Despite my desire to read something a little more substantial (after the serial disappointments of the past five books), I am to an extent ruled by my library account. When you put e-books on hold and the library notifies you that your next one is now available, it’s foolish not to take advantage of that while you can. So I just finished reading Fool Moon, the second in Jim Butcher’s urban fantasy series, The Dresden Files.

I don’t have a lot to say about it, except that I liked the second even better than the first and will definitely read more as they come my way or when I’m looking for an in-betweener. They don’t bowl me over to the extent that I want to drop everything else to read the entire series, but as an occasional “amuse bouche,” they are a delight.

Interestingly, posters on Goodreads note that A. this is one of the weaker books in the series, and B. that the series doesn’t get really good until [book 3] [book 4] [book 7]. So I guess my trajectory with Harry Dresden has nowhere to go but up!

Things I really enjoyed about this one:

Bob. He may be a plot device to keep Harry in the know, but Bob is also a delightful store of arcane (literally) knowledge, and I enjoy reading his “dissertations.” I also enjoy that he’s an old, old guy who inhabits a skull and who occasionally gets let out to “play.”

Werewolf lore. The aforementioned Bob is responsible for filling Harry in on a lot of it, but he also sources it from the various wolves’ mouths, and it’s both complex and fairly sensible as a set-up for weird trivia. There are hexenwolves, werewolves, lycanthropes, and loup-garous, each with its own set of characteristic behaviors and abilities, and the ins and outs of these aren’t just interesting info, they have a profound effect on the murders Harry (and Murphy) are trying to solve.

Things I continued to dislike: Harry is kind of a chauvinist. Murphy is kind of a dick (and I’m not using that as shorthand for detective). Their relationship and interplay is problematic, and I hope it gets substantially fixed as the series continues.

Verdict: Keep reading.