Comments | wickedevra: Everybody loves George

wickedevra

Everybody loves George

Mar 07, 2006 14:11

For Tara and anyone else interested....

Marian Keyes reading in Melbourne today! It was really great; she is such a lovely lady. The reading was held in a bookstore, so it was quite small. She read two chapters from her latest novel, Anybody out there? No spoilers, happily, since I haven't quite finished it. She reads very well. Of course I could ( Read more... )

Comments 14

mauvaise_etoile March 7 2006, 03:50:00 UTC

Yay! I'm glad she was lovely :) I love going to author signings/readings. I didn't even realize she had a new book out either: I'll have to pop out and get it. Have you read all of her books? Which was your fave? I *really* liked Watermelon.

wickedevra March 7 2006, 03:55:24 UTC

This was the first reading/signing I've been to, so it was quite exciting! Her new book is called Anybody out there? It has just been released here, presumably to coincide with her Australia tour. I have read all her books. Watermelon was great. I also really enjoyed The Other Side of the Story, being all about the writing world.

mauvaise_etoile March 7 2006, 14:45:05 UTC

I have Other Side but haven't read it yet; I didn't realize that was what it was about!

wickedevra March 7 2006, 23:42:05 UTC

Other Side has three main female characters, two of whom are aspiring writers and one is a literary agent. It's tres interesting.

momebie March 7 2006, 04:52:36 UTC

Haha, well, I'm assuming you have a cute South African accent, so you might be half way there. :p I don't even have a cool accent. Just this weird American one that isn't even southern after being hin Florida all my life. (My mom was a speech pathologist, so if we started using weird pronunciations she would smack us.)

wickedevra March 7 2006, 05:02:09 UTC

I don't know about my accent being cute! Aussies tend to identify me as British, unless they know 'ja' to be South African. I'm sure yours is nice - and proper, with all the smacking, poor KL *pats*

momebie March 7 2006, 05:39:25 UTC

Hahah, thanks. They weren't like, hard. Hehe. But yes, I tend to say way more things than most people. Darn my mother and her correct grammar. WTF Mate?! :p

What is 'Ja'? Is it just 'yeah'?

wickedevra March 7 2006, 06:04:46 UTC

*relieved* :) 'ja' (pronounced yah) is just like yeah. It's 'yes' in Afrikaans.

canutius March 7 2006, 10:11:27 UTC

Nope, your accent must be cute. SA and Brit accents are totally diffent. The people who confuse them must be tone deaf or something.

So, now that you have nailed the cute accent... :0)

And it sounds interesting to go to a reading. We don't get those here in English obviously *sob of self pity*

wickedevra March 7 2006, 11:04:25 UTC

Thanks! SA has quite a range of accents; the English-speaking English one probably sounds closer to British than any other nationality, although very different. Have you kept your accent since living in Europe, or do you sound more local now?

I never went to a reading before. It was really fun!

canutius March 7 2006, 12:14:48 UTC

Yes and no. I do speak differently over here because you usually have to ennunciate well and speak slower so that people can understand you, but at home I still have the same accent as usual. Having said that, I had one for home and one for other places like my maternal grandmother's and uni. My father comes from the south or east. He was born in Alabama and grew up in Illinois and his parents were from the south. They were also not from the better classes so they have quite a distinctive "uneducated" type of speach. This is what I usually use at home, although less and less since my dad is going deaf and you have to speak up and speak clearly for him to understand. My maternal grandmother remarried an English teacher (a.k.a. snob extrordinaire) so they were always on us about our ennunciation, pronunciation and grammer. This turned out to be quite helpful at uni, as well as here (but well and truly annoying while we were children ( ... )

wickedevra March 7 2006, 23:47:45 UTC

That's interesting! I hope I'm not becoming "polluted" (I really do prefer the SA accent!); people at home seem to find I sound the same, except for replacing 'ja' with 'yeah' quite a lot. The only Aussie phrase I use quite often is "no worries", I prefer it to "no problem" probably because our grandmother always used to complain about people saying that! People here said my accent sounded particularly "clipped" (wtf does that mean?) after I got back from two months at home. The husband is a vocal chameleon though. He fits in with how people sound here, but nobody got to laugh at him in SA because he switched right back to his old way of speaking.

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