No, I'm not jealous of your Kindle/Nook/Kobo/iPad/GR!

     She was such a tease, I thought, smiling. Did she mean to be? She didn't like games; she'd said that. Could she be flirting? With me? Who could tell? All of this, her, she was an uncertainty. A mystery. Yet, when we talked, when we were together, she seemed so familiar. Seemed to know who I was, where I was coming from. She knew me better than I knew myself, I think. She was easy to be with.
     And I wanted to be with her, like all the time. Eliminate the obstacles, the people and things in our lives that were keeping us apart: Brandi, Seth, Kirsten, society, me.
     Me? Make that my fear. What was I afraid of, exactly? What other people would think? I guess, a little. But that wasn't what was stopping me from acting on my feelings. It was the intensity of them. The desire for her. I knew that if I gave into it, I'd have to surrender myself completely. I'd lose all control. Everything I knew, everything I was, the walls I'd built up to protect myself all these years would come crashing down. I might get lost in the rubble. Yet, she made me feel alive in a way I'd only ever imagined I could feel. Bells, whistles, music.

-Julie Anne Peters, Keeping You a Secret

I actually wasn't crazy about Keeping You a Secret, though it's a novel that is endorsed and loved by many as a YA lesbian novel. (Peters is probably better known for her novel Luna, actually, which I have not read.) For me the coming out teenage angst kind of felt like anything you'll probably find in a fanfic, thus why I tend to champion YA novels like Ash by Malinda Lo and A Love Story Starring My Dead Best Friend by Emily Horner. (And why are these novels written from the POV of the person coming out? Anyone know of a novel from the other way: the person who is out confronting the person who isn't and all that confusion?) But for some reason I was thinking about this novel today and opened it up; it showed me this page. When I read this novel, the writing didn't jump out at me, but it did today. Reading really is circumstantial.

I'm not rereading this novel at the moment. I am rereading An Instance of the Fingerpost by Iain Pears, which I read long enough ago to only remember vague points about the plot. Which is fine, since the beauty of it is in Pears' grasp of the unreliable narrator. It's really like four novels/novellas for the price of one story. XD I also just finished Dragon House by John Shors, but I'm not going to talk about that and will simply say that finding it in the bargain bin is no longer surprising to me. I told myself I'd work on the stack of gift books I have, but that stack of books will have to wait. D: