March '24 Mid-Month Wrap Up
We are almost halfway through March, so I am going to give you a wrap up on the books I have read so far this month. Also, we are halfway through March! Holy moly.
The Guncle Abroad by Steven Rowley - It took me weeks to read the first half of this book. I read the second half in one day. I am sure that if I had had a decent amount of time available for reading it when I started it, I would have flown through the first half of the book the way I did the last. Patrick is still Patrick. Still outlandish and an attention-whore and pretty clueless. Nevertheless, he is in charge of his niblings again. This time while their dad prepares to remarry. As soon as he sees the kids, they are after him to stop their dad's wedding. He's not sure he wants to do that. Maybe. But nevertheless he takes the kids on a tour of Europe while trying to teach them about the importance of love. It's cute. The kids are cute. The lesbian prospective aunt is great. The dad and the bride are pretty boring, just like the dad was in the last one. I got the feeling he was just there because the kids have a dad.
Fruits Basket Collector's Edition, Vols. 1 and 2 by Natsuki Takaya - I have been hearing for years that this is the best place to start for beginner manga readers. I've also been hearing that I would like it. So here we go. Spoiler alert: I did like it. I read two 400 page volumes. In this story, Honda Tohru is a teenage girl whose mother died, leaving her to live with her grandfather. When some more people planned to move in with them, they had to remodel the house, and Tohru had to find somewhere else to stay. She ended up in a tent in a secluded area of land that belongs to the Sohma family. Sohma Yuki is in Tohru's class at school. The Sohma's feel bad for her and have her move in with them. But surprise! This family has a secret. When they are hugged by a member of the opposite sex, they each turn into an animal from the zodiac. At the end of Volume 2, I still haven't met all the animals. It is pretty cute how she navigates this whole situation without giving away their secret. Apparently, in the anime, each person has a different hair color that helps tell them apart. In the black and white manga version, I have to find other ways to tell them apart, like their clothing or accessories or something. Otherwise, I'm having a grand time.
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel - I finally did it. I finished the whole thing. I think it took 6 weeks. But I really enjoyed it. The main character is morally gray, therefore I think he's fabulous. My one quibble with this book was with the writing. It was frequently difficult to figure out who was being described. It would change in the middle of a paragraph. The narrator would be describing what the cardinal was doing, for example, and then suddenly the "he" in the next sentence would be refering to Thomas Cromell. That took awhile for me to figure out, so I was confused for about a quarter of the book. This is a retelling of the story of how Henry VIII got booted out of the Catholic church/left the Catholic church and made himself the head of the church in England so he could divorce his wife of 20 some years and marry a new one. I assume the next book carries on the story through more of the eventual six wives.
Saga, Vol. 4 by Brian K. Vaughan - This took an interesting turn in the story of the couple from two planets who are running from the governments of both their planets because they have a child together. I would tell you what the turn is, but that would be a spoiler. Let's just say it went a direction I was not expecting.
Ok. That's five books already read this month. Not too shabby, even if 3 of them were graphic novels/manga.