Catching Up With My Reading List, Part II

Here's my reading so far in March:

31. Agincourt. Bernard Cornwell. Fiction

32. The Flood, Ian Rankin, Fiction

33. Dead Souls, Ian Rankin. Thriller

34. Crossing Open Ground, Barry Lopez. Essays/Nature

35. The Falls, Ian Rankin. Thriller

36. Dreaming Up America, Russell Banks. Non-Fiction

37. Wonder Boys, Michael Chabon. Fiction

Again, there are some patterns, including three books by Ian Rankin. The Flood is Rankin's first book, and reads as such. Dead Souls and The Falls feature Inspector Rebus. I do like these books. The characters are extremely well defined and the narrative is riveting.

I've become a Bernard Cornwell fan. I am impressed at how (seemingly) effortlessly and seamlessly he weaves hard fact into an engaging narrative. His characters are lightly drawn, but entertaining. Some of the minor characters are quite vivid. It's the setting and the sense of history that are palpable and the narrative rolls along in the most entertaining fashion.

Lopez' essays on nature are finely written and insightful. Banks ruminations on America less so.

Wonder Boys is an entertaining early novel by Michael Chabon. You can almost see him mastering his craft in this wild, slapstick novel with its undertones of Richard Brautigan. I liked it.

I didn't add it to my reading list, and maybe I should have, but I also finished Book 3 of The New Avengers, a hardbound compilation from Marvel.