The Livings of Leyla

  Recently, I got a cat named Sylvi. She's half Maine coon and half normal cat. She is almost four months old and we got her two months ago. She is born on August 31st and is named after Sylvester the cat from looney toons as she looks just like him.  She is around 1.7 kilos and can be carried with hand even though she's not fond of being picked up. She isn't that used to us but she starts crying/meowing when we go out the door. She has tried to ecscape may times and succeeded three times. One of them consisting of an open window and me running outside with my socks. She likes being around children but usually doesn't feel comfortable being carried around. She doesn't mind strangers petting her.  She sometimes scratches if she isn't happy at playfully bites at your feet when she is bored. When she is hungry she will meow constantly while looking up at you! We feed her food twice a day and I pick up her litter most of the time. L

  An action packed book with twists that’ll you gasp so loud that you’d startle the birds off your roof. In a world where each individual has a daemon and there is a force called dust which only some have the knowledge of,   An eleven year old called Lyra lives at a college with her daemon (Pantelaemon.) They journey through different places in the college, sometimes with Lyra’s servant friend: Roger.  They do rebellious things like playing on the roof and venturing through places whith corpses of scholars.  Kids are disappearing and are being taken by people called gobblers. Soon, Lyra assumes roger has been taken too.  She is later called to dinner with “The Master” and meets a fine young lady named ‘Miss Coulter’ and she is chosen to be her apprentice. Little does she know that Miss Coulter is one of the Gobblers. No more spoilers. L

  In the Cheltenham Literature Festival, I met a children’s author named Kathrine Rundell. She explained how she had faced many adventures caused by her books. One of her books -‘The Explorer’-  was set in a rainforest and it was about kids who had crashed in a helicopter . She explained how she was inspired to write this book, because she had went to the Amazon rainforest. She also stated that if she wanted to make her stories sound real, she had to try the things in real life, especially the food. In her book, the characters ate piranhas so she decided to try them, she said they tasted like chicken and they were easy to catch.  She also wanted to try Tarantulas, like the people in her book. The person who was catching them for her told her they were like gerbils, that lowered her enthusiasm to eat one of those hairy eight legged creatures even more. So instead of trying one she decided to ask the people who lived in the Amazon. They said it tasted like prawn and soft me...

  Cheltenham-Literature Festival. Last weekend, October 8th, we discovered a new town: We ate Sri Lankan food for the first time and had posh English tea. But the reason we came was because of the literature festival that was held annually.  At Cheltenham Festival, we met a man called Karl Ove Knausgård, a famous author from Norway - the place I had lived in for several years.  He read out a " self-rejected”  segment of his book -‘Morning Star’- which was about a nineteen year old boy with a dead father, ill mother and a younger brother. He read a scene of a nineteen year old at a night. Apparently, this was the piece which stopped him from publishing his novel. Eight or even ten years later, he read it over again and realised this was a great piece of work. He decided to work on it more and finally published it as his first major novel a fter his book series of four. Speaking about his autobiographies, all four books in the series are called “My struggles” parts one...