Tag Archives: Sophie Greene

r8. Blog Posts

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One blog I really enjoyed reading was Sophie’s Novel Terrain. I admired the way Sophie effortlessly brought the landscapes of these books to life. She made it extremely easy for her readers to picture themselves in the setting of various novels. Some of which, I might add, are very heavy and those I imagine were difficult to dissect. In my opinion, at least, Dickens’ is not an easy read. One post that stood out to me in particular was from earlier this semester, In the Land of Pride and Prejudice and Chickens.

Men would have to court women without the help of the internet.  You would not be able to click a button and have a fresh bunch of roses delivered to your lover; instead you would have to saddle your most noble steed and ride for hours (in England, it will most likely be in the rain) and arrive at your lover’s house looking like a drowned rat with a bunch of drooping roses.  What an effort! A good-old Austen-styled ballroom dance sounds fun until I think about the corsets and lack of air-conditioning, and- perhaps most important- lack of deodorant.

Sophie brings a strong voice to her post, one that made me laugh several times. Her interjections are powerful and straightforward. They state the facts that are often overlooked by readers (i.e., “A good-old Austen-Stylend ballroom dance sounds fun until I think about the corsets and lack of air-conditioning…”). Her sarcasm adds spunk to her writing that make her posts very fun to read!

Another blog I looked forward to reading was Nicole’s The Last Supper.  Her tone is conversational and her writing style is amusing to read. Here is an example from her post, “KKC” (aka the Krispy Kreme Challenge):

I was literally the slowest person on the team – okay, I’m not the fastest runner in the world, but in all my years on Track and XC I was never the absolute slowest. That’s why when I heard about the Krispy Kreme Challenge, I knew I’d finally have my chance to shine.

The Challenge: 2.25 miles there + 12 donuts + 2.25 miles back; < 1 hour, no throwing up

I know. I KNOW. Finally – I could definitely out-eat all of these serious runners; I’ve pretty much been training for a race like this my whole life. (My parents felt a weird balance of pride and disgust.)

I like that Nicole doesn’t have to try to get her readers to like her. Her honesty and her wittiness do that for her. Nicole implements a personable writing style that made me feel like I could relate to her. She isn’t afraid to make fun of herself and I think this is a very important factor for good blog writing!

“and the Bloggie Award goes to….”

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I’ve enjoyed many of the posts and blogs that our little family of writers has offered to the interwebz, but a few of us have delivered some affecting, effective prose. Here are a pair of the posts that resonated with me most:

Sophie’s blog, Novel Terrain, has been excellent fodder for her obvious talents as a writer. She has re-imagined historical moments, uncovered layers from some classic works of literature and made them accesible to modern readers, and most importantly, made us excited to read these works. One example in particular from her post, “Have an Adventure!”, makes me remember how fiendishly I awaited moments when I could dive between the covers of my bed and the covers of some girthy tome:

“There are few other novels in the world that paint as vivid a picture for our imaginations as The Hobbit does.  The details are as clear as peering through a microscope at the brush stokes on a van Eyck painting. Rivendell, the center of elf-land, gushes with waterfalls and oozes with magic. And Smaug’s treasure gleans at us from under his heaving belly.  The characters too, and not just their surroundings, are depicted with rich detail: Gollum’s pathetic insanity is so real you can almost smell it, and Bilbo’s sensible and good-natured heart is at hand through all the novel’s terrain.”

In those few sentences I am transported. “Rivendell, the center of elf-land, gushes with waterfalls and oozes with magic. And Smaug’s treasure gleams at us from under his heaving belly,” she writes, and I am ten again; would that I could travel with our heroes, and that more writers had a flair as imaginative as Sophie’s.

 

I had the pleasure of reading this post on Carburrito from Kristin in class one day when we were workshopping, and for the entire time I couldn’t stop smiling. You might think, “Hey, and stupe with a keyboard can write a blog about a burrito and catch your interst, Parker.” And yeah, you’d be right, but, Kristen’s prose in this post made me forget the food she was describing (and the succulent pictures that accompanied the descriptions) because I so enjoyed what she said and how she said it. She was relatable, informed and clearly, clearly biased towards tasty tasty cuisine; her passion was contagious:

“Apparently, I love burritos, or at least I love burrito places.

There is nothing like Carrburritos on a Saturday night before going to see The Artist to make you feel like the hippest kid in Carrboro. I didn’t actually get a burrito though, I got a sweet potato quesadilla, which sounds like a typo but isn’t.

[...] Above, the meal is shown. It was delicious. As we waited for our double order of quesadillas, we snacked on guacamole, chips and salsa. The guac was divine, but if you haven’t noticed, I have a strong desire to eat guacamole for every meal, so I may be overzealous. Lies. I’m not overzealous because Carrburritos is delicious and so is their guacamole.”

She finished that post with arguably the best slideshow outro in the history of photography. “Please enjoy” she declares with little ado, but obvious bliss, “a slideshow of nom.”

Boom.

R8: Blog Standouts

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Allison’s blog, A Crazie Obsession, is an athlete’s take on exercise options for the busy, overachieving, Norts-wearing Duke student. One thing I really like is Allison’s honesty in reviewing Duke’s fitness classes – if I were a runner, I’d probably be much more arrogant about how “easy” I think these classes are. This is a paragraph from one of her more recent posts on the H.I.I.T. class offered at Wilson Gym:

“At the start of the year, nothing sounded more terrifying, yet simultaneously intriguing, to me than did the new H.I.I.T. class, which stands for “High Intensity Interval Training.” As you have probably noticed by now, my “obsession” for working out definitely isn’t an understatement; therefore, I would be lying if I told you that I didn’t walk into that class thinking “ehhh…I’m in shape…this can’t be too difficult.”
Flash forward one hour, and all I’m thinking is…’Welp, I couldn’t have been more wrong.’”

I also love how Allison incorporates her own thoughts while going through this experience. It makes her posts personable and gets you thinking about what, exactly, you’d be saying walking out of this workout (from personal experience I know it’s just a cry for more water). I’m definitely more apt to take advice from someone who is obviously knowledgeable but also genuine… not to mention funny!

Novel Terrain is an example of more lyrical prose, in which Sophie uses vivid imagery to evoke the worlds of the literature she explores, as below:

“Imagine a world that is full of characters so animated that they seem to have stepped out of a coloured Disney sketch. Add some horse-drawn carriages, plumes of darkened clouds, and a cheery but unfortunate little red-cheeked ruffian called David. You are now in Charles Dickens’ masterpiece: David Copperfield.
Copperfield’s terrain is an Elysian field for any sensitive soul who takes pleasure in observing human traits and truths. Every adventure is fraught with shrewd honesty and cynical judgments. Copperfield’s characters are his pawns in his somewhat jolly (but wry) account of human nature. Fat Tommy Traddles bumbles through life as blindly and as humbly as any miserable, but kind, fellow would. Traddles is, after all, according to Copperfield, made of fine human dough.”

It’s usually not my preference to wax too poetic in such a colloquial medium, but Sophie keeps her writing sharp enough that it doesn’t become pretentious. I especially like her metaphor describing the novel’s characters as pawns – it’s precisely what they are, and yet no one really considers them that way.