Time Out for Books: The Demon Queen and the Locksmith

The last month has been so busy that I haven't even had time to update our reading lists.

This time of the year is crazy!
The High Holy Days have been upon us, and the Month of Tishrei (seventh Jewish month) is basically one long holiday. Rosh Hashanah (Tishrei 1-2), Fast of Gedaliah (Tishrei 3), Ten Days of Repentence (Tishrei 1-10), Yom Kippur (Tishrei 10), Sukkot Tishrei 15-21, Hoshanah Rabbah (Tishrei 21), Sh'mini Atzeret (Tishrei 22) and Simchat Torah (Tishrei 23). I get tired just listing them, let alone celebrating them all. Many Jews call the eighth month, Cheshvan, Marcheshvan (bitter Cheshvan) because it has no holidays except Shabbat. But it was not a Jewish baalboostah (mistress of the house) who made that up, let me tell you! I love the peace and quiet of Cheshvan.

And then there has been the additional duties that go with our involvment in the patriot movement. We've had the 9-11 commemoration, the 9-12 Rally, the Patriot Alliance Leadership Retreat, and now the Continental Congress Elections. (Have you voted yet? Here is voting information for this non-partisan, non-political citizen's congress).

And there's my work with Retake Congress. And the Engineering Geek's work that puts the bread and butter on the table. And the Boychick's education. And this week, to top it all off, on Tuesday I got a call from the school nurse. The Boychick had contracted H1N1. I brought him home to bed with his first real illness ever: chills, fever, cough and aches and pains. Well. We don't have to worry about the unproven vaccination. He'll be immune now.

Nevertheless, these past few weeks I have made a special point of taking time out for reading. Pictured above is an array of new books for the Guest Room/Library.

I just finished The Demon Queen and the Locksmith by local author Spencer Baum. Although it is a book written for young adults, I couldn't put it down! I got this book because Spencer is also a libertarian homeschooler and he wrote his book about an imaginary town called Turquoise that sounds a lot like Taos, NM. Complete with the mountain and the hum.
The book is an adventure story involving a high-school boy, Kevin Brown, and two homeschooling friends, and it involves the Ta--I mean the Turquoise Hum. It also features two radio personalities, one a lot like Art Bell, and of course, a Demon Queen. The underlying theme of the story is what happens when teens learn of truth that is unpopular and even considered "black helicopter" crazy by their peers and according to their previous understandings. However, this book does not lecture and it does not moralize; Baum allows the story to carry the theme with grace and humor. He's never preachy, and always maintains a sense of adventure and fun. I'd read it again, and right away, too; except that the Boychick has snapped it up.

I recommend The Demon Queen and the Locksmith for young adults and the young at heart! It can be found at Amazon here. I hope there will be continuing adventures from Spencer Baum.

I am now looking forward to dipping into Margaret Atwood's new novel, The Year of the Flood, as well as Karen Armstrong's The Case for God. And I have been reading The Anti-Federalist Papers in short bits and bites for a few weeks now. On my list is also a re-read of Nechama Tec's history, Defiance: The Story of the Beilski Partisans.

So many books, so little time! But truly, books keep me sane during this insanely busy time.

Ragamuffin Reading: The New Library is . . . Comfortable

NEARLY WORDLESS WEDNESDAY

I was going to call this post 'the new library is finished.' But then I realized that I added five new books to it just this week. Libraries are never finished!

It may not look like it, but these books are in order on the shelves now--These shelves contain world history, American history, Judaic studies, world religions, field guides, and science.

The quilt (left) is 24 years old this summer. My coworkers at "The Children's Meeting Place" made it for me just before I stopped working to give birth to the Chem Geek Princess. The center panel has her ultra-sound picture, back when she was "Junior" (as in a Junior Lotaburger. I was addicted to the Green Chile Junior Lotaburger while pregnant).



These shelves are also in order: general psychology, politics, practical arts and how-to, writing and language, biography, and fiction. (Teaching, schooling, ASD, and gifted kids, are all in my office. Astronomy, Math and Woodworking will go in the Engineering Geek's office).







In honor of making the library a cool and comfortable place to read, and to assert the never-finished dogma of libraries, I ordered some new books this week: Bastiat's That Which is Seen & That Which is Unseen and his The Law, as well as Murray Rothbard's The Ethics of Liberty. The Amazon reviews for Rothbard's book promised that reading it will make me an anarcho-capitalist.





I also ordered Henry Hazlitt's classic Economics in One Lesson, and at Borders I picked up The Politics of Freedom: Taking on the Left, the Right and Threats to Our Liberties by David Boaz. He is a fellow at CATO.

This July the heat is bothering me more than last year--ah, the joys of RA--and the library-guest room is the coolest room in the house.




Although she has been subdued this morning after the strange and abberation of a fight with Lily last night, Shayna wagged her tail in the cool of the library this morning.


I hope the calm of the library will be a place for them to rest while I read through the heat of the remaining summer afternoons!


Summer afternoons, cozy winter evenings, happy spring and fall mornings--these are all times to curl up in platform rocker and read. As Jefferson said:


"Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves, therefore, are its only safe depositories. And to render even them safe, their minds must be improved to a certain degree." -- Notes on Va., 1782.


If I am not out and about, you'll find me in the comfortable but unfinished library, improving my mind!

Of An Ominous Financial Crash, An Ordinary National Election, A Trivial Tea Party

One of the great pleasures of finally setting up my library (after more than ten years of rooting in boxes), is the pleasure of re-reading old books that I own, after a long absence. One of the most intellectually delightful and challenging aspects of this rediscovery is reading with fresh eyes, from a different perspective in space and time, as well as experience and knowledge. Thus, ideas come together in new and interesting ways, keeping the mind active, and providing much welcome new understandings that can blunt the worry and concerns of our times.

So it is that a book that I had been thinking about came into my hand once again, out of the depth of a box labeled simply: Books (4/06)--Under-stair closet. Most of the books in these boxes had first been packed in the summer of 2000, when the kids and I moved from our rental house in Rio Rancho, to the first house I had ever owned; the one that I thought I would live in for a long time. Never unpacked for the nearly two years we lived in that house, they were moved again in early summer 2002, when the Engineering Geek and I married, and we moved into a house in the Far Northeast Heights of Albuquerque. Three years ago in April 2006, in the process of moving once again to this house in Sedillo, we unpacked boxes of his-and-hers books that had come to reside under the stairs in the walk-out basement, in order to give away about one third of them and move the rest. They were shuffled and re-packed, and I remember seeing this particular book, but neither of us had the leisure to actually read any of them.

So this book came to my hands again last Tuesday, a book that I had thought about quite a bit over the past half-year because of the events that are overtaking our country. The book is called The Fourth Turning, An American Prophecy: What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America's Next Rendevous with Destiny by William Strauss and Neil Howe. I stood there, among the half-emptied boxes, haphazardly piled books awaiting some semblance of order, feeling a sense of familiar excitement, as the book fell open in my hands. It opened to a chapter toward the end of the book, "A Fourth Turning Prophecy", and as I glanced down the page, I read:

"Sometime around the year 2005, perhaps a few years before or after, America
will enter the Fourth Turning . . . A spark will ignite a new mood. Today, the
same spark would flame briefly but then extinguish, its last flicker merely
confirming and deepening the Unraveling-era mind-set. This time, though it
will catalyze a Crisis. In retrospect, the spark might seem as ominous as a
financial crash, as ordinary as a national election, or as trivial as a Tea Party."
(Strauss & Howe, 1997, p. 272).

That last sentence, in particular, jumped out at me, demanded my attention, and sent a chill of recognition through me. "Wow," I thought. "This is an American Prophecy--not in the sense of reading the tea leaves, but in the more traditional sense of those who stand on the tracks and see the train coming from a long way off."

The authors, Strauss and Howe, published their first book together in 1991. It was called Generations: The History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069.In it, they present a history of the United States and a possible vision of the future drawn in broad strokes, told as the story of generations, each four of which has a particular archetypical "personality." From this Strauss and Howe have developed a theory that the lifecycle placement of these generations (childhood, young adulthood, middle-age, elder) influences the mood of all of them, and further, creates a seasonal cycle lasting 80 - 90 years, that they call the saeculum. This consists of an exuberant High "spring", a turbulent, fertile Awakening "summer", an unraveling social fabric "fall", and a Crisis "winter." They detect just such a cycle operating in Anglo-American history since the Reformation. In The Fourth Turning, Strauss and Howe go on to predict the coming of the new crisis, as the Boomers take their place as elders and the Millenial generation enters young adulthood.

I read The Fourth Turning in 1998, as a Strauss and Howe Unraveling Turning was approaching its end. They describe an Unraveling Turning as "a downcast era of strengthening individualism and weakening institutions, when the old civic order (created during the High) idecays and the new values regime (created during the Awakening) implants." (p. 3). When I read the book, I certainly identified with and recognized the Unraveling mood they were describing, and I had been walking through my life at that time with the strong notion that "this can't last." Therefore, I was receptive to the predictions they were making about a coming Crisis period, and I was interested to see how predictive their theory of the saeculum would be. Thus when 9-11 happened, I thought it might be that "spark", but later thought it was more likely an early warning of a still distant but approaching storm.

As the strange and apparently ominous events of the past half-year have been accruing, I have wanted to re-read The Fourth Turning, but all my rooting in the accessible boxes in the garage came up wanting. So I was anxiously on the lookout for the book as I began the task of making my library as planned in the Chem Geek Princess's old room (now the Guest Room/Library). Thus I was amazed when finally, I found the book and read the page that fell open, and that last, pregnant sentence:

" . . . the spark might seem as ominous as a financial crash, as ordinary as a national election, as trivial as a Tea Party."

When they were writing the book in the mid-90's, Strauss and Howe used these events as examples of the catalyzing spark because they were indeed the sparks that catalyzed the Crisis mood during the Fourth Turnings of one each of the last three Saecula: They identified the Boston Tea Party (1773) as the spark for the Revolutionary War Crisis, the election of 1860 as the catalyst for the Civil War Crisis, and the Crash of '29 as the spark that began the Great Depression-WWII Crisis that ended what they call The Great Power Saeculum.

But from the perspective of this past half-year, it seems that we are entering the Millenial Crisis via sparks pulled from all of these past catalysts. Since September of last year we have experienced a financial crash, a regular but divisive national election (the last of three such thus far), and this spring, tax-protest Tea Parties, the names of which were inspired by that of 1773.

The generations are all in place according to the Strauss-Howe paradigm as well: We have the inner-directed Idealist/Prophet generational archetype (Boomers) entering elderhood, full of fervor and moral certainty; the alienated and pragmatic Reactive/Nomad archetype (Gen Xers) entering mid-life; the outer-directed Civic/Hero archetype entering adulthood ready to be achievers; and just in past decade, a new, and likely Adaptive/Artist generation (Homelanders?) is being born. If these last grow up through a successfully resolved Crisis, they will be protected during the great doings, thus becoming risk-adverse and somewhat conformist in general, as a result of their childhood experience.

The human mind loves to find patterns, and it might be that the Strauss-Howe generational paradigm is just that, except that they provide very good historical evidence of the saecular rhythm in modern Anglo-American history. And now, as a Crisis appears to be catalyzing before our very eyes, the predictive power of the paradigm will be tested. In Generations they say:

"Anyone who claims to possess a vision of the future must present it with due
modesty, since no mortal can possibly forsesee how fate may twist and turn.
Readers who encounter this book fifty years from now will no doubt find [the
predictions it contains] odd in much of [the] detail. But it is not in our purpose
to predict specific events; rather our purpose is to explain how the underlying
dynamic of generational changes will determine which sort of events are most
likely." (p. 15).

Still, that one sentence in The Fourth Turning almost jumped off the page at me in light of the events that are catlyzing the coming Crisis. As I re-read this book, my new place in space and time, and in experience as a leading-edge Gen Xer (and I agree with this placement for me, at least), will likely create more of those "big chill" moments.

IRD Term II Week IV: Book Dreams

Yesterday I finished teaching week four of the IRD late summer term. Tomorrow I begin the last week of my summer job teaching reading skills to children and adults. The week went well--it was one of those flow weeks in teaching, where no problems seemed large, and I had fun with my students in different ways in all my classes. Nothing stood out, the week just smoothly went by. The lessons structure seems automatic to me now, as I approach the end, and so I have much more time to enjoy my students and enjoy, too, instructing them.

Although I am going to be really glad to have weekends back to spend with the Engineering Geek, the Chem Geek Princess, and Boychick (aka N.), I had a dream last night that shows that I am still going to be sad to see this summer teaching gig end. In my dream, I was at the IRD Offices on Ontario Street in the North River Neighborhood of Chicago. And I dreamed that we were having a celebration--a book celebration. The whole town had turned out, the kids and adults all wearing costumes and carrying their favorite book. John Boyd (the director of teaching) took us all on a tour of the crowded streets. We were collecting books and passing out books. As we walked along, I saw Frodo and his Fellowship. Boychick was dressed as Legolas, with long hair and bow. We turned the corner, and I saw Dicken's Pip, and Oliver Twist, and the Pickwicks. Across the street by the Lebanese restaurant, I saw Harry Potter, with Ron and Hermione in tow, all waving wands. We crossed Erie Street, and there was the Chem Geek Princess, carrying a box labeled Schroedinger's Cat. (It's Heinlein!) There was music, and, of course food! And we IRD teachers were working hard, passing out new books and collecting old ones and stacking them on the El Station Steps over Franklin Avenue.

I wonder if part of this dream came from my discussion yesterday with my Albuquerque adult class. We spent the last part of class reading and discussing Dana Gioia's speech On the Importance of Reading, which was published in the June 2006 issue of The Commonwealth. Many of the students were shocked and surprised about the decline of reading in the US and the importance of reading to civic values and American culture. Some were not impressed with Gioia's program, The Big Read. They said it was "lame." I think those who thought so were thinking it was too little, too late, and that education must be changed. (IRD president Paul Copperman did try to reform reading instruction in Americans schools, alas, to no avail). However, even the students who were critical of The Big Read, thought that Albuquerque ought to participate. So they took themselves off through a cloudburst to Starbucks to discuss it further.

Reading Gioia's essay always makes me think about Ray Bradbury's Farenheit 451,"the temperature at which paper burns." It is a novel about an American in which the TV screens take up all four walls and are interactive, and in which billboards on the highways get bigger and bigger as the traffic goes by faster and faster. It is an America in which firemen do not put out fires, but rather burn books because the consumers (they are no longer citizens) demanded to be protected against the kind of thinking that reading engenders. In the novel, some people leave the cities and become living books--they can recite an entire book or volume.

Our discussion last night, thoughts of Gioia's article, thoughts of the end of this summer teaching gig; all of these seem to have caused me to have book dreams last night.
I was told that I would not only learn to teach differently, which was a true statement; I was also told that I would be doing important work: The kind of work that would enable me to fulfill my reading passion by sharing it with others. Sometimes, when we are confronted with the brass tacks of our work, we forget the underlying reason for doing it. And then it comes back to us in dreams.

It's Always the End of the World As We Know It: A Review of The Little Ice Age

Today is the last day of the winter term break at UNM, and tomorrow I begin the spring term studies. My time to read what I want will become more limited as my spring semester studies begin in earnest by the end of this week. So over the weekend just past, I completed a book I had begun shortly after the secular new year.

Tomorrow is also Tu B'Shevat, the Jewish New Year of Trees, which is the Jewish Arbor Day, and has become a time to consider our dependence on Earth's ecology. It is therefore doubly fitting that I finished reading Brian Fagan's The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History 1300-1850. (Basic Books, New York, 2000) just this morning.

In honor of Tu B'Shevat, then, as well as a commemoration of 5 weeks in which I got a lot of miscellaneous reading done, I thought I'd discuss this book today on my blog.

I first heard about a climatic event called 'the little ice age' when I was working on a BS in Geology in Illinois in the early '80's. It was discussed briefly in the Historical Geology course I was taking, as well as later, in an Astronomy class that I took for fun. I knew it as a period of colder climate that affected primarily the northern hemisphere during the early modern period, that it was preceded by the Medieval Warm Period and followed by the Modern Warm Period, in which the earth's average temperature once again is stable, high and climbing. There was some speculation at the time that changes in ocean currents in the north Atlantic Ocean may have been a cause of the colder period that followed the Medieval Warm Period. Later, when I was studying Paleoclimatology under Dr. Roger Andersen at UNM, I heard more about how changes in water salinity in the north Atlantic could have stopped the warm Gulf Stream from crossing east south of Greenland, thus affecting the climate of Europe during the little ice age. So when I saw Fagan's book toward the bottom of the stack on weather at our little East Mountain Branch library, I thought I might find out more about this interesting period in European and Earth history.

I read the preface at the library, while waiting for N. to finish his selections. I tend to do this in order to decide which books that I have taken off the shelves are really worth checking out and lugging home. What really intrigued me was that Fagan promised the reader that he would not only discuss the little ice age in terms of the science we have now, but also the impact it likely had on European history, as well as how ongoing climate change might continue to affect us. Fagan wrote:

"Humanity has been at the mercy of climate change for its entire existence. Infinitely ingenious, we have lived through at least eight, perhaps nine, glacial episodes in the past 730,000 years. Our ancestors adapted to the universal but irregular global warming since the end of the Ice Age with dazzling opportunism. They developed strategies for surviving harsh drought cycles, decades of heavy rainfall or unaccustomed cold...(but t)he price of sudden climate change in famine, disease and suffering, was often high." (Preface p. xii).

Fagan then discussed the current state of the science of reconstructing the climatic fluctuations and what that means for what we know, saying: "...the Little Ice Age was far from a deep freeze. Think instead of an irregular see-saw of rapid climatic shifts, driven by complex and still little-understood interactions between the atmosphere and the ocean...the Little Ice Age was an endless zigzag of climatic shifts, few lasting more than a quarter century. Today's prolonged warming is an anomaly." (Preface, p. xiii).

I was hooked! This was going to be really interesting, especially given all of the controversy about global climate change in our discussion of the politics of the day. So often, as I have discussed here, we tend to think of the past climate as if it was one long now, with change only happening in the future, and we think in very short periods of time.

Fagan structured the book in four parts, each about a particular time period related to the subject, and each part is divided into chapters that discuss the the climatic shifts, the science behind their causes as we know them, and the related historical events and social changes that were affected, at least in part, by the climate. Part I, Warmth and Its Aftermath, gives information about the Medieval Warm Period and the social and agricultural activities that it affected, such as the Norse exploration of Iceland, Greenland, and North America (Vinland), and the increasing agricultural use of lands northwards and at high elevations in Europe. He then discusses the North Atlantic Oscillation (the NAO, similar to the ENSO cycle of the Pacific) and how the stability of the NAO contributed to the warm period and how the predictability of the climate encouraged the medieval European social structure called "the Full World" by the French. He then discusses how, by the end of the Medieval Warm Period, the NAO was weaker and more unpredictable, leading to the Great Famine of 1315 - 1321 signaled the beginning of the instability of the Little Ice Age.

Part II, The Cooling Begins, starts with a discussion of the 'climatic see-saw' that characterized the Little Ice Age. Here Fagan outlines the evidence for changes in climate found in tree rings and ice cores, and ties this information to events such as volcanic eruptions, and descriptions of storms and bad weather. He then outlines how these climatic changes first affected trade in the North Sea and with Iceland and Greenland, the breaking of the Hanseatic League monopoly on cod fisheries, and the abandonment of the Greenland Western Colonies. He also discusses the development of ships better able to withstand storms and ice, as well as the economics behind these changes and how they were precipitated, in part, by the climate see-saw.

In Part III, the End of the 'Full World,' Fagan turns to the organization of European agriculture at the end of the Medieval Warm Period, and the changes brought on by the onset of an unpredictable climate. He begins this part with a description of subsistence agriculture and what it means: farmers grow enough to feed a small number of people for that year, and they may harvest enough to survive one bad year, but no more. Fagan then goes on to explain how the rapid climatic shifts and many bad years during the Little Ice Age resulted in an agricultural revolution in Europe, but not all at once and not for everyone. Political structures and custom, as well as the varying impact of the unpredictable NAO on different regions, had much to do with which parts of Europe developed more intensive commercial agriculture and when. The Low Countries and England, both politically more innovative, did so first, and France, with its entrenched nobility and top-down decision making was dead last. The Little Ice Age, Fagan says, did not in itself cause the violence of the French Revolution, but climatic shifts resulting in a series of bad harvests had a hand in the timing of it. To me this part was the most compelling in the book, because in it, Fagan related events to a much more precise understanding of the climate at the time, for in discussions of more recent events, records using modern measurements of temperature and precipitation were available. This part ends with descriptions of two catastrophic events that came near the end of the Little Ice Age: the Year without a Summer brought on by the eruption of Tambora, and the 'Great Hunger' of the Irish Potato Famine, brought on by a combination of climate, oppressive political rule and indifference of the English, and the establishment of monocultural subsistence farming in Ireland.

Fagan concludes the book in Part IV, The Modern Warm Period, with a discussion of what we do and do not know about the causes of the current global warming. Currently, he says, the data show that we are experiencing warming equivalent to the Medieval Warm period, and thus can expect to see vineyards in Britain, and the movement of arable land northward and to high elevations. But is this the result of the cycle of warming and cooling that the earth has experienced since the end of the last glacial period, or does human activity (increasing greenhouse effect due to the burning of hydrocarbons) play a major role now? The answer, Fagan says, will not be definitively know for possibly 30 more years, although the evidence points to an increased role for human activity. This is because we are only now beginning to understand the role of solar activity (sunspot cycles--minimums and maximums, as well as changes in solar radiation) in producing earth's climatic cycles. (You can find more about this topic here). I found this little discussion compelling, and I want to share it with you:

"What form will this (new era of climate change) take? One school of thought...is serenely unfazed by global warming. Gradual climate change will bring more benign temperatures...milder winters and more predictable weather--much like earth in the time of the dinosaurs. Humanity will adjust effortlessly to its new circumstances, just as it has adjusted to more extreme changes in ancient times.

"The record of history shows that this is an illusion. Climate change is almost always abrupt, shifting rapidly within decades, even years, and entirely capricious. The Little Ice Age was remarkable for its rapid changes...(and) the same pattern of sudden change extends back to the Great Ice Age of 15,000 years ago, and probably to the very beginnings of geolocical time." (p. 213).

The very last paragraphs of the book describe how glacial melt-water flowing into the North Atlantic 11,000 years ago completely shut down the warm oceanic conveyor currents, and stopped an earlier warming period "in its tracks." This created the Younger Dryas, a 1,000 year long cold period that brought Europe to near-glacial conditions. It happened rapidly, within a decade or two, and was a complete climatic shift.

Fagan says: "Even if the present warming is entirely of natural origin...we and our descendents are navigating uncharted climatic waters. In that respect we are no different than medieval farmers or eighteenth-century peasants, who took the weather as it came. Today we can forcast the weather and model climatic change, but globally we are still as vulnerable to climate as were those who endured the famine of 1315 or the storms of the Spanish Armada...The vicissitudes of the Little Ice Age remind us of our vulnerability again and again..." (p. 217).

It will take me some time to really chew over the lessons of the Little Ice Age, its impact on history, its warnings for the future. But I can say now that one thing that made this book so fascinating and so compelling to my thought, was that Fagan did not, in the end, attempt to give a definitive answer about global climate change and its trajectory and causes. Nor was he overly prescriptive in what we ought to do, if anything, to meet its challenges. Rather, he shows us through eyewitness descriptions, science, literature and art, how suddenly, how irrevocably the world as we know it can change, and has changed. Indeed, when we face an unknown future, it's always "the end of the world as we know it."

My Lips Are Sealed

I finished the book. I will not reveal the ending.

We did not end up going to the midnight release EVENT for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. MLC and I decided that we would have a nice quiet Shabbat dinner with Bruce and then retire early so that we could pick up the books in the morning for a full day of reading pleasure.

Above: D., T., and N. picking up their books at a bookstore in Illinois. The three cousins caused no mayhem yesterday. They were too busy reading.

We got our books about 9:30 AM MDT and were ensconced in "comfy" chairs near the Seattle's Best counter with lattes in hand by 10 AM. I even had them put carmel in my latte. We were making our own morning release party. We had dropped Bruce off at the Hardware store, so we figured we had about an hour's reading pleasure. I got four chapters read before Bruce called.

We came home, had some lunch, and I settled in my red leather chair in the sitting room with some chocolate and tea and propped my feet up on the hassock. And I did not move again for about four hours. By then I was half-way through the book. I knew I was not following my plan to read a few chapters at a time, but I could not help myself. I could not put the book down! It had a spell on me!

After a short break to walk the dogs, I was back in my chair and I finished the book at about 10 PM. And then I read the first chapter aloud to Bruce. It was that good!

Today I have been wandering about in that post-book mixture of euphoria and sadness. You know the feeling--you've been in an alternate reality, a different world and you have grown to know and love the characters. They have become real. And now you have to re-enter your own world. So you are stuck between worlds for a while. A really good book just does that to me. This morning I re-read different parts, looking closely for the foreshadowing and literary allusions that will allow me to discuss the book. But not here. Not yet. My lips are sealed.

I think I will go back and re-read this book. Soon. That is how powerful it is.