Probably the last read of 2005

For Xmas, my lovely Celeste got me a copy of "How I live now" by Meg Rosoff and I finished reading it yesterday with tears in my eyes.

Although some found it irksome that there was a lack of detail about the War that forms the crucial backdrop to Rosoff's novel, for me this perfectly captured the self-absorbed sense of teenagehood and especially of it being the incomprehensible 'thing' that interrupts the relationships of teenagehood.

A beautifully brief read with matter-of-fact horrors and pleasures in uneven abundance. Not the "classic" some have proclaimed it to be (that word should be banned from being offered to anything not yet 10 years past, however well deserved), but nevertheless a touching piece of writing with a magnificent central character in Daisy. Worth reading if you haven't already.