The Owl Service (minor books post)

[radiantfracture]

This isn't so much a post as an excuse to show you a paper owl.

I went to Russell Books today and -- inspired by Backlisted, my new podcast boyfriend -- hunted up Alan Garner's Red Shift.¹

The Owl Service was also on the shelf, which let to this fruitful use of my afternoon:



I like very much that Garner makes his books into puzzles, without its being coy or forced. I am trying to hold off on decoding the ciphered message at the end of Red Shift until I've actually read the book. No spoilers please.

So far I like The Owl Service -- the only thing that makes it a young adult book is the way it leaps immediately into its weirdness, rather than easing you through a process of deduction the way a book with aspirations to a certain kind of maturity -- to creating a realistic unreality -- might.

{rf}

0. I looked for, but did not find, the edition of Woolf's The Waves with the absurdly patriarchal back cover copy mentioned elsewhere.

1. I am still compiling the list of essential books recommendations from friends (old, new) and helpful strangers, so right now my reading looks like this: Owl ( Red ( Recommended ( Party (Howards End) Going) Mystery Book ) Shift ) Service, with books for teaching in their own noble stack at my left hand.

Comments

[heliopausa]

I'm puzzling over the nested parentheses - do they represent reading order?

[radiantfracture]

Yes -- I could more logically have stacked them in the opposite order -- with Howards End around the outside -- since that is the order in which they're being interrupted for each other, but this way mirrors my experience of procrastination: I cloak or contain the book I'm supposed to be reading with the new book -- bracket the gratuitous anxiety around it, maybe?

That's probably more than you wanted to know about my punctuation choices.