I love her so much that I knew if this book even made me think about her, I’d be a fan, but it did way more than that. I felt like I love Jenny Slate.
I love her so much that I knew if this book even made me think about her, I’d be a fan, but it did way more than that. I felt like I was in what appears to be the single most magical non-fictional place in all the world: inside Jenny Slate’s brain.
If you have so much as watched an interview of hers, it’s immediately clear that she sees the world in a way that is totally unique to her. It is such a gift to be able to see that perspective for 304 pages.
She uses language differently. Words are lovely and flowerlike and carefully selected. Images are clear and breathtaking. This is an extraordinary thing.
Now, for a small request.
I would like every book I read to be written by Jenny Slate, thanks very much.
Okay, fine, compromise. I at least would like her to write 100 more books.
I got one dose of the beautiful starlike lens through which she perceives everything and just one look through her perception is not going to cover it please and thank you.
This was so gorgeous that when I finished it I immediately wanted to restart.
Also now I want to again.
Bottom line: This is a perfect little book.
---------------- project 5 star
welcome back to PROJECT 5 STAR, an event in which i revisit books i used to love and see if i still do out of masochism or completionism or...something.
i feel (gag) hopeful about this one.
update: not to worry. STILL FIVE
---------------- pre-review
while i was reading this, i had to stop for a moment, close it, put it down, take a breath, and whisper to myself: oh, my gosh. i love this so much.
review to come / 5 stars
---------------- currently-reading updates
i am 11 pages into this book and i already know i've never read anything like it in all my life.
---------------- tbr review
i love jenny slate and i can't wait to have this book in my brain....more
It is taking...everything I have not to stop writing this review and pick up this book instead.
I could justify it so easiHAPPY FALL!!!
----------------
It is taking...everything I have not to stop writing this review and pick up this book instead.
I could justify it so easily. “Just refreshing the ol’ memory,” I could say. “It’ll take less than an hour. And think of the review! Masterful, probably.”
Wow, I am really convincing myself. THIS IS DIFFICULT.
This was exactly what I wanted it to be. I wanted to read this book desperately that on release day, I dragged myself to Target (by which I mean journeyed out to Target with great delight because that place is the best), and when Target didn’t have it, I did the unthinkable.
I went to the dreaded Books-A-Million in the mall, which I hate because a) it’s small, b) it’s weirdly dark, c) the employees are overbearing in a way that borders on unsettling, like YOU’RE BOOK PEOPLE TOO YOU SHOULD KNOW I DON’T WANT THIS, and d) the books are so expensive that it seems like they’re adding on to list price.
And they didn’t even have it either.
Anyway, eventually (after an excruciating wait), I got this book, and oh boy was it worth it.
What I wanted: - autumn-ness - trademark Rainbow Rowell Banter & Chemistry - friendship - delicious treats - pretty art - cuteness
I got all that in HEAPS.
This is probably the most charming book I’ve ever read? It’s so funny and cute, and the characters are so lovely, and the little world of the pumpkin patch is a goddamn delight.
The first time, I read this fast because it’s addictive, and the second time, I read it slow because it’s filled with lovely little Easter eggs and funny things and turns of expression on the characters’ faces and wowow.
It’s just perfection.
Bottom line: As a reward for writing this review, I’m going to reread the book now.
--------------- reread 4
i have been in one of the reading slumps of my life, but then my guardian angel (presumably) gave me an idea...
IT'S BASICALLY FALL IN MY HEAD AND THAT MEANS IT'S TIME FOR THIS SLUMP-KILLER.
update: it worked? maybe? at least it was fun and delicious.
--------------- reread 3
phew. i almost let fall pass without rereading this book
--------------- reread 2
i read this book, and then i took a day, and then i read it again.
do i want to read it again already? naturally.
--------------- reread 1
i'm reading it again.
yes, it's been 2 days.
--------------- pre-review
I LOVE THIS BOOK AND I WANT TO LIVE INSIDE IT.
but i will settle for rereading it immediately.
--------------- tbr review I AM READY FOR FALL AND I AM READY FOR THIS BOOK...more
Logically, it seems that maybe shorter books would be harder to love. You spend less time with the characters, the narrative complexity must be limited, you live in the world for a minimal amount of time.
But for the past few years, I’ve found that I’m more likely to adore short books. Maybe it has something to do with the incomprehensible length of so many young adult fantasy books I’ve read, which have no need or right to stretch so far past the four hundred page mark.
Or maybe I’m endlessly impressed by the power of some authors to touch me with the strength of their voices, their prose, their characters, their stories, in less than three hundred pages.
I had fallen in love with this book, for example, within a few dozen pages.
Salinger’s writing is glorious, Franny and Zooey and the Glass family leap off the page, I could spend unlimited volumes sprawled in the overcrowded living room of their glamorous unusual apartment. The ending hits like a physical strike. I was reading of both feelings I’d always had and never put into words and emotions I had never imagined.
I need a modern day Frankenstein - someone to wake Salinger up and tell him I need enough of the Glass family’s words to spend the rest of my life with.
I don’t care about the ethics.
Bottom line: Literally no one needs me to tell them this book is amazing, but it is and I’m saying it anyway.
---------- reread updates
welcome back to another installment of PROJECT 5 STAR, an excuse for me to revisit all my favorite books and feel joy again.
for once.
update: it worked!!!
---------- pre-review
this book feels like it was made for me in a lab.
review to come / 5 stars
---------- currently-reading updates
30 pages in and i am already absolutely in love with franny...more
It’s reached a concerning point -- seemingly 1 in 3 or 4 books I read is actually a reread. Previously I was wI have a debilitating rereading problem.
It’s reached a concerning point -- seemingly 1 in 3 or 4 books I read is actually a reread. Previously I was way too picky about adding books to my to-read list to suffer a massive TBR issue, but now that I’m barely reading new books, the pile (which is a physical one in the corner of my room, stacked by color because a) rainbow shelves forever and b) I am out of shelf space) is looming. Concerningly.
If I die mysteriously, I was probably crushed by the blue stack. (I also seem to have a problem with buying blue books, specifically.)
Anyway. My sole limit has always been that I must wait at least one year after my initial read before reading it again. This is my last shred of rereading-related logic and sanity.
This book smashed that sh*t to pieces. Less than five months after I read it for the first time, I was rereading.
I could make excuses. “My flight was delayed and I only brought one book, ” I could say, and it would be true (and a fatal mistake and a shame upon my bookworm title). “I happened to have this one because the person I lent it to gave it back.” But it was a nighttime flight, and I finished my first book on board, and I had to go out of my way to turn on that reading light that is really more of a goddamn chandelier considering how well it illuminates everything in an eight-foot radius. (Sorry, everyone around me.)
Also, it was a short flight and I only got 50 or so pages into it. I easily could have put it down.
This is where it’s the book’s fault.
This story is not action-packed, nor particularly suspenseful. Neither is it jam full of what you’d call Exciting Events or even a traditional love story that gets you rooting for your couple in any familiar way.
In spite of all that, it is absolutely unputdownable.
Conversations with Friends, if you are one of the few who somehow haven’t read it yet, is about Frances and, less so, her best friend and ex-girlfriend Bobbi. Frances is thoughtful and cool (in the less-used definition of the word, according to my lexicon), Bobbi is effervescent and charming. They encounter a married couple, Melissa and Nick, and much of the novel is devoted to the changing ways in which the four interact with each other.
The writing is beautiful. Sally Rooney’s style is clean and sharp and true. Each word is thoughtfully chosen. Each image feels real and complex. Her New Yorker profile (which I read in a fit of desperately needing to get my hands on everything Rooney has written, in the wake of my first encounter with this book) highlights a description of a party at Melissa’s home as “full of music and people wearing long necklaces.” Conversations is teeming with terse, evocative descriptions like that, and if you’re anything like me once you start reading writing like that you’ll never want to stop.
Being forced to stop by the dearth of Sally Rooney material has been very difficult for me.
Like the writing, the characterization is somehow spare and complete at once. Frances and Bobbi, Melissa and Nick, even the background actors and extras of their lives are stunningly real. I think about Frances and Nick especially all the time. I can identify statements in life as “very Bobbi” or “exactly Melissa” or “totally something Frances would say.”
Above all, this book crawled inside my head and stayed there. It ever-so-slightly changed the way my brain works, but mostly it made me feel noticed and heard. It seems a way of looking at the world I hadn’t realized I ascribed to is captured in these pages. It’s surprising and kind of spooky and I’m truly grateful I encountered this book at all.
Lastly, it wouldn’t be a review of mine if I didn’t confidently write about something I’m likely not qualified to. And I want to say f*ck everybody who acts like Sally Rooney is some kind of lesser writer because she’s young and a woman. There’s a difference between saying “this writer is not for me” and “I didn’t like this book, and therefore everyone who calls her brilliant or talented is actually wrong.”
You don’t spew that sh*t about the bajillion dead white male writers. Your internalized misogyny and ageism is showing.
Bottom line: Sally Rooney is brilliant and talented. The end. ❤️
----------- reread 9 updates
starting the year as i mean to go on: reading this book for the 9th time and buddy reading with elle
----------- reread 8 updates
my 8th time reading this book begins...now.
this time i'm doing it for a book club - follow along / join the fun on instagram or discord!!!
----------- reread 7 updates
it's been almost a year since i last read this, which is unthinkable. time to fix that
have been truly dealt a series of death blows this week from the heartless chaos of the universe, so i will once again be rereading the book that simultaneously makes me feel better and so, so much worse
----------- reread 5 updates
when you see me and lily rereading this every month in 2021, mind your business
----------- reread 4 updates
reread this in its entirety on a plane to be on my main character sh*t
----------- reread 3 updates
what has to be wrong with a person for Conversations with Friends to be a comfort reread for them? asking for myself
----------- reread 2 updates
just as just as just as good
----------- reread 1 updates
there's never a wrong time to read sally rooney.
even if that means a reread less than 5 months after the first time you read it.
----------- pre-review
upping this to 5 stars because i can't stop thinking about it, and also in all that thinking i can't remember a single flaw
----------- currently-reading updates
i bought this book 2 days ago and have not really put it down since...more
I know a lot of people are still waiting for their Hogwarts letter, and that’s fine and all, but I’m still over here waiting for my formal invitation I know a lot of people are still waiting for their Hogwarts letter, and that’s fine and all, but I’m still over here waiting for my formal invitation to attend college with Anne and Gilbert and Philippa and the gang.
I’m sure it just got lost in the mail.
I adored Anne of Green Gables (in spite of the fact that I read it for the first time at 21 years old, on a whim, having no intention of reading it beforehand and, in fact, only having a copy at all because it was very pretty and I’m very book-shallow). Against all odds, I loved Anne of Avonlea just as much.
And even more unlikely-ly, I loved Anne of the Island most of all. (So far.)
The writing is beautiful. The settings are immersive. The storyline(s) are charming. And somehow all the characters are lovely, regardless of whether they’ve been there since the beginning or were just introduced two pages ago. I love all of them.
So you understand my confusion at the fact that I have not yet been invited to Prince Edward Island, let alone accepted to Redmond College, LET ALONE inducted into Anne’s friend group.
But like I said, I’m sure it’s just a matter of time.
(I love this series way too much to consider the alternative.)
Bottom line: GIVE ME THE NEXT ANNE BOOK!!! Please.
-------
i was late for work because i physically could not put this book down.
review to come / 5 stars
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hello i would like to live inside these books and be best friends with anne and also be of the island thank you that is all...more
I picked up a book I had no intention of reading on a whim and discovered one of my new favorite series.
This must be positive karma for an immensely lI picked up a book I had no intention of reading on a whim and discovered one of my new favorite series.
This must be positive karma for an immensely lovely deed I did in a past life. (It couldn’t have been this life, because I spend most of my time reading and eating cookies, and while I’d count both of those as immensely lovely activities I don’t know if I can unbiasedly say they’re really contributing to the greater good.)
I did not own this book when I finished the first one, an evil I had to counteract by purchasing this the next day. And then reading it immediately. And, once again, enjoying every second of it.
I do not know where all this good karma came from but I DO NOT want it to stop.
These books are just so lovely. I don’t even want to pick up the next one (which would be book #4) because then I’m one book closer to finishing the series, and I absolutely can’t have that because I want to live in this series forever.
I don’t know if I’ll ever really be able to write a true review of an Anne book. I definitely couldn’t with Anne of Green Gables. I think the best I’ll ever be able to do is write at length about how desperately I wish Anne and her kindred spirits were real, and I could live in Avonlea with them and visit Green Gables and all their beautifully named haunts. I’d go to school in the early twentieth century (previously a nightmare scenario for me) in a heartbeat if Anne Shirley would be there.
I just love these books so much.
Bottom line: It’s a very rare thing to find a story you love so desperately that you feel lucky to have discovered it. That’s how I feel about Anne.
My original review of this wasn't much of anything, because I believed (and still kind of do) that everything worth saying about this book has been saMy original review of this wasn't much of anything, because I believed (and still kind of do) that everything worth saying about this book has been said.
However, there are things that I believe no one should say emerging in real time, and so contributing my likely already-expressed thoughts might counterbalance them, to some degree.
In my first foray at writing about this (which you can still see below), I focused on the immersion of it. I said I "loved" its characters, though of course I meant more that I loved them as figures, considering they are unlikable murderers. I wrote about it vaguely and glowingly, thinking everyone had sort of...gotten the point of the book, already.
But then I read this review in Gawker, so I'm coming back.
The Secret History follows mainly our narrator, Richard, as he looks back on his time in the classics program of a liberal arts college. Richard is unhappy, impressionable, desperate. His values are more ideas than ideals - vague and dim reflections of what love, and beauty, and wisdom, concepts he's never known, might feel or look like, rather than what they are.
He arrives at his preppy and prestigious(ish) New England college to slowly become obsessed and then part of the mysterious and selective classics program, a cultlike group of trust fund babies led by an often-overstepping and charismatic professor.
Coming from a poor and abusive background, where beauty is nowhere to be found, Richard wants nothing more than to immerse and lose himself in this group of wealthy and charming students. He wants to befriend them, to sleep with them, to live with them, to do everything he can to become them.
Including, as they indulge in ever-spiraling hedonism, murder.
And it never works.
When our story ends, our group is decimated, some members dead, some irrevocably changed, all unwilling to return to the story of that fateful year - all except Richard, who is unable to leave it behind.
When I hear this, I don't believe that the point of the story, or what Tartt is trying to tell us, is that a love of beauty is equivalent to an amoral life. I don't think she condemns an appreciation for the aesthetic, or even a classical scholarship.
I don't think you're supposed to like these characters, or even think they're very realistic - they are, after all, portraits in hindsight written by someone in the throes of unrequited obsession.
I don't think you're supposed to relate to them, or to see their story as something that might happen to you if you read too much Greek myth or like pretty things too much.
To quote the article that inspired the fit of rage that has me typing away, I don't think this is "about all the things [its writer] loved," while "miss[ing] the point of them entirely." At the age of seventeen, they continue, they "wanted (I thought) exactly what its youthful characters wanted: a poetic life, a mythic life, a life shot through with meaning. I loved (I thought) exactly what its characters loved: nostalgic emblems of an era imagined as significant."
To that I say: huh?
As I grow older, I care less for lovely or perfect or nice or even good (in the moral definition of the word) characters, and find myself only wanting to read about the unlikable, the complex, the ones who have something to say on what I shouldn't do, rather than teach me about what I should.
It was clear to me that The Secret History is not the latter example, but the former.
Our merry band of classics fetishists may think they are living a life of poetry and meaning, but we, the readers, know they aren't. We know that life's beauty lies not in pleasure without regard for others, in the fulfillment of selfish desires, but in case we get confused, Donna Tartt shows us that a life lived by those guidelines leads to irrevocably damaged relationships, unfading pain, and death.
The Secret History is not a nihilistic book because its characters' behaviors result in no meaning. Quite the opposite - it is a book about what makes life meaningful by showing us what meaning is not.
The Gawker piece quotes a Tartt essay in which she writes, “'Something in the spirit longs for meaning — longs to believe in a world order where nothing is purposeless, where character is more than chemistry, and people are something more than a random chaos of molecules,'” and in this vein concludes, "To take Tartt the essayist seriously is to wager on that meaning. Even if that means leaving Hampden behind."
And I would agree. To find meaning, one must leave Hampden behind - for it was never intended that what happened there should be lived by as example.
(I also think there's something very interesting in the class dynamics here. But I'll save that for the next time I get mad enough to write almost 1,000 words.)
Bottom line: Book so nice I reviewed it twice.
------------ book club update
this is the july pick for the beautiful world book club!! elle and i will be vibing amidst the dark academia and the gluttony and the classics. please join us!!
------------ original review
Here is the problem with reviewing every book I read: Sometimes I throw around terms before I really need them, and then once I read THE book, The Story that requires and deserves that descriptor, I have nothing to give it.
Right now I have this problem. Because I have used the word “immersive” before, and immediately upon my completion of this book it became clear that I should have saved it for right now.
I felt like I lived inside these pages. I felt like I began to think in the beautiful and sharp prose that fills them. I felt like I knew the characters, ate decadent lunches and walked the snowy campus and whispered with them. I felt an aching emptiness, a genuine longing, when I read the final words.
I miss living here.
This was very, very slow - to the point that about halfway through I said (inexplicably, aloud), “I don’t know what they’ll even do for the rest of the book” - and yet I was gripped by it.
It’s genuinely masterful.
I love Richard and I LOVE Camilla and I love Francis and I, fine, okay, at least like Charles and Henry and even Bunny and Julian.
And I miss them all.
This is an incredible work, but maybe the most incredible thing is how the reader is Richard. I, too, miss my bygone days at my prestigious New England college with my whip-smart group of eccentric friends, and, like him, I am too quickly forced to realize the fallacy of such a feeling.
After all, it was all a fiction.
Bottom line: I’m raising this to a five star rating.
------------ pre-review
you'll have to excuse me, i'd love to actually write something here but my brain is broken and i am incapable of thought.
also seems absurd to try to use words when donna tartt took all the good ones.
Someone PLEASE procure me a striking, modern, big-city apartment with lots of windows, where I can hold a glass of expensive wine and gaze unseeing ovSomeone PLEASE procure me a striking, modern, big-city apartment with lots of windows, where I can hold a glass of expensive wine and gaze unseeing over the skyline at night, because apparently I’m going to feel melancholy for the rest of my life over never again being able to read this for the first time and if I’m going to do so I at least want to be glamorous about it.
Or, at the very least, I need to locate the sort of old-fashioned library described in 1920s mystery novels with a bar cart stocked with aged scotch and shelves filled with leather-bound tomes, except their antique spines will be a façade for the kinds of things I actually enjoy reading, rather than being 800 different copies of the Bible or whatever, and I will never drink the scotch because everything about the process of drinking scotch is like the scotch is asking you not to drink it. (Scotch is the poison-dart frog of beverages.)
Basically what I’m saying here is - Ever since I read the last page of this book three months ago, I have felt a small, unrelenting sadness, which I believe will only be solved by one of the following methods: a) I dedicate my life to tracking down a door to the Starless Sea, and either I find one or it turns out the real reward was the friends I made along the way; b) I experience repeated memory loss, allowing myself to read this book over and over again for the first time, re-beginning every time I finish it; or c) I live the rest of my days in homage to this story.
All options will require funds that I will never have (I’m an English major, after all), so please kindly Venmo me at your convenience. Thanks.
This is the most gorgeous ode to stories and literature. It’s a thank-you gift to anyone who has ever been a Reader, with a capital R - not just someone who reads but someone WHO READS, as an identity, as a life-force, as a passion, as the meaning of life.
I dare any true bookworm to read this book with an open heart and a ready mind and not feel grateful that their life overlapped with its publication date.
Erin Morgenstern’s ability to create divine settings you can see and smell and lust after and yearn to experience is unparalleled.
My favorite book ever is, as anyone who has so much as made the online equivalent of eye contact me knows, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. I love it with enough passion that everything about it is my favorite of that thing: my favorite characters, my favorite prose, and, naturally, my favorite setting.
Before I read this book, my unrivaled first runner-up was the setting of the Night Circus.
Now, I think both Wonderland and the circus may have been bumped down a slot. Never has a setting known me, seen my soul, like that of the magical underground great world of stories in these pages.
Plus, I didn’t have to slog through a Night Circus-level instalove romance to get there.
This was a perfect book. Mysterious, confusing, strange, magical. Beautifully written and populated with characters you love hard and immediately. I read this so slowly because I SAVORED it. I, a compulsive speed-reader whose simultaneous highest compliment and M.O. is reading a book in a day or so, knew that my finishing this book would be a small heartbreak, and so I tried to postpone it as long as I could.
So instead, I’ll pay the highest compliment to this that any reader can pay to any story -
Bottom line: It was hard to pick up another book after reading this one.
------------- rereading updates
THIS IS THE BEST DAY OF MY LIFE!!!
all month long, i'll be rereading this fav as part of my book club with my lovely elle! follow on instagram here or join the discussion here.
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Yes, I teared up upon finishing my reread of this book like a starlet in an old movie. No, I don't want to talk about it. I JUST WANT THIS TO NEVER END.
This reality is fine and all, but if given the option (and I am choosing to give myself the option), I would much rather live in an island world of beautiful ocean landscapes and lovely giant birds and wonderful little inns and divine magical justice, thanks.
If this is not possible, I would be happy with any Katrina Leno world.
Because she is just fantastic.
I love these gorgeous flawed characters. I love the inn and I love the island. I love the way this FEELS - so, so real, which is my favorite way for magical realism to feel. On reread, some of the magic had been rubbed away, and I felt a little less in love, but no less enjoyment.
This is so atmospheric and beautifully written and sometimes funny.
I just wish the world we lived in was this world.
Bottom line: This slim little book is so powerful.
------------------ pre-review
it's another installment of PROJECT 5 STAR, a devious plan in which i ask for trouble by rereading books i've previously rated five stars.
let's see what happens.
(updated review to come / lowered slightly to 4.5)
------------------ tbr review
so the cover of this is cute + magical...and the first 50 pages are cute + magical...coincidence? i think not....more
introducing: the runaway winner of the Most Personal Thing I Have Ever Put On The Internet contest!!! find this full review here if you dare: https://introducing: the runaway winner of the Most Personal Thing I Have Ever Put On The Internet contest!!! find this full review here if you dare: https://emmareadstoomuch.wordpress.co...
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At the end of 2014, I was in my junior year of high school, and I was in the deepest depression of my life. Before then and since, I’ve had bad days and dark spells, but none of it has ever been as bad as it was then.
In the winter going into 2015, I watched nine and a half seasons of the TV show Friends. I do not remember a single second of it. I would just go to school, get home, put Friends on, dissociate, go to sleep, repeat.
It was very bad. (The show, not the depression. I mean that was definitely not good, don’t get me wrong, but wow Friends is a very bad show.)
Even when I wasn’t watching possibly the least funny show that manages to call itself a comedy ever in the history of time, I was still on the internet. I don’t really know what I did - I don’t have many memories of that time of my life.
I know at some point during that time, I started listening to Serial. And something about the podcast format really clicked with me - maybe that I needed to do something else while I did it to stay focused. I don’t know. But it felt better than just putting garbage (and I do mean garbage) television on and staring at the wall.
Soon I started googling tons of podcast recommendation lists, which were really in a renaissance then. Honestly I think entertainment sites profited off of articles about podcasts more than podcasts profited off of podcasts. But anyway.
I saw one Vulture listicle on the best episodes of any podcast ever (isn’t it crazy that once upon a time there were few enough podcasts that that seemed possible? How times have changed), and it mentioned an episode of a show called Comedy Bang! Bang! that included a name I recognized: Bobby Moynihan, from SNL.
I listened to it. And I loved it so much. It made me actually smile, actually laugh, when that seemed kind of impossible.
I looked up more best episodes, and one name kept coming up: Harris Wittels.
I listened to every episode of CBB with him on it. I read his Twitter feed. I looked up his standup. He quickly became one of my favorite comedians, at a time when my favorite comedians were, like, SNL cast members.
I listened to an episode of Pete Holmes’ podcast where he was the guest, and he talked for hours about his addiction to heroin.
Then, in February 2015, after just a month or two of him being an unexpected beacon of joy and laughter in what felt like my impossible-to-live life, he died.
I don’t know Harris. I wasn’t his biggest fan or his most ardent follower. But he meant a lot to me, and his death hit me hard.
I’ve listened to and relistened to his podcast appearances, watched his Vine compilations repeatedly, trawled his Twitter feed. I’ve seen Parks & Rec (which he wrote for and guested on) over and over, have fawned over the brilliance of Master of None (in which his role would have been immense, just weeks after his death).
I’ve consumed a lot more comedy since I was 17, and become a lot happier, but Harris has never stopped meaning a lot to me.
I’ve known this book was coming out since Stephanie Wittels Wachs promoted it on Comedy Bang! Bang!, and I’ve had it on my to-read list ever since, but I’ve never felt ready to read it.
I knew it was going to make me very, very sad. Cry-level sad, which is ordinarily an impossibly high level of sadness for me to reach.
But reach it I did.
This is the single most heart-wrenching book I have ever read. Never has a page carried emotion like these ones did. It is real and raw and breathtakingly sad and somehow, still, funny.
I read it, for the most part, in a day, swaths of it in public (yes, weepily). I stayed up till 2 a.m. to finish it. This is the first book to make me feel like I had to do that in a very long time. It was that level of unputdownable.
My heart hurt the whole time. Stephanie Wittels Wachs is a brilliant writer. I felt this so hard (and I’m not a reader who feels hard constantly or easily).
Like Harris, it’s a f*cking amazing, once-in-a-lifetime thing.
I feel so lucky to have picked it up. And so glad I finally did.
Even though doing so the day before my birthday made me spend it in a serious state of melancholy.
Bottom line: Do not miss out on Harris Wittels, and do not miss out on this book.
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this was everything i hoped it would be and more.
review to come / 5 stars
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reading this book (which i absolutely know beyond a shadow of a doubt will make me cry) in public is my version of living on the edge.
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rip harris wittels, who died way too young three years ago today.
Well, the answer for me is yes. I can’t comment on your answer. But like, if your answer is no...what is wrong with you? Read a damn Neil Gaiman book, you cretin. Allow yourself that happiness.
Anyway.
The fact that this is Neil Gaiman’s first novel makes me want to throw up and die. How do you write a first novel like this? It is beautiful, it is creative, it is magical, it has lovely prose. The world is clear and well-constructed. It is action-packed and well-characterized (seriously, all the characters are so lovable). Also, IT PULLED ME OUT OF A READING SLUMP. A READING SLUMP, I SAID.
It is, in short, an on-paper perfect book. (Paper pun intended.) (Directly stealing my own description of another Neil Gaiman book - Coraline - only semi-intended.) (But if Neil Gaiman would stop writing perfect books it’d be avoidable, so.)
That’s really all there is to say. This book is perfect and it’s a debut and there is absolutely no justice or sense in this world.
But fingers crossed there’s a little bit of Neil Gaiman-style magic in it.
Bottom line: Is Neil Gaiman well on his way to being on my favorite authors list?? Stay tuned!! (But yes. He is.)
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i goddamn love neil gaiman.
review to come
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no, i'm not just picking up an increasing number of books and marking them as currently reading in order to distract myself from the fact that i haven't finished a book in forever and i'm definitely in a reading slump. why do you ask?...more
Do you ever love a book so much that it doesn’t feel like a book? You’re so immersed and reading is so effortless that you don’t feel like you’re reading at all? The characters are real enough to be people, and their problems and happinesses feel like they’re happening to you?
That was me with this book.
Which is all well and good until it comes down to reviewing it.
Basically what I’m saying is I’m at a loss for words. I’m saying I have nothing TO say. This is just too damn good.
I didn’t read this as a kid, or for many years after. I didn’t think I’d be interested. I had a copy for years with no intention of picking it up, because I am shallow as hell and only bought a copy in the first place because it’s pretty. (In my defense: look HOW pretty.) Honestly, I can’t remember why I decided to read it in the first place.
But I am very, very, VERY glad I did.
I love Anne so much. I love Green Gables. I love Diana, I love Matthew and Marilla, later on I love Gilbert (although I don’t really understand how people love him from this book alone. Not much to see).
After reading this, I was obligated to chase the high of the reading experience by picking up the next two installments as quickly as possible, and they were just as good. Mostly. But still an unparalleled level of good.
I guess what I’m trying to carry across here is that somehow this hundred year old children’s classic about an orphan girl moving to a rural island in Canada was one of the most unputdownable books I’ve ever read.
And also the writing is as pretty as the cover.
Bottom line: I want to live in this book, please and thank you.
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fun fact: joy exists as a concrete object, and it's called Anne of Green Gables.
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