Julia

This week I am reading ‘A Lesson in Vengeance’ by Victoria Lee, and it is pure coincidence that I chose the perfect season, month, and week to read it since the book came into my hands via a spur of the moment loan from a friend (thanks Emily!). I say the perfect week because Halloween, also known as Samhain, falls on this Thursday, and this dark academia witchy psychological thriller (a mouthful of buzzwords, I know) not only takes place primarily during the autumn months, but also has significant events revolving around Samhain. Of course, this week is great for reading witchy books in general, and this book hits the spot with its themes of witchcraft and the occult.

While I am enjoying this lighter read – light because it has a readability to it, not because its subject is particularly light – I do find a lot of it quite repetitive, and not in an effective way. I like the play on an unreliable narrator and how suspense is built on our mistrust of her perspective, but I didn’t always feel like it was necessary to see her go down spiral after spiral after spiral…

I do also have a gripe with the fact that this book is set at an all girls boarding school. I love a dark academia boarding school setting, but having gone to a New England boarding school, I find the book’s descriptions so wholly unrepresentative of a boarding school setting that it is distracting me from the actual plot. The setting IS lovely, don’t get me wrong, but it reads much more like a small university à la ‘The Secret History’. 

The main character in this story, Felicity Morrows, struggles to draw the line between her version of magic and reality, and much of the book so far also asks readers to toe the same line. So, it is perhaps no surprise that I find myself picking up my tarot cards once again, drawn to the veiled realms, just like Felicity. 

Ayesha

I started this a few weeks ago – one of the books that I’m currently reading is Sheila Heti’s “Alphabet Diaries.” I bought this during my trip to Paris earlier this year and was really pulled into the writing format. Each chapter is focused on a letter of the alphabet, hence the title. Heti pulled half a million words from her journals spanning around a decade and compiled them into a spreadsheet. After organizing them alphabetically, she refined and edited her wording to bring us this chaotic masterpiece. 

I’m on chapter “H” and as I’ve been reading, the formatting is quite resonant with that of an anxious mind. I don’t know if this was her intention but for me, I can relate to the million ideas and thoughts running in my head at the same time – often on unrelated topics. 

“A book can be about more than one thing, like a kaleidoscope.”