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landofnowhereA DWJ-rereading week!
Howl's Moving Castle, Diana Wynne Jones. Yes, Sophie in the hat shop is super relatable right now, and in general I find Sophie extremely relatable. This time around, I was reading it thinking of what a friend had said at book club, which is that everyone in the book is constantly being grouchy/cranky at each other. Which is true, and yet the book is still a comfort read for me -- I think part of it is that when I need a comfort read, I'm often grouchy :-D And also that I find "everyone's grouchy and blaming each other in the moment, but deep down they all love each other" comforting, partly because that's the sort of family I come from.
Another insight I had from that book club was that Howl's Moving Castle/Sense and Sensibility/Frozen all have something in common: they are stories that start with the death of a father of girls, and the protagonist is the emotionally repressed oldest sister who gets more in touch with her emotions over the story. And although they are stories about sadness/grieving, they never really get into how the protagonist feels about her father's death. So I was partly thinking of reading that storty against the other two, and there are certainly illuminating similarities and differences.
Fire and Hemlock, Diana Wynne Jones. I finished Howl's Moving Castle on Halloween, and then realize that this was the DWJ that was really appropriate for that day. So I immediately started this. I think I read this about once a year, sometimes more, between the ages of 14 and 24, and then stopped reading it because I'd gotten to the point where I basically had the book memorized. Well, now I'm 34 (which is to say, about the same age as Tom, wow...), and it's been a long enough break. It's still a very good book, though I'm not unreservedly in love with it as I was as a teenager.
I think the main new thing I noticed this time was when they meet and start pretending together, Tom's suggestion that "couldn't you be the one to save my life" and giving her the picture "instead of a medal for life-saving". He really is grooming her.
Howl's Moving Castle, Diana Wynne Jones. Yes, Sophie in the hat shop is super relatable right now, and in general I find Sophie extremely relatable. This time around, I was reading it thinking of what a friend had said at book club, which is that everyone in the book is constantly being grouchy/cranky at each other. Which is true, and yet the book is still a comfort read for me -- I think part of it is that when I need a comfort read, I'm often grouchy :-D And also that I find "everyone's grouchy and blaming each other in the moment, but deep down they all love each other" comforting, partly because that's the sort of family I come from.
Another insight I had from that book club was that Howl's Moving Castle/Sense and Sensibility/Frozen all have something in common: they are stories that start with the death of a father of girls, and the protagonist is the emotionally repressed oldest sister who gets more in touch with her emotions over the story. And although they are stories about sadness/grieving, they never really get into how the protagonist feels about her father's death. So I was partly thinking of reading that storty against the other two, and there are certainly illuminating similarities and differences.
Fire and Hemlock, Diana Wynne Jones. I finished Howl's Moving Castle on Halloween, and then realize that this was the DWJ that was really appropriate for that day. So I immediately started this. I think I read this about once a year, sometimes more, between the ages of 14 and 24, and then stopped reading it because I'd gotten to the point where I basically had the book memorized. Well, now I'm 34 (which is to say, about the same age as Tom, wow...), and it's been a long enough break. It's still a very good book, though I'm not unreservedly in love with it as I was as a teenager.
I think the main new thing I noticed this time was when they meet and start pretending together, Tom's suggestion that "couldn't you be the one to save my life" and giving her the picture "instead of a medal for life-saving". He really is grooming her.