I'm putting this here for now. Things Althea & Oliver get right.

1. The potential for that enmeshed friendship that occurs when you have known someone for so long.

2. Unrequited feelings and how ambiguous it can be for both people. It's not always leading someone on or taking advantage. But it's more complicated.

3. The sheer amount of alcohol and cigarette consumption that can (and does) happen in high school. Not in a romantic way, but in a totally blase way.

4. Sometimes sex can cause ambivalence too. I'm not saying that Althea did not rape Oliver (I absolutely believe she did). I think that even though he was the aggressor and initiated sex and initiated sort of unpleasant bad sex, he was still taken advantage of. I think that his confusion about how to feel about it and his blithe getting over it is sort of right, as someone who was in that situation when I was too drunk to say no in college. There has been a ton of writing about how fucked up and wrong it was and how the author should have come down harder on rape, but I will say, what happens in the aftermath felt more real than anything I have read around this. Just pure ambivalence.

5. These characters are terrible and messy and wonderful and damn, it felt like, minus the disease, a snapshot of how I grew up.

Well, now I'm definitely interested. I'll look for it at the library.

I just started Alison Bechdel's Fun Home and it's amazing. No idea why I'm so late to the party, but so glad I'm reading it now.

I really liked Fun Home. I should re read because I can't remember it at all.

I have been in a state of ecstatic reading which has included:

• Both Jandy Nelson books (the one that one the Prinz was great).
• All of the Saga comics (I'm so late to that party, so don't worry, Amy).
• Lots of JoJo Moyes
• All the Truth In Me which was amazing.

Oh, I want to read the Jandy Nelson books, too. And, unrelatedly, Perseopolis, which I saw at the library when I picked up Fun Home. I also took out Wild, because I guess I'm in a memoir mood.

All of the Saga comics

Yeah, I love these too!

I just finished The Black Count, which was great, and I'm currently trying to slog my way through War and Peace. I say slog, because I'm fairly sure this is a shitty translation. I just don't know of a universally admired one.

I had the same experience with W&P. I...didn't finish. I intend to try again someday.

Same here, and I was reading a widely-acclaimed translation. I think I'd almost need a W&P vacation, where I could spend several hours a day on it for as long as it took. I was trying to read it half an hour each day at lunch, and I just couldn't keep up with all the people and threads.

I've been loving my kindle and am so happy to be back reading. I just finished the Divergent series and The Fault in Our Stars (the feels, man). K-Bug and I were at the book store yesterday and I saw the size of Allegiant and Insurgent and they are huge. You definitely lose sense of the size of a book on an e-reader.

What to dive into next? With mention of War and Peace, maybe I should get brave and give that a go.

My blog is practically one extended chronicle of my attempts to read War and Peace.

juliana, which translation are you reading?