Philosophical Musings of a Book Nerd

Well, it looks like I have skipped one of the books quite by accident: Ghost Story. The reason this happened was because the friend that I had borrowed the series off had purchased the hard cover edition of Ghost Story, which meant that it sat at the bottom of the pile, so when I went to read the next chapter in the story of Harry Dresden I accidentally grabbed the wrong one. This was somewhat annoying since the Harry Dresden books are supposed to be read in order, which means that I had missed out on what had occurred in Ghost Story. However, from what I picked up from a quick glance over Wikipedia I could quite easily go back and read that one.

Anyway, for those who are familiar with the trials and tribulations of Harry Dresden – Wizard for Hire, will probably have picked up by this stage that his his party of adventurers (for want of a better word) have pretty much become stable (though I'm sure a few others might pop in as the series continues). So we have his brother Thomas, the White Court Vampire; his apprentice Molly; his 'lover' Karin Murphy (who has been kicked out of the police department and is now pretty much a sword for hire); as well as a bunch of fairies that happen to be addicted to pizza.

The plot of the story also seems to have become somewhat settled now, and has moved on from a bunch of disconnected mysteries that this magical sleuth has to solve, to a number of world saving events that Harry must step in and deal with, namely because Harry is Harry and nobody else can actually do what Harry does. Mind you, the political machinations are still being played out behind the scenes (with the White Council still keeping their heads firmly stuck in the sand – though at least there is no Red Court to worry about any more).

In this chapter we find ourselves back in the world of the faire (or the sidhe, which is the proper term for these rather dark, and mischievous creatures), and we also find ourselves exploring the Never-never, which seems to be very much akin to the Astral Plane, or more so a spiritual reality that exists in the fringes of our world. However, what is interesting is that our world still seems to be very much the centre of the action. In fact it seems that these fantasy stories take the world out of the scientific realm where we float somewhere on the edge of the galaxy in amongst a huge universe that leaves us smaller than a quark. Instead they seem to drag our world back into the centre, with these spiritual realms drifting off into infinity. Mind you, for all we know the Never-never could actually provide passages to other worlds, but, at this stage of the story, this doesn't seem to be an idea that Butcher is interested in exploring.

Mind you, for a rather mindless story I am still finding myself being dragged into this universe and wanting to find out what ends up happening to poor Harry. While these stories may make some good movies, unfortunately they did experiment with a series a few years back and unfortunately it didn't end up going anywhere (though I really have to watch it again sometime, but there are a number of other series, such as Mr Robot, that I want to watch first).