On the reading front, I finished the other two books by Deborah Harkness in the All Souls Trilogy. The second book (Shadow of Night) was very good. There was a lot of history in it, and I really enjoyed it. The third (The Book of Life) was really bizarre. I like weird, but the end of this trilogy was really pushing the weird factor for me.
Then I picked up
City of Dark Magic (Magnus Flyte), which had a lot of similar themes as The All Souls Trilogy. There was a lot of weirdness in this one, too, but it was a good read.
Once a city of enormous wealth and culture, Prague was home to emperors, alchemists, astronomers, and, as it’s whispered, hell portals. When music student Sarah Weston lands a summer job at Prague Castle cataloging Beethoven’s manuscripts, she has no idea how dangerous her life is about to become. Prague is a threshold, Sarah is warned, and it is steeped in blood.
Soon after Sarah arrives, strange things begin to happen. She learns that her mentor, who was working at the castle, may not have committed suicide after all. Could his cryptic notes be warnings? As Sarah parses his clues about Beethoven’s “Immortal Beloved,” she manages to get arrested, to have tantric sex in a public fountain, and to discover a time-warping drug. She also catches the attention of a four-hundred-year-old dwarf, the handsome Prince Max, and a powerful U.S. senator with secrets she will do anything to hide.
After I finished that one, I read the sequel
City of Lost Dreams which was equally strange and delightful.
Yesterday, I started (and finished)
Orphan Train. This was an excellent, through-provoking novel. It's been a long, long time since I stayed up late (when I had to get up in the morning!) to finish a book. I think the only time I put it down was when I had to feed my kids dinner - otherwise I read it straight from beginning to end in virtually one sitting.
The author of Bird in Hand and The Way Life Should Be delivers her most ambitious and powerful novel to date: a captivating story of two very different women who build an unexpected friendship: a 91-year-old woman with a hidden past as an orphan-train rider and the teenage girl whose own troubled adolescence leads her to seek answers to questions no one has ever thought to ask.
Nearly eighteen, Molly Ayer knows she has one last chance. Just months from "aging out" of the child welfare system, and close to being kicked out of her foster home, a community service position helping an elderly woman clean out her home is the only thing keeping her out of juvie and worse.
Vivian Daly has lived a quiet life on the coast of Maine. But in her attic, hidden in trunks, are vestiges of a turbulent past. As she helps Vivian sort through her possessions and memories, Molly discovers that she and Vivian aren't as different as they seem to be. A young Irish immigrant orphaned in New York City, Vivian was put on a train to the Midwest with hundreds of other children whose destinies would be determined by luck and chance.
The closer Molly grows to Vivian, the more she discovers parallels to her own life. A Penobscot Indian, she, too, is an outsider being raised by strangers, and she, too, has unanswered questions about the past. As her emotional barriers begin to crumble, Molly discovers that she has the power to help Vivian find answers to mysteries that have haunted her for her entire life - answers that will ultimately free them both.
Rich in detail and epic in scope, Orphan Train is a powerful novel of upheaval and resilience, of second chances, of unexpected friendship, and of the secrets we carry that keep us from finding out who we are.
I've been reading in Spanish, too. I finished the first three HP books again, and I'm working on the fourth. I'm in the middle of three other books as well. I have a habit of reading too many books at once.
Some of it is because I like to take a paper book with me when I take the kids to the pool - it's too hard to read on a screen out in the sun. (That's actually why I've read so much in English the past couple weeks. It's a lot easier for me to read in Spanish on my phone/tablet using ReadLang. I also don't have as easy access to Spanish (print) books as I do English books.)
But then I realized there was a purpose to her acting like that.