I am very slow with completing books this semester, so I thought that it would be fun to have a progress report of my reading.  This is an online reading group where all the participants set aside time to read every Sunday and blog about the experience.

 I continued the book I started two weeks ago. St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves makes for good reading while in law school.  The short stories are easy enough to read quickly, but bizarre and filled with enough twists to keep my attention.  This morning I read "The City of Shells," which was surprisingly sad. The cleverness of the author's writing is how she manages to pack in a lot of subtle twist and turns, but then still manage to have a quick ending.  In some of the stories I found this frustrating because I wanted the characters to have more resolution.  I also realized that many of the short stories feature water--- either the ocean or rain.  This week I also read the following stories in this book: "from Children's Reminiscences of the Westward Migration" and "Lady Yeti and the Palace of Artificial Snows." Both of those stories featured characters with rough transitions.  Of the three stories, my favorite was the one about Westward Migration.  In that story, I liked the relationship between the father and son.  In the Lady Yeti story, I found myself disturbed by the sexual undertones. 

Another theme that is emerging from the stories is the poor choice of friends. As an awkward kid, I had a strong desire to be accepted by the cool crowd.  However, the acceptance into the popular crowd sometimes means giving up other things you enjoy.  The stories do a good job of illustrating this conflict.  Some of the main characters betray family members or old friends in favor of acceptance by "cool kids" or as I like to refer to them "assholes."   Of course, I know that I can pass judgment easily as an outside reader, but if I were in the same situation, I may not have chosen any differently.  I really like the way the characters are coming to life and I look forward to finishing the last three stories this week.