Sebastian Faulks

On Friday I finished reading 'A week in December' by Sebastian Faulks, and it was a long hard slog of a read! Ever since I read the back of this book in a shop a few years ago I've been interested to read it, so I feel really let down by how much of a disappointment it turned out to be. A week in December is a book that follows the lives of multiple characters during a week in December whose paths kind of cross at various times in the story. With this book, the same thing happened to me that I get with other books that focus on lots of different characters, I just couldn't get any empathy or interest in the characters going for me. I would find one character would peak my curiosity only for the next chapter to move on to somebody else, and by the time it came back around to the person I had been interested in I just didn't really care anymore. It felt like we got so much day to day detail about the characters but none of their emotion and the story just kind of fell flat on me, I found myself having to force myself to read chapters of this book and counting down the pages till the end of the book. The idea of the story, all these characters living slightly disconnected from other people against the back drop of the fact that they all travel on a London transport line that is constantly connected in a loop was a great setting, but the actual product just didn't live up to it's potential for me.

Letting go of the need to manipulate!

When I was suffering with depression the worst behaviour I engaged in was manipulating and controlling people. Although I understand now that I was unwell, it's still the one thing now that I look back on that time and struggle to forgive myself for. Back then, I could never let things unfold naturally, or let people decide what they thought of me and my actions, everything had to be carefully contrived to produce the outcome and image that I wanted. People could only have the opinion that I was the best, and I would manipulate people to the highest degree in order to make them form that view of me. Three years later and I've let go of my need to control and please people so much, but yesterday I found myself slipping back into a trap of manipulating somebody, and I instantly disliked the person that I became. I have a shared work situation with a friend which is coming to an end and we are trying to complete it so that we both end up in good positions. In my head I had mentally planned out how things would go and the timescales they would be working to, so when yesterday I found out that things would be moving quicker than expected, this instantly threw me off kilter. I quickly caught myself coming up with ways to slow things down, putting ideas in my friends head to hold her off from taking action and getting angry when I didn't get the responses that I wanted. I retreated to my bedroom feeling crazy and out of control, I didn't like this side of me that I hadn't seen in so long, who was this person who manipulated people's thoughts just to make sure she wasn't disadvantaged? I came back out of my room and told my friend the things that the new developments in our arrangement were making me feel concerned about, and we sat down and made a plan to deal with them to make sure the situation still works for both of us. Today everything feels on track and the fact that things are going at a faster pace than I had expected doesn't seem like it will harm me. I am learning step by step to just trust the process of things and that I can let go and keep my inner manipulation monster firmly in it's cage!

Feeling motivated!

After what has seemed like weeks of distractions, interruptions, birthdays to buy and make plans for, lethargy and illnesses that I just couldn't shake off, this week I am finally feeling calm and motivated and I am experiencing that brilliant feeling at the end of every day of loving what I am working on and creating. The fears that have surrounded me for the past month that I will never recover my motivation have just silently retreated, and it's like they never existed. Maybe the key all along was not to fight the lull in my motivation and just let it take it's course. Just let all the busy and annoying bits of life have their way with me and consume my time and then allow illness to render me a couch potato for a while. If you truly love doing something you will get back in the swing of it and it will feel all the more sweeter for having to live without it for a while.

Young girls need role models exactly like Zoella!

I'm 33 years old and I love Zoella (aka Zoe Sugg), so I can only imagine how insanely I would have adored her as a 16 year old girl. I get emotional every time I see Zoe's YouTube advert come on the television, I want her to succeed in life as badly as I want my little sister to. I first became aware of Zoe when I started watching YouTube videos by sprinkle of glitter and my interest in her peaked when I learnt she was a fellow anxiety sufferer, five months later and I'm hooked on her vlogs and blog posts and well basically everything about her! With all the great things I feel about Zoe, it was disappointing to wake up to an article by the independent claiming that Zoe is the worst kind of role model for the young women of today. In a media world that is saturated with young people falling out of cocktail bars and being paid for photos of the marriages they rush into or children they create in a hurry all to remain famous, there is something refreshing and comforting about somebody who would rather go late night shopping at Waitrose than to the pub, goes for beach walks in a rabbit onesie and gets excited about a Wispa hot chocolate or Nutella pancakes. I am not Zoe's target audience, but does it matter? Beauty isn't my first love but I appreciate what she is creating from her own passion for it, there is an innocence and friendliness about Zoe that is truly infectious and I look forward to her daily vlogs where everything is so familiar that it almost feels like I am checking in with family. The article in the independent implied that Zoe is a bad role model to girls because she encourages young women to be obsessed with beauty and sends the message out to them that looks are the only thing that matter in life. As I read the article I thought, what about 'chummy chatter' where Zoe teams up with sprinkle of glitter to advise on issues such as 'setting boundaries in personal relationships' and 'allowing yourself to feel sad'?, what about the blog posts where Zoe advises young people to get the most out of school and to embrace their studies?, what about the countless times that I have seen Zoe stand up to twitter bullies to defend her followers? And what about the number of times Zoe has spoken out about her ongoing battle with anxiety? How do all those factors constitute a bad role model? The way I see it is that the beauty videos are just a very small part of Zoe's brand, she encourages girls to try new looks and styles and to get excited about products but she also tells them not to hide behind make up and frequently appears make up free in her own vlogs, while helping them negotiate the trickier issues of growing up. I wish there were more young women like Zoe, encouraging young girls to live up to their full potential and to feel good about themselves inside and out, and sharing their vulnerabilities as well as their successes to help inspire young people.

Book Stuff: life after life by Kate Atkinson *contains mild spoilers*

I've just finished reading life after life by Kate Atkinson, I've been eyeing this book up in shops for about 6 months, so I was ecstatic to find a copy of it in my library, as my budget for book buying this year is minimal. It is a fairly chunky book at 615 pages and it took me four weeks to read, but that is only because I started reading it just before I got a really bad head cold where I couldn't bear to look at a book for a fortnight, without that I think I would have devoured the book in days. The story goes a little something like this, during a snow storm in 1910 Ursula Todd is born and dies immediately at birth, on the same day in the same snow Storm Ursula Todd is born and lives to tell the tale and many after that. Ursula is gifted with a strange ability to relive her life over and over again, but in kind of different variations and parallel universises of the same life. The question of reincarnation and the journey of our souls is something that fascinates me, I quite often get senses of de ja vu, or feel instant connections to other people that I can't quite explain, so I was keen to explore this book and the questions that it was posing. I'm going to admit that I did sometimes find this book difficult to follow, it flits with alternating chapters anywhere between 1910 and 1967 as Ursula lives out her various lives, but as you get to understand the characters and the various periods of time it becomes a little easier to deal with. With themes of rape, domestic abuse, sexual assaults on children, war and abortion I did quite often find myself getting a little depressed while reading this book, but as Ursula gets an unlimited number of restarts on her life there was a lot of relief from the alternate versions of her life where the bad stuff hadn't happened. About mid way through the book when it seemed to settle heavily into the period of the second world war, I found myself asking if you had the ability to live your life over why would you keep coming back to the point where you live through war time? Surely you wouldnt choose that over and over again? As I got the end of the book though I understood why Ursula had to live through that in various capacities,ultimately in order to bring greater good to the world. I felt the book could have been a lot cooler if we had some kind of inner dialogue from her Ursula's soul or something like that. For instance why in some cases when she lived her life again did she make it so something bad hadn't happened? And why at other times did she ultimately go back to living the same scenario? This book has had me asking a lot of big questions about how much of our life journey is really chosen by our soul and how much of it is fate? If I had Ursula's gift would I go out of my way to do things differently or are there certain things that however bad they are I need to experience them? I gave this book 4 stars on good reads, its worth a read but like I said it has some heavy themes and requires serious concentration to keep up with the story moving between time periods.