Well, hmph. Well, not really hmph. I sort of take back my hmph. It’s that expectations/reality gap again – I should just stop reading positive reviews of books. If only there were some way of deciding what books to read without forming any expectations at all. Wouldn’t that be nice? But there are just some things that cause my expectations to become high, such as – let me think – okay, such as stories about children who go away to live with relatives/at a boarding school/with a bunch of strangers, and they have adventures. Or stories with Catholic orphans. Or…
5 CommentsAuthor: Jenny Hamilton
Update: Okay! I am sending books to mindy, Colleen, Kate, Darby, Anastasia, and Stacie. I’ve emailed y’all, but leave another comment if you didn’t get my email. I’ve heard some good things about John Bellairs, but when I tried one of his books once, I didn’t finish it because I wasn’t hugely in love with it. A little while ago, I found several of his books at the library sale for ten cents. So I got them. Why not? If it turns out I hate them, I thought, they were only ten cents. No big loss. Since then I have…
11 CommentsBlech. Everyone’s been reading Susan Hill lately, and her books all sounded so creepy and cool, but I couldn’t finish this. I stayed up late last night reading it, because I kept thinking I would read it until it got interesting and then I would go to sleep and have something to look forward to in the morning. What a stupid idea. I mean, that was always going to be a stupid idea, but it was particularly stupid in this case because the book never got interesting at all. Two-thirds of the way through, I figured out that I was…
1 CommentI’ve been meaning to read this book for ten thousand years. I saw it at Bongs & Noodles once, when I had a bunch of B&N gift card credit, and thought seriously about getting it, before ultimately deciding on something totally different. And then I got it out of the library before Christmas last year. I love the library. I don’t know how anyone functions without the lovely library. This book is just what you might imagine, a history of virginity, or really, cultural attitudes towards virginity. It is completely fascinating. Really. I’ve been staying up late the past two…
3 CommentsSo last night I dreamed that I was reading this book of Neil Gaiman’s I’d never heard of before. It wasn’t out yet, so the pages were black with white print, instead of white with black print. After a while I realized that I had a large stack of these books with black pages, and they were all by Neil Gaiman. IT WAS AMAZING. And I’m reading a book of C.S. Lewis’s essays, and he said this: [A reader] does not despise real woods because he has read of enchanted woods: the reading makes all real woods a little enchanted.…
3 Comments