13. Juni 195*

Myrtle, später bekannt als "Moaning Myrtle"

die Hogwartsschülerin stirbt, als die Kammer des Schreckens zum ersten Mal geöffnet wird und sie zufällig dem Monster begegnet. Sie bleibt danach als Geist auf Hogwarts, wo sie in den Wasserleitungen und Toiletten ihr Unwesen treibt. Erst Harry Potter und seinen Freunden gelingt es, die Umstände ihres Todes aufzuklären.

(Joanne K. Rowling, "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets", 1998)

Neu gelesen: (als E-Book)

Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper

Obwohl die Taschenbuchausgabe mittlerweile billiger ist als das E-Book, konnte ich einfach nicht länger widerstehen und lud es mir auf den Paperwhite. Und - natürlich - lohnte es sich doch, nicht nur wegen der unerwarteten Enthüllung am Ende der Anhörung und dem völlig überraschenden Ende (das vermutlich vielen Lesern das Buch verleidet hat), sondern auch weil viele Nebencharaktere genauso bewegend und mitreissend geschrieben sind wie die Hauptpersonen, und Picoult es schafft selbst die am negativsten erscheinende Figur der Mutter sympathisch und verständlich zu machen.

Normal, in our house, is like a blanket too short for a bed - sometimes it covers you just fine, and other times it leaves you cold and shaking; and worst of all, you never know which of the two it's going to be.
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Mr Hume, my science teacher, taught us about the primordial soup full of natural gases and muddy slop and carbon matter that somehow solidified into one-celled organisms called choanoflagellates...which sound a lot more like a sexually transmitted disease than the start of the evolutionary chain, in my opinion. But even once you get there, it's a huge leap from an amoeba to a monkey to a whole thinking person.
The really amazing thing about all this is no matter what yuo believe, it took some doing to get from a point where there was nothing, to a point where all the right neurons fire and pop so that we can make decisions.
More amazing is how even though that's become second nature, we all still manage to screw it up.
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When you have been with your partner for so many years, they become the glove compartment map that you've worn dog-eared and white-creased, the trail you recognize so well you could draw it by heart and for this very reason keep it with you on journeys at all times. And yet, when you least expect it, one day you open your eyes and there is an unfamiliar turnoff, a vantage point that wasn't there before, and you have to stop and wonder if maybe this landmark isn't new at all, but rather something you have missed all along.
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I try to work through the few things she has said, tracing them and trying to make sense of them the way the Greeks somehow found five points in the sky and decided it looked like a woman's body.
Then it hits me - I am looking in the wrong place. The Aboriginal people of Australia, for example, look between the constellations of the Greeks and the Romans into the black wash of sky, and find an emu hiding under the Southern Cross where there are no stars. There are just as many stories to be told in the dark spots as there are in the bright ones.
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There's an indigenous tribe in Africa that tells of life coming from the second star in Alpha Centauri, the one no one can see without a high-powered telescope. Come to think of it, the Greeks, the Aboriginals, and the Plains Indians all lived continents apart and all, independently, looked at the same septuplet knot of the Pleiades and believed them to be seven yuong girls running away from something that threatened to hurt them.
Make of it what you will.

(Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper, 2004)

Neu gelesen: (als E-Book)

Lianne Moriarty, The Husband's Secret

Auch dieses Buch wurde mir von meiner Fanfiction-Chatfreundin empfohlen (sincerest thanks, Fictionwriter91), anscheinend ähneln sich unsere Geschmäcker ziemlich, zumindest was solch fesselnde Familien- und Sozialdramen angeht. Für die bin ich sonst nicht so schnell zu haben wie z.B. für Krimis oder Fantasy, aber wenn sie dermaßen spannend und bewegend sind, gibt's bald kein Halten mehr. Dieses Buch, in dem die Leben von drei Familien verhängnisvoll miteinander verzahnt werden, ohne dass es je unrealistisch - oder zu sentimental - wird, war keine Ausnahme. Obendrein spielt es noch in Australien, was es noch einmal extra interessant machte (z.B. dass Ostern im Herbst gefeiert wird, fand ich bemerkenswert). Diese Autorin ist schonmal vorgemerkt.

Neu gelesen: (als E-Book)

Jodi Picoult, The Pact

Das ist das bisher früheste Buch von Picoult von denen, die ich bisher gelesen habe, und im Nachwort bestätigte sie nur noch einmal, was mir schon während der Lektüre klar war, dass dieses Buch für sie ein Wendepunkt bei ihrer Art zu schreiben und Thematik darstellte. Ich muss zugeben, dass ich froh war das Buch ganz unvoreingenommen lesen zu können; für Eltern von Teenagern und auch Teenager selbst muss es eine echte emotionale Herausforderung sein. Schon so war es bestürzend genug. Und machte - natürlich - Lust auf mehr. Viel mehr.

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Jodi Picoult, Vanishing Acts

Mein viertes Buch von Picoult ist der bisher am breitesten gefächerte - als ob die Kernstory von der Entführung noch nicht genug wäre, geht es hier um Alkoholismus, Gefängnisleben, Kultur und Traditionen der Hopi, mexikanische Hexen, die Arbeit der Rettungsspürhunde, die Authenzität und Manipulation von Erinnerungen - und alles wie immer unglaublich packend und nahegehend in einer faszinierenden Geschichte zusammengefaßt. So allmählich macht mich die Autorin süchtig.
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Sometimes parents don't find what they're looking for in their child, so they plant seeds for what they'd like to grow there instead. I've witnessed this with the former hockey player who takes his son out to skate before he can even walk. Or in the mother who gave up her ballet dreams when she married, but now scrapes her daughter's hair into a bun and watches from the wings of the stage. We are not, as you'd expect, orchestrating their lives; we are not even trying for a second chance. We're hoping that if this one thing takes root, it might take up enough light and space to keep something else from developing in our children: the disappointment we've already lived.
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I suddenly remember being very little and being embraced by my father. I would try to put my arms around my father's waist, hug him back. I could never reach the whole way around the equator of his body; although I'd squeeze hard, he was that much larger than life. Then one day, I could do it. I held him, instead of him holding me, and all I wanted at that moment was to have it back the other way.
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"It just goes to show you," my father told me, on the last good day, "the world's only as big as what you know."
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I realize suddenly, that everyone is a liar. Memories are like a still life painted by ten different student artists: some will be blue-based; others red; some will be as stark as Picasso and others as rich as Rembrandt; some will be foreshortened and others distant. Recollections are in the eye of the beholder; no two held up side by side will ever quite match.

(Jodi Picoult, Vanishing Acts, 2005)

I was six years old the first time I disappeared.

(aus: Jodi Picoult, Vanishing Acts, 2005)

Neu gelesen: (als E-Book)

Margaret Atwood, Good Bones

Die Synopsis reizte mich, weil das Buch so kurz ist, keine Handlung, nur Gedankenspielereien und Betrachtungen, und die allesamt witzig, bissig, nachdenklich stimmend und immer höchst unterhaltsam. Besonders "Adventure Story", über die Reise der Spermien, mein persönlicher Favorit und nicht zuletzt, weil hier die Helden geschlechtsmäßig gleich aufgestellt sind:

(You may think I'm talking about male bonding, or war, but no: half of these are female, and they swim and help and sacrifice their lives in the same way as the rest.)
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though even stupid women are not so stupid as they pretend: they pretend for love.
Men love them because they make even stupid men feel smart: women for the same reason,
and because they are reminded of all the stupid things they have done themselves,
but mostly because without them there would be no stories.
No stories! No stories! Imagine a world without stories!
But that's exactly what you would have, if all the women were wise.

aus: Margaret Atwood, Good Bones, 1992