What I'm Reading: March 8

Cover, Hawkeye #16

Buckle up! Destination: Digression Central.

Here I am again, a full TWO MONTHS since my last post! Just like last year, I disappeared due to a Perfect Storm of Bloomer Reading and then Bloomer Deliberations and then Post-Midwinter Meeting Recovery, all of which took place while I was running my library's first Midwinter Reading Program—which was SO SUCCESSFUL, OMGGG—and also IT IS STILL WINTER.

Like. It is snowing right now and we're supposedly going to have EIGHTEEN INCHES by the end of this storm? WHAT? So ridiculous. Ugh, MARCH.

But, bright side: SNOW DAY!

ANYWAY. Even though I haven't been online a whole lot, I have been reading. Quite a lot, actually—way more than last year at this time, for sure. I'm chalking that up to adding conditional formatting to my Reading Spreadsheet—seeing all those squares turn from red to green is THE BEST.

As I said way up top—I told you there were bound to be digressions!—I tend to get quieter online when I'm snowed under with work and reading and stress and LITERAL SNOW. But as so much of the joy I find in reading and watching and listening and playing comes from SHARING my thoughts/feelings/questions about what I'm reading and watching and listening to and playing, I'm trying to make more time for that. 

So, as I said above, I have a snow day today.

And I started it off on my best foot forward... IN TEARS, thanks to reading the very last issue in Kelly Thompson's Hawkeye run. I wrote—or, well, had a caps-happy meltdown—a while back about why I love this book so much, so I won't repeat all of that here.

It's one of those special books that hits all of my sweet spots to such a degree that it feels like it's written FOR ME. And I will miss it so, so much.

I mean. Banter during combat! Good-bad jokes! Finger guns! Found family! A crabby, wisecracking heroine who is constantly winking at people! Literal punching of toxic masculinity!

This last issue read like a love letter to the characters and the fans, to found family and stories about scrappy private investigators, to trick arrows and friendship and hard conversations and forgiveness and difficult familial relationships and grief and empathy as a way of de-escalating extremely fraught situations and on and on and on and, like I said, IT MADE ME CRY.

And THEN, the Author's Note at the end ALSO made me cry, but for a very different reason... because maybe we're not saying goodbye to Kate Bishop for forever and ever after all?

Last few lines of the Author's Letter at the end of Hawkeye #16

While I wait around to find out what the deal is with THAT, if you have any recommendations for CHEERFUL NOIR—which sounds like an oxymoron but clearly isn't, because THIS BOOK—I'm all ears.