I have been reading more this school year than ever before during my career -- mostly because I hunkered down and told myself that I deserve it, especially since I don't get to teach literature right now. All of these were recommended to me by friends, which makes reading them all the more fun since we can compare notes on them afterward.
Since August, I've read all three books in the Millennium Series by Steig Larson, and I stand in awe for several reasons. First I love, love, love how he makes so many details come together and work for a common goal, even details that seem completely irrelevant when I read them the first time. No blatant foreshadowing here (thank goodness -- American Wife had enough to last me a lifetime). I'm also impressed with how much he can suck me into the plot, when his writing style is far from anything I've enjoyed before. He's rather dry for my taste, talks to us in the third person (in case you didn't know, I thrive on first person, even stream of consciousness), gives details opposite of what I want to know, and takes his time moving the plot along. And yet, I was so drawn into Lisbeth's story that I couldn't put the books down. I had to know what happened to her. Right now. Knowing more books followed, and, therefore, that Lisbeth lives, wasn't enough. I had to know all the tiny little details, the ones that Larson only provided when I pried them out of his hands. Details about the police officer's exercise habits, on the other hand, he freely explained. And knowing that Larson had many more books in mind when he unexpectedly died, leaving us only the first three, gives me goosebumps considering the sense of closure we have at the end of Hornet's Nest.
Then, after reading the three books over 4.5 months, I read A River Runs Through It by Norman Maclean in a week. Ok, so it's only 105 pages, so that helped. This one was more in the style I seek out -- first person, tell me what you're thinking down to the moment even if it means not telling me exactly what the other characters are doing, provoking thought about the ordinary. I didn't know heads or tails about all of the fly fishing information he gave, but it was at the center of my understanding of the characters, how they interacted, how they saw each other, how they saw themselves. And Mclean is such a wonderful wordsmith -- lines like the opening, "In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing," and, "The storm came on a wild horse and rode over us," painted beautiful images in a very unique way. I would like to write some academic paper on this story, comparing it to a story about sisters, and see what I can find.
And now, I'm in the middle (well, closer to the end) of The Hunger Games, and I only put the book down long enough to write because I was afraid I'd lose my ideas about the other pieces if I go too far into this series. I've nearly finished this book in two days, and I wholeheartedly intend on finishing it tonight before I go to bed, even if it means teaching in a sleepy stupor tomorrow. I have to know how Katniss fairs -- because like with Lisbeth, knowing more books come after isn't enough. Sometimes in math we say that the answer isn't always important, it's the process of getting from the problem to the solution that matters. So it is here, too, where I'm hungry for the journey far more than the destination.
