All posts by Sumayyah

About Sumayyah

Sumayyah is an Information Assistant at the Vaughan Public Libraries. She's also a bookworm and author, constantly dreaming up a multitude of different stories and wrestling with finishing them.  |  Meet the team

Death & The Maiden & Media

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Death-and-the-Maiden-by-marianne-stokes
Death and the Maiden by Marianne Stokes

I’m a lover of collecting things, from shells to magnets to k-pop albums to plants, and one of those things I like to collect are…tropes and archetypes. The Oxford Learner’s Dictionary defines trope as: “a theme that is important or repeated in literature, films, etc.” while the Collins Dictionary defines archetype as: “a constantly recurring symbol or motif in literature, painting, etc.”

You might be wondering how on earth I can collect something so intangible, but it’s easy. On my personal blog, I have a saved category of these tropes and archetypes that I come across in the form of quotations, literary analyses, art pieces, and more.

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Making Moving Marvelously Easy

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image-of-boxes-about-to-be-loaded-into-a-moving-truck
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

I’m hoping to be moving to a new place at the end of July, along with many, many others. It will only be my second time moving out on my own, and I’m very excited about having my own space, my own kitchen, my own bathroom, and a place that stays as clean as I left it—my cat’s shenanigans notwithstanding—and will be decorated according to my preferences!

Honestly, I may be most excited about listening to music and other media without headphones (which I use out of courtesy for my housemates and also to prevent them from making fun of me for blasting K-pop at all hours of the day. …Oooh, I just realized it’ll finally make sense to get a record player!)

Still, the actual move is looking to be a hectic affair—but luckily I’ve been mostly packed for a few months now and just have to physically shift everything over to my new place, unpack, organize, figure out which of my furniture makes sense to keep and what should be sold…

Ok, so that’s a lot of stuff to manage, and if you’re feeling a tad bit overwhelmed like I am (or someone else in your life is moving and stressed about it) check out these books, guaranteed to make the moving process, and everything related to it, marvelously easy! (Or at least, easier.)

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Cross-Genre Works: A Reading List

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bone-out-from-boneville

I was thinking about my colleague Maya’s post on comics (an excellent read!) while I was downsizing my bookshelves in preparation for a move, when I came upon my collection of graphic novels and manga. Among them are the Bone comics by Jeff Smith (which I love and am definitely keeping) and I thought it would be fun to talk about them and other works that I consider ‘cross-genre’.

But first, a definition of the term. According to Wikipedia: “A hybrid genre is a literary or film genre that blends themes and elements from two or more different genres. Works in hybrid genres are also referred to as cross-genre, multi-genre, mixed genre, or fusion genre. ” [Emphasis mine.]

Bone is definitely a cross-genre series. If I had to describe it in as few words as possible, I would say it’s the Snoopy comics meets The Lord of the Rings. They’re comical and funny, but set in a fantastical world with a plot that gets increasingly dark and the stakes increasingly higher. There’s a prophecy, dragons, lost princesses, a failing kingdom, a great eldritch evil, corrupting power…and strange little ‘bone’ creatures on the run from the fallout of a financial scam that had them chased out of their city by an angry mob. Hijinks and nonsense abound, as well as quests and heartbreaks.

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