Sunday, June 28, 2015

What I'm Reading: Roundup

Some of my recent reading:

The Little Prince  My son read this book in his fourth-grade class this year for a class project, and since the book was lying around I picked it up. I probably haven't read it since I was his age! If you're not familiar with it, it's a child's fantasy book written by Antoine de Saint-Exupery, a Frenchman, and has a definite French flavor to it. It concerns the Little Prince, a boy who is visiting Earth on a visit from his own planet, a very small asteroid, and the man he encounters here, an airman who has crash landed in the Sahara desert. The boy is confused by the strange ideas of the man and some other adults he encounters, who busy themselves with figures, or drink, or ruling over others, when in his view the important things in life are flowers, sunsets, and friends. Quite a charming book and with a good message communicated to the reader in a subtle way. I had forgotten the ending is so sad!

Harrow County  Emmy just turned 18 and lives on a farm with her father. She has never traveled far from her homestead and has little idea about the world beyond a handful of distant neighbors, but she is intimately familiar with the woods and marshes around her farm. Now that she's of age, mysterious men start visiting the house and talking in hushed tones with her dad. She's seen people hanging out by the big scary old tree she's supposed to avoid out on the edge of their property, too. And her dreams the past months have become vivid and frightening, full of witches and dead children. Out on a walk in the woods one day, she follows a path she's never seen before and discovers a "haint"-- something like a ghost. She's scared at first but when she realizes it's only the lost spirit of a little boy, she picks it up and takes it home. Harrow County is a new comic series written by Cullen Bunn and beautifully, and so, so creepily, drawn/watercolored by Tyler Crook.

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