Books of a feather

Book: Guardians of Ga'Hoole Book One: The Capture


Author: Kathryn Lasky


Published: 2003 (scholastic)


Pages: 219


Owls! I love owls. I like nighttime better than daylight (although my sleep schedule is convinced otherwise), I've always wanted to fly, and their paradoxical combination of cute and fierce is what I strive for when I bare my fangs before brushing my hair in the mornings.


So this book's combination of adventure story and owl education kept me amused. Great choice to narrate through a young owl (although the name "Soren" will forever conjure up Cracked.com for me, so I was giggling about remembered dick jokes and history lessons all through a children's book). That way the owl life-cycle and different species could be explained through organic discovery processes. 


Which doesn't mean that was a seamless segue all the time, but even when clumsily dropped into exposition, the educational bits were interesting. The adventure story was a typical hero's quest, but--guys, these were baby owls who got kidnapped by a cult that used the moon to brainwash them into--what? I don't know. They elude the moon-washing and escape to go find this mythic tree. I also don't know what that's like because there are fourteen more books in this series and I guess they'll stretch it out. 


I will not be stretching with them, but only because I have other books to tend to first. In the meantime, I will continue to watch this YouTube video for an owl fix:

http://youtu.be/KczxuINjk54

Psychopathic destraction

Book: The Silence of the Lambs

Author: Thomas Harris

Published: 1988 (Yazoo, Inc)

Pages: 367

No, it hasn’t taken me like three weeks to read a paperback thriller. I blew through most of this over a weekend at home, where I become distracted from my official reading pile by all the books I decided to not take with me when I moved out. When I go back, I’ll start reading something to remember why I left it.

Sometimes I get caught up enough to bring it up here, which is what happened this time.

The police chase serial murder main plot line going on here is great. Tense, teased out so the reader knows just enough more than the feds to groan when they scoff at a weird (right) theory or head in the wrong direction. Short but thorough explanations about procedures and weapons that work well with third-person omnificent (and would be the stiltiest of all stilted in any other point of view). Convincing psychopaths and characters who are, if not fully rounded out, at least recognizable as real people.

Clarice Starling is within a centimeter of being a Mary Sue but gets away with instead having a relentless driving perfection that comes from a bad childhood. Harris almost gets away with his occasional lapses into poetic streams of consciousness and grandiose life pronouncements, too, but those lean just on the other side of ridiculous. He’s best at compiling evidence and stringing it out so its reveal becomes its own drama. And why the flips between present and past tense, usually during an explanation or description of setting? Those were confusing.

But kudos for letting Lector slip away. Of course he won’t get caught; he’s far smarter than anyone who was chasing him. The smart ones of them knew that.

I read it for the plot thrills and was rewarded thusly.     

Although--one more thing. My copy has a blurb from one Roald Dahl saying this is the best novel of the year. This does not compute.