I’ve just gotten home from 6 hrs at the museum of civilization. I feel like I’ve run 2 marathons.

I finally managed to finish this series!  I was initially inspired to read it after I went to see the film with my two ten year old nephews this past winter.  I enjoyed it quite a bit, being a lover of kid and teen lit and general and having a soft spot for Freddie Highmore. So I ordered the series as one book back in the spring.  It’s sat on my coffee table since then, and I would pick it up every now and again and read a bit and then forget it for weeks and then pick it up again.

However I had made a promise to my nephew that he could have my spiderwick books the next time I saw him, which will be the end of July, so I had to finally buckle down and finish it (plus I have another nephew visiting me right now, and he has comendeered the computer to play Rollercoaster Tycoon, so I was left with nothing to do!)

What struck me about the books, particularly from book 3 on after the kids meet Lucinda, is the amount of differences between the books and the movie.  It doesn’t particularly bother me, mostly because it was completely necessary to fit the books into one film.  I suppose it was just that I was surprised to be surprised — I had thought after seeing the film I would know what happened in the books, but clearly, clearly not.  I am curious now how kids who read and loved the books before they saw the movie reacted to those changes.

Spiderwick was a fun read.  It wasn’t particularly sophisticated, even for a kids book (it’s no Potter, or Narnia or His Dark Materials), but it was good fun that will have you rooting for the Grace kids and wondering what became of them.

I find it amusing that my brother (the minister) finds himself with a surprising amount of lesbian musicians on his ipod, while I (agnostic lesbian) finds herself with a shockingly large contingent of christian bands.

The music god(s) must have a sense of humour!

Yesterday was Canada Day, and I spent about 8 hours sitting on Parliament Hill.  While I was sitting there getting sunburnt, I read The Kite Runner.  I hadn’t planned on reading this book, and in fact left the Hill to go to Chapters and buy a book.  To go even further, I had actively avoided reading this book for several years because I knew of one of its major plotlines and didn’t think I could handle it.

I should have trusted my first instinct, because this was an incredibly sad book.  Quite possibly the most depressing book I have ever read.  For sheer amount of bad things that happen to central characters it still doesn’t quite match the horror of A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry, but with Khaled Hosseini’s work I actually really cared about the characters.  I was quite invested in them, and there were several times I made the cliched move of gasping outloud or setting the book down for a time because I had to take an emotional break.

And I’ve learned never to tempt the literary fates with the words “It can’t possibly get any worse!” HA!

All that aside, it was a very good book.  It always feels weird to say I liked a book that is so dark, but it certainly touched me, raised some questions and probably would have made me cry if I hadn’t been in public.  I’m not sure I could ever see the movie (but who knows, maybe I’m a bigger masochist than I thought).  But if you’re prepared to feel an incredibly wide range of emotions, I highly, highly reccommend this book.