Bookish Thoughts

Shirley Jackson is one of those authors who just sticks with you. I'm not entirely sure what it is about her writing, but it haunts for years. I read  The Lottery  in high school, and I still think about it from time to time. I'm sure that  We Have Always Lived in the Castle  will be no different. It gets scarier the more I think about it, which is a little strange, but it also keeps getting better. And it's so short that I have no doubt I'll be re-reading it in the future. Probably to celebrate Halloween. The narrator is a young woman named Merricat who, strangely, reminded me a lot of Rothfuss' Auri. When  The Slow Regard of Silent Things  came out earlier this year, Rothfuss took pains to warn his readers that it was an unusual story with an unusual protagonist. Sure to be unlike anything they'd read before. Well Rothfuss has likely never read this book, because the two are more than a little similar. Merricat and Auri have a lot in common. They are metic

I'd forgotten how much I like this book. For some reason, the sixth book always gets lost in the shuffle for me. Must be because it's the penultimate book. I expect it to just be build up for the final book. And in some ways it is. This is the book that introduces us to Horcruxes and fills in Voldemort's past. But there's also a lot of fantastic stuff in here. Even if it does put some strain on Rowling's decision to use a limited third-person perspective. I love all of the relationship stuff that begins happening in this book. Ron and Hermione's jealous dance around each other is perfect and so typical of first romances where people are too scared to just say what they want. Harry's crush on Ginny is wonderful, too, if a little cheesy with the chest monster metaphor. The moment when they finally kiss still thrills me completely, and I always wish she was more of a presence in the final book so that we could see them together a bit more. Overall this book

Bless Me, Ultima  is a book I missed back in high school. My sophomore year was American Literature. The school decided to start a new class that combined American Lit with American History into a single 3-hour class. But because I was science track, I opted for the regular, easier english and history classes that year. And I ended up with a different reading list because of it. So while all my friends read and fell in love with  Bless Me Ultima , I was keeping busy with  The Great Gatsby  and  Catcher in the Rye . (My friends probably read those, too. I think the advanced class had an expanded reading list, not a different one.) Recently I saw this book on a best-of list, then encountered it at a used book store for $1. Which meant that I basically had to read it. I think I may have enjoyed this book more had I read it in a classroom setting. It reads like a lot of the other books I read for school, heavy on the metaphor. And each chapter works fairly well as a stand-alone segment

The first and only time I attended a midnight book release party was when this book came out. It was the summer before my senior year of high school, so a couple of friends and I were easily able to make the trek to the nearest Barnes and Noble by ourselves. The party itself was geared to a much younger audience, but we were bookish and happy to spend some time browsing the shelves before the book was officially released. On the way home I sat in the backseat and read the first chapter aloud for the benefit of the driver. This is also the first time I spoiled myself for something. I care less about this now. I know the shapes of stories well enough to understand what's coming, and spotting the clues is a big part of my enjoyment. But at the time I was genuinely upset that I'd figured out Sirius was going to die from the blurb on the dust jacket. I was even more upset when the text proved my prediction correct. Despite that I remember being excited when this book first came