I HAVE TO BEAT VICKY! ViCckckkYYYYYYyyyyy!

So I have a friend/archenemy Vicky or, as I like to call her: ViccKKKYYYYYyyyyyyYYy. Here is a drawing I made of her, in case you're curious what she looks like. It's super accurate:

ViCkKkYYyy and me are currently in the middle of a fierce battle. We both set our 2021 Goodreads reading challenge to 100 books! That's right, 100! We're trying to see which one of us has the bigger brain. 

I can't lose to someone like her. So I better get reading. 

ViCckkkYYY, if you're reading this, just know you're going to have to buy me a whole box of candy corn at the end of the year cause ur gonna lose. 

2021 New Year's Resolutions

My new year's resolution is to read 100 books in 2021. I'm competing against one of my friends to see who can reach this target. I know this is going to be difficult as I usually read only 28-30 books a year. But it's not impossible. I set a target of 100 books on Goodreads for 2021.

Here are some of the books I plan on reading:

• The Kite Runner (very popular novel. might read this one as well as A Thousand Splendid Suns by the same author)
• Entering Sappho (a poetry collection)
• Shades by Arthur Slade (a short story collection)
• A Bride's Story manga (we agreed that a graphic novel is worth 1/3 of a regular book)
• The State and Revolution by Vladimir Lenin (recommended by a communist friend)

...and many more!

Please let me know your recommendations for books I should read as well.

I'm also probably going to read a lot of historical fiction novels because I always do. Or perhaps some young adult fiction that's based on mythology or something. 

As a bonus, my other new year's resolution is to work on my self-esteem. This is probably going to be harder than the 100-book challenge. I don't even know how I can do this. ugh. I can't even think of a plan. I just really hate how I look. Maybe my goal will be to save up enough money for plastic surgery lmao. 

6 Books I Read in 2020 that I loved

 Hi pals. I'm back with a post with some book recommendations. So I use Goodreads a lot to keep track of everything I've read. If you don't use Goodreads, I highly recommend it. You can set a yearly goal for yourself of how many books you want to read. This can help motivate you to meet your target. This year, I set a target for 30 books and read 29. I usually read like 28-30 books every year. I'm thinking of setting a more ambitious target next year however. Maybe something like 100 books. This is because I know I should be reading a lot more and I think I can if I stop procrastinating. At the end of the year, Goodreads has a feature called "year in books" where you can see all the books you've read as well as some stats about your reading goal such as how many pages you've read, what the longest and shortest books you've read were and which of your books were the most popular and least popular with other Goodreads readers.

I also wanted to take the time to recommend some books I read this year to y'all. If you think you might be interested in some of these books, add them to your "want to read" shelf on Goodreads and maybe you can use them to meet your 2021 reading target. 

1. Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia 

This is a young adult fantasy novel based on Mayan mythology. The main character is an 18 year old girl from a town in Yucatan who meets a Mayan god. There's also some romance between the girl and the god (it's actually important for the plot, so even if you don't like romance I don't think this should turn you away from giving it a read). 

2. I am not your Perfect Mexican Daughter by Erika Sanchez 

This book is about a Mexican-American girl who is a high school student who has to deal with the tragic death of her older sister. She loves literature and wants to go to college to study English, so in this novel we get to read some of her poems as well. There is are also touching and heartwarming scenes about her relationship with her mother and other relatives. I loved the main character in this book. 

I must say, this isn't the first time I've read a book where an immigrant who comes from a non-English speaking background falls in love with English literature and writing and who finds the arts (especially creative writing) to be liberating when it comes to all the other struggles they've faced in life. The plot of On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong follows a similar plot as it's about a Vietnamese immigrant. 

Also, if we're being completely honest here, my life follows a similar plot lmao. 

3. The Marrow Thieves by Cherie Dimaline

omg ok get ready for epicness. This is a dystopian novel set in the near-future when climate change takes a toll on the world and people are struggling to survive. The main characters are all Indigenous and this book is targeted to a young-adult audience. It's also kind of terrifying and disturbing at times because it's inspired by the discrimination and historical atrocities that Indigenous people in Canada faced/still face. The author is Metis. 

4. When we were Vikings by Andrew David MacDonald 

This books will give you the feels. I know a bunch of the books I've mentioned so far were cultural-inspired but this one is different. I know the title may make you think this book has a lot to do with the Vikings, but it really doesn't other than that the main character liked learning about Vikings and is inspired by their bravery and epic mythology. The protagonist has fetal alcohol syndrome and has to deal with a lot of discrimination and people believing that she is not smart enough to be independent. She has an overprotective and overcontrolling brother who gets involved with some really bad drug-dealing gang members which causes her life to take a twist. Many parts of this book are sad but this is definitely worth reading if you wanto to be in your feels. 

5. Aru Shah and the End of Time by Roshani Chokshi 

This is a fun novel for those who like Hindu mythology and want to see some good South Asian representation in children's media. It's inspired by the Mahabarat. The main character is a descendent of the Pandavas and has to stop the end of the world. If you think this sounds very Rick Riordanish, that's kind of the point of this series. Rick Riordan promotes a series by diverse authors called "Rick Riordan presents" where you can read stories about mythology you may be less familiar with than the Greek/Roman/Egyptian/Norse stuff that Riordan has written about.

6. The Inconvenient Indian: a Curious Account of Native People in North America by Thomas King

I love this book and highly recommend it to people who want to learn more about Indigenous people. The book covers history from both Canada and the United States. The author frequently references media representations of Indigenous people such as in Hollywood. This is the best out of all the nonfiction books I read this year.

Those are 6 of the 28 books I read this year which I enjoyed the most.

I'm also just going to list a few of the other books which I enjoyed a lot this year but that I don't feel like going into detail about. 

• The Travels by Marco Polo 
• Don Quixote by Miguel Cervantes 

Those two are classics that have aged quite well because they are still enjoyable today. 

I also continued reading the manga "a Bride's Story" by Kaoru Mori about Central Asian nomadic tribes which I highly recommend for the beautiful artwork and wholesome slice-of-life stories. 

Speaking of graphic novels, Louis Riel: a comic-strip biography by Chester Brown is also another graphic novel I enjoyed this year if you find history to be entertaining and if u think Louis Riel was one of the coolest people in Canadian history. 

If any of you have any recommendations, please let me know ;D  

Have a great 2021!

Blog Updates

Hey everyone. So my blog is linked with Goodreads, which means anyone who follows me on Goodreads can see the posts. Although Goodreads messes up the formatting considerably. So this blog is also hosted on its own site at freyathefrypan.blogspot.com. I know that URL is ridiculous, but let me explain why it is so weird.

I started this blog in 5th grade (I was 10 years old). My name is Freya. The kids in my class thought my name was weird so they called me "frypan." So I decided to call my blog that. Blogger lets you change the URL if you want now. But I decided to keep it the same. I don't care if it's weird or cringy and prevents people from taking it seriously. It makes me nostalgic. Its been the name of the blog for 8 years. So it will stay that way.

A lot of people criticized the original layout of the blog, saying it looked like a website from the 80s. I tried modernizing it and experimenting with different themes and blog titles. But they all seemed inauthentic. So I think I will revert it back to a cringy website from the 80s now. Deal with it.

The blog right now is simple if you visit the URL. There is a feed where you can scroll through all my posts. The sidebar contains book reviews that I wrote on Goodreads and a search bar if anyone wants to find an old post that is no longer in the feed. And that is all. 

If I'm ever in a chaotic mood, I'll add a chatbox (the original blog when it first started had a chatbox. But it started getting spammy and annoying so I removed it) and an artist shoutout page where I promote the work of artists, writers, etc. who I admire. Maybe an "about me" page and maybe a page for pictures of my cats. Idk. We'll see. I also play a game called Chicken Smoothie which is for collecting and trading virtual pets. I might make a page for discussing it. 

In its 8 years of existing, this blog has never been popular. But that's okay. Blogs usually aren't popular, because social media kind of made blogging obsolete. But I don't feel like deleting something I've worked on for 8 years. So I will continue it. Even if no one reads it.

My First Book Vlog: New Finnish Grammar

Review: Frankenstein

Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Very spooky. Gave me many nightmares. I'm only going to call this book "the modern prometheus" from now on. I liked the framed narrative. I liked how there was a framed narrative inside a framed narrative at some parts when the monster was speaking. I liked all the stuff that was typical of romantic era writers, like descriptions of sublime nature and people from other cultures and the warnings about science going too far. I like how the monster was shown to be so intelligent and persuasive and have superhuman strength and speed. You really felt bad for him because it seems as though he could have done as much good as his creator had caused him to do evil. Even though the story was from Victor's perspective so it was constantly trying to make the monster look bad, you eventually came to the realization that Victor is really in the wrong. He shouldn't have just let his creature loose without becoming like a father to it or something. He didn't even give the monster a name. He really has no one to blame but himself for the death of his entire family.

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Goodreads Review: Sophie's World

Sophie's World by Jostein Gaarder
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This was beautiful, not only because of all the lessons on philosophy that were embedded into it but because of the awesome mystery of the characters that made you keep turning the pages. The writing style is very different from anything I've ever read before, with all that "romantic irony" plus the fact that it was a story inside a story inside a story sometimes. The ending was really well done as well. I wasn't expecting it to end that way. I love how they became immortal characters in the end.  There were also parts that were really funny, for example whenever Alberto Knox would be explaining a philosophy concept, the interjection of Sophie would always be something really comedic.

So even though this book is awesome, I didn't know whether to give it 5 stars or 4, but I decided on 5. The slight imperfections were that it didn't talk much about philosophy outside of Europe. It did mention Eastern philosophy a bit, but not enough. I won't hold this against the book much though because it was already quite long and I think if the author tried to talk about every type of philosophy it would reach a ridiculous length and cause the plot to move along way too slowly. The cover should say "a novel about the history of WESTERn philosophy" then. The author did spend a long time on certain parts, like Romanticism, and gave other areas a rushed treatment, like the Enlightenment thinkers I guess. The part about Hegel's theory of history and the "world spirit" really stood out to me. I guess it was all necessary for the plot. I like how the author included stuff about feminism, but it was sad that they didn't include much about other cultures. The Native Americans were called "primitive people" :( , and hardly any non-Europeans were mentioned. Once again though, this omission was probably necessary to move the plot along, and the setting of the Nordic countries and the general descriptions of the culture were awesome enough. One more flaw was that at times in got super unrealistic. I don't know how the mother could have been so chill with Sophie always going out to visit a random philosopher.  I don't know how she just allowed her only daughter to do a disappearing act at the garden party. [ I don't know how she just allowed her only daughter to do a disappearing act at the garden party. (hide spoiler)]

I would recommend this book to anyone for its incredibly unique writing style and as an awesome intro to philosophy.

View all my reviews

So Frypania, it seems that my Goodreads account has been linked to my blog and is automatically posting my book reviews for me. Wonderful!