A lapse in reading regularity

Hi, all four of you readers!. :)

As you may have read on Facebook, I re-injured my back last week and the shop was closed while I healed. (If there's one drawback of owning and operating a small, independent business, it's running the show by myself and not having employees to cover for me!) Long story short, I was in a car accident as a teenager and have had back problems since. Last week, I found these AMAZING bureaus on a Facebook swap & sell page that I just HAD to have for my children, and I messed up my back pretty badly when I was moving one of them down some steep stairs. I'm talking pain worse than childbirth (I've given birth twice), and after the muscle relaxers and pain killers kicked in at the hospital, all I could think of was the transformation scene in An American Werewolf in London.

(This was pretty much me, complete with screams and howls, except I have less body hair.)

ANYWAY! I am back at the shop for normal hours and I have some new arrivals and recent reads to share with you!

Just before I took my forced staycation, I had picked up Secrets of Eden by Chris Bohjalian off the fiction shelf. I've been wanting to read another of his books since I read and loved The Night Strangers last year. While The Night Strangers is a supernatural thriller, Secrets of Eden deals with the mysteries and horrors of our very real world: religion, relationships, and domestic violence among them. I left the book at the shop the last time I'd been there so I look forward to reading it further this coming weekend.

Out of curiosity I checked to see if this novel had been adapted for film and I was surprised to find that it was a Lifetime movie in 2012. Did any of you happen to catch it? I've watched my share of Lifetime movies, and I think we all know how they are perceived and critiqued, but I would be interested in seeing it because I am liking the book so much. In the past few years I've been better able to separate books from their film counterparts- I had to, when The Giver was released- and tell myself that even when a movie is disappointing, it doesn't make the book retroactively bad.* But then there's the issue of John Stamos: I love me some Uncle Jesse, but he was definitely not who I was picturing as Pastor Stephen Drew when I was reading. 

Moving on... at home, in bed for a few days, I reread Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle, from my personal bookshelf. HAVE YOU READ THIS MASTERPIECE?? I thoroughly enjoyed it the first time I had read it several years ago, but this time I tore through it with zeal and hunger. It is truly brilliant. Sisters Merricat and Constance Blackwood live in seclusion with their frail Uncle Julian, keeping the townspeople at 10-foot-pole's length after a mass murder took place in the Blackwood home six years prior. Then a long-lost cousin arrives, disrupts the Blackwoods' strange and comfortable routines, and all hell breaks loose. This is a mystery told only as agonizing and patiently as Shirley Jackson can. Find yourself a copy. You won't regret it. 

In another IMDb curiosity search, I checked to see if there was an old movie version of this. There is not, but lo! There is one currently in post-production, starring Alexandra Daddario and Taissa Farmiga as the sisters Blackwood, and Crispin Glover as Uncle Julian. Perhaps encouraged by Hulu's excellent adaptation of The Handmaid's Tale, I'm quite curious and very anxious to see We Have Always Lived in the Castle on screen.

*Exception: It's been 15 years since its release, but I cannot bring myself to watch Tuck Everlasting ((shudder)).