ABAW June Edition

Summer vacation has blown apart all of our routines.  Everyone is reading. A lot. More than during school because of the long, hot afternoons.  I just have no idea what everyone else read during June.  

I read seven books in June. One for the kids, six for me.  All but one book this month were part of different series. 

The Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Lee Stewart

Sonar X10 tried to read this book a year or so ago, but quit after a few chapters.  When prodded, he admitted that he didn’t like the story because everyone in it seemed so mean.  When the kids decided we would read this story out loud together, I was curious about that sense of meanness.  There are several characters in the book that are mean bullies, but more than that, the story is full of complicated maneuvers and twists of detail that are both fun and occasionally confusing.  Out-loud reading gave us the chance to pause when things got tricky and sort them out as best we could.  The main character is Reynie, an exceptionally bright orphan. He is joined by three other gifted kids, each with his or her own talents.  Sticky remembers everything, but is often sad and lacks confidence.  Kate is physically clever, can move her body with precision and grace, is is exceptionally confident and daring.  Constance is supremely obstinate.  The four orphans are recruited by Mr. Benedict, a grandfatherly man who needs the children to help him infiltrate a school, which is the front for an insidious plot to take over the world.  The bad guy is Mr. Curtain, a brilliant egomaniac.  Constance names their team The Mysterious Benedict Society and they set off to thwart Mr. Curtain.  They use codes, hard work, diplomacy, and deception to infiltrate Mr. Curtain’s organization.  The team themselves are good kids, but they face snarky bullies and a bizarre school structure.  Ultimately they have to work together and trust each other and their individual talents to figure out just what Mr. Curtain is doing and how he’s doing it.  The kids really liked this book, and we look forward to the others in the series.  

His Majesty’s Dragon (Temeraire Book 1) by Naomi Novik

Napoleonic wars. Naval intrigue. Cannonade. Dragons! Patrick O’Brian with a dash of Pern. I admit that I don’t much like the stifling manners and sea-sweat & leather atmosphere of most Master-and-Commander-type books, but this book was fun.  The series is named for the main dragon, who is also my favorite character. Temeraire is a rare dragon, curious, charming, and on his way to being wise.  His captain, Will Laurence, an awkward transplant for His Majesty’s Navy, strikes me as a bit stiff and naive sometimes.  The closed society of the flying corps is strikingly different than society at large, with more progressive codes of behavior and opportunities for women.  I look forward to the second book, which brings in Chinese culture and the continued threat that Napoleon will try to take back his dragon. 

Grave Peril (Dresden Files Book 4) by Jim Butcher

This is my favorite in the series so far. The characters and world-building are settling-in comfortably, so the tropes of each book feel familiar.  Surprises continue to pop up. Dresden has a new sidekick, Michael, a knight of God.  Butcher uses Michael to introduce the nuances of power inherent in Faith.  Dresden’s personal history and background take a leap forward, as does the mythology of the world.  The Nevernever begins to play a  more direct role in the action.  Every volume in the series has grim moments, but this one was for me especially grim, as truly horrifying violence strikes very close to Dresden this time.  Dresden is frighteningly damaged in this story.  He’s cut down in several ways.  He is in peril, as the title suggests.  He balances close to the edge of something—insanity, darkness, blackest grief.  I’m curious how he will go forward. 

The Millennium Trilogy by Stieg Larsson.  

I’m going to write about these three books in a separate post.  Know that they were very good, very complicated, and occupied a great deal of my time in June. 

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (Millennium Book 1) by Stieg Larsson

The Girl Who Played With Fire (Millennium Book 2) by Stieg Larsson

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest (Millennium Book 3) by Stieg Larsson

Tinkers by Paul Harding

The Pulitzer Prize-Winner for Fiction this year. This is a quiet, contemplative, melancholy book.  The words convey the stark beauty and practical elegance of the final thoughts of a man in the days before his death.  Structurally, the book takes place in the final week of George’s life, as he lies dying in a bed in the living room of the house he built, surrounded by his family. The narrative encompasses George’s death, but also his contemplation of his father Howard’s death, and his grandfather’s death as well.  The prominent metaphor of the book is of a clock, connected to George because he has spent the last several decades fixing and rebuilding clocks.  Each piece of the story, like each piece of the clock, is disassembled in a quiet and orderly way, the ticking of the other clocks marking time.  The time of the narrative corresponds to the length of one winding of a clock-about eight days or 192 hours.  Mechanically speaking, in a clock, there is one point that marks the beginning of the clock’s cycles.  All other times on the clock are determined relative to that beginning point.  The lives of the men in the story are similarly marked by a profound point, a moment that is sealed in their memories, a moment they contemplate with cyclical certainty, against which all other experiences of their lives are measured.  A beautiful book that inspires quiet reflection on both the nature of the book (I reread several sections when I finished), and on the cycles of my own life.