Entertainment and fiction

I would now like to discuss what fiction means to me.

Everything.

My head is 90% in the clouds. Fiction, especially but not always fantasy, whether in books or movies or photography or music, has always been my escape. I sometimes feel that I get melodramatic when I talk about my love of books, but if that's the only area of my life where I am melodramatic, I'm ok with that. They are life changing for me, and I will always believe that.

I previously mentioned Harry Potter. I will not talk much more about it, just that it is inhabiting an incredibly personal era of my life, which will effectively end in July 2011. There is no coincidence that one of my most respected celebrities also plays a major part in the Harry Potter movies.

A few more books I will mention. Beside Harry, the other most life changing book series for me has been Outlander.

I read this series like inhaling crack cocaine in my sophomore year of college. First of all, it was a hard family time for me, so I think I escaped a little too much into the web of fiction that Diana Gabaldon expertly wove. But this book, it changed my entire ideal system. I don't think it's what the books set out to do, but they did it anyway. It's hard to describe, without being verbose, but just trust me. I am a different person for having read those books. They are incredibly personal for me, maybe even more so than HP. But Diana Gabaldon gave readers every single mundane or exciting detail of her characters' [longgggg] lives. I felt as if I knew them like my own family. Outlander is hands-down the reason I studied abroad in Glasgow.


Basically, a book or book series cannot make it into my top 5 without being incredibly close to my heart. So in the interest of being brief, I will list other ones that have affected me this way. The His Dark Materials series, anything Brandon Sanderson ever wrote, especially Warbreaker, the Chaos Walking series (I just finished this yesterday, and WHEW.), and Lord of the Rings. All of these have some fantastical element to them, many full blown fantasy. I wonder what it says about me that they are so vital to my personality.

Let's move on to movies.

The only one I really want to talk about, though there are others, is Cemetery Junction. It was released in Glasgow when I was abroad, and I don't think it ever really caught on in the US (or really, in the UK - I think it was a flop). Isn't it funny that reading Outlander led me to Glasgow, where I would watch this movie. Funny how things that change our lives are linked.

I went to see it alone one dreary, boring day. I was having problems with homesickness at the time, which adds to my aforementioned statement that the context of my having watched this movie definitely affected my interpretation of it. It is not that great of a movie. That is to say, I doubt it won any awards at all. But I came out of it feeling so moved, so absolutely affected by it, that I am [probably the only person in the world who is] glad it was made. I felt it spoke directly to me, although my situation was far different than that of the characters'. Maybe if I watch it again, I won't get the same sense, but it was honestly the first time I had left a movie theater with that feeling of... undefinability.

But this ties into entertainment, and childhood, and career (I want to be a book cover designer because of my early-adopted love of books). It is what makes me who I am, is important to every nook and cranny of my person.