I was pretty flattened after three long days of training last week, and I ended up staying in for most of this one. Work is getting busy, but all those long, cozy hours at home meant I could curl up with books—recommendations from friends, books I picked up along the way, and those from my childhood.

One such book was the YA classic The Giver. I found it just as haunting as when I first read it as a kid, which may well have been my first encounter with dystopian fiction—thirty years ago! It’s crazy to me how the memory of particular scenes from the book came back to me. In that era of childhood, I was a real bookworm. I didn’t have anyone to discuss books with (it didn’t occur to me to do so) and I lived a parallel fantasy world in my mind.

Oh, what a treat to realize that Lois Lowry had turned this novel into a quartet. And as an adult, I can buy and read all of them at once! Ten year old me would have been over the moon.