And just like that, the first quarter of the new school year is over.  It’s amazing how time flies.

I’m also amazed at how little I posted over the last few weeks of the quarter.  There are a few reasons for that, I suppose, but nothing really work making note of at this point in time.  It was a good quarter, but it was also a busy one.  And I’m not quite done . . . I need to take care of grades today and prep a little today and tomorrow before heading to the West Coast for a few days.

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I did finish Katherine Rundell’s Impossible Creatures just as the break came to an end.  I highly recommend the book.  In some ways it’s more Wingfeather Saga than Harry Potter, though maybe that’s not the best descriptor.  Rundell does a great job of bringing in layers of backstory without weighing things down.  The characters are enjoyable (though surprisingly expendable), and you get to know them just enough.  Rundell also creates a fun framework for the magical creatures of the world.  So there’s lots of storytelling potential for the second book, which drops this time next year.  What I’m most surprised about, though, is that this could easily have been a done-on-one novel and been perfect.  Rundell ends the book in something of a risky way.  A complete story, just risky.  That’s all I can say.

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I’m now a few chapters in on the new Rivers of London novella, The Masquerades of Spring.  The story follows a younger Thomas Nightingale to America and the Jazz Age.  I’m enjoying the book, though I was really hoping that Nightingale would narrate the story.  He’s one of the most endearingly enigmatic characters in fiction for me.

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This feels like a very unplanned break for me.  I don’t have a stack of books to read.  At this point, it’s likely that I’ll revisit some Erik Varden as well as the last quarter of C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity.  Varden because he has something vital to say about my own place in life (in a way) and Lewis because we don’t cover much of the final quarter of MC in my spring class and I really feel the need to reread it after it got some airplay in Fred Sanders’s Deep Things of God).

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As I mentioned at the beginning of the post, I’m planning on heading to the West Coast for a few days.  I found a cheap ticket and have good friends to stay with.  My big hope, though, it getting to spend the night in the Yosemite valley floor.  I’ve wanted to go there since my friends moved to that part of the states, but it hasn’t worked out until now.  So I’ll land and them make my way east to Yosemite.  I’m grateful to live in a beautiful place, but I also long to see other beautiful places, big places.  And Yosemite fits the bill.  (I’ve also got a friend who has visited there often and has put together a nice little suggested-itinerary for me, for which I am grateful.)

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These last few weeks I’ve been blessed by the music of Brother Isaiah of the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal.  Here’s the lyric video to a song I found myself thinking about a lot yesterday, “Holy Hunger.”