What I'm reading Wednesday...

From now on, I think I will just post my finished challenge books on What I'm Reading Wednesdays.  Yesterday, I was too excited to have finished Moby Dick, so I had to share immediately.  :)

Eighth finish for the year.

I have not read all of the books in this series (Cork O'Connor Mysteries), but have enjoyed the few that I have read (and the author's stand-alone novels are wonderful).  When I saw that this prequel was available, I definitely wanted to read it to fulfill this prompt.

Wasn't disappointed.  I read it every chance I got, and worked my way through it very quickly.

Ninth finish of the year.

Glad I stuck it out.  Personally I think it could have lost about four- to five-hundred  pages for the current-day audience.  But as I was thinking about it, when it was published, there weren't a lot of forms of personal entertainment, and books were expensive, so I suppose the hours and hours and hours of story were welcome.

And I learned a lot about whaling and sperm whales.  Then, just today, I was sad to see that a sperm whale was entangled in ropes from fishing boats and washed up on the Isle of Raasay (between the Isle of Skye and the Scottish mainland) where it died.

image found at animalspot.net/whale

Check out the size difference between the Sperm Whale and the Killer Whale that we are used to seeing at Sea World!

Tenth finish for the year.

I really love Elizabeth Strout's work.  The way she writes auxiliary characters is the best.  They come, stay awhile, and go.  And then in another book or two they drop by for another visit or at least a mention.

I almost gave this 5 stars, because I could happily read it again.  In fact, I wouldn't mind starting with the author's first book and reading them all again chronologically.