Today was a typical Tuesday, for the most part. We had a small birthday celebration for a coworker at the office this afternoon, with cookies and brownies and a card I don’t remember being asked to sign. It’s not really his birthday, but he’ll be out the rest of the week at a conference. Then this evening, my parents and I celebrated my father’s birthday, which is actually today. There were presents and cake and all that good stuff.
And meanwhile, the weather outside has just be lovely.
Oh, and I finished reading William Sleator’s House of Stairs. I don’t have a lot to say about it, except that I can maybe see the influence it had on the movie Cube, and that ultimately I was left kind of disappointed. It was one of those books, like A Wrinkle in Time, for instance, that I probably would have loved if I had read when I was younger but now…
Still, lovely weather.
House of Stairs freaked the ever-lovin’ hell out of me when I was a kid. I went back and re-read it a few years ago, and while I could still more or less see why it freaked me out, it didn’t have anywhere remotely near the same impact. I’ve come to the conclusions that Sleator’s stuff in general really is best read when you’re young, before you’ve already encountered any of the concepts he’s using anywhere else.
It felt much too telegraphed to me, and not at all surprising, but I can definitely see how I might have felt differently if I’d read in when I was a kid. I’d seen this one hyped at a lot of places as a great, semi-forgotten young adult novel, and maybe that’s true, but I’m not going in search of Sleator’s other books.