Friday Five!

1. I am three books away from done with my reading list for Contemporary Young Adult Realism, and it is sweet. For today I read Unleaving by Jill Paton Walsh. I was quite prejudice against it, because it uses the terms "mongoloid" and "mongol" for a child with Down Syndrome, who comes to a not-very-good end. However, the book has incredible depth, and it required me to see past my contemporary biases to analyse it. We're meant to pick one of these "touchstone" books to do a significant amount of work on through the semester, and I think I might pick this one. To work with a book that's inherently problematic to me.

Also the language is beautiful, and it has some great parallels to To The Lighthouse /Nerdery.

2. Speaking of Nerdiness, I am a sad Nerdfighter. I do not get my copy of The Fault in Our Stars until next Wednesday when Mom and I go to New Orleans to see John and Hank on the Tour of Nerdfighteria. THIS IS ALL THE SAD THINGS. And yet all the happy things.

3. Amazon put the DVD collection of My So-Called Life on sale this week, so I bought it (of course). it comes with a little book by Winnie Holzman the creator, which I haven't delved to far into yet, but she starts off by talking about what she would have done if the series had continued. It makes me think about the way in which characters live in an author's mind, whether or not anyone else cares about them at all.

4. In my watching-all-the-Netflix time, I've been watching a few disability-related documentaries. Technically, they were all Deafness related. I figured Netflix was recommending them to me because I've watched all the Switched at Birth ever. But upon further searching, both on Netflix and Google, I found that most of the documentaries that are available, or at least known, are about Deafness. Is this because Sign adds another layer to film? Because it fascinates people more than it scares them? Because Marlee Matlin is awesome? Not sure.

5. I may or may not have mentioned I got a Kindle Fire for Christmas. It's being used in conjunction with my iPad for all the awesome things I use tech for, but as I was installing apps on it the other night (through the backdoor, because the app store is not that great) I felt like SUCH a traitor every time I clicked on "download Android version." Why should I? All tech is out there for me to consume. Why must I be so brand loyal? Are you this way about things? Am I the only one? Thoughts?