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Originally Posted by gmw
Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones. I, too, found it very enjoyable. [...] 4/5 from me.
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Having enjoyed the first, I read the two sequels
Castle in the Air and
House Of Many Ways by Diana Wynne Jones. They lacked some of the novelty value of the first, and they were both somewhat tidier stories in some respects, but they were both good fun, so I'm giving these both 4/5 as well.
The Unlikely Pilgrimage Of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce. I wasn't sure about this at first, it seemed rather predictable and trite, but the story kept evolving, surpassing itself again and again. The ending comes with revelations and more evolution with each of the final chapters. The conclusion was perhaps not completely surprising by the time you got there, but I thought it was very well done. 4/5.
Quote:
Originally Posted by gmw
[...] picking my way through Black Summer, edited by Michael Rowland and compiled for the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation). It is a collection of articles written by ABC journalists about the bushfires of summer 2019/2020. It's interesting enough, although it may be describing events that are still too recent and familiar to me, for me to really appreciate the text. And while emergency broadcasts from the ABC undoubtedly played an important part in the events, I must say that some of the articles feel a little too self-serving; some things said that would have been much better left implied. [...]
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I finished
Black Summer at last. The structure seems a bit haphazard, and some of it starts to feel a bit repetitive - a consequence of the scale of the events, I guess. It doesn't help that the journalists tend to be trying to put a similar sort of slant on the stories: tragic but with the upbeat note of community pulling together and people being resilient. As a result, while most of the articles are well written, it was probably the last, by Josh Szeps, that stood out from the crowd here, offering rather more context to the events then and subsequently. All up, I thought it was worth reading but could have been better, so 3/5.