My Expectations Are Always Waaay Too High

I was in Blackwell's today, which is the gargantuan corporate equivalent to Barnes and Noble, and I was buying a book for class. Well, two books: Kidnapped and Catriona by Robert Louis Stevenson. They come in a single-volume work, so it's kinda like getting two for one, no?

While I was queuing (Did you see that? British word used!), my eye alighted on an all-too familiar book, Jon Connelly's The Book of Lost Things. As the astute follower already knows, I have already read it, and although my eager child's imagination readily devoured the back cover and then the whole book, it was not satisfying in the way I had expected it to be. I wanted the characters to move with such grace that they left a trail of glowing dust in their wake, the writing to be so eloquent that I want to throw myself off the top of the cliff like the poet-bard in Martin's painting The Bard below, due to sheer ecstasy of spirit.

You may doubt that such a character can ever produce a result like that. I may be exaggerating a smidgeon, but Mara from Mara Daughter of the Nile was like that for me. She sparkled, and not in a vampire-like way. Think of Philip Pullman's golden dust from His Dark Materials Trilogy combined with Tinkerbell's pixie dust, and then add some of the glowing scenery from David Cameron's Avatar, a few 4th of July sparklers for good measure, and then you begin to get close to what I have in my head.

Connelly's book held such promise, but in the end it fell apart for me. It was still beautiful, but it did not sustain the expectations I had for it.

Aside from Connelly's book on the table, I saw another: The Boy with the Cuckoo-Clock Heart. Listen to its title in your head, say the name aloud. Cuckoo-clocks catch me; I remember a friend of mine in a high school creative writing class wrote a poem about cuckoo-clocks, and she capitalised on the rich consonants of the word. Cuckoo-clocks evoke, for me, a world that is slightly askance, Lewis Carroll-like, full of imagination and childhood.

We'll see what this book has in store for me. That is, if I ever get around to reading it this semester...