I Didn't Finish My Planned Post On Time

I started writing a post last comparing Whip It the movie to the book, but I neglected to finish it this morning. Amanda, at Fig and Thistle posted this questionnaire, and I stole it. What can I say? I like filling these things out, and I can do it with a headache. 

1. Sum yourself up in twenty-five words or less:  I’m an introvert who can’t think in straight lines. I have the hair of a Tolkein Elf and mermaid lovechild but none of the grace.
2. Do you read? If so, why, what, and how often?  I usually read every day. The times I read vary, but I almost always read before bed. It quiets my brain. I read biographies, poetry, trashtastic historical fiction, Victorian novels, Modern novels, primarily I read women writers, dry, darkly comic novels and stories….
3. Do you blog? If so, your blog’s name & focus (classic books? YA? art? college? writing? movies? miscellaneous? etc?): My blog is called Cornflake Girl, for now. It doesn’t have enough posts to have an immediately discernible theme or subject, but I want it to be about books, feminism, music, class, and my life.
4. Your favorite adult book(s) &/or children’s book(s)?  The Bell Jar, Sense and Sensibility, Wuthering Heights, Mrs. Dalloway, A Confederacy of Dunces, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
5. Your favorite movie(s)? Titanic, Ghost World, Welcome to the Dollhouse, Pulp Fiction
6. Your favorite quote(s) from literature? “I've no more business to marry Edgar Linton than I have to be in heaven; and if the wicked man in there had not brought Heathcliff so low, I shouldn't have thought of it. It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now; so he shall never know how I love him: and that, not because he's handsome, Nelly, but because he's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same; and Linton's is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire.” And

“Because misery and degradation, and death, and nothing that God or Satan could inflict would have parted us, you, of your own will, did it. I have not broken your heart—you have broken it; and in breaking it, you have broken mine. So much the worse for me that I am strong. Do I want to live? What kind of living will it be when you—oh, God! would you like to live with your soul in the grave?' —Emily Brontë Wuthering Heights

“He was not an ill-disposed young man, unless to be rather cold-hearted and rather selfish is to be ill-disposed”—Jane Austen Sense and Sensibility

“If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
 "You mean,’ Captain Penderton said, ‘that any fulfillment obtained at the expense of normalcy is wrong, and should not be allowed to bring happiness. In short, it is better, because it is morally honourable, for the square peg to keep scraping about the round hole rather than to discover and use the unorthodox square that would fit it?"--Carson McCullers Reflections in a Golden Eye

7.      Most challenging book you’ve read in your life?  Les Miserables

8.      Book(s) you’re currently reading, if any?  I’m rereading Save Me the Waltz and diving into a stack of Zelda Fitzgerald biographies and going to finally read Middlemarch.

9. Book(s) you’re most looking forward to reading?  Sylvia Plath’s Letters Home. I’m also going to reread her Journals.
10. Author whose works you’re curious to explore soon?  George Eliot—I need to read more of her, Anne Sexton—I need to reread her more carefully
11. Book you’re most scared to read but might read eventually, anyway? None really.
12. Book you have re-read the most times in your life (or if you hate re-reading, just write that!)  Wuthering Heights followed closely by The Bell Jar
13. If you could spend a day in any era, where would you go (including “I would not go anywhere! I LOVE the 21st century!”)?  I have two favorites. Either England in October 1962 or England just before WWI. The clothes are a little less constricting than Victorian dresses but still gorgeous and I could have tea with Virginia Woolf.

          

14. If you could be any character in literature, who would you be (and why)? It’s impossible to pick just one. In a lot of ways I’m like Elinor Dashwood, but at the same time I’d really like to be someone like Cathy or Marianne. Despite the consequences, I envy their ability to let themselves feel things so completely and openly.

15. Do you love Jane Austen or want to “dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone”? (Phrase borrowed from Mark Twain).
1. Why? (for either answer)?  I adore Jane Austen. She was a brilliant, witty, far ahead of her time writer.
2. Favorite and/or least favorite Austen novel?  Sense and Sensibility is my favorite. Pride and Prejudice is my least favorite.
16. Your favorite season?  Autumn. If I could choose a second I’d go with winter.
17. Do you prefer dawn or twilight?  Dawn.
18. Your favorite memory from childhood?  Reading in the woods during winter
19. Some of your interests beyond books?  Writing, creating the clothes I want cheaply, music, feminism, pop culture, history, word games, walks, hilariously bad movies
20. What question do you wish I had asked? (Ask and answer it!):  I’m doing two. What writers do you enjoy as people but are less than thrilled by their work? Edna St Vincent Millay, Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, Radclyffe Hall. I like parts of each other work, but overall I’m more interested in their biographies than their writing.

What was the first poem you ever read or the first poem you ever loved? The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes was both. I read it when I was 11.