It’s been a good summer of fiction for me, though I haven’t moved through anything too quickly.

The latter half of June was all about The Ferryman by Justin Cronin.  Some of my favorite moments reading during the summer involved Cronin’s The Passage, so I was surprised and excited to find The Ferryman at Barnes and Noble just before leaving on my trip to Tennessee.  I can’t say much about the book without spoiling it.  I will say that, as evidenced in The Passage trilogy, Cronin is a master of juggling multiple plots while also making great cuts between those plots (like a movie maker in so many ways).   While The Ferryman doesn’t quite fly as high as The Passage (it definitely isn’t as dense as most of that series), it is entertaining and does keep you guessing, which is nice for a summer read.

I had meant to start the summer off with a reread of C. S. Lewis’s The Silver Chair, but it got pre-empted by The Ferryman.  I’ve read The Silver Chair before at least once, if not twice.  I chose this Narnia book from all the series because of this post by Richard Beck over at Experimental Theology.  The story picks up some time after Dawn-Treader, with Eustace Scrubb being the connecting link to the earlier stories.  Jill Pole, a schoolmate of Scrubb, also plays a lead role.  I’ve got about two chapters left, which is pretty good for being my morning bus-reading.  I like what Beck said about “the signs” of the story.  That theme works on a couple of other levels, too, I think.  In fact, as I read the story I feel and share some of Jill’s pain at botching the signs.  It’s an easy thing for people to do.  It was just announced, but the way, that Greta Gerwig (of Little Women and Lady Bird) is set to direct two Narnia movies for Netflix.  The Silver Chair would be a good one to work with, I think.

After Lewis, I’ve got one more novel to read.  Or in this case, a novella.  Every now and again, Ben Aaronovitch writes a novella set in the broader world of his Rivers of London series.  This time, he’s brought it to the United States to follow a story with Agent Reynolds.  I read the series as much for the British flavor as anything else, so I’m curious to see how Winter’s Gifts fares without it,