Hello friends, and happy weekend!
In books this week, I finished three different novels; one was a big tome, and the other two were short YA or middle grade books. The big book was The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, by V.A. Schwabb, and it was fantastic. This book held me in thrall, and I highly recommend it if you like Faustian bargain-type stories.
I also finished The Outsiders, by S.E. Hinton. My daughter and her class finished it, and I was reading along with her. I’d read it when I was a kid and wanted to discuss it with her. It’s a pretty good book, considering it was written when the author was sixteen years old! Now we just have to watch the movie, lol.
The last one I finished was The Weapon of a Jedi, a middle-grade book by Jason Fry. It takes place between A New Hope and Empire, with Luke on a mission for the Alliance. But he ends up on a planet with an old Jedi Temple, and it’s here he learns more about how to use the Force and become more proficient with his lightsaber. Apparently it’s addressing some questions fans had about how Luke learned these things between the two films. It did a pretty good job, I think, but it was never a pressing question for me.
Soon we’ll choose our new book club book, but until then I needed something on my Kindle to read, so I chose Moving Target: A Princess Leia Adventure, by Jason Fry and Cecil Castellucci. This is also a middle-grade book, and also a “Journey to the Force Awakens” book like Weapon of a Jedi. This one takes place between Empire and Return of the Jedi, while Han is still in carbonite. I’m really enjoying the Leia-centered canon books, like this one, Leia: Princess of Alderaan, and Bloodline. I like these short little middle grade books, too, because they’re fun, quick Star Wars reads when I need one, but don’t want to get into a big adult one yet.
That’s because I’m still trying to get through Ronin: A Star Wars Visions novel. I was really looking forward to this novel, as something new and different in Star Wars. And it is, but it’s not the story that’s making it slow-going for me reading this book. The story intrigues me; it’s the style it’s written in that bothers me. Most Star Wars books are pretty easy reads, and that’s great; that doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy more challenging styles (I’m thinking of James Luceno, for example). But there’s something about this one that makes it hard to read. Most of the time, I have no idea what the hell’s going on, lol. I have to read and re-read sentences over and over to figure out what’s happening. And that’s just too distracting.
I’m sure Emma Mieko Candon is a fine writer, and perhaps Visions is something so completely different that she doesn’t feel beholden to the usual Star Wars writing style. And that’s fine, too. But it’s hard work reading this book, lol. And I’m a capable reader: I’ve read and loved Jane Austen, Tolstoy, Henry James, and any other number of classic authors whose style is, to say the least, challenging. But I don’t want it in my Star Wars books, lol. I’m going to keep at it, though, because I like the story I saw in The Duel and I want to know more. I’ll let you know how it’s going next week.
Anyway, in Marvel movie news, I watched Spiderman: Homecoming and loved it. The Spiderman movies are not on Disney+ as you may know, because of licensing stuff, so I have to watch it on Youtube to catch up. I’d watched the Tobey Maguire Spiderman movies back in the day, and really liked him in the role, but I have to say that Tom Holland really captures the young naivete of Peter Parker perfectly. At first I thought I watched the wrong movie first, that No Way Home must have been the first one (even though I checked) because there’s no origin story here. He already has his Spidey powers. Unless I missed something? But it kind of makes sense, because we already know how he got the powers from the other movies. We don’t need to see it again. Anyway, I loved seeing Tony Stark taking him under his wing. Next week I’ll watch No Way Home, and then I should be ready for Far From Home (that’s not confusing, right?).
And because I can’t seem to get enough superhero movies lately, I watched The Fantastic Four and Fantastic Four: the Silver Surfer. I think I had seen the first one way back when, but not the second. They’re super fun with simple plots, and not much else, lol. I wish there were a few more with the original cast. There’s an updated one from 2015 with a new cast, and maybe I’ll check that out next week, too, but I’m partial to the originals. Oh, and it was a gas seeing a younger Chris Evans playing the wild ladies man Johnny Storm, the complete opposite of good-boy Steve Rogers. Flame on!
That’s it this week. What’s been entertaining you lately? Let me know in the comments and we’ll talk about it!
Star Wars and Other Obsessions 