Currently reading #21

Title: Kyou no Kira-kun

English: Closest love to heaven - Kira-kun Today

Author: Mikimoto Rin

Currently reading #14

Title: Senza nome

English: No name

Author: Wilkie Collins 

 Yesterday it was my mom's turn to pick the movie for the night and she chose a Barbra's film entitled The mirror has two faces. 

Of course it’s a romance because the obsession for romance is the one thing the two of us have in common and let me tell you, I loved it. 

It was quirky, it was cute, it was sweet. And the premise itself is quite interesting and unique, I’d say. 

It went straight into my favourites.

 A few years ago I made a mental list of anime from my childhood that I either remember nothing about (apart from the fact that I liked them a lot), or that for some reason I was never able to watch in their entirety. 

Up until now, I managed to complete ten of them. And without doubt, my absolute favourites from the bunch have been Ace wo nerae! and Kaitou Saint Tail.

Opposite genres for two equally enthralling stories. 

 The Christmas chronicles is adorable! Such a fun and quirky movie. I expected it to be rubbish, but instead I was utterly surprised by how much I enjoyed it.

Straight into my list of favourites. 

And Kurt Russell was kinda hot as Santa. THERE, I SAID IT.

 The tapestry of us in one we keep doing and undoing for the entirety of our lives.

If we’re lucky, we may sometimes get our pick of threads to choose from, but more often, we get them handed by chance.

And as we weave, some strings become the foundation around which we spin all the others.

Anime was among those strings that, without me realising it, wrapped themselves around my heart, from mere entertainment of my childhood, to passion that influenced a great deal of my adult years.

And should I unravel the tapestry again, or should life tear it apart, I will take the strands that remain hanging from my chest and twine them with more, new yarn.

The picture emerging would be different than before, but in it, I will still be able to recognise a familiar pattern.

My own.

✧ Kaitou Saint Tail

✧ Versailles no bara

✧  City Hunter

✧  Ace wo nerae!

✧  Taisho Otome Otogibanashi

✧  Fruits Basket

✧  Ashita no Nadja

✧  Romeo x Juliet

✧  Alps no shoujo Heidi

✧  Akage no Anne

✧  Howl no Ugoku Shiro

✧  Metropolis 

✧  Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi

 It marvels me, the way we can leave our mark on other people’s lives.

And with that I do not mean the bad things, lodging into our fleshes like painful splinters no tweezer seems to be able to pull out.

I mean the unwitting act of kindness, of sharing, which can shape someone’s identity in ways we may never witness firsthand.

And that’s because the nature of human relations is so fragile, constantly mutating, with us somehow ending up always on the losing side.

But despite the number of losses we endure, the marks they left on us will always be a tangible reminder that there had been someone, in some place, at one time, without whom we wouldn’t be who we are today.

Because who would I be, without the thousands of manga I collected since, on a rainy Saturday afternoon, a friend brought me along to the comic book shop and encouraged me to buy my first volume?

And though I doubt we’ll ever meet again in this life, the memory of them will linger on, marked with the same ink of each manga I read and love.

Because love, it never fades away.

✵ xxxHolic

✵ Fruits Basket

✵ Kare Kano

✵ Lovely Complex

✵ Victorian Romance Emma

✵ Karin (Yuna Kagesaki)

✵ March Story

✵ Hime-chan no ribbon

✵ Gokinjo Monogatari

✵ Sora wa akai kawa no hotori

✵ Fushigi Yugi: Genbu Kaiden

I’m not exaggerating by saying that (to me) the world is often a rollercoaster of terrors.

I am scared of so many things - at times reasonable, at times irrational and unspeakable - that it’s no surprise how I literally destroyed my intestines with anxiety.

And in the dark, I can see many of those fears taking form. Their shapes elongating, twisting. A hundred eyes watching me, or none at all.

Yet, it was in a dark room that I felt the safest as a child.

Although perhaps that’s incorrect, because there was light. Almost blinding.

The light that comes from stories.

Each one a beacon guiding me out of my reality.

✯ The Lord of the Rings (trilogy)

✯ Beauty and the Beast (1991)

✯ Stardust

✯ Anastasia (1997)

✯ The last samurai

✯ Who framed Roger Rabbit?

✯ Miss Potter

✯ Curly Sue

✯ To Wong Foo, thanks for everything Julie Newmar

✯ You've got mail (and many others Meg Ryan's rom-com's)

✯ It's a wonderful life

✯ Casper

✯ The book thief

✯ Little Women (1994)

✯ Singin' in the rain

✯ Pride (2014)

✯ Pride and prejudice (2005)

✯ Ever After

✯ Notting Hill

✯ While you were sleeping

✯ Ben-Hur

✯ Cinderella (2015)

✯ Sleepy Hollow

I wish I could say that I emerged to the labours of this world (like so many seem to, nowadays) with limbs of paper and ink flowing from my eyes, but history was quite different than that. 

I hated reading as a child.

Well, maybe not hated hated, but it bored me out of my head. 

Until it found me.

You know the one, every reader knows it. It's the reason we're all here: that single book we couldn't put down, that made us bit our nails to the flesh, that strangled our throats and freed a kaleidoscope of butterflies in our bellies.

That's the book I've chased ever since.

From that day I was twelve and couldn't stop reading in spite of my car sickness, to every time I entered a bookshop afterwards.

And although not every book you read turns into a religious ecstasy (nor it needs to), whenever you do find a book capable of sating your hunger, I believe that's the closest thing to heaven-sent I shall ever experience in both this life and the next (if there's more.)

So here I am, counting my blessings.

✽ The city of dreaming books           

✽ No name (Wilkie Collins)               

✽ Book of a thousand days                

✽ The bronze horseman                    

✽ Emily the Strange (tetralogy)        

✽ Jane Eyre                                           

✽ The thirteenth tale                          

✽ North and South (Gaskell)             

✽ Peanuts                                              

✽ Il porto proibito (Radice/Turconi)

✽ Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell

✽ The shadow of the wind