Welcome to the HogwartsProfessor Book Club’s first official post! After last month’s fun looking at Mockingjay when it first came out (links to those 30+ posts and threads are gathered here), my fellow Professors and Potter Pundits agreed we should try to do this every month. Our first choice has been the Chaos Walking trilogy by Patrick Ness, the last of which novels — Monsters of Men — was published in the US just last week. I wrote reading guides for the first book, The Knife of Never Letting Go, and the second book, The Ask and the Answer, in recent weeks to encourage those of you for whom Chaos Walking was something totally different. I hope you’ve managed to find and read copies of all three Chaos Walking novels; everything from this point forward will assume you have read each book (file that under “Spoiler Warning”).
The purpose of these posts is “bringing up subjects for discussion” not “delivering definitive interpretations.” I’ve only read the books through once and quickly, but, as you know if you’ve read them, even that experience is sufficient for understanding that these are novels of significant, deceptive depth and artistry that merit re-reading both for pleasure and for that close attention on second and third readings which reveals the greater meaning only felt the first time. To encourage that second and third look, let’s start with some curiosities in the surface narrative after the jump.
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