Read/reading: The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky, The Casual Vacancy by J.K. Rowling.

I read a book in a day. God. I haven’t done that in a while.

This was a bit The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time in terms of its exploration of quite difficult subjects through fairly innocent eyes, but it still didn’t condescend. It deserves to be popular, but for good reasons rather than… Twilight reasons.

It’s tough to write about books like this (modern classics, as this apparently is, already suffer from massive overexposure) but I think I’ll be thinking about it for a while. The surface themes aside, this novel had things to say about coming of age that other coming-of-age novels struggle to articulate, and the protagonist feels like a laundry list of teenage quiet kid tropes, but in the sense that it’s immediately accessible for a lot of people. He still feels real.

It’s a bit trigger-y, though it always deals with the subject matter well, and it’s incredibly easy to get through. But… hmm. It’s very good. I’ll be interested to see how the film deals with certain aspects. It gets pretty dark.

Rowling, I have heard good things. I know you’re just an up-and-coming writer with not much experience in the publishing world, but I hope you don’t disappoint.