I don’t organically picture the characters or any scenery I read because I don’t have a visual imagination. Descriptions give me a vague impression, but that’s it.

That said, I will usually look up fan art to create a better picture of characters and settings.

For me it feels like relistening to an album I like.

Sometimes I relisten and it makes me feel different, sometimes it’s about scratching a familiar itch.

Sometimes I listen to the whole album, sometimes the single, sometimes the deep cuts.

Same with books. I’ll read favorites at different points in my life. I’ll read them for comfort. I’ll read the whole thing, skip around to highlights in the story, or read just a scene I’ve been thinking about

Goosebumps

Not a book, but an author. The summer reading they had us read in middle school tended to be heavy and difficult subject matter… Exactly what you don’t want to spend your summers thinking about.

One year it was Into Thin Air and I just did not appreciate Krakauer’s writing. I felt like I was reading a very long magazine article instead of a personal account of what he went through on Everest. I thought it was uncannily detached in a documentarian kind of way. I guess I found that detachment shocking or distasteful as a kid. I didn’t really know anything about PTSD then and no one really explained it to me either.

Also, since it was summer reading, we had to discuss it after school started up again. It just drew it out too long for me.

Made me never want to read Krakauer again, and I haven’t. Although thinking about it now, maybe I would like to reread Into Thin Air as an adult? Or another book by him…one day I hope.

Fluke’s way of aging people down is to make them all morons.

I read 2 of those books before I wished a lobotomy on myself.

You’re not the first person I’ve seen who didn’t connect the dots on this one. I think Finny falling out of the tree is so deliberately underplayed and then him dying later >!from a blood clot because of it!<, that it is easy to miss what was happening.

The narrator is unreliable and doesn’t dwell on the fact >!that he is responsible for Finny falling.!<

I am also surprised when I talk to people who have read it, boomers in particular, who did not notice that it is a >!queer tragedy and that the narrator gay panics when he causes Finny to fall!<. Boomers just want the book to be about love and friendship and so I ask them, “well if that’s the case, what is the whole point of the book and why is it considered a classic?” They don’t usually have an answer to that.