Sarah Marquez > Recent Status Updates

Got 60% done and honestly just can’t bring myself to finish it.

My favorite parts of the book have been when the Harrisons are described to be “eating an elf ball” and similar descriptions that make what they are doing so normal. It was disturbing and a little stomach turning, which is kind of what I was expecting more of.

Assuming that Stephen King wanted to accurately portray life in 2021, some of the details are a little frustrating regarding the use (or lack thereof) of cellphones and their modern technology lol. Like the scene of Holly walking a character through finding a picture of Emily on the school’s website rather than just texting a screenshot. Book is ok so far.

Feeling like maybe this shouldn’t have been my first Stephen King novel. Some of the dialogue is pretty cringy, specifically the lines surrounding the vaccines. But overall I’m interested and reeled in enough that I wanna see how this is gonna end!

Also was a little surprised by how political it was in the first few chapters of Holly being introduced to the novel.

Definitely reads like someone from the 50s writing about the current state of the world. Which it is. Could be because I’m listening to the audiobook but I sort of felt that Holly was meant to be younger, yet the writing gives her an older tone of voice. Interesting read so far.

So many em dashes…

I had a ton of questions reading through this novel but I loved it. I think it was a great mental exercise and a reminder that the main character wasn’t always a reliable narrator. I had no idea where this was going in the final chapter but the open-ended ambiguous ending of it honestly made a lot of sense to me.

Honestly got a good scare from the part where Esther goes to DeeDee’s room for the sheet music. I guess reading it at 2:30am didn’t help. But I was bracing myself for something creepy to happen.

So far the book almost reads like journal entries to me. Snippets of Esther’s encounters and experiences, no real passage of time in between each experience, per se. I think the mention of those spies getting executed was a cool way to pin point the time period of the novel. Esther is a little weird, self-absorbed, and immature… but I can see she’s trying to get by in a world she doesn’t understand yet.

Esther is an interesting little character so… very self-absorbed yet somehow insecure.

Finally started this classic that’s been long-overdue sitting on my shelf after Matt Haig referenced it in The Midnight Library. Read up on Sylvia Plath again to refresh my memory and thought this was an interesting book to have made an appearance in The Midnight Library. Definitely not a coincidence by any means.

I’d like to see the size and impact of the Book of Regrets at this point in the story. Mrs Elm mentions it a few times and each time Nora doesn’t go for it. Looking forward to see how this book ends. The life Nora is currently exploring seems nice but it’s interesting that for her to take on a new life, she’s stripping “someone else” of theirs.

I’ve read a few negative reviews that complain about Nora’s personality and negative mentality, but I think I’m liking the fact that she’s not very likable (to me). I think that’s sometimes the reality of someone who only knows seeing their life and decisions as bad ones and being a pessimist - they’re frustrating characters to readers who are the opposite.

Interesting how each life Nora has explored so far has had some form of grief/loss weaved within it.