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November 2025 will now be known as the month I first read We Have Always Lived in the Castle!
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#Bookly #BooklyApp

4 ⭐️s
It was eerie in a reverse sort of way. 😅(Can you tell it‘s been MONTHS since my last review?) The Lottery has haunted me since grade school, and in its own way, this will haunt me for the foreseeable future.

Happy to finally have a finished book under my belt again. 😅 Even if it is a wee one. Take THAT, reading slump!

This weekend I started my second by Shirley Jackson! So far I‘m liking the buildup and definitely want to read more about the main characters.

🍁 Loving the fall background @rachelsbrittain !

#weekendreads

#monthlywrapup

This story was more complex than I expected. At first I was creeped out by the family. There's Merricat, who's is 18 but acts like she's maybe 12. There's Uncle Julian droning on about his damn papers and obsessing on the infamous familial incident. However, events occur that make me empathize with the family and truly appreciate the story. I think this story has a lot of hints and layers and deserves a reread at some point.

I‘m glad I finally read this. I didn‘t find it scary, really, but I loved the unsettling feeling that grows throughout the story. Definitely creepy. I really liked Merricat and Uncle Julian, and definitely did NOT like Charles.

“From a deep sleep [Jonas] would start suddenly, lifting his head as though listening, and then, on his feet and moving in one quick ripple, he ran up the stairs and across the beds and around through the doors in and out and then down the stairs and across the hall and over the chair in the dining room and around the table and through the kitchen and out into the garden where he would slow, sauntering, and then pause to lick a paw…”

An unsettling and interesting read! I love Jackson! Merricat's bizarre witchy rituals, Julian's stilted rememberences, Constance's utter isolation - it's all so deeply uncomfortable. We can never know the truth, we can never trust anyone, we are all ultimately completely alone. But you have to forget those things, everyday, in order to move forward. And damn if Shirley Jackson doesn't just slap you in the face with how tenuous it all is.

Haunting, yes. Memorable, perhaps. But for me, Jackson‘s longer fiction doesn‘t quite cast the same spell as her shorter works.

Started last night (I have very little respect for sleep and reading sounded better) and finished this morning.

This one isn't so much scary to me as creepily unsettling. I just love how the language in this book keeps me feeling uneasy.

I‘ve had a friend tell me that I need to read this book for years… but I hated its creepy cover so I put that recommendation on the back burner until I stumbled across a copy at the library with a less creepy cover! And she was right, I did like this odd little book!

Its appeal lies in how unreliable a narrator Merricat is and how open to interpretation all the events are. It‘s a quietly, unsettling read that I suspect will stay with me.

I honestly thought this was going to be a story of the house told by the POV of Mericat but was I wrong.

It's a haunting read of two sisters and their uncle, the remnants of a family, living through the ordeal of a very public murder of their family, a very suspicious and nosy town, and the greed of a cousin calling to prey.

So glad to have read this and be able to knock another book off my TBR and the final book of 2024!

Brilliant! Not as chilling as The Lottery but I was unable to put it down. Four hundred five thousand stars.

It‘s a remarkably complex story for one so short, and you can read a lot into it. I read it as a book about isolation – physical and psychological – and cruelty. It will send shivers up your spine, and it will no doubt frustrate you at times, but it‘s still an arresting read and you‘ll struggle to look away. Full review: https://keepingupwiththepenguins.com/we-have-always-lived-in-the-castle-shirley-...

A classic gothic horror about a family with dark secrets. I did guess the mystery, but the journey was entertaining and the sense of dread and the darkness of humanity was so well written. 4⭐️

Thanks to @TheSpineView for the #Two4Tuesday tag! 🤗

1️⃣ Soup, soup & more soup! 🍲🥄🥣😋

2️⃣ The tagged us a favorite for this time of year. It‘s set in late summer/early fall & has a spooky/creepy vibe. 🍁👻🍁

Who hasn‘t played yet? 🍁🤗🍁

This was…not bad. It was an interesting sort of character study of three isolated relatives - one an old man not quite lucid, an agoraphobic but sweet older sister, and a young sister who seems much younger and innocent than normal. And that‘s about it 😂. I thought it was going to be scary but it just wasn‘t. It had a twist but I didn‘t really care about it 🤷🏼‍♀️. I did enjoy it overall, it just wasn‘t what I expected. 🌟🌟🌟💫

This is my recommendation for #HauntedShelf participants. It's creepy and spooky and IMO, even better than Shirley Jackson's better-known The Haunting of Hill House.

I also adore this updated Penguin Classics edition that my family gifted to me, with the penguin in the cat's clutches.

#Flerken @PuddleJumper

#Bookreport

📚Currently reading:

📕Fire & Blood
📕Akechi Kogoro
📙The Witness for the Dead

Progress:

Didn't listen to a lot of F&B last week due to the construction noise of our roof, but I did manage to finish one book. I hope to jump back into F&B this week.

Definitely an interesting read, but like Jackson's other work seems to be that I've read, it's very bare bones in terms of plot, even for a short book. I feel as if it gave us a bit more it would have been far more interesting. What I mean is instead of developing the plot points, the author leaves them as statements. The atmosphere was chilling and the character study was fascinating. I found myself wanting to read it more.

Catch up from yesterday #AboutABook

Starting to think about fall & the spooky season & these are two books I‘ve reread & think I might read them again in October. #YouveReRead

This novel is...bizarre, which is, at times, delightful and, at other times, very disconcerting. Pretty much what I expected from Shirley Jackson.

#WondrousWednesday not been on Litsy for a while, ever since the Android app was removed! I still find the website very fiddly! @eggs

Another Jackson title on sale for 99 cents today.

4-/5 ⭐️
Una lettura molto piacevole, nonostante parlasse di una famiglia nella quale la maggior parte dei membri sono morti avvelenati

This was a weird and engrossing tale, the dynamics between characters was fascinating and right now this audiobook is included with my Audible membership!

@Yuki_Onna #SundayFunday

I don‘t usually! But there are a select few that I do enjoy 😊 and a few that I would definitely consider rereading/plan to!🐰💕

“They are the children of the strangers,I told her. They have no faces. They have eyes.
Pretend they are birds. They cant see us. They don't know it yet. they don't want to believe it, but they wont ever see us again.”

#HauntedHouse
#StorySettings

@Alwaysbeenaloverofbooks

My second Shirley Jackson and this one was even better than The Haunting of Hill House. The Blackwood girls live with their uncle in their big, family home, shunned by the town because of suspicions of poisoning the rest of their family. Their lives revolve around mealtimes and ritual. Told from the perspective of the youngest sister, Merricat, she is methodical, has a unique view of the world, and protects the house and her sister (👇🏻👇🏻👇🏻)

Thanks for the tag, @barbarabb Below is my tentative #top23of23 I say tentative because I have the following week off & there is the very real possibility that I will read another book before the end of the year that would make the list; As of right now, my 23 favorite reads of the year are: (in no particular order):
1) We Have Always Lived In the Castle-Shirley Jackson
2) The Color of Magic-Terry Pratchett
3) After the Quake-Murakami
(CONT)

“I was pretending that I did not speak their language; on the moon we spoke a soft, liquid tongue, and sang in the starlight, looking down on the dead dried world.”

Honored to share a birthday with Shirley Jackson. Remembering her today.

This was an interesting read. The story wasn‘t mind-blowing by any means, but I was entertained no less.

A cautious pick - as weird as people say but not nearly as spooky as I was expecting. More like intense melancholia.

1. I connect literary references. I color coordinate without thinking about it ?‍♀️. Mom mentioned I take two hours long bathes. I don‘t think that‘s all that quirky. 2. The above and anything by Angela Carter. #two4Tuesday @TheSpineView

Rereading this favourite 😻

This is a reread for me, and I think I loved it more this time around.

Shirley Jackson is a goddess of her craft, and the way she spins a story, building the atmosphere and suspense, is pure perfection.

The dysfunction of this family and the relationship between the sisters makes this a great read that will mess with your head in all the best ways.

Fall vibes 🍂🍁🎃

Could only be described as creepy in a whimsical way. Kinda boring and I did expect something scarier or spookier to happen bc of the creepy cover. But I liked the relationship between the sisters, it redeemed the book for me

This is a great read, quite creepy and chilling. The sisters Constance and Mary Katherine are both great characters. From reading it feels like Mary Katherine is 12 or 13, but she is 18, I think. The sinister feelings of the villagers to the Blackwood family are great, and the cover really tells you all you need to know about it. This is my second Shirley Jackson book and definitely will read more.

In June for the past couple of years I have started posting my favorite reads so far of the year. For the rest of the month I will be posting my 15 favorite reads that I have read so far. These will be posted in the chronological order in which I read them.
With the completion of We Have Always Lived etc, there is only 1 unread title in Jackson's bibliography for me. I have said for years that she is a favorite & this is Jackson at her (cont)

These are two books I bought today! #books

Book: Tagged*White Teeth*Who Will Run the Frog Hospital*White Is For Witching*White Noise*What We See When We Read*War of the Worlds*Wind-Up Bird Chronicle*Wind in the Willows*Wuthering Heights
Author: V. Woolf*J. Wyndham*J. Winterson*J. Williams*C. Whitehead
Movie/TV: Whatever Happened to Baby Jane*Wages of Fear*Westside Story (Spielberg)*Walker (starring Ed Harris)*Wicker Man ('73)
Singer/Band: Wilco*Warpaint
Song: (cont.)

😳Jan 7th 2023

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ I think Jackson is becoming a favorite author; her stories never let me down!

What a perfect start to the year with a perfect little book. This was fabulous! Even better that I only picked it up a few days ago at a secondhand book shop for $3. It‘s been on my tbr list for sooooooo long.
I loved everything about this one and was so relieved that Jonas was not harmed, anything but that! 🐈‍⬛
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