Blurb.

[ayascythe]

• Holy fucking shit Germany. 4-0? 4-0?!?! Just ... wow. And that was some beautiful football there, my dear Mannschaft. If you hadn't already convinced me, this would've been the match to do so. I'm still so fucking nervous about the Spain match, though, I don't even know.
• This post on ontd_football is full of awesome sports/football commercials, including one taking place in the Star Wars Cantina and the infamous Nutella spots. Lol.
• Tomorrow is my first exam. My head is aching leik whoa and throbs everytime I sneeze. It's still pollen time >>> I sneeze a lot. Also, it's that time of the month again. In conclusion: *whiiiiines*
• Keisuke Honda is so pretty.

Tag 04 – Dein Hassbuch / The book you hate the most

Veronika decides to die by Paolo Coelho

Twenty-four-year-old Veronika seems to have everything she could wish for: youth and beauty, pleny of attractive boyfriends, a fulfilling job, and a loving family. Yet something is lacking in her life. Inside her is a void so deep that nothing could possibly ever fill it. So, on the morning of November 11, 1997, Veronika decides to die. She takes a handful of sleeping pills expecting never to wake up.
Naturally Veronika is stunned when she does wake up at Villete, a local mental hospital, where the staff informs her that she has, in fact, partially succeeded in achieving her goal. While the overdose didn't kill Veronika immediately, the medication has damaged her heart so severely that she has only days to live.


This book was more or less pushed into my hands by a friend who loves Coelho's books and said "you need to read this". I did. And boy, did I not like it. Whereas "The Alchemist" was still likeable in its fairy-tale style, "Veronika" was trying too hard to be deep and meaningful, all the while just scraping on the surface of what could have been an interesting story. Also, I'm pretty sure telling someone they've only a few days left to live is not a magic cure against depression.

I didn't like Veronika as a character. Her motives and thoughts were not reasonable to me. It didn't seem like she killed herself because of this "deep void inside her", the book made it sound like she did it because she was bored. Everything lacked emotion, the wording was awkward, the style unnatural and a chore to read. Although the latter two are probably due to a shitty translation, I have no idea.


Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami

Joining the rich literature of runaways, Kafka On The Shore follows the solitary, self-disciplined schoolboy Kafka Tamura as he hops a bus from Tokyo to the randomly chosen town of Takamatsu, reminding himself at each step that he has to be "the world's toughest fifteen-year-old." He finds a secluded private library in which to spend his days--continuing his impressive self-education--and is befriended by a clerk and the mysteriously remote head librarian, Miss Saeki, whom he fantasizes may be his long-lost mother. Meanwhile, in a second, wilder narrative spiral, an elderly Tokyo man named Nakata veers from his calm routine by murdering a stranger. An unforgettable character, beautifully delineated by Murakami, Nakata can speak with cats but cannot read or write, nor explain the forces drawing him toward Takamatsu and the other characters.


If you give a book a bad rating, there will always people who tell you you "just didn't get it". You know what? I did not and I will openly admit that. It's been years since I read it and I don't remember a lot, but it was terrible. The plot was a complete mess and didn't make any sense in any way. So this was an allusion to the Oedipus story. So what. What's the deal about the cat-killing whiskey-man or the fish raining down from the sky? Or that disturbing scene with the maggot at the end?

I guess a big part of why this all put me off so much was because I wasn't expecting it. It's supposedly "magical realism" and I didn't know that. I just kept reading because I wanted to know if there was going to be a huge aha experience in the end. There wasn't. And I was left with a huge WTF.