sitting on the new chair on the old deck

so i've now reread all 7 harry potters and it was super. really. especially the latter books and especially 7 were different than i remembered. the first time around 7 was disappointing and i felt like it didn't answer so many questions i had and now i have to wonder if i was paying attention at all! the first time i read it, i tried to read it slowly and carefully and get all the meaning i could out of it, but i had come to the book with a ton of expectations. i had my questions all lines up so i wasn't paying attention when the questions were answered in a different order and in a different way that i might have thought. so this time i came to the book thinking "well here we go - the great disappointment" and boy, was i surprised! i am not kidding. i was very surprised at how many questions were answered and loose ends were tied up. i think i will read them all again, probably next summer.

right now i'm reading the dead fathers club by matt haig. i picked it up in the dollar store. spending $1 on a hardcover book is fairly low risk. if the publisher thought enough of it to publish it in hardcover, then there's got to be something going for it. i generally read the backs or jacket flaps or where ever the synopsis is to see if i think i will like it and this one sounded okay, so i got it, and i am glad i did. brits write differently than americans which i am sure is because they have a completely different world view and a different method of processing and thus verbalizing. their whole way of writing is different - the delivery is different. also, obviously, the vocab. some british books are americanized, and i think harry potter must have gone through a bit of that. this book did not go through that, so perhaps that is why it was on the dollar store shelf. i like it better this way althought i don't always know what the words mean. what's a "Ka car" or a "Ra Ra"? i can figure out bottle bank, and i know what crisps are. mad is crazy. clever is smart. thick is stupid. football is soccer. what is a "div"? what is "owt"? biscuits are cookies. tenner is money. what is a "radgey"? i am sure some stuff is slang and some is kidspeak. the narrator of this book is an 11-year-old kid. the plot is (apparently) hamlet, and if you know hamlet you'd probably be all OMG OMG all the time but i don't know hamlet well enough to get all the references. the narrator is phillip and phillip's dad is visiting him as a ghost and phillip's uncle is sleeping with phillip's mom and phillip's dad is encouraging phillip to get revenge b/c according to phillip's dad he was murdered by phillip's uncle, and so there you have it, hamlet. that part i get. and, phillip's dad came right out and said "to be or not to be" which was a bit obvious. but other than that i am missing most of the reference. the bottom line, though, is that this is a good book whether you GET that stuff or not.