Reading Report: Mid-February 2022

  • I finished reading The Dreadful Tale of Prosper Redding (Grade: B+) near the end of January, allowing me to get started on my February reading a little early (hooray!). In this story, twelve-year-old Prosper Redding, born into a powerful and wealthy family, finds out that his inheritance comes with a major downside: there’s a demon inside of him who will take possession of his body on his thirteenth birthday. I enjoyed the conversations between Prosper and his demon, Alastor, as they vied for control over Prosper’s life, but I didn’t connect much with the rest of the story. It felt sort of childish, which would be an unfair criticism to lob at a children’s book, so let’s just say that the problem was me, not the book. Livia read it before I did, and she liked it enough to read the sequel.
  • Note of interest: from Prosper Redding I learned that in Iceland a “skúffuskáld” (translation: “drawer poet”) is someone who writes poems and doesn’t try to publish them. Writing poetry strictly for personal pleasure is apparently a common pastime in Iceland. Nice.
  • I am currently reading Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler. The title is a reference to a Biblical parable (Matthew 25:14-30). In this parable, a rich man is about to go traveling, and before he leaves, he gives his servants some money in the form of talents (according to www.biblegateway.com, “A talent was a monetary unit worth about twenty years’ wages for a laborer.”). Two of the servants invest their money and, by the time their master returns, they have made more money. The master praises them. The other servant hides his talent away, and upon his master’s return, he is rebuked, his talent is taken from him, and he is cast into darkness. The parable doesn’t make much sense to me, TBH, but the point is, whether it was fear or laziness or prudence that made that servant hide his talent, he got screwed, and one meaning to take from it is, I guess, “Use your talents wisely.” I probably won’t know exactly what Butler was getting at with the title until I finish the book. Because Parable of the Talents is the sequel to Parable of the Sower, I’m not going to say any more about it for now, because I don’t want to spoil anything for my friend who hasn’t read Sower yet.
  • Parable of the Talents is interesting, but also slow-going and grim, so I took a short break from it to read Still Life by Louise Penny. You wouldn’t think a murder mystery would offer a break from grimness, but a single murder that has a rationale is a lot easier to deal with than multiple, senseless acts of violence.
  • I finished Still Life by Louise Penny and gave it an A- grade. In this mystery, a popular former schoolteacher is killed in the woods of a small town in Canada, and Inspector Armand Gamache is called in to solve the case. I gave the story a high grade, but I’m not going to lie–it had some noticeable weaknesses, including a constantly shifting point of view, a sort of weird and mean side plot about a rookie homicide agent, the inspector’s attention to a detail which didn’t seem to warrant it (and which was, of course, a major clue to the murderer’s identity), plus some other odds and ends that didn’t quite ring true. The story succeeded in spite of all those things, testament to other positive qualities of the novel. Honestly, though, I think what I loved most about it was the author herself, whose general attitude seemed kind and upbeat. I will probably seek out more books from this series at some point.
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