Bookish Thoughts

My only complaint about the first volume of the new Hawkeye series is that it doesn't contain the infamous Pizza Dog issue, which is half the reason I decided to start reading this series in the first place. The first volume contains the first five issues, which cover three stand-alone adventures followed by a two-part story. The point is to get a sense of who Clint Barton is when he's not being an Avenger, so the stories are pretty low-key. Barton isn't super-powered like the rest of the Avengers, he's just a regular guy trying to do his best. His adventures have less to do with saving the world and more to do with helping his neighbors fight an eviction. Barton is something of a modern day Robin Hood. He's got a ton of money, enough that he doesn't have to worry about it. But he lives in a low-rent apartment, using the money to help others instead. Or pay his hospital bills, because without any super powers his choices land him in the hospita...

I'll admit that it took me several starts to actually get into Jane Austen's Persuasion . It takes a bit to get in the right mindset to absorb the language in the book, and I must have read the first page 4 or 5 times before deciding it wasn't the right time and picking up something else. I finally forced myself to read it by bringing it on a 7 hour flight, and I'm really glad I did. Anne Eliot may just be my favorite of all of Austen's protagonists. This is probably because she's more mature than the rest, but she takes all of their best qualities and adds a few of her own. She's kind and considerate without being a pushover. Well, she was a pushover in her early years and that caused all of her problems, so she's grown out of it. She's perceptive in a way Emma and Lizzie fail to be, picking up on what all of Captain Wentworth's varying moods and interactions mean. And she's patient. She's so incredibly patient and so com...

I came across Roise Rua in a small bookshop in Donegal, Ireland. It was originally written in Gaelic by Padraig Ua Cnaimhsi and was later translated into English by JJ Keaveny. It tells the story of a woman, Roise, who was raised on the island of Arranmore, off the coast north of Donegal. Cnaimhsi spent many years interviewing Roise about her life on the island and used those interviews to put together the book, which is told from the first person perspective. The first two-thirds comprise an autobiography of Roise, and the last third is a collection of stories that either happened before her time or didn't fit into the main narrative. It was definitely an interesting read. Roise's life was so unlike anything I have any experience with. She spent most of her young life as a migrant worker, working as either a servant on farms in Ireland or picking potatoes in Scotland. The money was sent back home to her mother until she finally decided to settle down and get...

The Three Musketeers was a lot of fun, and a good book to read on vacation. But it was also completely absurd. Everyone in this book is a ridiculous idiot. They fight duels at the drop of a hat or a handkerchief. They share everything, but they also keep crucial parts of their lives secret. They honestly seem to cause at least half of their own problems and fix everything with either swords or guns. And no matter how fast they come into money, they seem to spend it faster and spend large chunks of the book destitute. The plot was certainly fun and entertaining, once it kicked in. But I just barely cared about any of these characters. The only one I came close to rooting for was Milady, because she tended to have the clearest motivations and the most direct plans to achieve her goals. But she was also doomed from the start, because of the genre of the book, so it was hard to get attached to even her. I would have had a harder time sticking with this book under differ...

I'll admit that I picked up Carlos Ruis Zafon's  The Shadow of the Wind  partly because it takes place in Barcelona and that's where we were heading for the first leg of our honeymoon. But I also read the sequel to it several years ago when my mother in law (I can finally say that!) read it for her book club and liked it. Picking this book turned out to be a spectacular idea. I'd read about a third of it by the time we landed in Barcelona, so I was already able to pick out some of the major landmarks on the way to the hotel. As I became more acquainted with the city, the book, which relies heavily on Barcelona's geography, became more alive. I couldn't place many of the smaller streets where characters lived, but when someone was cutting across town, dashing through the Plaza de la Catalunya or passing a specific cathedral, I was able to mentally trace their journey, and that added a lot to my experience of the book. The Shadow of the Wind ...

And so I've managed to come full circle in Marie Brennan's Onyx Court series, returning to the dragon that burned London to the ground. It was a lot of fun to read this series in not quite the right order. Especially as the characters I recognized from later books began to appear. In Ashes Lie is much more sprawling than any of the other books in the series. Where the others took place mostly over the course of a year or two, with a few flash backs to fill in story, this one spanned decades. It begins in 1639, with the rise of the Puritans in London. The political unrest of London and England at large is mirrored by Lune's own struggles to maintain control of her realm without turning into Invidiana, the cruel former queen. Her journey is closely tied to that of the royal family, and both the execution of Charles I and the return of Charles II match with major and similar events in Lune's own rule. The book ultimately culminates in the Great Fire of ...