This pug is how I felt this week. Courtesy of Unsplash/Matthew Wiebe.

My oh my, it's been a week. I'm about to hop on the caboose of the #truthtrain, so strap yourselves in.

I spent most of last week chugging toward the weekend, only to have it arrive and not be able to turn off my ever-buzzing brain enough to enjoy it. (Yay, GAD!) I didn't even have lofty plans: visiting a new coffee shop, baking some cookies, getting some reading done. And not one of those things happened (EDIT: lies, I did read A Wizard of Earthsea and will soon be posting about how much I loved it). Instead, I sat on the corner of my couch and fretted. My boyfriend was feeling a bit antsy himself, so we had trouble with our stress feeding into each other. Even the thing that calms us both down (getting some exercise) didn't work its usual magic.

I also did stuff like this:

That's not to say that doing that was bad; I'd been meaning to reflect on this question for a while, and lists help me settle my thoughts down into more manageable chunks. Unfortunately, this one just made me even more obsessive, and not in a way I could channel into productivity (researching programs, reading publications, etc.).

I finally started feeling calm on Saturday evening... only to have a moderate-to-severe allergy attack on Sunday afternoon. A faucet for a nose and hot, itchy skin aren't conducive to tranquility.

ANYWAY. It's a new week, and I'm going to treat it that way.

I was going to share the opening of In Cold Blood by Truman Capote with you all for Bibliophile by the Sea's First Chapter, First Paragraph Tuesday Intros, but it just deleted itself from my Kindle. *shakes fist at library lending periods*

Also, I'm not into today's Top Ten Tuesday topic, so I'm going to make up my own listicle. HA. Take THAT, Broke and Bookish.




I read The Valley of the Dolls at some point late in high school. I guess I wasn't necessarily *too* young to be reading it, but as someone who'd barely had a sip of alcohol before college, I couldn't exactly relate to their level of partying. This goes in the same category as Less Than Zero, which I read around the same time. I was just so ~edgy~, you guys.

I know I found my mom's copy of She's Come Undone while we still lived in my childhood home, so this was a pre-14 read... I was probably around the same age as the protagonist, Dolores, when we first meet her. I scarcely remember the story now, but I do know there was plenty of disordered eating, body hatred, and weird sex.

I took The Bell Jar with me to summer camp when I was thirteen, because nothing says summer fun like existential crises and suicidal tendencies in New York City, am I right? I'm pretty sure I read this one multiple times, but I still don't remember it. It's one of those books I sometimes think about re-reading, but honestly, I think I got the gist well enough the first few times.

Really, this one could be "any Chuck Palahniuk at all," but Haunted takes the cake. I think this one came around late high school as well, and it's another example of how alternative and out there I was as a teenager. I distinctly remember stealing one of the nastier plot points for my own short stories. Oops. "Guts" will forever haunt (hehe) my dreams (and those of some unwitting bookstore patrons). Why did I do this to myself?

What are some books you probably should have waited to read? Or, ahem, not read at all?