sydneyslibrary

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Raiding my guy's sci fi fantasy shelves 😎📚

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These kitties love each other, okay?

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Oh, to own a quaint and well kept apartment in the centre of a romantic city, to have art clinging to every surface to an excessive degree, to be able to type nuanced and well thought essays on my typewriter while gazing down to the bustling streets below, to have small notebooks of poetry scattered across my home, to have bottomless coffee everyday, to have a gentle partner to share my life with.

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pls follow my book twitter I make quality memes I swear

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27.04.16 don’t skive off school kids, unless you only have PE in the afternoon and there is a great coffeeshop round the corner to revise in

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Old people can"t understand when younger people are willing to cut a whole relative off. They have lived their entire lives in guilt or based on some sense of loyalty to someone based on blood. People will abuse you betting on that fact, just because ya’ll are blood that means you have to accept it. No, you don’t.

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Quarter Pounder

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a Lizzy & Mr. Darcy commission- thank you! 🌹 ❤️ my commissions are currently closed but will re-open in June!

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Greatest Girl Characters of YA Lit

Laura Ingalls of the Little House series. Perhaps the original girl character frontierswoman, Laura Ingalls could tap a maple tree for sapand played with a balloon made of a pig’s bladder. She also lived through a long, blizzardy winter and had her share of going hungry. Can you say survivalist?

Claudia Kincaid, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. To teach her parents a lesson in valuing her, and, more obliquely, to find out who she is, Claudia works out a plan to run away from home and live at the Metropolitan Museum of Art with her younger brother Jamie, a miser with money. When she gets there there’s a mystery to figure out, and this changes her and ultimately makes her able to go home again. She’s a frontierswoman of a totally different kind from Katniss or Wilder, but she’s a frontierswoman nontheless.

A Wrinkle in Time’s Meg Murry. Of course. Read about why here.

Liesel Meminger of The Book Thief. Throughout the course of this book, which takes place in Nazi Germany, Liesel comes in contact with Death on numerous occasions—the first being when her brother dies as she and he are being taken to what would be their new foster home by their mother, who has been forced to give them up because of her “Communist sympathies.” At her brother’s burial Leisel spots and steals a book, The Grave Digger’s Handbook, even though she can’t read. In the course of the book, she does learn to read—but she’s a heroine in many more ways as well.

Ramona Quimby, of Beverly Cleary’s wonderful series. Spunky, wonderful Ramona, who’s not perfect but who just keeps trying. How can you not love and relate to her? She’s the flawed everygirl of toothpaste-squeezing to Katniss’s more grown-up reality televised-warrior, but they are both spunky and sometimes trouble and sometimes in trouble, but always, at their core, they are fighters.

Harriet the Spy. And her predecessor, Nancy Drew. Girl spies, we salute you for figuring it out before we did.

Pippi Longstocking. “Nine-year-old Pippi is unconventional, assertive, and has superhuman strength, being able to lift her horse one-handed without difficulty.” She also has a name that would trump that of any Hunger Games participant: Pippilotta Delicatessa Windowshade Mackrelmint Ephraim’s Daughter Longstocking. Yep, she’s awesome.

Francie Nolan of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Betty Smith’s classic about a Brooklyn girl growing up and finding herself is still poignant, affecting, and beautiful, perhaps more so now when the Williamsburg streets where Francie learned how to be herself are cluttered with young adults of an entirely different sort, seeking to grow up as well. As Robert Cornfield wrote in a moving New York Times piece on the book in 1999, “It is a story of triumph over adversity. Francie, spat upon, ridiculed, molested, betrayed by her first love, trusts her imagination to save her. Of her education, Smith says, ‘Brutalizing is the only adjective for the public schools of that district.’ The librarian, who 'hated children,” notices nothing about the girl working her way down the shelves from A to Z.“

Winnie Foster in Tuck Everlasting. Natalie Babbitt’s fantasy novel published in 1975 tackles questions of immortality, love and relationships, and doing the right thing for the future of humanity—questions which the character of Winnie, herself only a girl, must find answers to for herself. Her choices are hard ones, yet she makes them with the wisdom of someone much older.

Anne of Green Gables. Anne Shirley is an inspiration to all of us. So funny, so imaginative, so prone to accidents and mishaps in her youth—and, in the end, a self-possessed young woman who finds a way to live the way she wants to while also being kind, gentle, loving, intelligent, and courageous.

Betsy Ray of the Betsy-Tacy series. Many of the books that girls of a certain age grew up on involve characters who wanted to be writers, probably because many of those grown-up women writing those books had the same dream in their youths, and accomplished it. So Betsy, a girl living in small-town Minnesota in the early 1900s, is in some ways a small-town girl, with a traditional upbringing and values, but she’s also a girl who dreams of being a writer, who staunchly supports and respects her female friends always, who finds love despite plenty of missteps along the way, who travels around the world, and who realizes her dream, while also, in the end, being a wife and mom. For a book series that began publication in 1940 and deals with a character living at the turn of the last century, that’s pretty damn impressive.

These girls and others showed us how to grow up and be individuals and make hard choices and face moral consequences for our actions. Katniss Everdeen is great, of course, and the plot of the book (and the movie) is clearly compelling enough to keep these sorts of discussions going for weeks. But as we talk about Katniss as this brave new character, let’s also remember those who came before. She might be a new breed, but she comes from hardy stock.

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*slides Disney $2*

Princess and the Frog 2 where Naveen gets himself into some nonsense and Tiana has to go rescue him and Lottie will NOT be allowing her best friend in the whole world to go on an adventure without her AGAIN, not this time no sir. And the whole movie is just about the power of friendship and the love and support that exists between women with brief intermissions peppered throughout showing Naveen having the time of his life being the most obnoxious prisoner he knows how to be with full certainty that his amazing wife is on her way to save him.

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one thing that never changes and is always true for everyone is the desire to own a house with a bookcase covering a hidden passage that it slides back to reveal when the correct book is pressed or removed

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Why is book insurance not a thing?? Pfft if my house burns down you think my top priority will be finding a new place to live? Nah man, the first place you’ll find me is at the bookstore trying to recreate my library

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From Betsy’s Wedding, by Maud Hart Lovelace

oh this exquisite book. I can’t even express how much I love this series.

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Actor David Suchet was taught how to eat a mango in ‘polite company’ by Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. On May 2 1990 Suchet was at a private lunch at Buckingham Palace, per the Queen’s invitation. It was his 44th Birthday. He discovered the Queen likes to invite people from all walks of life whom she finds interesting.

During lunch, Suchet was served a mango and suffering from an acute attack of nerves, he turned to Prince Philip, confessing he didn’t have the slightest idea how to deal with the fruit. That provoked an enourmous laugh from Prince Philip, who replied immediately, ‘Well, let me show you,’ and demonstrated what exactly one should do. Suchet was relieved he wasn’t left floundering and was now able to eat the fruit in front of him.

Later that day he told the story to Brian Eastman, the producer of Agatha Christie’s Poirot, and asked him if they could include it in the episode they were soon to film, 3x09: The Theft of the Royal Ruby.

“We sent a copy of the finished film to Buckingham Palace on DVD, and I’m thrilled to say that it became the late Queen Mother’s favourite film. Indeed, whenever I’ve met the Duke of Edinburgh since that lunch, he always calls me ‘the mango man’.” - David Suchet, Poirot and Me