Well, shelf browsers, I have taken an enormous step out of my comfort zone and moved to Florida! I departed Boston on November 4th and have been enjoying my first two days in beautiful Bradenton, Florida more than I ever imagined I would.I was actually forced rather rapidly into this relocation by a breakup of my six year relationship with my boyfriend. We had been living together the past two years in Revere and it just morphed into such a toxic situation for us both. Initially there was anger but we made peace before my departure and promised to each do our best to put our pieces back together so that we can maybe have a chance at giving things another shot as two whole, healthy humans in the future. There’s also a chance it won’t happen that way and that is okay, too…I have been working on accepting that I can only control and heal myself.So now for a yet-to-be-determined period this blog will consist mostly of my exploits in transferring my life from being a Bostonian to a Floridian, including my emotional recovery and exploration of places, foods and things I’ve never experienced before.Since it’s only been two days I haven’t done much yet. However I did go on my first real outing today, which I’m surprised I even wanted to as I had initially anticipated days of crippling depression upon transition. My dad and I went to the Post Office for my change of address form (first and simplest of the things on my to-do list) and he treated me to a pile of books at the Goodwill Bookstore, pictured below for my fellow book nerds who care to see.
I’m doing a few things here: trying out some new authors I haven’t read before (top), expanding my collection of books by authors I’ve explored already (middle) and tossing in a standalone I’ve wanted to read for a while (bottom.) A little heavy on the thrillers and mysteries but not a bad little haul. :-)Stay tuned for Episode 2 of the Florida move! I don’t know what it will be yet because it can be whatever I want!
Jill opened her eyes and looked at the clock to her left.
10:05 am.
Testing each of her limbs and finding that they were still bonded to the table, she relaxed her body and laid still, smiling.
She’d slept so long because he’d drugged her again. She wished he wouldn’t do that; why couldn’t he understand that there was no need? She was enjoying this. Her dream she’d been fostering since she was a preteen of being forcefully stolen away from her miserable life was unfolding gloriously before her and she wanted to soak in every moment.
She wanted every moment of the pain she deserved.
Every moment of torture and agony.
Every cruel word he whispered in her ear or screamed at her in fits of rage. It made him angrier that she liked it. But she liked his anger. The cycle was in her favor rather than his, and he clearly wasn’t used to that.
He wanted her to beg for her release. He wanted her to want mercy, to tell him about her family and try to appeal to his softer side by talking about her life, her friends, her dog. That was how she knew hed taken her on impulse, like window shopping and deciding suddenly that you must have what is in the window at all costs. Her abduction itself had been risky and if he’d at least stalked her a little before taking her he perhaps would have known she’d stopped caring about anything a normal person should care about a long time ago.
She was twenty-five now and couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt a real feeling, one not manufactured to appear normal to others. She figured it must have been somewhere between 13 when the three freshmen basketball players took her in the basement hallway as she left her after school tutoring session, and 20 when the two drunk sweaty galoots were millimeters away from double penetrating her in an alley behind a rave club but a bouncer came out just in the nick of time…and chased them off so he could rape her instead.
She looked at the clock again;
10:50 am.
He would be out again now, prowling for a new girl.
She remembered what he’d said the day before and wondered how he would take the next one. He’d told her he’s never needed two girls at once before, but since she his current charge didn’t seem to care about anything no matter how much damage he inflicted on her, he was left with no choice. His habits were fed by the excitement of the subjects’ suffering, and frankly he was finding her to be very boring.
“You may not care about yourself, whore,” he’d snarled, “but what about the next girl? If I bring in a woman with some class, some self respect and you see her perfect, milky white skin being poked and prodded, burned and peeled away from the bone, then what?”
She’d simply stared at him in silence, as she always did. She liked the way it made him squirm.
“You smile now,” he’d said with a chuckle as he headed for the door, “but we’ll see what happens when it’s someone else being destroyed, and you get to see every second of it, hear every shriek and scream Then we’ll see.”
Without another word he’d turned and left, pulling the heavy door shut behind him. As Jill listened to the now- familiar jingle and bang of half a dozen locks being secured on the other side, she put her mind to work imagining what it would be like to watch this next bitch be slowly butchered. As she glanced down at her own series of wounds, all at various stages of healing, she noticed a creeping sort of tickle between her legs. She recognized it as a sensation that she hadn’t felt since her first boyfriend at 16…and the only truly pleasurable sexual experience she’d ever had.
She’d never deserved that feeling, she knew. Nor did she deserve it now, and she suddenly wished her captor were there to slam her head against the table or drive his ice pick through another part of her body. After a lifetime of people telling her she deserved better, that she was worthy, she’d finally found in her captor a person who truly understood her–someone who knew without question that she deserved nothing.
She glanced at the clock. 11:05 am.
11:10 am.
Sometime around noon he’d take a break for lunch. He’d come back down here and force her to eat; slap her repeatedly when she refused, which she always did even if she was hungry. After that, who knew what today held?
She just hoped he found the new girl soon. What he had yet to figure out was that as little as Jill cared about herself, she cared far less about some bitch she’d never met. The fun times had only just begun, and in the end sweet, merciful death would follow.
Laying back against the damp wood, which as the days passed had begun to feel soft against her numb body, she relaxed completely. Knowing he would be back soon to stem her loneliness she let herself drift into peaceful meditation, the only sounds the ticking of the old clock inside, and the distant whirring of cars as they drove by outside.
And the rest of the world carried on.
Have you ever started out absolutely hating a book’s main protagonist, finding it almost impossible to have any sympathy for them and their utter lack of likability?
Chances are you have. But have you ever been inescapably drawn into the book anyway and then completely changed your mind about them as you went along? That’s not nearly as common, and that’s what happened to me with this book–and the beauty? The author most definitely did it on purpose.
I guess I shouldn’t call Jay the main protagonist; he’s one in a series of four. But the book begins and ends with his storyline, and he stands out the most to me as the center of it all, sort of like the way Jerry is the center of the Seinfeld four. (Anyone who knows me at all knows of my Seinfeld obsession but that’s a topic for another day- let’s just say I’m always more than happy to draw a parallel to that.) Jay makes a personal journey from an obnoxious drunk in complete denial of the extent of his problem, to a selfless and overtly courageous hero. Considering the story takes place over a series of mere weeks, this may seem a bit unrealistic. But when one is forced into a surreal life-or-death situation such as, say, battling a hideous ancient creature that’s been working on viciously murdering and consuming the blood of their entire town, the true nature of their character is bound to show through.
I kind of have a thing for stories about addicts overcoming their addictions to face the horror both within and around them. It’s an encouraging–although perhaps overly optimistic–idea to imagine that when faced with a choice of continuing to use or putting down the drugs to save the day, anyone who started out in good moral standing would revert back to that. That’s the gamble here, the question on which everyone’s survival depends, and you feel the weight of that question throughout. The way this author handles that concept reminds me of another horror masterpiece called Skin by Patrick Logan in which a struggling heroin addict is called forth from the depths of his debilitating habit to defend himself and his family against a horrifying creature of death. (I highly recommend that one as well–and read it in the dead of winter if you can. You’ll never look at snowstorms the same way.)
The other thing I enjoyed about this book and that defines it as good horror is the masterful suspension of disbelief. When you’re talking ancient curses and grotesque, unnatural and hopefully completely nonexistent creatures, it’s important to craft both it and the story surrounding it in a way that gets the reader past the facts that what’s happening in the book is not realistic.
Am I pretty confident that a horrific creature like the one in this book won’t ever invade my or someone I know’s body and start systematically murdering everyone? Yes. But did this book still creep the hell out of me and cause me to look over my shoulder once or twice? Also yes!
Ultimately I had only two small problems with this book. One was that Jay’s fiance was a pretty flat and hollow character considering how involved she eventually became in the buildup and climax of the story. The other was an imaginary friend of one of the other main’s, A) whose significance to the story was never explained and B) who just disappeared from the story at some point and never came up again. I’m still not sure what the point was of including that detail, but I’ll let it be because the rest of the story tied together in a totally satisfactory (and gruesome) conclusion.
Despite the two little pitfalls, solid horror novel. I give it 4.5 out of 5 and will definitely pursue further reading by this author.
I’ve finally picked up reading again after a short break where I didn’t read much at all for a few weeks. Sometimes I just need to spend my free time vegging and letting my brain do other things, but vacation is over! And I’ve started on a new reading project that I’m sort of allowing to lead itself rather than over-planning. The premise: rereading some Stephen King books!
The reason I started with The Dead Zone is because it’s one of the ones I kind of cruised through without recognizing its significance. I began reading SK books in the 10th grade. Actually, The official beginning was in the 6th grade when I attempted to read The Stand. At that point I was a little young for it all and didn’t make it past the 1st quarter of the book, but the introduction did stick with me and when a member of my class chose and accept from King’s Salem’s Lot for quarterly class declamation (a tradition at Boston Latin School English classes which consists of memorizing and reciting literary works in front of your class) I became re-intrigued with King and read the book myself. The second work of his I embarked on was The Eyes of the Dragon, and after that I was hooked. Carrie…Christine…Four Past Midnight…The Tommyknockers…From a Buick 8… Rose Madder…The Dark Tower Series… Bag of Bones…Desperation… Insomnia...Hearts in Atlantis…Blaze… I read them in highest concentration between ages 17 and 21, and now that I’m at the ripe old age of 32 I’m starting to realize that I probably missed a lot of the nuances, and maybe even some of the bigger ideas involved in some of those works that I flew through in my early years. I suddenly feel this hunger to find out what I missed, similar the the hunger I felt when I was plowing through his extensive pile of masterpieces the first time around–a similar, but more mature hunger.
So the adventure has re-begun. I’m not sure which one I’ll re-read next; I’ll decide when I get there.
Mostly autobiographical without being strictly chronological, this gem is actually informational, too. Rather than being heaped on in momentum-killing lumps, facts are worked into the story-like examination of the author’s experience with mental illness. The title is of course a non-literal interpretation of the term atlas; this book contains no maps or visual images. What it does contain in that vain, though, is a literary map of many of the different facets of life with depression. Every affected person’s life is a unique combination of the things in this book, which makes it relatable and applicable even if a lot of the things that have happened to the author have never happened to you.
This book may be a tad dated, but it’s more important now than ever. What I think is most important about it is that it concentrates both on what depression is, and what it is not. And while the author is writing largely about his own experience with depression, he does it in a way that invites me as the reader to feel like the book is about what depression is for me.
Depression is not simply negative feelings proportional to what one is currently experiencing; i.e. feeling sad when somebody passes away or losing interest in a relationship you may be outgrowing.
Depression is not just about crying all the time (although this can happen,) frequent moping (this happens as well,) being a complainer (though we can seem like that’s all we can do at times) and the color gray (though this is the color that most accurately matches our feelings.) These are all partially accurate stereotypes because they are common components of the disease. But depression is so many other things that aren’t always so obvious.
Depression can be crying with relief when you finally get back to the safety of your car after a social event.
Depression can be trying to decide between doing laundry or dishes because you don’t have the emotional energy to handle both.
Depression can be hesitating to make any plans ever because you can’t be sure you’ll be up for the activity on the day it occurs.
Depression can be the urge to nap at every opportunity.
Depression can be insomnia.
Depression can be feeling things you used to value slowly losing their importance until you struggle to remember why you ever cared.
Depression can be dwelling on and hating yourself for all the things your depression keeps you from doing.
Depression can be getting easily frustrated and having little to no patience with anything.
Depression can be a lack of focus.
Depression can be focusing too much on one idea or thing–usually something negative like your weight or your skin–and being consumed by that.
Depression can be feeling more at ease on cloudy days than sunny days–on cloudy days we’re expected to feel down.
Depression can be no appetite or an unstoppable appetite, or an appetite for only one particular type of food.
For me, depression has been all of these things and more at one time or another, but not all symptoms are present all the time. There is definitely an atlas worth of struggles that come along with managing mood disorders, and this book is a good start at navigating your depression by getting a detailed glimpse inside the life of someone who has found success despite his own.
There’s a feeling I miss that’s hard to describe; the feeling of getting lost in a good book on summer vacation.
When we reflect on a past feeling, we remember what the feeling was at the time it was being felt. The funny thing is that once it’s recalled, it’s not that feeling anymore. The very recollection of that feeling invokes the knowledge that it’s part of the past. This knowledge then becomes part of the feeling itself, fundamentally altering it. Part of the significance of our memories is their context as things of the past; in being summoned to the present, they becomes tainted by it. Remembering a feeling that can no longer be means both remembering the actual feeling and also becoming acutely aware of the fact that that feeling is never to be felt again in the same way.
When I think back on how it felt to be free of adult responsibilities, I recall not only childhood innocence and carefree life but also the anxiety I have always felt at times when I didn’t know quite what to do with myself…a feeling which used to be sort of neutral has become a negative. The summer was an entire season of having to decide what to do with myself, and though I didn’t recognize at seven, ten or twelve years old exactly what anxiety was, it was there just the same. In the context of such a young life a nameless feeling like that doesn’t mean much, and reading was the solution I most commonly employed to fill the gaps between my occasional obligations like meals and going places (although even car rides and some meals were spent reading.) Back then of course I didn’t realize how much my future self would envy my past self for the privelage of having copious amounts of free time that could be used indulging in exercises of the imagination.
Not only does having free time feel totally different nowadays; I can’t even properly re-experience the feelings I used to enjoy. Instead of being able to look back at these times with the pure happiness provided by a successful escape into a good book, these memories come with a mix of emotions. I feel both the joy of that former freedom and the slight melancholy of nostalgia tinged by the comparison of the past to one’s current reality. If I forsake the memories in favor of trying to simply recreate a past situation, I run into the obstacle that as an adult there are always other things I should be doing at any given time other than the activity with which I’m presently engaged. Society encourages us to feel this way- that our work is never done, that there is always more to do, more to say, more to buy. It interferes viciously with our ability to be present, and I feel this most intensely when it comes to enjoying a good book.
Sure I have days off in my future that I may choose to spend reading, but never again will they be as devoid of worldly worries as they used to be. I’ve learned the best way to secure enjoyment of these occasions is to do my best to make legitimate space for it rather than crudely pushing my other responsibilities aside, where they will loom over me for every moment until I give up and get sidetracked by laundry, vacuuming my car or getting to the gym. But no matter how empty my schedule is for a given day and how many hours of reading time I’m able to secure, I will always think lovingly and somewhat sadly back on those times I rode around in the back seat lost in characters’ adventures or smuggled a book to the dinner table, sneaking in a few sentences as a time as the sun set on Cape Cod (in the case of patio vacation dining) or behind the garage beyond our kitchen window–or my favorites of all, the times I read far into the night past my non-existent summer bedtime and eventually dozed off, a book on my chest and nothing but the sound of summer crickets chirping in the dark.
**Before I begin the rant I just wrote, if you don’t want to read it all just at least skip to the bottom and read the last part where I ask for your opinion. I want to hear as many people as I can!**
Looking back I’m starting to have a very important realization as relates to my personal growth. I was thinking about how 15 was definitely my most miserable age. I had yet to learn about gratitude, I knew only the “oh woe is me” reaction to everything. I was determined to be miserable and dislike people. It was a very selfish and immature phase of my life, and I didn’t really make large strides toward growing up until 18 when I was forced to grow and transition into college.
Then I had another inner growth spurt when I was 20 and started my first true adult relationship (which thankfully was mostly healthy and with a great guy who treated me very well) and then another forced one when my friend Ian passed (2010, we were 23) and relatively shortly after I entered what was my longest period of being single since agen17. More forced growth in 2017 when I had to move out of my parents’ house. More when I started my first truly professional Job last April.
What I’m realizing is how much of my growth has been forced, something I’ve kicked and screamed and flailed about. And I’m understanding just as suddenly that this is likely an integral factor in why inner peace so often eludes me, why I’m riddled with anxiety and depression. Life IS change, and here I have been for almost 32 years resisting, running from it, cursing it and refusing to open myself to it. The only times I’ve been about it were very particular situations of my own choosing– changing my room from pink to blue, changing my hair color, little things like that. Picking and choosing what changes is not how it works. That’s not how *real life* works.
What I will do now that I’ve had this monumental revelation about myself, honestly, is sit on it for a bit. Not for too long, but it’s something I’d like to examine within myself and through discussion with others and see where I end up. How do I change this fundamental thing about myself? I’ll be asking that question in many different contexts. I’ll also look for a professional I might be able to explore it with, maybe a life coach or something like that rather than a psychologist necessarily. I’ll address it that way once I’ve decided which angle to come in from.
The first step is talking to you, the people I have right here who have been watching my life through the window of social media and know more about me than any doctor can. Are YOU afraid of change? Have you ever taken active steps to embrace it? Do you LIKE change? Do you seek it out? Tell me. I want to hear you.
I hate to bore you with my “new year, new me” stuff, but there’s a lot going on in my personal life right now that happens to correspond with the turning over of a new calendar year, so I’m seizing the opportunity to make the most of that. It seems New Years’ resolutions have fallen out of favor in the past few years thanks to social media trends and meme’s ridiculing their repetitive nature and aptitude for failure. There have even been articles written from a scientific point of view explaining why these particularly timed life goals are especially unlikely to be upheld.
But I think a resolution is what you make it. For some people a new year his little to no significance, so trying to measure the success of their personal pursuits starting on the first of the year isn’t especially motivational. But for others each year is a rebirth, whether they count a new year as beginning on January 1st or on their own birthday, the first day of Spring, whatever. Point being everyone is different, and I think anyone who’s even bothering to set goals oriented toward bettering themselves is doing a good thing.
If there is any problem with this whole resolution thing at all, it’s that by encouraging us to whittle our goals down to one or two words so as to fit into the sentence “My New Year’s resolution is to __________”, it also encourages an all-or-nothing attitude due to the oversimplification of our objectives. I doubt many have reached a lasting result without first taking one small step toward their goal, and then the next, and then the next. So why not structure our goals that way from the outset? Rather than simply setting a goal of losing weight, you make it more approachable for yourself by taking each of the things that makes losing weight a difficult thing to do, and framing each of them as your resolutions– for example: my goals are to reduce my caloric intake, increase my activity level, improve my hydration and work on my snacking habits. Each of these is a necessary stepping stone to weight loss, and by acknowledging this you set yourself up with the built-in outline of a game plan.
So that’s what I’m doing here- setting a game plan. Ultimately my goals for this year are to clean up every area of my life–this includes my finances, my professional life, my social life to my personal health, both body and mind. There are many steps involved in achieving this, and if I try to focus on all of them every day I’ll never get anywhere. So the first mini-goal is to divvy this up into steps in order of importance and how much attention I feel it’s going to require from me. My emotional resources each day are limited, some more than others, so I have to remember to be kind to myself and work within my natural limits, but without selling myself short or setting my sights too low.
So how does the revival of this blog tie in? It’s part of my zeroing in on my professional life-not my current one, but the one I’d like to have perhaps a few years into the future. I’ve always wanted to incorporate writing into my work, and since I have no way to do that currently the best way to prep myself for making that change is to write, write, write and write some more! As for titling it The Extra Shelf, it has a different meaning now. It’s a blog mostly about books and words, yes, but think of what else a bookshelf can hold. I don’t know about you, but in front of my books stand a variety of trinkets, mementos, Pop! vinyl figures (which are relevant to the books when possible) and other little things that speak to what’s important to me. And then there’s the “extra shelf”, which contains only the most special of books (I’ll share that collection in another post) and, to quote the lovely Mary Poppins, “a few of my favorite things.” Hence the title here.
This blog is still about books. But now it’s expanded to include also the life that those books go along with, and how they fit in and contribute to my path toward creating a deeper meaning to my daily life. Thank you for following, and I always follow back!
“There is nothing more dangerous, nothing more powerful, nothing more necessary and essential for survival than the lies we tell ourselves.”
Having read my share of mysteries and thrillers, I can rattle off some things that most of those books include. A deliberate murder or two; a few people with a motive; victims whose characters are never really flushed out, leaving the live characters as the main focus rather than the dead ones; sometimes an additional death while the mystery solvers are trying to unravel the truth; and very often, another person with a motive we don’t know about until close to the end.
Megan Miranda’s All the Missing Girls does conform to that formula…but not comfortably. Actually, there is nothing comfortable about the experience of reading this book. If you’re anything like me, you’ll say you can’t stand it and then when you’re done, start looking for more books like it. And I’m not sure there is one.
Due to the disjointed way in which it’s written, I’ve honestly been having trouble organizing my thoughts about this book into something coherent. The story is advertised as being written in reverse, which is true but also not entirely accurate; I’d classify it more as timehopping than strictly being told in reverse. The narration is in the voice of Main Character 1, Nicolette “Nic” Farrell, whose best friend Corinne–or Main Character 2 according to me–disappeared ten years before when they were eighteen. I name Corinne as a main character despite her being dead because a significant percentage of the book is dedicated to describing her troubling tendencies and rather deplorable character while trying to simultaneously explain why people, particularly Nic, were so drawn to her despite her awfulness. This gives rise to a host of reasons why various people may have wanted to kill her, and the timeline jumps back and forth between two different periods: the two weeks in the present leading up to the book’s conclusion, and the few weeks in the past surrounding Corinne’s disappearance.
While I have to say the whole distorted timeline thing kind of confused and annoyed me at certain points, I can’t see the story being what it is were it to be told in a more linear fashion. Miranda includes quite a bit of outspoken ruminating about the nature of time and memories, so clearly the back-and-forth plotting device she was using is meant to say something about the nature of time itself. What I took away from her words and her plotting is that there can be a realness to the concept that time is not linear despite that we normally do experience it that way. Each of us has doors through which we can instantly be transported to the past for better or for worse. It may be skeletons in our closets or simply strong memories that tie us to what we perceive as being our most important life experiences; some parts we embrace while others we push away. This is a book about the ones we push away, the parts of the past we leave as far behind as we can and yet never detach from at all. “You change. But the past, it’s still there. The only thing moving is you.”
I’d recommend reading this book in as short of a period and in as few sessions as possible. The more time you leave in between what you’ve read, the more likely you may be to get lost in the structure of the narration. Sometimes I’d find myself questioning certain detail, wondering how it had come up without my realizing it and whether I should go back and read some previous part of the book again, before remembering of course that it’s purposely written out of order. It drove me crazy the way my mind was reaching for understanding of things I wasn’t supposed to understand yet. And yet the more I read, the more I began to understand that this is probably the way real murder mysteries unravel. Look from a new angle. Find a clue. Go back and examine the context of that clue. Take that as far as it goes. Sometimes it branches off into something else and the trail continues; other times you lose the scent and that roll you were on stops cold. That’s what reading this book is like; you never know when Miranda is going to push Stop and Rewind, or catapult you back into the present, or where she’ll send you next. You just know you have to find out what happened, almost as bad as Nic herself. Or perhaps even more.
The Extra Shelf 