Harriet the Spy was the first big book that I read on my own and I honestly could not have picked anything better. I’ve reread it several times and it’s fantastic.

I’m not currently reading this, but it did make me think of the book that took me an entire year to read: Soul Mountain by Gao Xingjian. It was meandering and philosophical and that’s not typically my thing which it why it took me so long, but I still enjoyed it on some level and there was some beautiful writing throughout.

“You should know that there is little you can seek in this world, that there is no need for you to be so greedy, in the end all you can achieve are memories, hazy, intangible, dreamlike memories which are impossible to articulate. When you try to relate them, there are only sentences, the dregs left from the filter of linguistic structures.”

I feel the same way; HP has always been my safe, comfy read. I’ve been hard-pressed to find something else that hits the same and I haven’t gotten there yet, though I keep trying new stories. I also recently had a loss and that grief feels like it’s leading me to another reread of the series, seeking out that comfort.

Not often, but I recently read Earthlings by Sayaka Murata and there was one scene towards the beginning where I had to set the book down and debate if I was going to continue reading. I carried on and thankfully that particular scene was not repeated.

The book Trainspotting uses a lot of local dialect and colloquialisms, varying the POV for chapters which really changed up the language. It works well when you hear the accents in your head and it even includes a dictionary.

I haven’t read it yet, but I’m really intrigued by the narrative in The Country of Ice Cream Star. It’s a post-apocalyptic setting where the language seems very cobbled and evolved phonetically, an arrested development in language because the adults aren’t around to correct them - for example, October is now just Tober.

Random fantasy books worked when I was younger, but lately the closest I’ve gotten to that magical escape reading has been with the Feed series, If We Were Villains and Station Eleven. Maybe my older brain just struggles more with outside distractions, but these have come very close to quieting that extra noise.

There’s some kind of magical ratio of anxiety/pain/etc to book immersion that creates lightning in a bottle for me. I’m always chasing that next read where the world sort of disappears when I’m so engrossed in a story, but it’s rare! I can love a book, rate it 5 stars, but it rarely has that true captivating quality. It’s when that hits, that I can use it to escape some anxiety or illness.