I have a confession. School briefly killed my love for reading. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy the books that I was assigned to read in high school and college—some of my favorite books are books I eagerly dissected in essays and class discussions. My life was just so full of stress, assignments, and mini existential crises that the idea of reading a book that I picked up of my own volition seemed ridiculous.
6 Comments
I’m going to preface this post by saying that I have never been officially diagnosed with a mental illness, but that I have had depressive episodes and tendencies toward social anxiety since high school. This post isn’t intended to do anything more than share my personal experiences. You should seek professional help if you have thoughts of suicide, or harming yourself or others.
As I’ve been struggling with some ups and downs in my personal life and my mental health, I’ve started thinking about how my mental health impacts my writing, and vice versa. As I sat down today (I started writing this on 1/16/18) to write my novel with my brain in a depressive fog, I found that it just wasn’t happening. But then, something weird happened. A poem came out instead—so I decided to write about why I think that happened. The Hate U Give, by Angie Thomas, is a story about a black teenaged girl named Starr who grows up in the projects, and she witnesses firsthand her childhood friend Khalil, who is unarmed, be shot and killed by a white police officer. This happens within the first chapter of the book, and the rest of the story covers the fallout as Starr tries to navigate her own trauma and the reactions of her community as the story gains national attention.
If you're reading this, it means that I finally committed to starting my book blog, and you might even like books too! Exciting stuff!! I have been putting off starting this blog since May of 2017, which is when I graduated from NAU with my shiny English degree and a whole lot of uncertainty about what happens next.
All the Crooked Saints is the first Maggie Stiefvater book that I've read, and let me say, I could not have chosen a better book to introduce myself to her body of work. Magical realism, owls, black roses, Elvis, trucks that are recovered ecosystems, coyote-headed priests, the incomprehensibility of love and radio waves and miracles—it doesn’t sound like all of these seemingly unrelated things could work together, but they all live in this book, and I didn’t once question it.
|
AuthorWriter, reviewer, bookseller, book nerd extraordinaire. Fiction reader at Waxwing Magazine. Archives
September 2019
Categories
All
|