Whew! That's a lot of titles.
I just finished reading Cold Shoulder Road to the little guys. Joan Aiken writes wonderful dialog--I love the way different characters use different dialects, and you can practically hear their voices. I wasn't so thrilled with the deus ex machina near the end, where it turns out that de la Twite was wearing radioactive stones (or some such thing). Which seems odd to say, considering that just about every book in the series has some sort of deus ex... But I think it's because the others tended to be Dickensian (kids have lockets which just happen to tie them to the Duke, which is exposed at just the right time, that sort of thing), which fit in perfectly with the setting. This just came out of nowhere. Still an excellent book, though.
I just finished reading The Crab with the Golden Claws to the littlest guy. Lots of fun. I think Herge really hit his stride in the book before this one (King Ottokar's Sceptre). There's a lot less herky-jerkiness in the plot, although you can still tell it was written for the newspapers. But Herge was obviously at the point where he could get away with occasional sections that don't have a cliff-hanger or punch-line -- they just move the story along -- and that helps with the pacing. We're now reading The Shooting Star, which isn't one of my favorites; I think it feels like Herge changed his mind about what kind of story it was several times, and it really shows.
Speaking of comics, but for adults, I'm up to book 5 of Girl Genius. Not much to say about it, though, except that the art at the beginning seems sloppy. But halfway through, Foglio seems to have settled down. Fortunately the writing is top-notch all the way through so far.
I was really tired last night, so Tom Jones was a stretch. (Book 13 starts with a long invocation of the muse, which is very funny, but not so easy to read). So I started on the last Harry Potter book. I'm about 100 pages in, and it's feeling a bit stop-and-go. 4 chapters go by where nothing happens, there's a big set-piece where Harry leaves the Dursley's house, and then nothing happens again for a couple of chapters. I'm hoping the pace evens out a bit as the book picks up speed.
Today though, I jumped back into Tom Jones. I love how consistently surprising Fielding can be. The invocation of the muse of avarice came out of nowhere, and was very funny. Then we get the story of Nightingale and Miss Miller. I first expected Nightingale to abandon Miss Miller completely, but Tom convinces him to come back, while he (Tom) talks to Nightingale, Sr. Then I was expecting Tom to be a persuasive orator, but that didn't happen either--Nightingale Sr insists that his son break off the marriage to Miller. But his brother interrupts, and says that a good marriage is more important than money, and I'm thinking the brother will help Nightingale marry Miss Miller. Then it turns out that the brother decides to dissuade Nightingale from the marriage as well--he had been under the misapprehension that they were already married, and was trying to make the best of a bad situation.
None of these developments are surprising in a bad way--they're all consistent with the characters, and each seems logical in retrospect, which makes for some fun reading, and leaves the reader up in the air what'll happen; although this is a broadly funny book, not every character comes out well. In fact, Fielding points out in one of his introductory chapters that the idea that virtuous characters end up well is an absurdly naive idea; since he intends to write a true-to-life novel, he can't have that happen in his novel either.
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