lol, so for all that I started out well, I followed up my first day by getting slammed with a sinus infection. Yesterday was the first day I woke up feeling completely healthy. It wasn't a good week for goals, but I'm going to cut myself some slack and start in on the writing habits tomorrow. I did manage to keep up on my reading though and finished four books.
Darkest Light by Hiromi Goto - this is the follow up to
Half World. After Melanie returns to the normal world with the baby Gee, he grows into a teenager. However, it would be a bit much to expect kid to shed all the effects of a millennia spent as a monster. Eventually, he has to return to Half World to deal with his origin. This is a case where a sequel is stronger than the first book. Gee is an easier protagonist to relate to and his internal struggle felt more real than Melanie's did. While there are still flaws in the plot, and it is still a little heavy on exposition, this is a much more polished work.
The Underdog and
Fighting Ruben Wolfe by Markus Zusak - after accidently reading the third book in the series, I had to go back and read the first two. It wasn't a hardship and they are very short. I'm not generally a fan of slice of life stories, but these are really good. All three books are from the POV of Cameron Wolfe, who is the youngest of three boys growing up working class in Australia.
In
Underdogs, Ruben and Cameron are sort of these punk kids with no direction and no motivation to find one until Cameron starts working with his dad on Saturdays and meets what appears to be his first real crush. He is instantly smitten and thinks about her obsessively. The book is really about Cameron coming to terms with himself .
Fighting Ruben Wolfe is about slightly older Wolfe boys. A high school hall fight defending his sister's honor brings Ruben to the attention of a shady underground boxing promoter. Both he and Cameron start fighting on Sundays. At first, they tell themselves that they are helping out the family finances, but eventually it becomes something that they are doing with and for each other. There is a beautiful story in here about being brothers and what that means, but with a slice of life narrative, there is obviously much more than just that going on.
I'm really surprised by how much I liked these books. It isn't what I usually go for, but I would easily recommend these books to others.
Spider Man Noir: The Complete Collection - this was next in my read through of the Spiderverse books and much easier going for me than Spider-Ham. This is like a Dashiell Hammett make-over on the Spider Man stories. Set in a gritter pre-WWII world, this Spider Man wields a gun and takes human life. The villains are all speak-easy thugs and crime bosses. I loved it. It's a far cry from the awkward pimply teenaged hero that I'm accustomed to, but it still holds onto some of the odd naive do-good aesthetic.
I'm really not sure how next week is going to go. I've been reading in spurts instead of consistently. I'm not sure if there is a problem with that or not, but it bears watching. So the list:
- The Rule of Thoughts by James Dashner
- The Kappa Child by Hiromi Goto
- A Letter of Mary by Laurie R. King
- There's Something about Sweetie by Sandhya Menon
- Love Soup by Anna Thomas
- Where Do you Get Your Ideas? by Fred White
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