"God! Look at that thing! You'd have gone straight to the bottom!" - Jack, in "Titanic"

I seem to be reading LM Montgomery’s The Blue Castle; I picked it up one afternoon when I needed something to read while sitting on the floor in the bathroom while The Baby had a bath (and sunk the Titanic and poured water on the floor). It’s typical Montgomery, and although I find the plot assumptions (spinster heroine grows a bit of a spine, throws over overbearing family, and finds herself) a little improbable and slightly tired, it’s mostly pretty charming. I didn’t set out to read it, it just happened to be at hand. I could have picked up worse things.

My ILL of The Shadow of the Wind came in yesterday. I was immediately turned off within the first ten pages by the ten-year-old boy conversing at length with his long-dead mother every night. Is it just me, or does this seem unhealthy behavior? I guess I’ll keep going; I was in a mood yesterday so it may not rub me so wrong later today. Or I’ll wait till Katya sends me the extra copy she’s got and I am in the mood to read it. What I want it to be is another Secret of Lost Things, and I don’t suppose that’s likely, hmm?

Speaking of Katya, she loaned me a copy of Octavia Butler’s Kindred. It has worked its way to the top of my TBR pile, but it looks fairly intense. I may shuffle it down a few books yet, Katya, if that’s ok. My brain just isn’t up for intense right now.

The other night I left my copy of Meg Wolitzer’s Surrender, Dorothy on the floor of the baby’s room, where I had been reading while he played with his trucks. He was just starting to calm down and get ready to sleep and I couldn’t go back in to retrieve it (which was honestly fine, as it is a little dated and not nearly as good as The Position which I really liked), so I picked up Daphne Du Maurier’s Jamaica Inn which was sitting on my downstairs bookshelves. (Yeah, I seem to start a lot of books that way. There’s something to be said for having books all over the house.) Jamaica Inn seems to be a strange little almost-Gothic tale, along the lines of Jane Eyre or maybe even Wuthering Heights. So far; it’s fun. Du Maurier writes atmosphere like nobody’s business, and the rain-swept moors are helped along by Pittsburgh’s grey skies and pre-thunderstorm winds today.

The boys and I are off to the main branch of the library, to track down some more Encyclopedia Browns and Asterixs (Asterices?) for Primo, and books about the Titanic for Seg.

I am wearying of reading books about the Titanic; I mean, it’s not as if the events of the night are in any way disputed, and how many different fictionalizations can be generated? (Actually, you might be surprised. Apparently hundreds.) But if it saves me from having to read The Magic Hockey Stick ONE MORE TIME (a charming and very sweet book but one I am heartily sick of), I am all for another unfortunate soul perishing in the watery depths of the North Atlantic. I am debating trying to turn Seg onto the Marie Celeste story, though that might be a bit too creepy for bedtime reading.

I have already terrorized them with The Hobbit - Smaug freaked them right on out, and why does Bilbo have to become a burglar, burglars are BAD; and The Wizard of Oz: it didn’t seem to matter that the Wicked Witch of the West was, well, WICKED – she was still killed by a house falling out of the sky, and it’s not as if Primo needs any more help generating neuroses to obsess over. So, back to the drawing board. Or the library, as the case may be.