Exeposé Books - 'Can You Judge a Book By It's Cover?'

Christy Ku argues that the cover and title of a book is one of the most important elements to take into account when choosing what to read. Do you agree?

Does this cover make you want to find out what’s written inside?

Several years ago, Borders was liquidising its stock as it went bust. Naturally, I went bargain hunting/scavenging through the boxes and chose a book purely because of its beautiful cover and intriguing title. To this day, I Capture the Castle still stands as one of my all-time favourites.

As a result, I firmly believe that judging a book by its cover is a wonderful way to choose books. When you’re faced with overflowing bookshelves (physical or virtual), the book cover and title will be the first things that attracts your attention, making you pick it up and flick through the first few pages. Just listen to these book titles; Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, When God Was a Rabbit, Life of Pi, A Clockwork Orange – they’re utterly bizarre, intriguing or just hard to forget.

There’s no denying the importance of book covers. We all know that first impressions matter – when we meet someone for the first time, we will make so many assumptions about them in a few seconds. It’s the same for books – the publishers dress the book in its Sunday Best and send it off into the big wide world...

Read the full article here!

Taylor Swift ft Kendrick Lamar - 'Bad Blood' Music Video

Click image to go to music video

The music video for Taylor Swift's latest single is out and it's pretty epic; explosions, weapon-slinging, Tron bikes, fight scenes and leather-clad women destroying things.

Writing Update #10

Exams are over. I don't have to study any more.

I don't know what to do with my life now.

Writing

• Remember I talked about writing a radio play? That never happened because I couldn't get the story to work and I just had no time to write it. I might try again this year, but I'm not sure.
• Just wrote an article on the Met Gala and cultural appropriation, that should go up on the student newspaper soon and it'll be in my online portfolio (see the tab on the top).
• I wrote a short story for a competition, which never received any success. For a writing workshop, we had to adapt a previous piece of work into a screen script and it worked...really well. I'll be redoing it and sending it in. It's a futuristic piece, set in a world where there's a shortage of clean air. Hopefully should be easy to make? We'll see.

Music

• I've just been playing the ukulele a lot (I have this beautiful white Octopus ukulele). This channel is excellent if you want to learn:

Real Life and Other Nonsense

• I've been immensely lonely for the last month - I stayed on campus for a few weeks when everyone was gone. Then, I went home as most of my friends were leaving to go back to their uni's, and I was too busy with revision to meet up with many people. Upon returning, we were all shut up revising. However, friends are emerging and a little group of us went to the beach, which was lovely.
• I PASSED MY DRIVING TEST. It took 3 attempts, but I did it! I won't be able to afford a car for a long time, so we had pizza to celebrate instead.
• Still learning French on Duolingo. The experience chart on the side is really useful - it makes me want to keep up the streak. I can now say "the cat eats the mouse" in French. 

Have a lovely day - don't let your cat eat mice.

Writing Update #9

Writing

• I wrote a post last night about my struggle with body confidence over the past years. I was a bit apprehensive about putting it up, but I've been helped a lot with other people's honest and open work, so here it is. It had an amazing response, including Meghan Tonjes favouriting and retweeting it:

• So far, I've managed to blog infrequently and write an article on YouTube culture (it'll be up soon).
• Otherwise, my own writing is on hold until my exams are done. I can't wait to get back into blogging, writing reviews, reading and generally being less anxious. 

Music

• I've discovered Amber Run. They're a British indie band and their music is beautiful. Check out this song:

Real Life and Other Nonsense

• I'm listening to the radio play adaptation of Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. It's excellent and really does the novel justice. It won't be available on iPlayer for much longer but I guess if you look for it, you'll find it on the internet somewhere/you can buy it from BBC Radio 4 online.
• My driving test is coming up and I'm a bag of emotions. I feel nothing, then worry and stress, then I'm confident. 

Wish me luck for everything!

Body Confidence, YouTubers and Modelling for Razz Magazine

I haven't felt this bad about my body image in a long time. I was about 17 when I started to not actively hate how I looked. It then took several years of carefully finding my way out of the same ways of thinking about myself before I felt happy with who I am.

I wanted to talk because reading things like this have helped me in the past, and made me feel less alone. So here we go.

Very First Attempt At A 'Shopping Haul' Post

I finally went shopping and thought I'd share what I got! Don't expect too many of these posts - I've barely bought anything aside from groceries since January and I'm a student with little money. Also, I really hate the word 'haul' for some reason.

It's actually really hard to do those perfect photographs where all your purchases are neatly laid out