Friday Finds

I'm heading to Sydney this weekend for the All About Women conference at Sydney Opera House. I'm ridiculously excited for a couple of reasons - one, travelling to Sydney's always pretty fun, the guests are amazing and I'm ticking off another of my 24 Before 25 items - going to a festival for a festival and not to work at it. I'll be livetweeting over on my Twitter too, so feel free to follow me.

Also the Gold Coast Film Festival released it's program this week and it is a total killer. Check it out here.

- It's International Women's Day this weekend! Celebrate with this feminist ranking of female superheroes.

- Your week in trailers: more Orphan Black!! I'm counting down the days! Mr. Holmes looks like a really interesting take on a story that's been told to death recently.

- This article on 10 films that inspired Mad Men is pretty fascinating.

- An Adventure Time movie! Sign me up!

- Accidental wolves are the best sort of pet!

- This Wes Anderson-esque X-Men is giving me life right now.

- Start your weekend by reading 8 of the 10 Oscar nominated screenplays.

- Which book should you read next based on your zodiac sign?

- Which Hogwarts House were you ALMOST sorted into? From Pottermore, I know I'm a Ravenclaw, and apparently now an almost-Slytherin.

- This tiny, mobile library is basically all of my retirement plans.

- Book mugs!

- Book jewellery! 

This piece by the ever wonderful Catherynne M. Valente on writing strong, kick-heart characters is awesome and has me fist pumping like crazy.

The nameless narrator may have been around forever, but it's hard to argue the narrative tool is on the rise these days. This piece in The New Yorker talks about it pretty poetically.

Friday Finds

Totally late to the party on this one, but The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl is pretty great.

- If you've got a little bit of time up your sleeve this weekend (maybe while you're between sessions at QPF), check out this amazing bit of prose by Sophia McDougall on hating the strong female character. It's pretty powerful stuff.

- 4zzz Bookclub did an excellent interview with Junot Diaz as he heads to Brisbane. I'm seeing him on Monday as a part of BWF's Bookend event and seriously, I'm so excited.

- Bust has compiled a kind of hilarious list of 20 Male Celebrities You Didn't Know Were Ridiculously Hot Once. I sent it around to a few friends who all had varying degrees of horror until one countered it with this list of 27 Asian Leading Men Who Deserve More Airtime. This list features my movie boyfriend Lee Byung-Hun so you know it's basically the best.

- 40 Trashy Books that are Actually Worth Reading. Also, this game The Novelist is basically the best thing I've seen all week. Given my history playing The Sims (spoiler: my sims always die), I am predicting that my novelist's life will end in death and abandon and no novel.

- These abandoned houses in rural Iceland are pretty amazing. So are these leaf studies.

Tweed Ride Moscow

The photos that have emerged from the Tween Run bicycle ride in Moscow are speaking to my twee heart. People went all out, decked in clothes from the thirties and forties and basically cycled around looking dapper as all hell. The photographer, Cyril Kolobyanin, did an amazing job capturing the event too. A+ style, everybody. A+. View the full set over here.

Bookfest? Bookfest!

Bookfest, you guys! I spent $57! I got all of the above!

For those playing at home, Lifeline Bookfest is a huge, second-hand book fair held at the Brisbane Convention Centre once or twice a year. The enormous sale has tens of thousands of books, separated by quality, genre, collectables and price. I'd never been before, and don't particularly know why  - probably some combination of geography, finances and general uselessness.

The community and the atmosphere was this perfect cocktail of friendly and intimate and horribly competitive and focused - the people are there to rec books and help you, but also, man, are they there to shop. One of my favourite moments of the day was heading in with my mum (her first time too), bagless and trolley-less, and all the other people making their way from carpark to the halls had a look on their face that said noobz.

We were there for hours really, running up and down the trestle tables of books, hoarding them in arms that would ache for days after. I came out with exactly twenty books, a lot of which I'd been eager to get my hands on for a while, and even more to flesh out my Australian women author collection. I'm particularly excited to read The China Garden, Pieces of a Girl (because, Jesus, I love me some Charlotte Wood) and What the Family Needed. I also grabbed all the Isabel Allende I could, because what I've read of hers in the past - particularly My Invented Country - sort of make my life.

There's another few days left of Bookfest - it doesn't finish until the 28th Jan - and I am hugely tempted to go back for sale day (because $2.50 a book was dear), and I really do recommend it. It's a pretty wonderful experience.