owlectomy. Oh, Eugenides! (Reply)

I wish that I were thirteen years old and reading Megan Whalen Turner's Attolia books all in one gulp. There is a kind of singleminded concentration that I had then, lying on my stomach on my bed and just fugue-state reading for hours and hours and hours at a time. I don't think I could have begun teaching myself Japanese if I'd fallen into it any later than I did. Maybe it's a function of youth itself, maybe it's a function of having no internet and only a handful of TV channels until I moved to the US at 11, but it's not something I can do anymore, and without that, every time I dip into The King of Attolia I have to take some time to remember who are all these people? I guess I must have read The Queen of Attolia in 2007, which doesn't help.

Then again there is too much of subtle and mysterious politicking and subtle and mysterious human relations in these books to be clear to even a bright thirteen-year-old... or to me, at any rate. These books are always getting thrown up as, "Is this REALLY a YA book?" and I am beginning to suspect that at least in the case of The King of Attolia the answer is no.

But still! Oh, Eugenides!