Harry Potter...

Finally finished the whole thing. I can say without a doubt these books get tedious; especially Rowlings complete addiction to adverbs (he said snottily). But the story telling was good enough and some of her creations (horcruxes, hallows, the sorcerer's stone, the mirror of Erised, etc) are interesting enough to make it worth slugging on through. The value of love isn't shoved down your throat even though it is a huge player in resolving the story - commendable for a woman who otherwise sidles off into so much minutiae of teenaged life that it makes you scream "enough already" many times before you get to the end of the books. And an ending that ends and ends properly...yeah that is refreshing and took more skill I think than anything else she did before the last 4-5 chapters of her 7 volume tree killing escapade.

I read this because so many people coming into their twenties read all these stories and I wanted to see if there were concepts I could use to communicate the gospel. I still think The Lord of the Rings trilogy is in a league of its own for gospel imagery and story telling, but there is a lot here in the Harry Potter books, and it is probably more accessible to younger people who only have the cut down (cheap) movie versions of LOTR.

Glad I read them. Glad I'm done.

Marine Sniper

Carlos Hathcock lived in Virginia Beach. That's one of the reasons I picked up this book after watching a History Channel show about snipers. One of my friends met him several years ago and told me a little bit about Hathcock. I wanted to know the human element of story and the book didn't disappoint me too much there. Its obvious in the reading that the author had an agenda. To his credit, he admits it up front. He is making the case for the Corps to maintain sniper units at a time when their future may have been in doubt. But Marines make better snipers than writers and the book is pretty choppy. His attempts at real descriptive prose some times hit the mark, but often feel forced and unnecessary. It does give a feel for what this type of combat was like for those men who practiced it in Vietnam and it doesn't spare the gory details. The Kindle version was less than $10 and it was worth that.

Scar Let Pimp Ernel

Did I ever read this in days gone by?? Can't remember. But it was a fun quick read and I needed something like it after finishing the underwhelming and morbid Stiff (which seemed like 2 chapters worth of material shoved into 12). I keep returning to these period pieces (A Tale of Two Cities, Les Miserables, The Count of Monte Cristo). Why? Maybe the feel of authenticity accompanying times too distant for me to easily contradict their details. My internal judge can slumber and I can enjoy a story for a story.

Although the Baroness Orczy (had to look up the pronunciation of that = or-tsey) tends to repeat the plight of the heroine trying to save her husband from her own ignorant betrayal a lot, and there are whiffs of harlequin throughout the book, it never completely descends into romanticism. The hero is still a man (anatomically intact to the end).

A few notable bites:
No wonder that on this fine afternoon in September the crowd round Bibot’s gate was eager and excited. The lust of blood grows with its satisfaction, there is no satiety: the crowd had seen a hundred noble heads fall beneath the guillotine to-day, it wanted to make sure that it would see another hundred fall on the morrow.

“Loved me?—Well, Armand, I thought at one time that he did, or I should not have married him. I daresay,” she added, speaking very rapidly, as if she were about to lay down a heavy burden, which had oppressed her for months, “I daresay that even you thought—as everybody else did—that I married Sir Percy because of his wealth—but I assure you, dear, that it was not so. He seemed to worship me with a curious intensity of concentrated passion, which went straight to my heart. I had never loved anyone before, as you know, and I was four-and-twenty then—so I naturally thought that it was not in my nature to love. But it has always seemed to me that it must be heavenly to be loved blindly, passionately, wholly…worshipped, in fact—and the very fact that Percy was slow and stupid was an attraction for me, as I thought he would love me all the more."

You can find this book free in many places online. I read this kindle version, which had a working table of contents and cost less than $3.