Fanart, Fanfiction and Fangirling

Happy New Year! I celebrated at a friend's place with an impromptu dinner, complete with bad '90s music (Scooter!), K-pop and cards (Uno and a Harry Potter game I found somewhere). Yep, we're all very mature. XD

Since one of my resolutions for the new year is to read more non-fanfiction (I read TONS of fanfics in 2014, but a bit of variety wouldn't hurt), I've decided to pick up the 2015 reading challenge.


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I already have some novels I want to read: my parents had 3 or 4 boxes full of books in the attic and I grabbed a few when we cleaned out a couple of months ago. When I saw the list I realised that most of those books fit into one of the categories, so I thought it must be fate. I'm usually a very slow reader, so I'm not expecting to finish the whole list or even half of it, but I'm curious to see how many I'll be able to read.

Also, when I got home last night I had a quick look at Twitter and saw this:



Mark, your inner supermodel is showing. ♥

I finally started reading "A summer birdcage" by Margaret Drabble. I read a review some time ago and was curious, but I wanted to finish another book I had abandoned and then started again before beginning a new one. I found the first chapter on Amazon (here's the English version and the Italian version) and I realised at once how similar to the main character I am. Her journey back home felt so much like one of my various trips in Europe, I just couldn't stop reading. I read 4 chapters last night and I can't wait to go home and read more tonight. It's been a while since I found a book that grabbed my attention like this.

Also, I changed my LJ layout to a more Christmassy one. Maybe it'll get my arse in gear and I'll be able to actually work on those Christmas cards.

Kulturzeit post, to keep track of what I read, watch, do this year. Hopefully I'll do a little better than last year, especially in the book department, but I'm such a lazy reader. The first book I finished was "The Vampire Diaries - The Struggle", a Christmas present from my dad. It's the second book of a series and it was like watching only the second episode of a 4-episode TV series. It's not like the Harry Potter books: sure, there are seven different books, but each one of them has its own main plot with a beginning, a development and an end, while having a bigger plot in the background. This novel started right in the middle of an action and ended right in the middle of another one. But I'm not blaming my father, he knows I love vampires and just wanted to get me a present I'd like.

On a meta level, it's nice to notice that the novels were written at the beginning of the '90s and the setting is pretty much the same as in the Twilight series: American high school, girl falls in love with "good" vampire and so on. But the vampires here are closer to the classic vampire image: they drink human blood, and they love it. There's also an erotic subtext that's completely missing in Twilight (I can only talk about the first book, as I refuse to read the others). There's also the eternal triangle between the human girl, the good vampire and the bad vampire (the vampires are also brothers).

So, it seems to me that Stephenie Meyer took the idea behind this series, changed a few details, made everything tamer et voilà, she got her best seller. If I was an American teenager I would probably love the Vampire Diaries series, or, at least, I'd like it much more than Twilight (sparkling vampires, for Heaven's sake!), but as a European adult, I'm not so enthusiastic. I'll stick to Anne Rice, thank you very much.

( Kulturzeit 2010 )

Oh, life is SO unfair. This morning I found out where the pic of Bela kneeling before Farin and offering him roses was taken. In Bozen. BOZEN. ITALIEN. And I wasn't there! *cries*

( The above mentioned pic and two more )

Of course they played in Italy just a couple of months before I became an Ärzte fan. My timing's perfect as usual. Someone shoot me, please.

Other than that, I finished reading that book about Germany (and promptly started another one, hehe, I'm on a roll.) I knew Bela was playing up some kind of stereotypical guy in the "Unrockbar" video, but I didn't know which one. According to this book, the jogging suit is kind of an East German cliché. Is it true? I'm very curious about cliché and stereotypes, like, there's a way of dressing that we in the North consider quite typical from the South (really flashy clothes for young people and total black with shawls and rosaries for older women.) For example, when I went to see a dialectal play last month, there was a character from the South and you could tell it straight away just from the way she was dressed. I don't know much about this kind of clichés in other countries, so enlighten me!

Also, since we're talking about stereotypes...

Europe & Italy

So, so true. X)