I love that short story.

Oh man, I just finished the book Wonder by R.J. Palacio. I started at the gym and kept reading it after the kids went to bed. What a great book. Made me cry because it's sort of a Gracie-kinda-story. Except the kids at Grace's school love her.

I refer to it as "Children Are Bastards"

Bwah! Love that. So true.

Question... has anyone here ever read We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson? Rec it?

What everyone else said. I loved it and Hill House tons.

I also recommend The Sundial by Jackson if you can find it (I think it's long out of print). Really strange, odd book.

Hill House consistently gives me the wiggins, and I've read it probably 20 times. It's pitch-perfect.

It has one of the best first paragraphs ever:

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

YES YES YES. It is perfect, and I love that opening para.

LOVE.

(I'd love to do a Halloween week read-along of it; wish peeps lived closer...Skype and cocktails, mebbe?)

The movie version (the original one) is really creepy too.

The movie version (the original one) is really creepy too.

Indeed.

The story is that Jackson based Hill House on the mansion whose grounds became Bennington College. It became the music building [link] . It stands on the the top of a huge hill, with woods behind it and could be kinda creepy. Her husband was a professor at Bennington.

Hah! That's where I read her. I hated walking by that building, especially since it was so out of the way.