Bookish Thoughts

The Dark Knight Returns  is another of Frank Miller's Batman mini-arcs. This one is four issues long and takes place a decade after Batman has retired. But he decides to jump back into the action because, well... Look, reading comics is a skill. One I don't entirely have. You don't just read them. You look at the art. You take it all in. You think about it. And I probably read this one too fast. I might read it again some day and then I'll have a better understanding of what happened. But here's what I think happened. Harvey Dent has been rehabilitated, according to his psychiatrist. And his plastic surgeon has managed to fix his face. So they're releasing him from Arkham Asylum. Even though Bruce Wayne publicly supports this, it seems to trigger Batman into making a reappearance. In the meantime Police Commissioner Gordon is nearing retirement and a gang of mutants are trying to kill him. Oh, and the Cold War with Russia is still going on.

The Fellowship of the Ring is the first third of JRR Tolkien's epic fantasy classic The Lord of the Rings . But you probably already knew that. These books are pervasive, especially since the release of the movies nearly a decade ago. I read this book first when I was thirteen. And I didn't quite get it. The story is fun and interesting, but the world is so rich that I got bogged down. I couldn't keep Aragorn's five names straight. I didn't quite understand that the Nazgul and the Ringwraiths were the same thing. I conflated Saruman and Sauron and processed both names as Sa__r__on which led to lots on confusion. But I liked what I understood of the story. The hobbits were awesome. The adventure was exciting. The myriad cultures were interesting. The movies started coming out a few years later and really helped with my comprehension of the story. I finally sorted everything out and understood what was happening. Now that I'm revisiting the books

Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre is a much longer book than I was expecting it to be. This is partially because I read it on my kindle and had no physical sense of how big the book was when I started it. It was also not at all what I expected. I'd just finished Pride and Prejudice and Little Women and for some reason I was expecting a similar story, which is part of why I started reading it But right off the bat I had to toss my expectations out the window. The opening chapters of the book reminded me strongly of the beginning of Harry Potter . Ten-year-old Jane is an orphan living with her uncle's widow. She suffers from an abusive cousin and a neglectful aunt and can never seem to please anyone. No one arrives to tell Jane that she actually has magical abilities, but she is whisked away to a boarding school for orphans where things get marginally better. And by better, I mean that no one beats her or locks her up, but they do still starve and freeze her

Pride and Prejudice is a great book. Reading it made me really happy. That may be because I know the story so well. Though I've only read the book once before, I've seen the movie tons of times. The one with Keira Knightley. I adore the cinematography, especially in the party scenes. So I knew exactly what was coming at each turn. But this time through, I gained a better appreciation of Darcy's evolving feelings for Elizabeth. I hadn't really picked up on it in my first read, but the way he starts to fall from her almost from the beginning is well-executed. Of course, if he'd begun to fall for her from the beginning, they could have saved a whole lot of confusion. But then there wouldn't be a book. Really, this is a classic for a reason. Jane Austen is a master of the romantic comedy. You know the characters will all get a happy ending; it's just a matter of watching them get there. And that journey is a lot of fun.

I first started Louisa May Alcott's Little Women about fifteen years ago. I had learned a few basic things through osmosis: Jo likes to write, Beth dies, it takes place in Massachusetts. I made it about to Beth's brush with scarlet fever and stopped because I didn't want her to die. A few years later I received another copy of the book and made it about as far. And so, for many years, the books sat on my shelf. One paperback and one hardcover, with bookmarks in nearly the same place. I carted them both from apartment to apartment and across the country, determined to finish the book one day. A few weeks ago I was taking stock of my bookshelf to determine what I owned but hadn't read yet and decided that I was going to read Little Women once and for all. I would make it to the end, despite Beth's death, and I would finally learn what became of the other March sisters. I ended up mostly enjoying the book. It got a little repetitive and a little