The Complete Father Brown, Part 1 (GK Chesterton)

And so begins the Summer Reading 2014 collection!  And our first detective is one Father Brown, a Roman Catholic priest with a knack for solving all the mysteries that he has the misfortune to encounter.  This collection, written by a personal favorite of mine, GK Chesterton, has been on my To-Read list for years.  It's only now that I'm getting around to picking them up.

The collection I read was actually comprised of two Father Brown books: The Innocence of Father Brown and The Wisdom of Father Brown.  Before this, I had only read one of the stories before: The Blue Cross.  It was a great story about the French detective Valentin pursuing the master criminal Flambeau, who happens to be pursuing the mild-mannered, doddering priest Father Brown.  I highly recommend checking it out, just for a sample of these sorts of stories.  You can actually read it online here.  (Project Guttenberg is great for reading old books in the public domain, such as this one!)

What I liked the best about this detective is just how sweet and innocent he is.  Father Brown is not your typical action hero.  He's too short to scale walls, and not strong enough to fight off any desperate criminals.  But, he's full of common sense and goodwill.  He's more concerned with saving the soul of the perpetrator than he is with seeing that justice is done.  But, at the same time, he's not going around preaching and emphasizing an overly Catholic attitude.  This is not one of those books that is made to be obviously Christian to the point where everyone but the most zealous of believers are ready to put the book down.  For the most part, he most Catholic thing about him is the fact that he's a priest.  These are genuinely enjoyable cozy mysteries with surprising twists.  My personal favorite was probably The Hammer of God, which is about the mysterious death of the local minister's womanizing, hedonistic brother who is discovered dead in the center of town with his skull completely smashed like a pumpkin.  The murder weapon is a small hammer--too small to have done that kind of damage--which belongs to the cuckolded blacksmith whose wife was having an affair with the victim.

In an attempt to expand the scope of Ramblings, I'll also be including any supplementary material concerning the detectives that I pick up over the course of my summer.  In the case of Father Brown, there is actually a lot more than you would expect, including several audio adaptations (at least one of which is not so much an audiobook as a "radio program" or "audio play" retelling), and a couple of TV series.  I've been watching and greatly enjoying the one starring Kenneth More as the little priest.  While he appears to be a bit older than suggested in the books, he does an absolutely wonderful job, and I highly recommend it!  I'll be posting more about that later, though, when I have the chance to finish the series.

So, in the meantime, just sit back and prepare for more mysteries and mayhem to come.  Is there a mystery series you have particuarly enjoyed?  Share it in the comments below!  Unless something changes (and you never know!!) I'll be posting about the Flavia de Luce series next, with the first book The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie.  (And in case you were wondering, yes, I would also like to eventually read The Complete Father Brown, Part 2!)

Sandman 1-3 (Neil Gaiman)

I have a sort of love-hate relationship with Neil Gaiman.  On one hand, I think he is brilliant.  I love his novels, and his short stories are simply to die for!  On the other hand, his writing is pretty dark.  Actually, it can get very dark.  And that's where I have some issues with him.  Not because he's dark (like chocolate, sometimes I like my books dark), but because he can be too dark.  And then I get uncomfortable or depressed.

I think that's sort of where I am right now with Neil Gaiman's Sandman series.  Out of 10 graphic novels, I've read 3.  And I'm seriously considering stopping here.

Perhaps, before continuing, a bit of background is in order?  The Sandman series reads almost like a dream, confusing, convoluted, and fascinating.  The plot lines sort of run all over the place, but the main focus centers around one character in particular: Lord Morpheus, or Dream.  That's him to the left.  Morpheus is one of the Endless, a group of beings who existed before the "gods" of Neil Gaiman's world, and will exist after they have faded away.  There are 7 of these (Death, Desire, Dream, Delirium, Destruction, Destiny, and Despair).

In theory, it's an interesting series.  In Book 1, Morpheus is captured by a scholar who wants to live forever, and believes the best way to achieve this is to capture Death.  But, he captures her little brother Dream instead.  During his 70 years of imprisonment, Dream is unable to control the forces of dreaming and waking, and much of the world falls into chaos.  When he escapes, all hell breaks loose in his attempt to seek revenge and set things right.   The rest of the stories seem to jump around a lot.  Sometimes they are in the present, and sometimes in the past.  Dream meets Shakespeare, serial killers, and ordinary people who have no idea what they are getting themselves into.

I'm just not as into it as I thought I would be so far.  And that's always a disappointing

feeling.  Especially since this series got such high recommendations from two of my co-workers, one of whom enjoys similar books to me.  But, I suppose you can't win them all, and after 3 books of Sandman, I think I'm ready to move on to something new.  With work and classes, especially, I find that if I'm not really into something, then it's best to just pass it on and read something else.  I have time, but I don't have the luxury of infinite time to read as much as I might want to.

(You should see the stack of books lying on my bedroom floor!  Eek!  I'm not sure when I'll have time to read any of them!)

One thing I really liked about the series was in Book 2.  I'm not sure how much I've talked about him here, but I really like the works of British Christian author GK Chesterton, and was delightfully surprised to see him featured in the second installment, Doll's House, as a physical manifestation of a piece of the Dreamlands.  He was actually pretty cool, too, coming across as very heroic, larger than life, and very human for something that is really only the stuff of dreams.  So, that was a nice little tidbit for me.  While I won't be reading much Sandman anymore (or probably NO Sandman, I think I will be picking up more Chesterton.  Just for a change of pace.

The Return of Don Quixote (And of Literary Blog Posts!)

I just finished reading my first G.K. Chesterton novel: The Return of Don Quixote.  I was actually in the library looking for a completely different Chesterton novel (The Man Who Was Thursday), when I stumbled upon this one.  Now, thanks to my dear grandpa, Don Quixote is one of my favorite literary figures.  I love the story, the ideal....I own the book, the musical soundtrack, and even hand-carved wooden figures of the characters!  So, when I saw that there was what appeared to be a Cervantean sequel, I jumped at the chance to read it.

Now, I'll set you all straight right away.....this is not a sequel.  In fact, it took me until I was about five chapters from the end to figure out why the title was what it was, and it was nearly the second to last chapter where I saw the first reference to Don Quixote!  However, that does not take away from the many merits of this book!

I'll be brief, since I'm rather tired, but it was overall a very interesting read.  It was very funny, with humor reminiscent of Wodehouse, with theological and philosophical views intertwined (Chesterton was, after all, a Catholic philosopher).  The plot did get a bit confusing at times, but it was still worth it.  Honestly, it was a delightful reading experience, and, as I crack open my next book, I'm proud to say that it is ALSO a Chesterton: The Man Who Was Thursday.  Hopefully, there will be updates about that one as well.

I'd recommend this book if you like humor, philosophy, and a bit of theological undertones.  But, one thing I'd like to stress about this book: Chesterton cannot be rushed.  If you don't have the time to devote to him, this book will take forever.  But, once you give it your full attention, it's actually quite a quick and easy read.  The last few chapters, in fact, flew by, leaving me without reading material for the rest of the day :P

I'm having trouble creating a good summary, since there is so much going on.  I guess I would just suggest going into it blind, since that's what I did....sometimes, books are more exciting when you don't really know what is going to happen.