Happy Camp Nanowrimo! *confetti*

Hello all! Long time, no chat. The world's not in the greatest of states right now, I know, but it's time to bring a bit of light to the darkness again. At least, that's what I'm aiming to do. Bring on the positivity!

Project Pollyanna is go!

Now, I had planned to do a new Illumination post, highlighting a positive news story, but then I realized it's April Fools' Day. Not the greatest day for finding a trustworthy news story. So instead, let me tell you about something awesome.

Nathan Pyle is a web cartoonist who has created a lovely and thought-provoking series called Strange Planet. It's got a lot in common with the "humans are the aliens" idea, where humans are really, frankly, just weird. Nathan takes that idea and runs with it, showing aliens doing all the things humans do.

Enjoy, my friends!

The Joy of Re-reading

As some of you may have noticed with my round-ups, I love to re-read books. I'll frequently re-read an entire series in order to prepare for a new book in that series, partially to remind myself of what happened before and partially to remember why I care about these characters and worlds. Some, I just re-read because it's comforting - sometimes, it's helpful to take a step back and go with what you know for a little bit.

A co-worker once asked why I bothered to re-read books. "It's not like you don't know what happened!" Well, yes and no. I freely admit that my memory for details isn't fantastic - I can usually remember broad strokes, but not the nuances of the book. The nuance is what makes the whole experience of reading enjoyable.

Re-reading also lets me focus on something different each time. My husband mentioned this with some of the mysteries he's currently re-reading. He remembers who did the crime, and now he's reading the book to see what clues the author leaves for the reader about the ultimate resolution. It's a fantastic exercise in seeing how a good author works (or learning how a not-great author doesn't work as well - some books simply don't hold up to a re-read).

Reading in general is such a bizarre concept if you think about it. You, the reader, are taking the words written by an author, during a specific time in their lives, and absorbing them in a specific time in your life. That time of life will color how you interpret those words. Reading a book in which a character grieves a loss when you haven't personally felt that kind of grief is a very different experience than reading it after you've encountered that grief is. As you change, so does your perception of the books you read. It doesn't always change for the better - there are certainly some books that I devoured as a child that I couldn't get through a single chapter of as an adult. Regardless, taking a look at something you read months or years ago automatically resets your expectations, even if you do remember the plot and the characters. It's always different, even though the words remain the same.

Book review - The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

I am a big fan of comfort reading. I tend to re-read books that I love many times over the years, because even if I remember the broad strokes of the plot or the characters, there's always something new to discover and remember with every reading. This book? This is one that probably has, if not the most re-reads, at least in the top 5, in my library.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society was one of the first epistolary books I ever read. The entire story is told in letters and journals, which as a writer, is always fascinating to me - how can an author fit so much about a character into a simple letter? The fact that the book is also historical fiction, taking place not long after the end of the Second World War, helped to attract my attention as well.

The main theme is the love of the written word. The main character is an author who wrote columns for the newspaper during the war, and is now trying to find the best idea she can for a book. Out of the blue, she receives a letter from a man on Guernsey Island, who had purchased one of the books she had had in her library from a second-hand bookshop, and was writing to see if she knew of any other books by the same author. It leads to a discussion about reading, writing, and the importance of not only the written word, but also the ties of friendship and family, during the worst that life has to offer.

There's a bit of history that's rarely told in the US in this book - the occupation by the Germans of the Channel Islands. By hearing the voices of the people who lived through the occupation, the authors are able to give a good amount of detail to what happened, without coming across like a textbook. Knowing that it's in the past for them, but still building who they are in the present, is a gift for the reader to unwrap with each letter.

The audiobook version has multiple actors, which make the letters separate and distinct in ways that reading them can't quite get across. This is a book that I can honestly say I wholeheartedly love, and I recommend it to pretty much everyone.