Bookish Thoughts

This book has one of the strongest openings of any book I've read in recent memory. I fell in love with it from the second sentence and never looked back. The entire book was atmospheric and lyrical and I can't wait to read it again. Unfortunately, one of the reasons I'm going to need to read it again is that I felt like I missed a lot the first time through. That's more my fault than the book's. It demanded more focus than I could give it. When I tried to read it five minutes at a time between my kids' demands, I kept losing the thread. I had to go back and re-read sections, sure I'd missed stuff, only to discover that the book was simply too subtle for my sleep-deprived and kid-distracted brain. But man, was it beautiful. Hopefully next year I'll have a chance to revisit it, to really sit down and give it the attention it deserves.

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 ...