the lord of the rings | the sydney project

Woe, destruction, ruin, and decay; the worst is death and death will have his day.

Posted on September 24, 2013 by sydneyday

In case you didn’t guess from the title of this post, part 1 of The Hollow Crown, a collection of film versions of Shakespeare’s Henriad, FINALLY aired in the US on PBS Friday night. I have been waiting for ages to watch these. Seriously. As soon as the air dates were announces, I wrote them on a sticky note and stuck it to my calender, where I have started at it for months and months on end.

Part one was Richard II, starring Ben Whishaw as the titular character, and including Rory Kinnear, Patrick Stewart, Clemence Posey, Jake Purefoy, David Morrisey, Lindsey Duncan…it goes on. And this is only the first film. Let me tell you, it did not disappoint. And now I’m dying for Friday, so I can watch part two, Henry IV: Part 1, which starts Jeremy Irons as the title character, and my favorite, Tom Hiddleston (eek!) as Prince Hal. It also boasts the amazing Julie Walters, whom I love, and Simon Russel Beale as Falstaff. Is it obvious that I’m really, REALLY excited for this? Does that make we weird? I don’t really care if it does, I was just wondering.

Ok, I will move on from Shakespeare. Though it is not without difficulty.

Other than watching Richard II twice, I also did some crafting this weekend. I made three Fall/Halloween pennant banners. I finally spent some more time working on my cousins birthday present–which was about two weeks ago–and hopefully I will finish it this weekend. As long as it’s not another really busy week. Last week was crazy. I still haven’t made new fall wreaths. I have everything gathered and has been sitting on my kitchen table for three weeks. So my goal is to get them done by this weekend & get them out. My other goal to get my Halloween decor out! I want to make a few things, and I need to try and mend my favorite Halloween sign that one of my dogs ate last year. I have a feeling it’s a lost cause, but keep your fingers crossed anyway.

Let’s see, what else? I got caught up on the past two weeks’ episodes of Breaking Bad–and watched this week’s–and saw that I had missed some serious business. (Spoilers! Avert your eyes!) I can’t believe that Hank is dead! And I was on the verge of tears when I thought they were going to kill Jessie. Intense. That was intense. I watched the Emmys, too. They didn’t suck, but they weren’t great either. It was also the season finale (and possibly the series finale, if I here correctly) of Copper. Oh, and I watched episode 2 of Orphan Black, which I’m loving. I’m so BBC America is airing the first season so I don’t have to Netflix it. My queue is backed-up enough as it is!

I have a feeling I’m forgetting something from this weekend…oh well. Onward!

So, it’s Tuesday, which means it’s Top Ten Tuesday hosted by The Broke and the Bookish (but I will get to that later), and tonight is Face Off on SyFy! Yay! It doesn’t really feel like a Tuesday, but I can’t figure out what day it does feel like. I barely remember yesterday. I think my brain decided just take the day off & chill at home while my body was at work.

This week is Banned Books Week, so instead of using the TTT topic for today–favorite sequels–I’m going to do my top ten favorite banned/challenged books! But before I get into my list, a bit about Banned Books Week the ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom has more information on banned & challenged books, including multiple lists broken by year or decade, as well as a neat timeline.

Now, onward to my list! There are a few contemporary titles on here, but the majority are classic. And according to the ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, at least 46 of the Radcliffe Publishing Course Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century have been either banned or challenged. I have also included some of the reasons given over the years for banning or challenging each book (quotations all come from this ALA page on banned classics).

The Great Gatsby by F. Scot Fitzgerald – Banned/Challenged for: namely language & sexual references.
To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee – Banned/Challenged for: language, racial slurs that promote “racial hatred, racial division, racial separation, and promotes white supremacy,” “psychological damage to the positive integration process,” objectionable content, adult themes including rape and incest, inappropriate for age group.
Where The Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak – Banned/Challenged for: dark and disturbing nature.
The Perks of Being A Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky – Banned/Challenged for: homosexuality, suicide, language, drug use, alcohol use, anti-family, abuse, inappropriate for age group.
Harry Potter Series by J.K. Rowling – Banned/Challenged for: portrayal of witchcraft as good, occult/satanic themes, violence, religious viewpoint, unsuited to age group.
The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien – Banned/Challenged for: demoralizing content, excessive violence, language, racism, sexual content, “defamatory towards minorities, God, women, and the disabled,” satanic.
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller – Banned/Challenged for: language, content.
Gone With The Wind by Margaret Mitchell – Banned Challenged for: racism, language.
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins – Banned/Challenged for: anti-ethnic, anti-family, language, violence, occult/satanic references, sexual explicit, unsuited to age group.
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger – (Now, here is a testament to how much I hate book banning: this is one of my most hated books. I wish to all that is good that I could love this book, but it’s never going to happen. I hate it! But I hate book banning even more, and this is one of the most banned books there is, so I had to include it.) Banned Challenged for: “anti-white,” obscenity, language, sexually explicit including prostitution, “undermines morality,” alcohol abuse.

Go on & be a rebel! Read a banned book this week!

P.S. I remembered what I was forgetting from my weekend: I read volumes one through four of Locke and Key!! It’s official, I’m in love. Highly recommend. I plan on finishing volume 5 tonight!

Weekend Recap, TTT, & Day 1 of Blogtember!

Posted on September 3, 2013 by sydneyday

And we’re back from the long Labor Day weekend! I hope yours was a little better than mine. My weekend wasn’t terrible, but it would have been much better without the dreaded migraine I had all of Sunday which caused me to miss two birthday parties I was really looking forward too. I did, however, get to spend Labor Day with a surprise marathon of the BBC’s Pride & Prejudice, and I did quite a bit of cooking & baking, which makes it a success, really. I hadn’t seen the BBC version of P&P in a long time. Not surprisingly, I fall for Colin Firth’s Fitzwilliam Darcy over & over again every time I watch it. He is the best personification of the beloved Mr. Darcy that I have ever seen. Did you know that this miniseries originally aired 18 years ago?! Yeah. 1995. It doesn’t seem like it could have been that long ago. I mean, that would have made me 8 years old when it first aired. No matter, it definitely holds up to the test of time.

Now for Top Ten Tuesday hosted by The Broke and the Bookish! This week is top ~~ten~~ nine contemporary & classics/”required reading” book pairings, and/or books that should be required reading but currently aren’t.

Pairings

Dracula and The Historian – This is an obvious pairing to me, seeing as both books circle around the character of Dracula, and both are on my all-time favorites list.
To Kill A Mockingbird and The Help – Both are fictional takes on the reality of racism/civil rights in the South, at different points in our history, and both are, again, on my all-time favorites list.
Pride and Prejudice and Bridget Jones’s Diary – This is kind of a given, seeing as BJD is kind of a modern take on the classic story, and they just seem to go so well together. Again, all-time favorites.
The Wizard of Oz Series and The Wicked Years – The same basic story but from two completely different perspectives. And again, both are on my list of all-time faves.

Should Be Required Reading

Harry Potter Series, or at least one of the Harry Potter books – First off, HP is interesting & entertaining, so it should hold the attention of teens. Plus, this series is about so much more than witches and wizards and magic. It’s about responsibility, and learning how to deal with the good and the bad that comes with life. It’s about striving in darkness, and being true to yourself…and I could go on and on and on, but I’ll stop there. If you’ve read the books, you know what I’m getting at.
The Perks of Being a Wallflower – I truly think this book should be taught in high schools. I wish I has read in high school & not as an adult, but even so, it is a powerful book about being proud of who you are. Every one should read at least once in their life
The Lord of the Rings – This is a classic, but not usually a school-taught classic. Fantasy doesn’t get it’s due when it comes to high school curriculum, in my opinion. Most “genre” books don’t, really. At least not when I was in high school. Similar to HP, LOTR is about so much more than magic and elves and monsters. There are true life lessons embed in those pages.
The Help – A contemporary look at racism & civil rights in the South, that does so in a way that hasn’t really been done. It’s heart-wrenching and heartwarming, it makes you laugh and makes you cry. It makes you want to stand up for what you feel is moral and right. The only downside to this being taught in schools if that students may read it too fast. I mean, it took me less than 24 hours.
1776 – Too many people, kids especially find history boring (which simply baffles me), but this is different. It’s historically accurate & obviously about the American Revolution, but it’s told in a different way. It doesn’t read like a textbook, it reads like a novel, a story, because it is. And every classroom should have one copy of the illustrated version with the supplements included (copies of period newspapers, correspondences, maps, etc) to make even more interesting.

Now, as you probably noticed in the title, today is Day #1 of Blogtember. If you will harken back to May, when I did the Blog Everyday in May challenge, it’s basically the same thing, just for September. It’s hosted by the same blog as well, Story of My Life.

Day #1: Where I’m from: Part A

If you ask me where I come from, I don’t just think of the place(s) I call home, but also of the people I come from, namely my family. But since I don’t have old pictures of my family on my phone, I’m going to start with the actual “where,” and in a later post, once I get some pictures together, I will focus on my family.

I was born in the little Texas town of Henrietta, and I grew up the little Oklahoma town of Waurika. Well, Wauirka is where I went to school & all that, but I mostly lived in the even tinier Addington which was 5 miles north. Waurika is largely a farm & ranch community with a population of about 2000. It only has one traffic light, and that’s just a flashing 4-way stop light. Addington has a population of about 100, on a good day. It has a tiny post post office, a volunteer fire department, and the church I grew up in. And that’s about it, really. I loved growing up in a little, country community. I wouldn’t have had it any other way.

This is my elementary school and my high school:

I had about 28 or 29 people in my graduating class. And most of us had been together since kindergarten.

High School graduation.

Now, I’m not so crazy about where I’m from. It feels so different to me when I go back there. But, like I said earlier, I wouldn’t want to have grown up anywhere else. I had a wonderful upbringing surrounded by people I love. What more could you ask for? And I know that this place helped shaped who I am becoming.

That’s all for now, folks! I hope to be back this evening with Day #1, Part B of Blogtember, but if not, see you tomorrow!

TTT

Posted on August 27, 2013 by sydneyday

Before I get into Top Ten Tuesday host by The Broke and the Bookish, a couple of things I forgot yesterday:

First off is the casting of Ben Affleck as Bruce Wayne/Batman in the upcoming sequel to Zac Snyder’s Man of Steel. I’m not crazy about this casting choice, I have to say. I like Ben Affleck. I think he is a very talented director and his is great in the likes of The Town, and Argo, and Good Will Hunting. But remember Daredevil? And Gigli? Yeah. Therefore, my apprehension in casting him as Batman. I hope, I really, really hope that we are all pleasantly surprised by his performance as the Caped Crusader, and I’m keeping a tiny spark of hope alive because I really want this to work out. Only time will tell…
Secondly, this teaser for Season 4 of The Walking Dead. October cannot get here soon enough!!!

And thirdly, a movie trailer I forgot to include yesterday: Rush. I was reminded of it last night while watching Top Gear and couldn’t believe I forgot it.

Now for TTT! This week is top ten secondary characters, which was more difficult than I thought it would be. Here’s what I was able to come up with:

Molly Weasley from Harry Potter
Dobby from Harry Potter
Old Mrs Hempstock from The Ocean at the End of the Lane
Melanie from Gone With the Wind
Cinna from The Hunger Games
Tori from Divergent Series
Dr. Bora from The Historian
Merry & Pip from LOTR
Marthe from All Souls Trilogy

And that’s it for me today! See you lads & ladies tomorrow!

It’s Top Ten Tuesday again!

Posted on July 2, 2013 by sydneyday

Yep, I’m ready to get back into Top Ten Tuesday after two weeks of not participating. This week is top 10 books that intimidate you. It can be the size, the content, the fact that everyone else in the world seems to love it but you don’t…pretty much any reasoning. Here goes nothing:

The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger – This had to be the first book on this list for the third reason listed above – most of the world loves this book and I hate it. I think it’s more frustrating than intimidating, but oh well. I don’t understand how Holden Caulfield–mainly the way he talks–doesn’t annoy the hell of everyone else like it does me.
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy – I love classics, but I’ve never read this because of the massive size of it. And I like big, long books generally. But this one just seems to be on another level.
The Lord of the Rings Trilogy by JRR Tolkien – don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love LOTR. But it is intimidating, especially the first time reading it – even though I was already familiar with the story. It’s the vast, detailed world that Tolkien created–the races, the languages, the landscapes, the histories–that is so brilliant and, therefore, utterly intimidating. I can only imagine what it would be like to create something like this.
The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett – the size of it and the historically epic story (that moves a little slow at times) were intimidating to me at first, but it was well worth the read.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson – this is one I picked up 1027 times before I ever actually bought it. I knew a bit about the story and, at the time, I was intimidated by the modernness of the story, namely the bisexual protagonist. This was at the time when I was struggling the most with what my feelings towards homosexuality really were, so reading a story surrounding a bisexual, angry, kind of gothic girl involving serial murder and all that stuff was definitely intimidating. Of course, then I read it and I love the series, and Lisbeth is pretty bad-ass.
Gone With The Wind by Margaret Mitchell – I saw the movie before I read the book, so I knew the story & I loved it, but the size of the book was what got me.
The Diary of A Young Girl by Anne Frank – this one is definitely the content: knowing that it’s all real, that she recorded the horror that she went though, and knowing she didn’t survive it…
Night by Elie Wiesel – same as above, it’s the content of this one. It’s the realness – he is describing what he went through as he experienced, firsthand, the horrors of the Holocaust.
The Odyssey by Homer – This one is size and content. First off, I love history and have always been a little fascinated with Greek history, mostly due to be obsession with mythology, so in high school I was excited to finally get to read this. But this is such an epic story, with so much in it, it’s bound to be on alot of people’s intimidating books list.