In Which We All Say Goodbye
There is a book that lives under my bed.
It has lived under my bed since I read it. It is a book that both fills me with hope and brings me utterly low and it is perhaps the saddest book I have read with the strongest message of purpose and this is why it lives under my bed. Oddly enough.
Today, I pulled it out and re-read Homeward Bounders. I also re-read another equally sad and uplifting at the same time book, Dogsbody.
I would have thought, all things told, I'd go for Howl's Moving Castle, my childhood love of a book and the one I still FROTH over in a fangirl fury. I found it, I went and I found the entire series and set them out and I even picked up Howl's to give it a read through.
And I couldn't.
So I went for the book that lives under my bed.
It's a funny thing, with authors. They're people you've never met and often know nothing about their actual lives. But they write these stories that touch you and change you and remake your world, just a little. They teach you things no one else can and then make you laugh and weep and cry and they're always there for you, because the books are always sitting on your shelf.
But then, one day, even if the books remain, the person behind them does not.
Rest in peace, Diana Wynne Jones.
It has lived under my bed since I read it. It is a book that both fills me with hope and brings me utterly low and it is perhaps the saddest book I have read with the strongest message of purpose and this is why it lives under my bed. Oddly enough.
Today, I pulled it out and re-read Homeward Bounders. I also re-read another equally sad and uplifting at the same time book, Dogsbody.
I would have thought, all things told, I'd go for Howl's Moving Castle, my childhood love of a book and the one I still FROTH over in a fangirl fury. I found it, I went and I found the entire series and set them out and I even picked up Howl's to give it a read through.
And I couldn't.
So I went for the book that lives under my bed.
It's a funny thing, with authors. They're people you've never met and often know nothing about their actual lives. But they write these stories that touch you and change you and remake your world, just a little. They teach you things no one else can and then make you laugh and weep and cry and they're always there for you, because the books are always sitting on your shelf.
But then, one day, even if the books remain, the person behind them does not.
Rest in peace, Diana Wynne Jones.