Stephen King, stealer of sleep

After the post about Stephen King's greatness, I read a short story that gave me nightmares and had me checking to see if my front door was locked (IT WASN'T). This made for a very fidgety night.

Apparently I'm a sucker because regardless of that short story warning, I just started his latest undertaking, 11/22/63. It deals with time travel and possibly stopping the Kennedy assassination. It was all going along beautifully until about 120 pages in and the protagonist arrives at a town...

Not just any town.

A town with a pervading feeling of...wrongness.

Oh, and people who murder each other with hammers.

Hammers.

At that point, I closed the book and haven't opened it for two days. It's like I'm afraid of the book.

It is similar to the children's book - There's a Monster at the End of this Book - only in this case the monster is 1/6 of the way in. And really, it is probably only the first of many "monsters" to be dealt with in the massive tome.

Now, unlike Joey and Rachel on Friends when they read Cujo - when a book frightens me I don't put it in the freezer.

But I'm considering it.

Right now it is on my bedside table.

Next to where I sleep.

Sitting there all night.

Who knows what could happen.

Safety first.

When reading.

Freezer.

"Take care of yourself...and say! Did you maybe leave the oven on? Or forget to turn off the gas under your patio barbecue? What about the lock on the back door? Did you remember to give it a twist? Things like that are so easy to forget, and someone could be slipping in right now. A lunatic, perhaps. One with a knife. So, OCD behavior or not...Better go check, don't you think?"
Stephen King

Memory always needs a marker

I bow down to The King.

Stephen King.

Teaching is just four - relaxing - days away, which means it has crept back into my mind as careers are wont to do.

My freshman are reading short stories this quarter, so I thought I might liven up my break with some by Stephen King.

My history with Stephen King began as me being a hater for much of my life, but has come full circle to me now calling him the Jane Austen of horror.

I shouldn't - then - be surprised to find his short story collection, Just After Sunset, to be fabulous.

Writing this is filling up the halftime I'm taking in the middle of the collection because I just read a short story that was so meaningful I have to take a moment. Let it marinate. I can't let any other words mess with the ones currently floating around my head.

The story: "The Things They Left Behind"

It is about a man who didn't die in the twin towers on 9/11 because he was playing hooky from work. A little less than a year later, artifacts from his now deceased co-workers show up in his apartment. They don't talk to him really, but when they are around he begins to remember them and then - later - also knows how they died.

I won't tell you how it ends. At 29 pages you can read it for yourself. I will say that throwing the objects away does NOT get them out of his apartment for long...

I find that after reading the story, I don't want to read anything else for a bit. I just want to think for a bit. Kudos to King, because isn't wanting to pause your reading to let the words resonate with you the mark of a successful tale?

Then again, I could be touchy because I teach a group of young people to which 9/11 means barely anything. I want to yell and say, "The world changed that day; don't you understand?"

They don't. Perhaps if they read this story they could begin to.

"The things I want to tell you about - the ones they left behind - showed up in my apartment in August of 2002.I'm sure of that, because I found most of them not long after I helped Paula Robeson with her air conditioner. Memory always needs a marker, and that's mine."
Stephen King

Pausing 2012 to remember 2011

A year in books. 2011 marked the harrowing battle of reading vs. teaching. Even so, I managed to find time to read. The issue was never so apparent as when during one week of teaching break I read three books (completely for my enjoyment only). Oh the rapture.

Let's look back now over the entire year. It would seem this was a year of the series (Wallander, Game of Thrones, Dune, etc.) I've boiled my list down to my top three per category. It would seem, however, that I only read one happy/funny book this year. I feel pretty OK with that.

Here goes:

Favorite

Must Read

Not for Me

Page Turner

Feel Happy and Laugh

Wallow and Cry

Makes you Think

Entertaining Fluff

All the Rest
A Clash of Kings - George R.R. Martin
A Lesson Before Dying - Ernest Gaines
Batman / Superman / Wonder Woman: Trinity - Matt Wagner
Batman: The Long Halloween - Loeb & Sale
Batman: Year One - Miller & Mazzuchelli
Chapterhouse Dune - Frank Herbert
Children of Dune - Frank Herbert
Deogratias: A Tale of Rwanda - Stassen
Drood - Dan Simmons
Dune Messiah - Frank Herbert
Ender's Game - Orson Scott Card
Faceless Killers - Henning Mankell
Fahrenheit 451 (graphic adaptation) - Tim Hamilton
Firewall - Henning Mankell
God Emperor of Dune - Frank Herbert
Good Wives - Louisa May Alcott
Heretics of Dune - Frank Herbert
Hole in My Life - Jack Gantos
How Did You Get This Number - Sloane Crosley
I am an Emtional Creature - Eve Ensler
Inherit the Wind - Jerome Lawrence & Robert E Lee
Italian Shoes - Henning Mankell
Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
Mare's War - Tanita Davis
Marvel 1602 - Neil Gaiman
More Book Lust - Nancy Pearl
Murder in the Marais - Cara Black
One Step Behind - Henning Mankell
Promethea Vol. 1 - Moore, Williams & Gray
Promethea Vol. 2 - Moore, Williams & Gray
Promethea Vol. 3 - Moore, Williams & Gray
Siddhartha - Hermann Hesse
Sidetracked - Henning Mankell
Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut
Storm of Swords - George R.R. Martin
Swim the Fly - Don Calame
The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
The Books of Magic - Gaiman & Bolton et al.
The Dogs of Riga - Henning Mankell
The Fifth Woman - Henning Mankell
The Imperfectionists - Tom Rachman
The Last Wish - Andrzei Sapkowski
The Man Who Smiled - Henning Mankell
The Weight of Winter - Cathie Pelletier
The White Lioness - Henning Mankell
Touching Spirit Bear - Ben Mikaelsen
When the World Was Steady - Claire Messud
Wonder Woman - Picoult, Dodson, Johnson, & Diaz
Wonder Woman Archives Vol. 1 - DC Comics

"An accident rarely comes alone" and other things from Sweden

Imagine a world where police detectives don't have to carry a gun. That is the world Kurt Wallander lives in. Or at least did. Until people started shooting at him.


As a detective in a small Swedish town, Wallander likes things to be quiet. Happy and quiet.

Each book of the Wallander series deals with a different social issue which is breaking up Wallander's quiet and indicates a changing Sweden. First it was immigration. Second, smuggling. This time it is KGB renegades and South African assassination plotters taking refuge in a quiet country no one would think of as an assassination training ground.

Wallander gets put on the case of a missing woman. The reader knows Law & Order SVU style (at the very beginning of the book) that the woman is dead (I won't tell you how).

Piece by piece Wallander realizes that this murder makes no sense. Then a building is blown up. Then he finds a severed finger. And he is placed in the middle of a much larger crime.

What's really going on is a plot to assassinate a key figure in South Africa. The book goes back and forth between South Africa and Sweden and the reader is left feeling like chaos is attempting a coup. On the world.

For a guy who doesn't carry a gun, Wallander gets all Old Testament (thank you Fast Five) on the bad guys in the end. Like we knew he would. However, his psyche is going to pay for his violent decisions in upcoming books.

As with each Wallander book, I can't wait to start the next one. I have a feeling this series is the perfect summertime-I-want-something-fun-and-exciting-with-a-side-of-grit reading material.

"What breaks in a moment may take years to mend."
Swedish Proverb

Woman vows to give up dead dog literature, is tricked

So far, this whole making-reading-a-priority-this-winter thing has really paid off. However, sometimes I want to talk to people who have also read the books. So I've started several two person book "clubs" (partnerships?) that focus heavily on wine.

I read The Little Stranger with a friend. A book in which - among other things - a dog is put to death.

A dead animal is the sucker punch of literature (I'm looking at you The Red Pony).

After that, we agreed: no more dead dog books.

We thought we were safe going with a book about newspapers. We chose The Imperfectionists: a tale of an English newspaper in Italy told via vignettes about each employee. That can't involve dogs. Right?

Wrong.

By page 200 I was already annoyed, and that was sans dog. The highlight of each chapter was the title, wittily turned into a newspaper article title. The writing was adept and knowledgeable, but I disliked the people and what happened to them. I get the point and the metaphor of it all...but I just didn't like it.

I got to the last chapter and *SPOILER not only did a dog die, but it was murdered by a human. AND THAT WAS WHERE IT ENDED. Oh sure, there was a where-are-they-now wrap up, but all I could think was DEAD DOG DEAD DOG DEAD DOG.

I had to read a Batman comic just to lighten the mood...

"Anything that's worth anything is complicated. Don't you think? Or is that stupid?"
Tom Rachman

I'd give water to the dead (book) but I'm not done with the series so I'll hold off AKA why aren't you reading Dune so you know what I'm talking about

Monday kind of blew...a gasket. Seriously, I don't know what else to call the corroded metal steam holder thing-y on the side of my radiator which decided to spray hot water all over my dining room. And myself. And the kitty litter. And the floor.

And so, when Tuesday came around, I needed a little me time that didn't involve bailing scalding water.

Hence a night of reading.

Just as I promised Face years ago to read Dune, this year I have promised to read the second and third books in the series.

Over the weekend, I found myself - surprisingly - book-less. I had just finished The Little Stranger and was getting through More Book Lust, but I was in need of a story. And so I went to the Face Library and said, "Bring me the book!"

After reading the first book, I was all fear is the mind killer...and I was excited to start the second. But then time and many books passed. Once again, I wonder what took me so long. Reading Dune Messiah was like breathing fresh air.

Sometimes I feel bad for perfectly fine books I read around the time I read great books. Inevitably, the perfectly fine books will lose ground in my mind. They can't possibly keep pace.

I feel bad for Little Stranger and I feel bad for the Eve Ensler book I started today. Because all I have on my mind is Dune.

Dune Messiah picks up 12 years after the first book. Paul has had time to reign and take over planets and get married for political reasons while still keeping his true love Fremem woman. Unfortunately, his enemies have also had time. Time for plans within plans. Conspiracy. Only, Paul knows the plans within plans but he keeps walking his dangerous destiny so that something worse doesn't happen. Aaaack.

I really liked this book. Really. It was almost like I had missed the desert planet. I missed the values and philosophies and statements that have to be searched around in for meaning. The second book feels like a commentary on Earth's way of life. Of the rise and fall of empires. Of the rise and fall of religion. Of the burden of perception as a god but reality as only a man. Paul's empire - which is intrinsically linked to the religion - has grown and thrived. But now it is time for worry and laziness and complacency. Not. Good.

The second book was also a giant sparring match. All the characters warily edging around each other until it was time to strike. And strike they did.

*SPOILER ALERT. The ending is bittersweet. Important people die, but an important person returns and the future is born. And you're all YAAAAAY. But then, Paul gets blinded by some crazy laser molten beam thing that explodes down into the planet, and - oh yeah - disintegrates eye balls.

But since he is Fremem, after he saves the day, he has to be put out to pasture due to this weakness. Only there isn't pasture on Dune. There is DESERT.

Blind emperor in the desert, people!

And that is where it ends!

The moment I finished the book - which was quite late - I called Face and yelled, "WHY DIDN'T YOU GIVE ME THE THIRD BOOK AS WELL??"

He would answer none of my questions. All he would say was if I liked this one, my mind will be blown by the third book. Whaaa?? And so I was forced to restlessly go to bed.

Where I dreamed my family was at a library searching for the third book.

"Here lies a toppled god -
his fall was not a small one.
We did but build his pedestal
A narrow and a tall one."
Frank Herbert

Watcher of the dead

Don't be fooled. As much smack as I talk about love and emotions, I am as soft and sentimental as a Cadbury Egg on the inside.

My reading tastes have not escaped my gooey center.

Fantasy has always rated high on my rose colored memories list. Reading Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series out loud with the family gathered around when we were on our own great journey cemented Fantasy (and Jordan) as part of my all-time-favorite reading memories list.

Kind of like how the padre and I went to see True Grit on the same day (even though we are far apart). To pay homage to it being the first real book we read aloud together.


J. V. Jones holds a similar place. I've been reading her since high school. Her tales of clans and journeys and heroes and feisty female characters and magic and family and evil and sword fights have followed me as I've grown into my own feisty female character.

Watcher of the Dead is the fourth book in the Sword of Shadows series. Think of it like a fantastical story of good and evil and all the gray shades between. It is like the best soap opera ever.

The story is epic. Each chapter follows a different main character. Through them you see different struggles against the ever present super evil which is trying to escape and is almost succeeding. On occasion, I get annoyed by series. Like, ummm, get on with it. But with Sword of Shadows I'm liking the slow plodding towards oblivion, and I keep hoping against hope that evil doesn't win.

I could mire you down with details (like how Raif totally hates the Sull now for good reason and how I really hope Angus Lok finds his daughter and I wonder where Effie is headed and is Ash going to reach again and who is her baby daddy and I hope evil Mace dies on the field knowing Raina has taken over the chiefdom and is Bram really going to become an assassin and I hope Vaylo stays alive long enough to reunite his clan and what is the deal with Marafice), but I will just say this is a series about destiny and responsibility and growing up.

Kind of like life.

"Fantasy opens the door to experiencing the magic that is in the world around us and more importantly the magic in ourselves."
T.A. Barron

Capitol Men

It's strange, but I started 2011 off by reading historical nonfiction. And, even weirder, I liked it.

I read Capitol Men - the story of America's Reconstruction after the Civil War told by focusing on the first African American congressmen - due to a rave review from a stranger at a bus stop.

The closest I usually get to reading about history is through historical fiction, so this was a departure from the norm for me. I get why people read about history. Flipping pages I could feel myself becoming more concretely knowledgeable. With fiction, learning from the text is much more personal, much more about peeling back layers of the human condition. With nonfiction it is like: facts! Look at these facts!

I liked that Philip Dray interspersed the many facts with - sometimes fun, sometimes tragic - anecdotes. There is a crazy tale told of a governor and lieutenant governor racing back to Louisiana to try to enact legislation while the other is away. That was Pinchback. He could be quite grand and imposing at times. In 1867 he said, "There is a sense of security displayed by our people...They seem to think that all is done, the Great Battle has been fought and the victory won...The Great Contest has just begun."

Then there is the story of a wife of a supreme court judge whipping out the inkwell used in writing the Dred Scott decision - which she had hidden when people wanted to take it - to inspire her husband's words of dissent.

And just when I was beginning to get really perturbed about all of this talk about civil rights for men and nothing of WOmen, Dray brings up women's suffrage. Women's suffrage and civil rights used to be linked back in the day until "One of the saddest divorces in American history" due to short-sided and intemperate comments by both Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass.

First Susan said some crap about why should poor uneducated black men have the vote before educated white women. Then Freddy came back and inferred that women should shut their mouths because since they aren't being murdered they have nothing to complain about. Basically neither was thinking of the feelings of the other. No one was empathizing. And no one was rethinking their words before pressing PUBLISH.

Speaking of Freddy, he kind of gets the short end of the stick in the book. Douglass, usually hoisted up on a pedestal as a paragon of excellence in high school history classes, is quite humanly depicted. Including getting crotchety as he got old (and Reconstruction was basically torn down). At the low point, he chastised African Americans in the deep south for escaping certain death and moving to Kansas to try their luck. He said they should stay and fight. Unfortunately for him (who escaped slavery by heading and staying north), his words had the bitter taste of hypocrisy.

But there were great parts too. One of my favorites is Robert Brown Elliott, who was ridiculously eloquent in 1870 when he told congress: "The rights contended for in this bill are among the sacred rights of mankind, which are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records; they are written as with a sunbeam in the whole volume of human nature...and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power."

Then there was Robert Smalls who successfully stole a confederate ship during the war and then became an important figure in South Carolinian politics. Oh, and he purchased the house his once master owned. And then, when the senile matriarch of the family returned to the house one day, he let her live there thinking it was still the antebellum days.

Of the raucous and bipolar roller coaster times, poet Paul Laurence Dunbar wrote (alluding to Shakespeare): "Some men are born great, some achieve greatness, and others lived during the Reconstruction period."

Capitol Men does have a downside, however: its construction. At first, I blamed myself, as if my problem was not being used to reading historical nonfiction.

Now, I completely understand that attempting to cover a time period between two book covers accurately and in depth is like herding cats. But can a girl get a linear timeline? In one chapter Charles Sumner dies and in the next chapter he is alive and kicking missing important senatorial meetings. That just makes me feel CRAZY.

Also, if the framing of the tale of Reconstruction is African American congressmen, can the chapters deal a figure at a time? No? Because since they didn't and since the timeline of the book is all malleable, I have now finished the book and can't name all the men on the front cover. That doesn't seem right.

On the other hand, there were plenty of pictures and illustrations and engravings in the book. Something I think fiction should take note of.

All in all I feel smart and crazy having read Capitol Men. So basically, nothing has changed.

"The 'moral debt' to black Americans created by that conflict was simply 'found to be beyond the country's capacity to pay, given the undeveloped state of its moral resources at the time'."
Capitol Men

A year in books...2010 retrospective

FAVORITE FAVORITE FAVORITE...
Must Read...

Not For Me...

Just OK...
Great Story...
Page Turner...
Feel Happy and Laugh...

Wallow and Cry...

Makes You Think...
Silly - But Fun - Fluff...

"I made no resolutions for the New Year. The habit of making plans, of criticizing, sanctioning, molding my life, is too much of a daily event for me."
Anais Nin, someone I didn't read this year, but will be reading next...

Set the night on fire

Last Friday, I went to the Women and Children First book store to celebrate Libby Fischer Hellmann's latest novel: Set the Night on Fire.

I've put off writing about it because I don't know how to do so without seeming like a nervously excited 16-year-old fangirl.

Here goes.
I bought the book - regardless of my buying book ban to save my bank account - because I couldn't not. Set the Night on Fire is a stand alone novel in three parts: present - late 60's - present. I read through the sections trying to savor each one. In the present, a man gets out of prison and goes to reconnect with friends from 40 years ago. Meanwhile, those friends are being killed...but the daughter of one of the friends remains unscathed...for now.

There is a sketch guy on a fancy motorcycle that is trying to kill her and prison guy is trying to keep her safe. But why?

The second section delves into the past to answer that question. Having been born in the 80's, I really can't speak to the feeling of 1968-70, but I like the naively optimistic hubris - like almost all young people possess, but exaggerated at this time because the possibility of change was palpable - was depicted.

I wonder if it could happen now: a group of young people meeting each other and then deciding to make a go of it...together. Dropping out of college and all. There's conflict and love and growing up...and then more conflict. And pain. I'm not giving details. Just know that it is awesome.

Section three comes back around to the now, and the reader is going to get some answers. What keeps me reading Libby is not only the fast pace of her novels, but the fact that she gets you to care about her characters. By part three I was totally invested. But I'm NOT going to tell you what happens.

Overall, it was refreshingly interesting to chat with and listen to cool, accomplished, and intelligent people talk about books and writing and publishing and LIFE. I was the youngest one there, and I definitely respected my elders as their life experiences astound me. Sara Paretsky was there too. Writers writers all around.

Post wine, cheese, and book signing, I debriefed with the madre and it was decided that when we grow up she gets to be Sara and I get to be Libby.

Dibs. Now go read the book.

"We tried to change the world and the world ended up changing us."
Libby Fischer Hellmann...paraphrased

He was the great love of her life...one always thinks that every, every time

"He was the great love of her life...one always thinks that every, every time."

This is how Nancy Mitford ends her novel on love: sardonically.


Since the last quietly hilarious book I read - Excellent Women - I've kept my eye out. Because who doesn't love self effacing commentary on love and being a woman?

Mitford's The Pursuit of Love depicts - of course - the search for love, but also the search for self (sometimes through love). Luckily, the reader gets to hang out with Mitford's perfectly flawed characters, getting to know them first as children who engage in Child Hunts (it is what it sounds like...only no death) with their eccentric father and hunting dogs, but then as teenagers who yearn for social norms.

There are clashes between generations, mainly: "The argument...that young men were not very likely to propose to girls they hardly knew, was brushed aside as nonsense."

But once the ladies get out into the world, they realize some things: "...the behavior of civilized man really has nothing to do with nature, that all is artificiality and art more or less perfected."

The entire book is pulled off with an air of light seriousness. I imagine the following line being said/thought sitting on a chase wearing a silk dressing gown, martini in one hand while the other waves lazily to make her point: "She had found neither great love nor great happiness...and now she was doomed to the lonely, hunted life of a beautiful but unattached woman."

In the end, love is found, but there's a war on.

The lesson (if you are a true romantic) seems to be: die at the apex of love.

"Like all the very young we took it for granted that making love is child's play."
Nancy Mitford

Love funeral makers

Excuse my brief-ness.

Hurt a tendon in my finger.

Apparently right hand staging a protest against the gym.

Makes typing difficult, among other things (button up pants...).

This may mean I have to live in the world, sans computer.

Silver lining: sweatpants don't have buttons.

Have to say one thing though: I LOVE CATHIE PELLETIER.

Finished Funeral Makers last night. After playing around in young ad. lit and nonfiction, it felt amazing to get back to serious fiction. Her characters are real and tragic and hilarious. I can't speak for all her books, but I can say I loved this one. LOVE.

I found that I couldn't wait to cradle my out of commission hand and read about life. Full of mess. Full of pain. Full of love.

"...will go on with its cycles of life. There will be husbands lying down in the wrong beds. Wives caught in the wrong arms at the wrong time. There will be hasty weddings. The dying will die and move aside for the living to die, and the patterns of life will continue..."
Cathie Pelletier

I don't care about your band

I Don't Care About Your Band is the great title of Julie Klausner's memoir chronicling the ups and downs and whatever is below the downs in the search for love and self.

For Klausner, the two seem intrinsically linked. And that made me sad.

Which is why I skimmed the middle of the book.

I got tired.

Another jerk guy you should have known better than to date? If I wanted a list like that I would just review my own life.

Parts are funny, but parts made me want to give a strong woman speech. Which, to be fair, Klausner kind of gives herself.

I perked up when she noted that instead of dating someone in a band...you should just start your own band.

That's when I started paying attention again. Right in time for the ending.

Which finally made me happy.

Klausner lets it slip that she is in a relationship at the time of writing the book, which I think we all saw coming. Refreshingly, however, she makes light of it: "Hey everybody, good news! Everything's fine now: I'm in a relationship! The end!"

And then she surprised me further by acknowledging that - when it comes to relationships and happiness - it is different for everyone.

And that is OK.

"...Who am I to say whether we can't be satisfied alone, or happy while we're looking, or whether the destination out-ends the means, or that it was all worth it for the sake of meeting this guy."
Julie Klausner, strong closer

Belinda bo binda

"A gentleman sometimes finds it for his interest, his honour, or his pleasure, to suggest what he would not for the world promise - I mean perform."

With saucy lines like the above, you would think I would be infatuated with Austen contemporary Maria Edgeworth's Belinda.

Alas, sigh, this is not so.

It is just that the writing feels...heavy handed.

Like, I get it, you're being satirical about how men lie to women. Or how the flighty Lady engaged in a duel with another Lady and the butt of the gun hit her in the chest as she fired and she hasn't been to the doctor about it for years and says she is dying. Dude. It is probably a bruise.

Or how everyone is at a masked ball and the young girl, who has a matchmaking aunt, overhears her prospective paramour talking crap about how she is all fluff and secrets and trickery and just out to catch a husband so then she is turned off of him which makes him really like her and he changes his mind, but then the Lady uses the naive girl to get some fancy horses from the paramour and then he is all back to thinking she is a strumpet.

WHATEVER.

I can't take 400 more pages of this.

Austen thought highly of Edgeworth, but I think she should have thought higher of herself.

Back to the library I go.

"Surely it is much more generous to forgive and remember, than to forgive and forget."
Maria Edgeworth

Weeeee have aaaalwaaaayssss lived in the caaaaastle

Happy day after Halloween.

In honor of the holiday I not only watched Hocus Pocus (come little children I'll taaake you awaaaay...), but I read holiday appropriate literature.


You may know Shirley Jackson from reading the super creepy "The Lottery" in high school, but I try to forget that and focus on my college Jackson experience with The Haunting of Hill House.

Over the summer when I saw the spookily illustrated cover of We Have Always Lived in the Castle at the Newberry bookstore...I knew I had to read it.

Castle is a tale of familial arsenic poisoning and post poisoning domestic bliss-ish of two sisters and an uncle. I mean, she was acquitted of the murders after all.

The only thing I love more than dystopia is an unreliable narrator. And Castle comes through, or does it, or is it all true, or imaginary, maybe it is...maybe it isn't.

While reading, I imagined most of the dialogue said with an eerie head tilt and scary lingering pause after the line. Try it:

"Who do you think will last longer, you or me?"

or

"Everyone else in our family is dead."

or even

"We are so happy."

...

All I'm saying is I would think twice about sending one of the sisters up to her room without dinner...

"Fate intervened. Some of us, that day, she led inexorably through the gates of death. Some of us, innocent and unsuspecting, took, unwillingly, that one last step to oblivion. Some of us took very little sugar."
Shirley Jackson

From the stacks...October edition

Nothing silly happened at the library last night. My on-hold books were on the shelf where they were supposed to be. I found a fun new YA comic to read. There was only one person in front of me to check out. It was all so normal. Ho-hum.

I picked up:

1. The Lost Years of Merlin - T. A. Barron
I'm already 100 pages in. It is somuchfun because there is foreshadowing and that just makes you feel like you are in on the secrets of Merlin. Like he gets burned in a fire and then thinks it would be awesome to grow a giant beard to cover up the scars, oh and birds could live in there too. And I'm like...just you WAIT Merlin.

2. Belinda - Maria Edgeworth
Nicola over at Vintage Reads has been reading Maria Edgeworth and do you know who that is? Oh, only an author Jane Austen super loved. That makes it a must-read on my list.

3. Emiko Superstar - Mariko Tamaki
A "fantasy for awkward girls" sounds hilarious especially since it sates my need for comics/graphic novels.

"I have made up my mind to like no Novels really, but Miss Edgeworth's, Yours & my own."
Ms. Austen to her sister