Kevin

   Whenever I end up not packing enough books for any sort of trip, I will read whatever I can get my hands on. Once while on family vacation I blazed through the books I had brought so my mom said, "Why don't you read this?" to quell my ever-increasing complaints of "WHAT AM I GOING TO DO, WHY AM I EVEN ALIVE" and it was a book for children about anthropomorphic pigs and I said "give it to me" then read it in an afternoon and spent the rest of the week reading too many Good Housekeeping articles and, I don't know, staring into the eternal blue void. There was another time when I was sitting in an airport and I realized that I had stupidly packed all of my books in my checked luggage (who makes that kind of rookie mistake?!?) so I made a visit to the over-priced airport bookshop for people like me and that's how I came to read The Hunger Games.

   All this to say: I was not mentally prepared for We Need to Talk About Kevin / Lionel Shriver. My reading material sources were limited, I was about to leave a hostel, had just finished my last book, and was scanning the book-exchange shelf (a glorious invention), and it seemed the best non-romance, non-terrible-sci-fi/fantasy option available. Anyways the book is about Kevin, and the school-shooting he carried out, and how his mother deals with it, and will haunt you for the rest of your days. You will probably feel the need to write your own book, called I Need to Talk About We Need to Talk About Kevin.

   I read it while far from home, and kept emailing my sister about it (sorry, Meghan) saying things like "what the heck?" and "pretty sure such and such is going to happen" and "IT HAPPENED OH MAN I'M DYING", and when I finished it I couldn't stop thinking about it. When I was back in Calgary I found a friend who was experiencing the exact same thing, so we talked and talked and talked about it. There was a lot of "I know!" and "and then the part where.." and "what would you do?" and so on.

   This isn't really a review and I'm not really recommending that you actually read this book. I'm writing this largely because I was sitting at my desk in the library when all of a sudden my brain was all, "hey, hey, remember that Kevin book?" and I needed to talk about it (see what I did there?). I also felt compelled to listen to Applause by Lady Gaga earlier so maybe it is just one of those days.