Welcome to the new year! Same place, same oddball, different slice of history.
Because I usually have trouble motivating myself to get through the first three-ish months of the calendar year (Pittsburgh is just so dark and gray around this time. It's depressing), I was poking around the lovely world-wide web for something to occupy my time with (aside from school and work and such). I found this little situation on Tumblr that people call "30 Days of Books." (I also found 30 Days of Harry Potter, which I could probably run all the way to Russia with, but I figure that caters to a significantly slimmer audience). :) So for the next thirty days, you'll be getting daily updates from me about bookishness. Because that's the kind of person you're dealing with here. My apologies.
Disclaimer: I feel like you might expect a Fiction Writing Major to have really literary and intelligent interests and things to say about her reading material. And while I've definitely been exposed to some really excellent literary bits this past semester, a lot of my favorites are still along the lines of popular fiction. So. You know. You'll live, I'm sure.
Day 01: Best Book You Read Last Year
Immediately I'm reminded of the fact that I don't read enough, I don't read NEW things enough, and I don't keep a good enough record of what I've read. When I get time to read, I usually turn to Harry. Remind me to expand my horizons this year.
Okay. So I didn't read Freedom by Jonathan Franzen. SORRY.
Actually, just over Winter Break, I read a book called Room by Emma Donoghue that I sort of wish I had written first. It was one of those things that makes me sort of euphoric to be reading such an awesome story, but also pissed because it's just the sort of formula I've been searching for in my own stuff and someone else got it perfectly, absolutely right. (Not to say I could write something at this time in my life that would hit the NYTimes Bestseller List). But it's got the characters - they're flawed, of course, and their situation isn't exactly idyllic, but they're so real I still kind of want to be them. Or at least know them. It's got the emotion - it blurs the lines between happiness and fear, something we almost always see in black-and-white. It's got psychology and politics and family. Oh, and the whole thing is narrated through the eyes of a child (difficult to pull of in and of itself) who is held captive with his mother in an 11x11-foot room.
The woman's got skills.
It's not exactly a straightforward, effortless read. But such is life.
Room - Google Books
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