Yes, I’ve moved again! I’VE MOVED TO SELF-HOSTED. Hurrah! I’ve set afterwritten.wordpress.com up to redirect to afterwritten.com, so there should be no trouble at all for any of you. I’m just leaving this here so anyone who stumbles upon this blog somehow despite the redirect, or in the future after the redirect ends in one year, will know where to go.
So, here you go, my shiny new website, afterwritten.com!
Top Ten Tuesday: Hosted by the Broke and the Bookish!
1) A Darker Shade of Magic by V. E. Schwab: LONDON URBAN FANTASY WRITTEN BY AN AUTHOR I HAVE ALWAYS WANTED TO READ BUT HAVEN’T YET (this will become something of a theme in this post). AWESOME COVER. Just. AWESOME EVERYTHING. I LOVE LONDON URBAN FANTASY STORIES!!
Kayla @ The Thousand Lives tagged me! Thanks, Kayla! ❤
(I wrote up this post a whole week ago, and I could have sworn I posted it, but when I checked my blog the post had completely disappeared without a trace and I had to write the whole thing all over again. Whyyyyyy, WordPress, WHYYYY. x___x Don’t you dare do this to me again, WordPress.)
Abhorsen by Garth Nix (#3 in the Old Kingdom series) (HarperCollins Children’s, first published in 2003)
This review contains spoilers for the first two books of the series.
Oh, ABHORSEN. I finished you at 1am and sobbed for at least 15 minutes.
An ancient evil, imprisoned since the dawn of time, is on the verge of being freed. Lirael and Sam, followed by their companions, the Disreputable Dog and Mogget, are the only ones who have a chance to stop it from destroying the world before it’s too late. But Nick, Sam’s best friend, is being controlled against his will and unknowingly by a shard of the evil within his body – can Lirael and Sam possibly save the world and Nick at the same time?
Let’s talk about chapter titles!
I was reading Lirael by Garth Nix, and as I started reading Chapter One, I noticed with a sort of jump that the chapter was titled “An Ill-Favoured Birthday”. I say I noticed with a jump because… well, Lirael is the sequel to Sabriel, right, and while I was reading Sabriel, I could have sworn I never once took notice of any chapter titles at all. So I thought, oops, did I just completely miss out on the chapter titles in Sabriel? I MUST HAVE. Now this is not entirely implausible, because I’ve been known to miss chapter titles in the past.
So I started trying to make an effort to read every chapter title in Lirael, but I’m pretty sure I’ve still missed a few. Whenever I start a new chapter my eyes just tend to glide straight down to the text. I have to really pay attention and put effort into reading each chapter title, or else I’d just forget it.
BUT THEN I GOT HOME AND I REALISED SABRIEL DIDN’T ACTUALLY HAVE ANY CHAPTER TITLES AT ALL. PHEW. Just plain old “Chapter One”, etc.
So this got me wondering. What do you think of chapter titles? Do they really do anything for you most of the time? I really don’t think chapter titles have ever made much of an impression on me. I try and think back, and literally the only chapter titles I have any memory of IN MY ENTIRE LIFE are the ones from Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones, which all started with “In which”: “In which Sophie talks to hats”, “In which Sophie becomes Howl’s old mother”, etc. etc. (NO OF COURSE I DIDN’T RECALL THOSE FROM MEMORY, I just found a website that listed them! Don’t be silly, I can’t remember anything.)
Okay, that and Ultraviolet by R. J. Anderson, but I only read that one a couple weeks ago. I remember very clearly the title of the prologue: “Zero (Is Translucent)”. And on each chapter went: “One (Is Grey)”, “Two (Is Red)”. For the first few chapters I think I still hadn’t realised the significance of the chapter titles, but then I understood that it was because the protagonist had synesthesia, and the chapter titles were telling us how she perceived the numbers. WHICH WAS REALLY COOL. But after the first few chapters my attention started to slip and I stopped reading the titles again. Oops.
Afterwritten 