Murchie Plus Books: September 20th to 26th

The premise: I love my dog. I love books. I bring the two together by posing my dog beside every book I read, barring the comics I get as single issues.

The photos: go live on Instagram as I edit them and appear here in digest form every Sunday.

Not pictured: I reread the first three arcs of HAWKEYE in preparation for the finale. It was intense.

I also read the second arc of LOKI: AGENT OF ASGARD, which continues to delight me with its focus on the power of story. The crossover issues impeded the readability somewhat, but it still covered some interesting territory.

And I read another chunk of A DEEPNESS IN THE SKY. I'm getting pretty close to the end, so I might just finish it off during my next reading session.

I promise Murchie does have paws. He just felt like sitting on his front knees so his legs would look short and jointless.

Dogs.

So my mother won an advance copy of THE SCORPION RULES by Erin Bow, and she raved about it so long and loud that I got her Bow's first two books from the library. (She also loved PLAIN KATE, but she didn't care for SORROW'S KNOT.) Then she lent me her copy, which I proceeded to read rather later than I intended because I'm still in Frustratingly Slow Reader Mode.

I loved it, but I think I'd have loved it a lot more if it hadn't taken me four solid days to finish. Blah.

I want to say something more substantive than that, but the four days thing kind of wiped me out. I am so tired of reading short books this slowly. I think it's largely, though not solely, down to how much more I've been walking this summer. Hopefully my reading pace will improve once I start getting my exercise on my stationary bike again and can read books in print while I'm at it. Audiobooks are great and I'm glad I have access to so many of 'em, but even my slow-ass self can read a book faster than a narrator can say it. And that's with things speeded up to 1.5x, which is the fastest my audio borrowing platforms can go. (I prefer to listen at 2x when it's available.)

Bro.

I finish HAWKEYE, bro.

It was intense, and also emotional, and I don't even know what else to say about it beyond a heartfelt thank-you to Matt Fraction, David Aja, and all the other contributing artists for making this book so awesome.

ALSO, Jenny told me a spoiler (because I asked her to), and there was this terrible moment when I thought she'd lied to me so I wouldn't freak out, but she hadn't and everything was okay.

I planned to hang out with Miles Vorkosigan next, but for some reason my library audio of MIRROR DANCE refused to play past the eighteen-minute mark. Grrrr.

Since I needed to listen to something while I was out on my walk and well away from wifi, I switched to THE NIGHT CIRCUS by Erin Morgenstern. It's a reread I was keen to experience on audio because everyone raves about Jim Dale's narration and I'm a Jim Dale newbie so far as books go. (I love his TV work on PUSHING DAISIES.) I'm having a wonderful time with the book, though it took me longer to sink into it on audio than it did in print. Part of that was a certain skeptical attitude to the way Dale performs the characters (yeah, I know, I'm a philistine), but I think most of it is that I first read THE NIGHT CIRCUS at the absolute perfect time. It took a little bit to recapture that feeling.

I hope I'll finish it in the next day or two.

And no, I have no idea why Murchie's so sad in the above picture. Seems a strange attitude to take with such a great book.

Next week: probably some comics since they're due back to the library. I don't even know what else. This is the longest reading slump I've ever had and I'm really fucking grumpy about it, to put it mildly.