Getting Caught Up

I've been off work for the past two weeks, and as a consequence of that I've been able to get caught up on my reading. The most recent novels:

The Labyrinth of the Spirits

The final novel in the "Cemetery of Forgotten Books" cycle is a fairly hefty read, and was the volume that led to me being behind in the first place. It's a twisting novel, part detective story, part thriller, part horror, and part something else. It's hard going, but also very rewarding.

Although completely different in style, tone, and content, the series that this one most puts me in mind is the Musketeer novels by Dumas - in both cases the first novel ("The Three Musketeers" and "Shadow of the Wind") stands as one of the very best novels I have ever read. In both cases, I recommend them wholeheartedly.

After that, though, the stories get somewhat harder to get through - "Twenty Years After" is a bit of a slog, to put it mildly, while I found "The Angel's Game" tough to digest. Then there's something of a respite, in the form of the start of "The Vicomte de Bragelonne", or "The Prisoner of Heaven", and then it's the march to the end.

But when that end is finally reached, after thousands of pages of reading, it is triumphant. Indeed, as I came to the end of "The Labyrinth of the Spirits", I found that I genuinely didn't know what one character was going to do... and indeed I genuinely didn't know what I wanted them to do.

All in all, a great read.

A Stroke of the Pen

The lost stories by Terry Pratchett, and the third or fourth "last book" by my late favourite author. This was another collection of twenty short stories culled from his early days writing for newspapers, and it's packed with the usual collection of wit and craziness that is familiar from the other collections. But, alas, it means that I must mourn again that there is nothing more to read.

Hercule Poirot's Silent Night

Speaking of an unexpected read, I had assumed that Sophie Hannah was done with her neo-Christie stories, so it was with some pleasure that I discovered this fifth volume (and, indeed, that there's a sixth coming).

This is the standard Poirot murder-mystery, full of a cast of fairly ghastly characters, a set of clues that eventually come to an unexpected conclusion, with many twists and turns along the way. Good stuff.

#7: "The Labyrinth of the Spirits", by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#8: "A Stroke of the Pen", by Terry Pratchett
#9: "Hercule Poirot's Silent Night", by Sophie Hannah