“We all tell stories about ourselves, some repeated so often that we can honestly believe them to be the truth. Stories are our self-protective coating. Everyone has them, not only the people who have survived terrible families, though clearly they will have a larger canon than most.

And what narrative had I invented for my life with Dom? There were plenty, I now realized. Nothing important at first, but that’s the thing with stories–like lies, they start small. You play around to see what feels comfortable.”

Our weather this week has been so wonderfully representative of what I want fall to be. The nights have been cool and they create the perfect mood for immersion into Deborah Lawrenson’s novel, The Lantern. I hope everyone else has had time to get lost in the countryside of Southern France this past week.

Kailana supplied the questions for this second of three weeks of discussion. For those of you who are not reading the novel but want to, following along after the jump is something you do not want to do. Spoilers are present in abundance.

Continue reading The Lantern Group Read, Week Two →

“I have always been a reader. As a child, I loved books, though there weren’t many at home. But as soon as I went to school and was given one to look at the lovely pictures, and turned the pages to find more of the same, I was happy. Such colors and strange and vivid images! I marveled at how they were all closed up, asleep with their secrets unseen until you reached up and took the book down from the shelf.”

October is whooshing by at breakneck speed, yet I am doing all that I can to ensure that I revel in each fallen leaf and each cool night. Part of that revelry includes finally being able to read The Lantern. I’ve been looking forward to this group read for over a month as it is a book that I felt promised a moody, atmospheric, methodical (and I mean that in the best of ways) read that would embody the gothic spirit that is the inspiration for the R.I.P. Challenge. And here we are with the first week of our discussion. Thus far Deborah Lawrenson’s book is doing for me what I hoped it would do and I look forward to hearing your thoughts on it.

As with any group books discussion (as opposed to a ‘review’) there are potential spoilers in the questions and answers which follow. I hope that all of you who have already read the book will join in the discussion, just please remember not to leave any spoilers for those of us who have only read the first two parts of the book.

Continue reading The Lantern Group Read, Week 1 →