Garth Nix

rabbit rabbit!

I’m putting the last touches on my 2017 book list– there were too many books for which I jotted down only the titles before they went back to the library. Now I’m adding in dates, noting whatever impressions of them remain in my head, and finding their place in the list. Next year, I mean this year, I’m going to try a spreadsheet so it’s easier to put in order.

The first book I finished reading in 2018 is Mitali Perkins’ You Bring the Distant Near.

The writing is so assured– the characters seem real, like we’re just dipping in as the three generations live their lives. The resolutions do mostly involve romance, in a way that makes me wonder if Perkins is a Jane Austen fan. (Or maybe it’s just that Sanguinity and I watched the 1995 Sense and Sensibility last night while we waited for the new year.)

It’s been a peaceful holiday season. Christmas was with Sanguinity’s parents, which feels traditional now– eating cookies and reading Yuletide fic on the sofa-bed upstairs while televised football filters up from below. My favorite kidlit-fic this Yuletide is “Completion”, by oxfordRoulette (2106 words). It’s about Lirael from Garth Nix’s Old Kingdom series; it has domesticity and refuge, two of my favorite themes. It’s post-canon, so I did miss the Dog.

It’s been a season of good food, too– I made fudge, and Sang gave me a tofu cookbook and made ma po tofu for us. The sun has been shining. I think I’m ready for 2018. Best hopes and wishes for us all!

Kate, Emily, and Sabriel

I made Jean Little’s Kate my bedside book recently, then of course followed it up with Look Through My Window. They’re comfort books that I’ve read over and over. But this time I felt more on the outside of Kate than any other time I’d read it. The first note of the book, Kate finding herself enchanted with an eight-year-old soulmate when she herself is nearly in high school? It’s not a wrong note, but it’s not usual. It just is, without explanation even when we learn more about Susannah later.

The Kate+Emily friendship is the best, the best. I still love it so much, but I guess I don’t project myself into it quite as much as I used to. But I definitely still firmly believe that they will be friends when they are old, old ladies. (I was so happy and grateful that Jacqueline Woodson let us know at the end of Brown Girl Dreaming that she and Maria are still close friends!)

Look Through My Window has some very episodic chapters that, again, are just there without apology, like the one about Ann’s accident with the car. And Chapter 18 jumps into Kate’s point of view after 17 chapters of Emily. These things, they work, and it makes me want to keep that freedom and not have to press everything into a seamless narrative. But in previous readings I just went with it all. This time I noticed, and then went with it.

Now I’m reading Sabriel for the first time. It reminds me of reading The Dark Is Rising at twelve, a new world laid out for me and knowing there’s several books to be lived in it.

I made pumpkin muffins with chocolate chips. They are delicious.