OH MY GOD THE CHOSEN

The Chosen, The Chosen! Oh, the lovely lovely Chosen!

Basically I've been out hunting for new books for a while, and it turns out that with Christmas drawing nearer (we decorated our tree!) and exams stressing me out, all I yearn for is familiarity, so I went home and cleared out my bookshelves and brought back a whole bunch of familiar friendly books which divide cleanly into really good books and nostalgia:

Nostalgia:

Among Friends
Lost Boys
Thursday's Child

Good things:

An Old-Fashioned Girl (this one's borderline; I guess they don't divide all that cleanly)
The Moonstone (ditto)
all of the Harriet Vane & Peter Wimsey books except Busman's Honeymoon which I don't like
Catch-22
Rebecca
The Juniper Game (this book didn't receive nearly enough attention, and it was excellent)
I Capture the Castle
Miss Happiness and Miss Flower and Little Plum
Jack and Jill
The Color Purple
The Chosen

Anyway, by random accident I grabbed The Chosen when I went to brush my teeth last night, and I was brushing my teeth and doing my contact lenses and reading it, all this being preparatory to the shower-taking and the hair-washing (which has to happen without any books, sadly), and I think I would have been okay if I had read it more slowly, but I didn't, and I got to the bit where Danny shows up in the hospital, and then I was like, Oh, hey, I'll just keep reading until Reuven quits being a jerk to him, and then Danny was just so interesting that I couldn't stop. And I couldn't take a shower. I couldn't bring myself to get in the bookless shower. I just sat on the floor next to the tub in my pajamas and read and read and read The Chosen.

It is just that good. In fact, one of my friends who loves to read has not read The Chosen (she just told me), and I am just about as jealous as I would be if I knew someone who loved to read and had not read To Kill a Mockingbird and thus had the experience of reading it for the first time in the future, rather than the past.

If you have not read The Chosen, read The Chosen. It is as close to perfect as a book can be. It's elegant. Which isn't a compliment I throw around casually.

P.S. I went back and looked at emails I wrote to tim when we were fourteen and reading it for the first time, and apparently I was of the opinion, and God knows I quote, that the speculative themes of the novel were far too - oh, what is the word? - well, too subtle for most people of our age and they should hold off doing The Chosen until junior year.

What an appalling adolescent I was. Thank God all intellectual snobbery is behind me now.