bing bang boom @internrachel and @julia1! Had a very productive week/end, I read The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand, 704 pgs, in a week! A personal best. I have a strange tradition of rereading either Atlas Shrugged or The Fountainhead every summer, I can’t remember when I started but I’ve been doing it at least 5 years. I usually alternate but it seemed like it had been awhile since I had read The Fountainhead. I’m very ambivalent about Ayn Rand and her style of writing. She’s prone to awkward speeches (I really should have counted the times people said “Go on” encouraging another person to keep on with their screeds) and black and white thinking. I am always amused by how anti-feminist she is and I realized during this reading that I totally go for her pulpy writing. This was honestly a really fun read. I would recommend it but I know she isn’t for everyone, I guess I’d say go in skeptical and prepared to be amused. I would never never never try to take her books seriously.
Then when I returned that book to my sister this weekend I picked up Just an Ordinary Day by Shirley Jackon, 431 pgs, just to peruse while my sister was busy and ended up reading it in a day and a half. I hadn’t read Shirley Jackson in forever and I had forgotten how much I love her writing. I was first introduced to her by this awesome lady who lived on the same farm as me when I was a kid (my dad is in the military and we lived on a dairy farm in Germany for 8 years in this crazy former hotel, the cool lady was an American married to one of the farmer’s sons). I would go over to her house after school a couple times of week and she would give me buttered bread and let me hang out with her dogs. She threw the best Halloween parties and as my sister and I got older she would let us borrow her books, most of them horror books. I loved horror books for most of my adolescence and still do, though on a smaller scale. I can’t remember what book of Shirley Jackson’s she let me read but it was so good. I read some of her books, saw some movies based on her stories and then didn’t read her again for like 10 years. Jackson has a really great nonchalant style of writing that works equally well in her horror stories as her slice-of-life. Just an Ordinary Day is a collection of previously unpublished or uncollected stories that span all the genres she wrote in. Ugh guys… it was so good! Just read it, seriously, just go now and read it. Every story is so enjoyable. I can’t wait to read more of her this summer