Potpourri

In the interest of spring cleaning (not that spring seems overly inclined to ever arrive) I thought I would toss these unrelated titles into a single post just to clear them out of the Titles To Blog About folder on my computer. So, with no sense of connection to one another and no further ado, I bring you some random reading!

It's hard to do justice to Peters' Battle Hymn cycle. I picked up Cain at Gettysburg on a whim and read its 1200 pages (in nook form, anyway) in a single day. If any writer can hope to simulate the experience of war, its Peters. He left me reeling from that initial reading experience for days. Damned doesn't quite have the punch of its predecessors. I think this is a result of the events of that part of the war; the Petersburg siege has more in common with the trench warfare of WWI than the battlefield tactics of a Wilderness or Gettysburg. Still, a worthy addition to the cycle!

I can't remember what inspired me to check this title out from the library, but I'm glad that I did. It's writing style - heavy on nerd-culture references - reminded me of Ready Player One. The characters feel realistic even if the game contest events do not, the metaphor of the title is spot on, and I enjoyed the fact that Mary bucked the woman-in-a-tower-waiting-for-a-prince/ damsel-in-distress mold. A fun read!

The Peregrine is more poetry than natural history -- like an extended, breathless reading of "The Windhover." The beauty of it is still imprinted in the folds of my brain and I find my heart lifting high now when I see a prey-bird wind-dancing. Glorious.

You can't live long with an entomologist without starting to wonder about bugs - and seeing them as more than black blurs speeding past your eyes on missions of their own! This nonfiction account describes the entomological black market, butterfly collecting, and the efforts one agent went to in order to bring down a smuggler. In the end, it left me with regret for how light the sentences are for those who would take the beauty of the world, pin it to Styrofoam, and hide it away from the rest of us.