Decisions and Revisions

The other day, I was chatting with my friend Leslie about the book Swamplandia!, which she had just finished. It's been over year since I read it and was slightly disappointed by it. Since I suffer from mild bouts of literary amnesia, I started racking my brain to remember the specifics of the book. To my amazement, so much of the book quickly came back to me. Specific plot points, characters, and details were vividly there in my memory, right alongside the gut wrenching, tense feeling that I had as I read the book. It's so rare for a book to stick with me like this that it's actually led me to change my prior opinion . In many ways, my initial thoughts on the book were mostly in reaction to the fact that the story was much, much darker than I was expecting it to be. It is very dark, and depressing and terrifying by turns, but the fact that it's remained so memorable for me leads me to think that Karen Russell really pulled off something special with her writing. In fact, I'm even starting to think that Swamplandia! might deserve a place on this list.

Have you ever changed your mind about a book after some time passed from your initial reading?

(Random note: this image is from the original hardcover edition of the book, which I hadn't seen before since I read the paperback. For anyone else who's read the book- is that supposed to be the bird man in the illustration? I feel chills just looking at this knowing that's a possibility!)