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410. The Sense of an Ending

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Terra McKinnish

Author:   Julian Barnes

Genre:   Fiction

163 pages, published May 29, 2012

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

In The Sense of an Ending, we follow Tony Webster, a middle-aged British man, as he contends with forgotten parts of his past after receives a mysterious legacy and is forced to revise his estimation of his own nature and place in the world.

Quotes 

“This was another of our fears: that Life wouldn’t turn out to be like Literature.”

 

“How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but—mainly—to ourselves.”

 

“What you end up remembering isn’t always the same as what you have witnessed.”

 

“It strikes me that this may be one of the differences between youth and age: when we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old, we invent different pasts for others.”

 

“I certainly believe we all suffer damage, one way or another. How could we not,except in a world of perfect parents, siblings, neighbours, companions? And then there is the question on which so much depends, of how we react to the damage: whether we admit it or repress it,and how this affects our dealings with others.Some admit the damage, and try to mitigate it;some spend their lives trying to help others who are damaged; and there are those whose main concern is to avoid further damage to themselves, at whatever cost. And those are the ones who are ruthless, and the ones to be careful of.”

 

“Yes, of course we were pretentious — what else is youth for?”

 

“We live in time – it holds us and molds us – but I never felt I understood it very well. And I’m not referring to theories about how it bends and doubles back, or may exist elsewhere in parallel versions. No, I mean ordinary, everyday time, which clocks and watches assure us passes regularly: tick-tock, click-clock. Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time’s malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing – until the eventual point when it really does go missing, never to return.”

 

“Sometimes I think the purpose of life is to reconcile us to its eventual loss by wearing us down, by proving, however long it takes, that life isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”

 

“Later on in life, you expect a bit of rest, don’t you? You think you deserve it. I did, anyway. But then you begin to understand that the reward of merit is not life’s business.”

 

“Does character develop over time? In novels, of course it does: otherwise there wouldn’t be much of a story. But in life? I sometimes wonder. Our attitudes and opinions change, we develop new habits and eccentricities; but that’s something different, more like decoration. Perhaps character resembles intelligence, except that character peaks a little later: between twenty and thirty, say. And after that, we’re just stuck with what we’ve got. We’re on our own. If so, that would explain a lot of lives, wouldn’t it? And also—if this isn’t too grand a word—our tragedy.”

 

“The more you learn, the less you fear. “Learn” not in the sense of academic study, but in the practical understanding of life.”

 

“I remember a period in late adolescence when my mind would make itself drunk with images of adventurousness. This is how it will be when I grow up. I shall go there, do this, discover that, love her, and then her and her and her. I shall live as people in novels live and have lived. Which ones I was not sure, only that passion and danger, ecstasy and despair (but then more ecstasy) would be in attendance. However…who said that thing about “the littleness of life that art exaggerates”? There was a moment in my late twenties when I admitted that my adventurousness had long since petered out. I would never do those things adolescence had dreamt about. Instead, I mowed my lawn, I took holidays, I had my life.  But time…how time first grounds us and then confounds us. We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe. We imagined we were being responsible but we were only being cowardly. What we called realism turned out to be a way of avoiding things rather than facing them. Time…give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.”

 

“And no, it wasn’t shame I now felt, or guilt, but something rarer in my life and stronger than both: remorse. A feeling which is more complicated, curdled, and primeval. Whose chief characteristic is that nothing can be done about it: too much time has passed, too much damage has been done, for amends to be made.”

 

“Also, when you are young, you think you can predict the likely pains and bleaknesses that age might bring. You imagine yourself being lonely, divorced, widowed; children growing away from you, friends dying. You imagine the loss of status, the loss of desire – and desirability. You may go further and consider your own approaching death, which, despite what company you may muster, can only be faced alone. But all this is looking ahead. What you fail to do is look ahead, and then imagine yourself looking back from the future point. Learning the new emotions that time brings. Discovering, for example, that as the witnesses to your life diminish, there is less corroboration, and therefore less certainty, as to what you are or have been. Even if you have assiduously kept records – in words, sound, pictures – you may find that you have attended to the wrong kind of record-keeping. What was the line Adrian used to quote? ‘History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.”

 

“In my terms, I settled for the realities of life, and submitted to its necessities:  if this, then that, and so the years passed. In Adrian’s terms, I gave up on life, gave up on examining it, took it as it came. And so, for the first time, I began to feel a more general remorse – a feeling somewhere between self-pity and self-hatred – about my whole life.  All of it. I had lost the friends of my youth. I had lost the love of my wife. I had abandoned the ambitions I had entertained. I had wanted life not to bother me too much, and had succeeded – and how pitiful that was.”

 

My Take

Winner of the 2011 Man Booker Prize, The Sense of an Ending is a profound book with a lot to say about time, life, relationships, youthful hopes and middle age regret.  It is very well written and even has a bit of a twist at the end.

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409. Our Souls at Night

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Terra McKinish

Author:   Kent Haruf

Genre:   Fiction, Romance

179 pages, published May 26, 2015

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

In the small town of Holt, Colorado, widow Addie Moore pays an unexpected visit to her neighbor and widower Louis Waters to ask him is whether he would be interested spending time with her in her bed so they can each have someone to talk with.  While initially surprised, Louis agrees to try it out.  They share with each other their troubled pasts, their youthful aspirations and middle-age disappointments and compromises.  They both are happy to at last feel understood by another person.  However, their unusual arrangement results in the disapproval of their children, threatening the close bond they had formed.

Quotes 

“Who does ever get what they want? It doesn’t seem to happen to many of us if any at all. It’s always two people bumping against each other blindly, acting out old ideas and dreams and mistaken understandings.”

 

“I do love this physical world. I love this physical life with you. And the air and the country. The backyard, the gravel in the back alley. The grass. The cool nights. Lying in bed talking with you in the dark.”

 

“Who would have thought at this time in our lives that we’d still have something like this. That it turns out we’re not finished with changes and excitements. And not all dried up in body and spirit.”

 

“I made up my mind I’m not going to pay attention to what people think. I’ve done that too long—all my life. I’m not going to live that way anymore.”

 

“But we didn’t know anything in our twenties when we were first married. It was all just instinct and the patterns we’d grown up with.”

 

“Who would have thought at this time in our lives that we’d still have something like this.”

 

“Not like I was. I’ve come to believe in some kind of afterlife. A return to our true selves, a spirit self. We’re just in this physical body till we go back to spirit.”

 

My Take

Although it is a short book, Our Souls at Night has a big impact.  A beautiful story of a man and woman and their late in life attempt to find happiness and honesty.  A simply told, thoughtful and touching book.

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406. The Testaments

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Margaret Atwood

Genre:   Fiction, Science Fiction, Dystopia

422 pages, published September 10, 2019

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

The Testaments is a decades long awaited sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale by acclaimed author Margaret Atwood.   In it, Atwood continues the story of Gilead, a dystopian future country that supplants the United States of America after a far right religious sect overthrows the government.   The Testaments picks up the story more than fifteen years after Handmaid’s Tale protagonist Offred was left in limbo with the testaments of three female narrators from Gilead.

Quotes 

“You don’t believe the sky is falling until a chunk of it falls on you.”

 

“And how easily a hand becomes a fist.”

 

“As they say, history does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.”

 

“You’d be surprised how quickly the mind goes soggy in the absence of other people. One person alone is not a full person: we exist in relation to others. I was one person: I risked becoming no person.”

 

“The truth can cause a lot of trouble for those who are not supposed to know it.”

 

“Once a story you’ve regarded as true has turned false, you begin suspecting all stories.”

 

“The inventor of the mirror did few of us any favours: we must have been happier before we knew what we looked like.”

 

“But it can put a lot of pressure on a person to be told they need to be strong.”

 

My Take

I read Margaret Atwood’s iconic The Handmaid’s Tale over 20 years and thoroughly enjoyed her dystopian tale of a future where a fundamentalist religious cult has seized power in the United States, rechristening the country Gilead, and imposed a new social order where many women are forced to be handmaids and bear the children of the elite male ruling class.  The Testaments is a sequel to that story and also contains some of the back story, explaining how Gilead came into being and worked its will.  Like its predecessor, it is a compelling read that I couldn’t put down.

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405. At the Water’s Edge

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Joni Renee

Author:    Sara Gruen

Genre:   Fiction, Historical Fiction, Romance, Foreign, World War II

348 pages, published March 31, 2015

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

At the Water’s Edge tells the story of Maddie Hyde, a young ingénue who has entered into a disastrous marriage with Ellis Hyde (who may be gay), a high society Philadelphia playboy.  On New Year’s Eve of 1942, Ellis is cut off financially by his father, a former army Colonel who is already embarrassed by his son’s inability to serve in WWII due to colorblindness.  To redeem himself, Ellis embarks on a quest to find the Loch Ness monster, a venture his father had attempted but failed at in a very public manner.  While in Scotland during the war, the Hyde’s marriage begins to fall apart as Maddie discovers there is greater meaning in her life than being a socialite.

Quotes 

“I paused beneath the arched entrance, where the drawbridge had once been, imagining all the people who had passed in and out over the centuries, every one of them carrying a combination of desire, hope, jealousy, despair, grief, love, and every other human emotion; a combination that made each one as unique as a snowflake, yet linked all of them inextricably to every other human being from the dawn of time to the end of it.”

 

“One Crow for sorrow, Two Crows for mirth, Three Crows for a wedding, Four Crows for a birth, Five Crows for silver, Six Crows for gold, Seven for a secret, never to be told.”

 

“The monster—if there was one—never revealed itself to me again. But what I had learned over the past year was that monsters abound, usually in plain sight.”

 

“Life. There it was. In all its beautiful, tragic fragility, there was still life, and those of us who’d been lucky enough to survive opened our arms wide and embraced it.”

 

“It seems there’s nothing so good or pure it can’t be taken without a moment’s notice. And then in the end, it all gets taken anyway.”

 

“It was full of luxurious trappings and shiny baubles, and that had blinded me to the fact that nothing about it was real.”

 

“I did not take enough care with my hair, but a permanent wave would fix that. I was not thin enough, but for that, alas, there was no quick fix. I should never put more than the equivalent of three peas on my fork at a time, or one small disk of carrot. I should always leave two thirds of my meal on my plate, and was never to eat in public.”

 

My Take

I had previously read Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen and really enjoyed it.  At the Water’s Edge is a lesser book with a bit too much romantic melodrama and characters who could use a bit more development.  Still, it was a decent read.

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398. The Secret Place

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Tana French

Genre:    Fiction, Mystery, Thriller, Crime, Suspense, Foreign

480 pages, published August 28, 2014

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

A year after the discovery of a teenaged boy’s murder at a girlsʼ boarding school, Detective Stephen Moran is brought in with Detective Antoinette Conway to reopen the case.   Moran had been waiting for his chance to join Dublin’s Murder Squad when sixteen-year-old Holly Mackey arrives in his office with a photo of the boy with the caption: “I KNOW WHO KILLED HIM.”  Under the watchful eye of Holly’s father, fellow detective Frank Mackey. Moran and Conway investigate the murder which leads them to Holly’s close-knit group of friends, a rival clique, and to the snarl of relationships that bound all of them to the murdered boy.

Quotes 

“You forget what it was like. You’d swear on your life you never will, but year by year it falls away. How your temperature ran off the mercury, your heart galloped flat-out and never needed to rest, everything was pitched on the edge of shattering glass. How wanting something was like dying of thirst.  How your skin was too fine to keep out any of the million things flooding by; every color boiled bright enough to scald you, any second of any day could send you soaring or rip you to bloody shreds.”

 

“I love beautiful; always have. I never saw why I should hate what I wish I had. Love it harder. Work your way closer. Clasp your hands around it tighter. Till you find a way to make it yours.”

 

“She hears all the voices from when she was little, soothing, strengthening: Don’t be scared, not of monsters, not of witches, not of big dogs. And now, snapping loud from every direction: Be scared, you have to be scared, ordering like this is your one absolute duty. Be scared you’re fat, be scared your boobs are too big and be scared they’re too small. Be scared to walk on your own, specially anywhere quiet enough that you can hear yourself think. Be scared of wearing the wrong stuff, saying the wrong thing, having a stupid laugh, being uncool. Be scared of guys not fancying you; be scared of guys, they’re animals, rabid, can’t stop themselves. Be scared of girls, they’re all vicious, they’ll cut you down before you can cut them. Be scared of strangers. Be scared you won’t do well enough in your exams, be scared of getting in trouble. Be scared terrified petrified that everything you are is every kind of wrong. Good girl.”

 

“Trust your instincts, Dad always says. If something feels dodgy to you, if someone feels dodgy, you go with dodgy. Don’t give the benefit of the doubt because you want to be a nice person, don’t wait and see in case you look stupid. Safe comes first. Second could be too late.”

 

“She wants to leap up and do a handstand, or get someone to race her fast and far to wreck them both: anything that will turn her body back into something that’s about what it can do, not all about how it looks.”

 

“They always act like they’re having an amazing time, they’re louder and high-pitched, shoving each other and screaming with laughter at nothing. But Becca knows what they’re like when they’re happy, and that’s not it. Their faces on the way home afterwards look older and strained, smeared with the scraps of leftover expressions that were pressed on too hard and won’t lift away.”

 

My Take

The Secret Place is the sixth book was the fifth book that I have read by Tana French (and the fifth in her Dublin Murder Squad series).  While I loved her other books (The Witch Elm, In the Woods, The Likeness and Faithful Place, and Broken Harbor) I liked, but did not love, The Secret Place.  I found the characters and the central mystery a bit less interesting than previous French reads.  It is still a good book, just not quite up the standard French sets in many of her other books.

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397. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:    J.K. Rowling

Genre:    Fiction, Fantasy, Young Adult

734 pages, published September 28, 2002

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire takes place during Harry’s fifth year at Hogwart’s.  The book begins with a trip to the International Quidditch Cup where Harry and the Weasly family cheer on favorite player Victor Krum.  Krum then shows up at Hogwarts as part of the Durmstrang school (from Northern Europe) who, along with Beauxbatons (from France) are there to compete in the Tri-Wizard Cup.   Harry is also mysteriously entered as a contestant in the cup which will challenge Harry and the other entrants as they have never before been challenged.

Quotes 

“If you want to know what a man’s like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.”

 

“It matters not what someone is born, but what they grow to be.”

 

“I sometimes find, and I am sure you know the feeling, that I simply have too many thoughts and memories crammed into my mind.”

 

“Numbing the pain for a while will make it worse when you finally feel it.”

 

“Understanding is the first step to acceptance, and only with acceptance can there be recovery.”

 

“Who’re you going with, then?” said Ron.

“Angelina,” said Fred promptly, without a trace of embarrassment.

“What?” said Ron, taken aback. “You’ve already asked her?”

“Good point,” said Fred. He turned his head and called across the common room, “Oi! Angelina!”

Angelina, who had been chatting with Alicia Spinnet near the fire, looked over at him.

“What?” She called back.

“Want to come to the ball with me?”

Angelina gave Fred a sort of appraising look.

“All right, then,” she said, and she turned back to Alicia and carried on chatting with a bit of a grin on her face.

“There you go,” said Fred to Harry and Ron, “piece of cake.”

 

“Anyone can speak Troll. All you have to do is point and grunt.”

 

“I’m never wearing them,” Ron was saying stubbornly. “Never.”  “Fine,” snapped Mrs. Weasley. “Go naked. And, Harry, make sure you get a picture of him. Goodness knows I could do with a laugh.”

 

My Take

Another creative and captivating Harry Potter book.  I was intrigued by the different schools (Durmstrang and Beauxbatons) that spend a year at Hogwarts participating in the Tri-Wizard tournament and their unique approach to magic.  I also appreciated the inclusion of the Cedric Diggory character (a real class act).  JK Rowling is a treasure.

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387. Quichotte

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:   Steve Atlee

Author:  Salman Rushdie

Genre:   Fiction, Fantasy

416 pages, published September 3, 2019

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

Quichotte is a modern day take on Don Quixote.  In it, spy thriller writer Sam DuChamp creates the character of Quichotte, a befuddled salesman obsessed with television, who falls impossibly in love with a reality TV star.  Along with his imaginary son Sancho, Quichotte sets off on a quest across America to prove worthy of her hand.  Interspersed with Quichotte’s story, DuChamp deals with issues all his own.

Quotes 

“BE A LAWYER in a lawless time was like being a clown among the humorless: which was to say, either completely redundant or absolutely essential.”

 

“Men on the road together have three choices. They separate, they kill one another, or they work things out.”

 

“AS I PLAN MY QUEST,” Quichotte said, drinking from a can of ginger ale, “I ponder the contemporary period as well as the classical. And by the contemporary I mean, of course, The Bachelorette.”

 

“Every quest takes places in both the sphere of the actual, which is what maps reveal to us, and in the sphere of the symbolic, for which the only maps are the unseen ones in our heads.”

 

“He devoured morning shows, daytime shows, late-night talk shows, soaps, situation comedies, Lifetime Movies, hospital dramas, police series, vampire and zombie serials, the dramas of housewives from Atlanta, New Jersey, Beverly Hills and New York, the romances and quarrels of hotel-fortune princesses and self-styled shahs, the cavortings of individuals made famous by happy nudities, the fifteen minutes of fame accorded to young persons with large social media followings on account of their plastic-surgery acquisition of a third breast or their post-rib-removal figures that mimicked the impossible shape of the Mattel company’s Barbie doll, or even, more simply, their ability to catch giant carp in picturesque settings while wearing only the tiniest of string bikinis; as well as singing competitions, cooking competitions, competitions for business propositions, competitions for business apprenticeships, competitions between remote-controlled monster vehicles, fashion competitions, competitions for the affections of both bachelors and bachelorettes, baseball games, basketball games, football games, wrestling bouts, kickboxing bouts, extreme sports programming and, of course, beauty contests.”

 

“When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished,’ Czesław Miłosz once said.)”

 

“Other hurdles were ideological. ‘I’m not fucking fighting to defend women’s right to wear the veil, the hijab, the niqab, whatever,’ she declaimed. ‘All these young women these days who describe the veil as a signifier of their identity. I tell them they are suffering from what that presently unfashionable philosopher Karl Marx would have called false consciousness. In most of the world the veil is not a free choice. Women are forced into invisibility by men. These girls in the West making their quote- unquote free choices are legitimising the oppression of their sisters in the parts of the world where the choice is not free. That’s what I tell them, and they are very shocked. They tell me they find my remarks offensive. I tell them I feel the same way about the veil. It’s exhausting. I’ve become embittered. I just needed to stop.”

 

My Take

This is the first Salman Rushdie book that I have read and it was a pretty good, not great, experience.  Rushdie writes from a deep vein of creativity and has some unique insights into the human condition.  I also liked his use of Don Quixote quest as the theme of his book.  I myself am on a quest to read 1000 books during my 50’s and can relate to Quichotte’s quest on a certain level.

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386. The Maze at Windermere

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:   Terra McKinnish

Author:   Gregory Blake Smith

Genre:   Fiction, Historical Fiction

580 pages, published July 11, 2018

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

Like its title, The Maze at Windermere takes the reader on a maze like journey through multiple time periods in the same area of Newport, Rhode Island.  We follow the romantic entanglements of couples through the ages, starting in the present day and going back to the 1600’s.

Quotes 

“What interests me,” she took up finally, and there was now no touch of her characteristic satire, “is a life in which I am engaged in discovering what interests me. Not just now, as a young woman, but when I am a wife, and when I have children, and beyond. A life of imagination, and experience, and engagement, and commitment to something beyond myself.”

 

“But I feel myself marooned on the island of myself.”

 

“One must take care that one’s life does not begin to resemble the plot of a novel.”

 

“Ah, to be able to read both the surface and that which is below the surface!”

 

My Take

While it started out a bit slowly, around the halfway point I started to really enjoy The Maze at Windermere.  Smith is a talented writer and presents some compelling insights into the human condition and the motivations which drive us.  Interestingly, I found myself most captivated by the oldest story from the 1600’s and the most recent one from 2011.

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385. Thirteen

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:   Ben Emerson

Author:  Steve Cavanagh

Genre:   Fiction, Thriller, Suspense, Crime

356 pages, published January 30, 2018

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

As the front of the book Thirteen announces, “the serial killer isn’t on trial.  He’s on the jury…”  That’s the premise of this thriller.  When Hollywood star Robert Solomon is charged with the brutal murder of his beautiful actress wife, con artist turned lawyer Eddie Flynn is called in to serve as his attorney.  All the evidence points to Robert’s guilt, Eddie isn’t so sure and discovers that there is a lot more to the story than initially meets the eye.  His sleuthing puts him on the trail of the real killer who is just happens to be on is jury.

Quotes 

“The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.”

 

“What they all understood was that if they told me they were guilty but that they wanted to fight the case anyway, I could no longer represent them. That was the game.”

 

“Whatever good things you’ve heard about me probably aren’t true. Whatever bad things you’ve heard are probably just the tip of the iceberg,” I said.”

 

My Take

Thirteen meets the primary requirement of any good thriller, it is a fast reading page turner.  I enjoyed the characters, the plot twists and the courtroom scenes.  A perfect vacation read.

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384. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   J.K. Rowling

Genre:  Fiction, Fantasy, Young Adult

435 pages, published May 1, 2004

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

Harry Potter is a third year student at Hogwarts and faces a new round of danger.  Chief among his worries is the escape of Sirius Black from Azkaban prison.  Black, who was convicted of murderering Harry’s parents, now seems to be after Harry.  To protect Hogwarts, the dementors, the Azkaban guards who are hunting Sirius, are called in and they seem to also be after Harry.  To combat the dementors, Harry learns how to summon his own patronus from Professor Lupin, the new Defense of the Dark Arts teacher, who was a childhood friend of his father.  With the help of the Mauraders Map and the invisibility cloak, Harry, Ron and Hermione set to make things right again at Hogwarts.

Quotes 

“I solemnly swear that I am up to no good.”

 

“Mr. Moony presents his compliments to Professor Snape, and begs him to keep his abnormally large nose out of other people’s business.

Mr. Prongs agrees with Mr. Moony, and would like to add that Professor Snape is an ugly git.

Mr. Padfoot would like to register his astonishment that an idiot like that ever became a professor.

Mr. Wormtail bids Professor Snape good day, and advises him to wash his hair, the slimeball.”

 

“What’s that?” he snarled, staring at the envelope Harry was still clutching in his hand. “If it’s another form for me to sign, you’ve got another -“

“It’s not,” said Harry cheerfully. “It’s a letter from my godfather.”

“Godfather?” sputtered Uncle Vernon. “You haven’t got a godfather!”

“Yes, I have,” said Harry brightly. “He was my mum and dad’s best friend. He’s a convicted murderer, but he’s broken out of wizard prison and he’s on the run. He likes to keep in touch with me, though…keep up with my news…check if I’m happy….”

 

“Happiness can be found, even in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the light.”

 

“You think the dead we loved truly ever leave us? You think that we don’t recall them more clearly in times of great trouble?”

 

“I want to commit the murder I was imprisoned for.”

 

“Why, dear boy, we don’t send wizards to Azkaban just for blowing up their aunts.”

 

“If you made a better rat than a human, it’s not much to boast about, Peter.”

 

“Professor Kettleburn, our Care of Magical Creatures teacher, retired at the end of last year in order to enjoy more time with his remaining limbs.”

 

“I’ll fix it up with Mum and Dad, then I’ll call you. I know how to use a fellytone now—”

“A telephone, Ron,” said Hermione. “Honestly, you should take Muggle Studies next year…”

 

“The consequences of our actions are always so complicated, so diverse, that predicting the future is a very difficult business indeed.”

 

“Don’t let the muggles get you down.”

 

“How’re we getting to King’s Cross tomorrow, Dad?” asked Fred as they dug into a sumptuous pudding. “The Ministry’s providing a couple of cars,” said Mr. Weasley.  Everyone looked up at him.  “Why?” said Percy curiously.  “It’s because of you, Perce,” said George seriously. “And there’ll be little flags on the hoods, with HB on them-”  “-for Humongous Bighead,” said Fred.”

 

My Take

I am thoroughly enjoying my repeat romp through all of the Harry Potter books, especially the amazing voice work of narrator Jim Dale who seamlessly transitions between characters and brings The Prisoner of Azkaban to life.  J.K. Rowling again delivers a compelling, intricate, creative and fun tour de force in this book and it is a pleasure to re-read it.

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