Why do you read?

Sometimes I read for entertainment or the delightful flights of imagination a book sparks. I’ve done a good bit of academic reading which can be both entertaining and enriching. There’s poetry to inspire me; and non-fiction to grow my knowledge and interests. Usually, I know what I’m getting into when I start a book… But now and then I come across something that refuses the usual categories. And it leaves me with a strange feeling, like an itchy spot I can’t reach.

“Oblivion’s where all learning goes anyways, sometimes the very next day.”

I’m homeless if this is not my home

I’m homeless if this is not my Home is like this. To say I enjoyed it doesn’t feel quite right. It is enjoyable and entertaining but in a discomforting way. Strange and beautiful and disconcerting. Poetic at times. Interwoven with references and images that are above my level of academic understanding but that most people will pick up on intuitively.

All in all, I loved it.

I don’t know if I have much more I can say. It’s a love story and a ghost story, as the cover teases. It’s creepy and beautiful. Strange and sad.

“Now insanity had come to him and caught them both in this strange late dusk dream, which was like a daydream but with more solidity, less light, and more doubt.”

I’m homeless if this is not my home

If you want to look at a light analysis of Moore’s work and her latest novel, this article in the New Yorker might be of interest:

‘For here she is, wandering a graveyard, a little wobbly, dirt ringing her mouth, not deeply dead but, she says, “death-adjacent.” She asks to be taken to a body farm in Tennessee and used for forensic research. Finn agrees—how could he not? Her face is “still possessed of her particular radiant turbulence,” he finds, with an ache. “You had to stick around for the show.”’

Happy reading,

Chantelle