I decided to change the name of my weekly reading journal post. There’s a bit of nostalgia attached to the name. Way back when I was a elementary school student in the 1970’s, there was a publication called The Weekly Reader that was sort of a magazine for students covering current events. I loved reading it. I understand that it was discontinued in 2012, but I don’t remember either of my kids bringing it home. So, I’ve decided to adopt the name, even though my Weekly Reader will have very little to do with current events.
The books I finished this week:
Reread. I initially read this shortly after it was published in 1998, although it was before I started using GR in 2013, so I can’t say what year it was. I bought it because my daughter was a big reader and really liked the Tamora Pierce Wild Magic books. I thought that this one might be a good bridge for her between YA and adult fantasy (it’s tagged YA in GR, but I dispute that it is really YA).
I’m not sure she ever read it, though. I read this one, and also the second one, Rider’s First Call, and I bought the third one, High King’s Tomb. I’m not sure what made me think of it, but when I checked, it’s up to 8 books. I decided that I would reread to see if I wanted to finish the series.
I’m still not 100% sure. This one is not especially well-written. It was Kristen Britain’s debut and, while it’s not a bad book, there was quite a bit of room for improvement. It bogged down a lot in the beginning, when the main character was on her travels trying to deliver the message. I got the feeling that the author, also, got bored with this part of the book because she used supernatural means to cut it short. It had some problems.
But, it’s also a debut, so I can forgive a lot. There are the seeds of a good story there, and there are a lot of things to like about it, including the main character. So, I’m going to reread the second one and then see how I feel.
Information Received by E.R. Punshon was published in 1933 and is the first in the looooong running Bobby Owens series, which, according to Goodreads, runs to 35 books. The final book, Six Were Present, was published in 1956.
Dean Street Press – possibly my favorite small press – has reissued the series in its entirety and they are cheap for kindle, between $.99 for the early books and $3.99 for the later ones. In addition, over the years, DSP has made many of them free for limited times and I’ve grabbed them when I can. I’ve only read a couple of them so far, but I’ve liked them.
Back at the beginning, Bobby Owens is a likeable constable who has been with the police force for three years after his graduation from Oxford with a “pass” degree. Throughout the series, I know that he gets married and at the end of this book, he is transferred to the CID.
In terms of the mystery, the solution is fairly obvious and I figured it out early on in the book. The actual motive remained a mystery that isn’t revealed until the very end. Punshon also uses a device that I really don’t like – the murderer leaves a letter behind that tells the whole story. I tend to think that this method of reveal is not very interesting and tends to drag the tempo to a halt (see, e.g., And Then There Were None). It’s true here, too. But, I enjoyed the book and have several of them, so I’ll pick them up when the urge hits me.
Command Decision by Elizabeth Moon is book 4 in her Vatta’s War series. There is only one book left, Victory Conditions, which I have already checked out of the library and will start once I finish Amy and Isabelle by Elizabeth Strout and get a bit more of the Oppenheimer biography under my belt.
In this installment, we have added to our cast of characters. Ky, Stella, Aunt Grace and Rafe are all on separate planets, trying to figure out how high the conspiracy goes. They are fighting back against the pirates that are trying to conquer planet systems, in all of the ways that they can. But, the pirates keep surprising them with their technology and their strength.
Ky’s leadership and tactical capacities have risen to the challenges so far, Stella is much cleverer than anyone gave her credit for, Rafe isn’t nearly the rogue that his family claimed he was, and Aunt Grace remains a pistol. I’m really excited to see how Moon delivers victory to our rag tag band of heroes.
It seems wild to me that I’ve never read anything by Elizabeth Strout, in spite of the fact that she’s been on my radar since the 1990’s. It’s just a testament to how little large press literary fiction I read these days. My reading is so concentrated on either genre or small press literary fiction (NYRB, in particular) or classics or backlist women’s fiction from the mid-twentieth century that I just never pick it up.
Having said that, I do like some literary fiction, especially written by American women; I put Elizabeth Strout here, as well writers like Anne Tyler, Anita Shreve, Jane Smiley and Elizabeth Berg, all of whom I’ve read in the past, but rarely read now.
Amy and Isabelle was Strout’s debut novel. It is beautifully written and characterized, and does not read like a debut, but rather like a book from an far more experienced and accomplished novelist. The second half is better than the first half, which, for me, dragged a bit. I will read more by Strout, possibly moving on to either her Olive Kitteridge books or her Lucy Barton books.
Currently Reading:
- American Prometheus: the Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird;
- Ironwood by Michael Connelly;
- Black Out by Connie Willis
I’ve read one Bobby Owens, from the middle of the series but fortunately he’s just been promoted so it feels like a new start, and enjoyed it greatly, so I’m hoping to revisit him at some point!
There was a GR group that read the entire series, one a month, but I didn’t discover them until they had just finished the final book, so I missed out on it. That would have been a good way to read them! I read quite a lot of GA mystery, and I thought that the writing in this one was pretty strong.