My reading in 2025 has slowed a bit, at least as charted by my blog. Actually, I'm in the middle of some big tomes so rest assured that I'm still percolating along. This morning I finished Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle, which is definitely not a massive tome, but I started while taking a short break from the longer works. It's embarrassing to admit that I've never read any Shirley Jackson, not even her famous and influential short story "The Lottery." I've seen a couple different film versions of The Haunting of Hill House, although, inexplicably, I've never read the original (although I'm going to check it out now). I've seen We Have Always Lived in the Castle referenced as her masterpiece, but since I haven't read her other work I don't feel qualified to reflect on the validity of that statement, but I will say that I loved the novel and highly recommend it.
The opening of the novel is, justifiably, appreciated: "My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead. . . . The last time I glanced at the library books on the kitchen shelf they were more than five months overdue, and I wondered whether I would have chosen differently if I had known that these were the last books, the ones which would stand forever on our kitchen shelf." The narrator, rendered by her sister as Merricat, is the perfect voice for a Gothic novel, and that's usually how the work is described. Jackson perfectly captures the general creepiness of New England.
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