Tumblr!!

This week I had a lovely email from the people of Tumblr, telling me that my own tumblr had turned one :) What a proud day, here is the link -> http://wendyhouseofdreams.tumblr.com/ <-. I use all of my social media outlets differently. My tumblr tends to be reblogs of pretty things, it's part online journal, part me trying to figure out the internet. I use it a lot more now that I have remembered the password and I've downloaded the app on my phone. I tend to use tumblr a lot more when I have assignments and writing to do because I can scroll for hours (procrastination for the nation!) and the nice images inspire me enough to work whilst not overstimulating me enough to loose track of what I'm doing. I also update most of my modelling adventures on tumblr because it's linked to my instagram. It's easy to keep track of things on tumblr if you can use it properly (which I can't). So yes, here is my toddler tumblr.

Living with Irlen syndrome. Part 1

I'm writing this entry through the colour purple (no this isn't some experimental writing project, yet), it's in fact the only way I can stand to look at the screen without squinting. If the sun comes through the window and hits the screen I can't do my work, and reading a book on the bus whilst we drive past long railings in the morning is actually my idea of hell. These are just a couple of the annoying things that are affected by Irlen Syndrome.  When I first made this blog I had to ask my partner if the text was easily read because although this blog pleases me aesthetically I can't read my own reviews with all that image of the room behind the writing. Irlen syndrome is a lot more than having trouble reading.

    I was first diagnosed with Irlen syndrome in year 11, when I was 15, a few months before my GCSE's, the optician just happened to have gone t a few lectures on this relatively new optical condition and had quite basic equipment for testing for it. I complained that text was often unfocused and moved around the page, but the list of complaints grew once I knew more about the condition. My head was put inside of a brightly lit box, in the box was a roll of text with random words in rows all over it. Things like 'Dog has a parrot' or 'The grapefruit razorblade was' and I had to read this sheet of paper first with a regular white light and continue reading as the optician filtered different coloured overlay's and counted the increase or decrease of my word count. In the end it was pretty clear I had Irlen syndrome, there isn't a wide spread knowledge of this condition and if my optician hadn't noticed I don't even know what would have happened.
      This all happened quite late on in the GCSE year and it was no longer permitted to apply for different exam circumstances. I had to sit all of my GCSE's on white paper, in a stupidly fluorescent room with nothing but my glasses to help. My results were good, but I can't help thinking how much easier high school would have been if I had know about this earlier. I have always loved reading but in high school I slowed down considerably, and I now know it's because it hurt to read.

This will be a continual blog post / ranty knickers.

The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks - Review

This is Iain Banks first novel from 1984, and it is the first Iain Banks novel I have ever read. This has been sitting, lonely, on my shelf for about a year and I had every intention of reading it a hundred times. If I'm being honest, the size of the novel makes it convenient to read, sitting comfortably in the hand at 184 pages. Don't be fooled by this! This is 184 pages of beautifully uncomfortable reading. I am equally impressed and disturbed by this novel, slightly worried I haven't let this novel settle into my mind and that I am writing this review too soon, having finished the novel 10 minutes ago. That is the intelligence of this novel, it forces you to sit down, back straight and pay attention to it. If you laze around reading a page or two at a time you're likely to miss the fine details, and then loose the plot. At one point, and you'll know where I mean, I had to hand this book to my partner as I couldn't continue reading, I couldn't even bare to have it in my bag, but that lasted about 5 seconds before I just had to know what was going to happen.  This novel doesn't give the game away at any point, even the ending is a slow burner, but the more I think about it the more I want to chew over the finer images of fire and running, drunken haze's and kite flying.

                            

The novel follows an *cough* eccentric period in the eccentric life of Frank as he methodically grooms and cultivates the island that is his home. In the process we discover some of Frank's achievements and are given an in-depth view of Frank's mind. It's a journey,  pack a cheese sandwich and an apple in that backpack and be prepared to ramble the dunes. The blurb gives away that Frank has killed three people, children, two cousins and his brother, two boys and one girl, and these murders dropped from a great height *still a bit raw!* fall into the lap of reader and force you to accept them and move on, or you'll miss them. Murder mingles with animal abuse and the border line of sanity and insanity are amongst the side lines. The relationship of a secluded family with a history of macabre, and how these twisted jigsaw pieces fit together is the true plot of this novel. 

The imagery contained in Banks novel is beautiful, set on the north-east coast of Scotland and allows for a connection between plot and  nature that accentuates and isolates all characters in the novel. The glory of nature is juxtaposition against the mechanical thinking and construction that Frank takes out on the island itself. Turning beautiful rolling sand dunes into dams, or erecting poles high in the sky that will break up the horizon line and a step further adorning them with the dried heads of gulls and mice, or the occasional cat. There is a real fight in this novel between nature and human intervention, which leads subtly to the end of the novel.