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4040714 | /m/0bf07d | Providence: The Story of a 50 Year Vision Quest | Daniel Quinn | 2000 | {"/m/05h83": "Non-fiction"} | Quinn begins by describing the earliest incarnation of a book like Ishmael back in 1977, which Quinn at the time called Man and Alien. This manuscript was revised over the next several years, resulting in five more incarnations (The Genesis Transcript, The Book of Nahash, The Book of the Damned, and two entitled Another Story to Be In), none of which Quinn could successfully get published. At last, though, Quinn heard of the Turner Tomorrow Fellowship Award, which called for creative solutions to global problems. To win the award, though, Quinn was required to translate his long-brewing thoughts for the first time into a work of fiction: a novel. Quinn won the award with Ishmael but was left unsure, until now, about what he should write as a follow-up. Quinn details basic memories of his Depression-era childhood in Omaha, Nebraska: specifically, the occurrence a dream in 1941 that he feels has influenced the rest of his life. In the dream, a tree is blocking the middle of a road he is traversing. A beetle crawls down the trunk to greet him and tells him that itself and other animals deliberately downed the tree to get Quinn’s attention in order to talk with him. Quinn is dumbfounded as the beetle says that the animals need to tell him the secret of their lives. Quinn is then expected to follow a deer into the forest, because he is for some reason needed by the animals, but before he can venture on, he awakes. Quinn recounts the gambling habits of his father (who he feels may have been friends with Meyer Lansky) and the sudden appearance of severe obsessive-compulsive tendencies in his mother. Quinn’s parents habitually fought, each unable to understand the other’s behaviors. Quinn feels his reaction to this was to try to perfect in himself what was unachievable with his parents in their relationship. Quinn’s desire for perfection led him to an interest in the arts and a belief in Catholicism. Quinn received a full scholarship to St. Louis University because of his writing, though left after two years to devote his life to his religion, by becoming a Trappist monk at age nineteen. Greatly influenced by Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain, Quinn went to the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky. At Gethsemani, Merton in fact became Quinn’s personal spiritual director. As a postulant at the monastery, Quinn decided after a troublesome moment at the monastery, involving a miscommunication with a novice, that he had to either completely submit his will to that of God or else he had to leave the monastery. Summoning his strength, Quinn made the choice of submission to the complete guidance of God. The next time he stepped outside (having been indoors for three entire weeks), Quinn experienced an unexpected moment of explosive, positive emotion, which he interpreted as infused contemplation, meaning utter centeredness on God: a feeling he describes as a "rage of joy." Quinn convinced himself at the time that this awe-striking moment of beauty with the world was evidence of God's approval of his decision to submit. Quinn told an incredulous Merton of this amazing experience, but was soon discharged from the monastery by Merton, who attributed the reason for Quinn’s dismissal to the recent results of a Rorschach test. Quinn was crushed by his expulsion and began to see a psychoanalyst, as recommended by Merton. Quinn continued with his lifelong inability to understand his own sexuality, largely since his father always assumed him to be homosexual and because his current therapist thought him unready to be in any serious relationships. Quinn, however, soon married a woman who later left him for another man. During this whole time, Quinn continued to struggle with his self-destructive need to be perfect. When Quinn talked to a priest who claimed to worry more about people than rules, Quinn’s religious worldview began to crumble and he became an atheist. Quinn then got a job in educational publishing, which instigated his questioning of the educational system of the United States; this came with the rise of the Flower Children of the 1960s. Quinn briefly mentions the failure of his second marriage and his own willing movement toward going back to psychotherapy. Quinn began to realize in therapy that his entire technique with social situations was to merely trick others into thinking he was worth knowing, while he actually believed himself valueless. One day, however, he was idly making a list of all his valuable attributes when he suddenly realized that he did not need to try to fake his personality in front of people; he did not need to be perfect—merely human. Quinn explains that this newfound insight gave him the courage to ask out his future (and current) wife, Rennie, on their first date. Quinn then delivers his most recent understanding of learning and education, notably including the idea that formal education is an unnecessary social institution, since children learn automatically by following the behaviors of fellow members of their culture and by pursuing their own innate interests (which rigidly-structured public schools largely stop from happening). He also refers to his discontents with how history is studied in its disregard for tribal societies, reiterating many of the themes from Ishmael. Finally, he examines religion, including his own more recent advocacy of animism, which he considers the one-time world religion with its refreshing lack of any sacred text, institutions, or dogma. He revisits the memory of his “rage of joy” moment, now understating it in animist terms. He concludes with the thought that many needy people (like himself prior to his epiphany) are just those who do not feel needed. He asserts that the reader should feel needed because he or she is needed: needed desperately by the community of life to understand humanity's forgotten interdependence with the rest of that community. |
4042710 | /m/0bf371 | Girls on film | Zoey Dean | 2004 | {"/m/03h09f": "Chick lit", "/m/0dwly": "Children's literature", "/m/03mfnf": "Young adult literature", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | Still living with her father, Anna receives an internship at her father's girlfriend's new agency but is still forced to attend Beverly Hills High (BHH) and finds herself sharing classes with Cammie Sheppard and Dee Young. Her friendship with Samantha Sharpe however blossoms as the two work on a film project for their English class regarding the Great Gatsby. Sam finds herself developing a crush on Anna and spends the novel worrying if she is gay. In a subplot, Anna's older sister Susan Percy was kicked out of rehab (though she claims she checked herself out) and takes a room in the Beverly Hills Hotel. Anna tries to persuade Susan to stay at their father's house, but Susan only vaguely mentions her reasons for hating their father. Anna is worried Susan will not be able to stay sober and grows even increasingly worried when Susan makes friends with Dee Young and Cammie Shepherd, Anna's nemesis. To add to Anna's troubles, Ben is still pining after her for forgiveness, which she refuses to give, but in the meantime she begins dating Adam Flood, an all around good guy who is a point guard on the school basketball team, whom she met at Sam's father's wedding. However, Anna realizes that she is truly not interested in Adam and cuts off ties with boys in order to focus on her and Sam's Great Gatsby project. Anna volunteers to write the screenplay for the project, despite Sam's misgivings. Anna and Sam shoot their film project at Veronique's Spa, with Susan tagging along. On the way there, Anna reveals to Sam and Susan what happened between her and Ben on New Year's Eve and makes Sam promise not to tell Cammie or Dee. Susan encourages Anna not to be afraid of falling in love but admits that Ben sounds like a bit of a "player". Much to Anna's displeasure, Cammie and Dee are at the spa as well though Sam promises they won't get in the way. Two schoolmates, Parker and Monty Pinelli, arrive and they help find actors for the short film. Even though she made a promise, Sam cannot resist and ends up telling Cammie and Dee Anna's secret. Cammie tries to use this information to get Ben back but he rebuffs her advances. To his surprise, Anna calls him later that night but she immediately regrets that decision, but not before Ben is able to check his caller ID and figure out where she is. In the midst of filming, Ben bursts into the sauna the group is in and begs to talk to Anna alone, but they are locked in by a vengeful guest who wanted to punish Susan for flirting with Parker Pinelli. Susan gleefully reveals everyone's secrets in an attempt to get Anna out of her cold and repressive ways: Anna and Adam broke up, Dee had sex with Ben during her tour of Princeton, and Dee is forced to admit that she is not really pregnant. Anna runs away from the scene when they are finally let out, with Ben chasing her. Cammie is annoyed that Ben came for Anna and loves Anna more than he ever loved her whilst they were going out so she he decides to manipulate Susan into falling off her sobriety wagon. At the Steinbergs' party, Anna has to accompany a new playwright, Brock Franklin, who was her sister's ex-boyfriend, for Apex, the agency she's interning for. Susan, courtesy of Cammie, becomes drunk and causes trouble at the party, but fortunately for Anna, Sam plays it off as if it is all part of their Gatsby project and rush Susan home. While at Anna's house, Sam realizes that her lesbian thoughts about Anna are harmless and that she's not gay. She advises Anna to go away for awhile and leave her troubles behind. Anna's father, Jonathan Percy, comes home and Anna demands to know what happened that made Susan change into an alcoholic. Jonathan explains that Susan had been going out with a terrible boyfriend who was getting her hooked on drugs. Susan overhears and coldly adds to Anna that the Percy family actually paid the boyfriend to leave Susan, which clinched her descent into addiction. Susan and Jonathan begin to argue until Anna decides she has had enough and tells them that she is going away for a few days and asks them to try to resolve their issues. Anna goes off to the Montecito Inn, in Santa Barbara, hoping to get away from drama. Then, Ben shows up. He tells her that Sam told him where Anna was going to be and he finally admits why he left her on the boat on New Year's Eve: his father is a gambling addict who lost a lot of money that night and threatened a suicide attempt. Embarrassed and ashamed, Ben concocted a story of a mystery celebrity friend who needed his help. He apologizes to Anna once more and she forgives him. The two go back to her hotel room and Anna loses her virginity to him. |
4042722 | /m/0bf382 | Blonde Ambition | Zoey Dean | 9/1/2004 | {"/m/02xlf": "Fiction", "/m/05hgj": "Novel"} | The novel begins with Ben and Anna in bed at the Montecinto Inn. However, they interrupted by a call from Anna's father who says that Susan is going to back to rehab and wants to say goodbye. Anna considers their farewell to be intimate and is surprised when Ben tags along though she does not voice her displeasure. After Susan boards the plane to her next rehab, Anna must face the consequences of the Steinberg party. Margaret informs Anna that her behavior (abandoning a client in favor of rushing a drunk Susan home) was unacceptable and is about to fire her when Clark Sheppard intervenes. He takes Anna as his intern and gives her the assignment of covering the latest hit TV show Hermosa Beach. Anna meets the young but charming co-executive producer Danny Bluestone who actually dreams of writing the Great American Novel and is appalled by Ben's increasing jealous attitude towards him and Jonathan Percy's driver, Django, who has always been friendly to her. Anna is also worried that Ben is dropping his studies for her and tries to get him to go back to Princeton. Their relationship must come to another end when Ben agrees he must go back to Princeton to finish school and not worry about his family so much. Meanwhile, Cammie feels increasingly deserted by her friends: Dee is enamored with her new boyfriend, Stevie, while Sam seems to be showing interest in Adam Flood. To further her dismay, her step-mother announces that her daughter, Mia, will be moving in. Cammie initially hates Mia, a secretive fourteen-year old Valley girl, but takes her out shopping in order to not feel alone. After finding out that Sam is no longer interested in Adam (Adam is still hung up over Anna and Sam refuses to be a rebound), Cammie kisses him at a party but is surprised at the chemistry between them. She not so subtly follows Adam to a Beck concert and the two are invited to a rave by a rapper, Mo Bad. Cammie and Adam kiss again but are interrupted by Dee who nonchalantly mentions inviting Mia along with her as well. Cammie's protective instincts kick in and the three go find Mia at the party and take her home. Cammie reveals to Adam that even though she doesn't like Mia, Mia reminds her a lot of how she acted after her mom died. Cammie also mentions that she wished she had a big sister to keep her from making stupid choices which is what she is going to try to do for Mia. However, the next day, Cammie becomes frustrated at Mia's self-destructive attitude and decides she can't be Mia's rescuer. Meanwhile, Adam tells Cammie that they should slow down their relationship because he still has feelings for Anna. Enraged, Cammie plots to sabotage Anna, who is somewhat enjoying her internship, despite the unfamiliar terms and erratic actors. Soon, it all comes crashing down when Clark accused Anna of leaking sensitive information to the press. He fires her and forbids anyone from work associating with her. Anna tries to explain to Danny her side of the story but he sadly tells her that he can't been seen with her or else he will lose his career. Sam makes Anna realize the true culprit and the two plot a plan for justice. In the meantime, Cammie organizes and throws her sweet 18th birthday party on her own (since Sam and Dee have been too busy to help) and is horrified when her credit and debit cards are denied by the party planner. Even worse, her BMW is towed and when she returns home, Clark reveals that he knows Cammie was the true culprit behind the leaked information and is going to be punished for so, thanks to Mia who collaborated with Sam and Anna to clear Anna's name. In the morning, Adam shows up to comfort Cammie and the two go on a quiet date to the park while Clark half-heartedly apologizes to Anna for the mistake and offers her job back. Anna politely declines and then surprises Danny at the office. He leaves work early for her and the two go on a date. |
4042764 | /m/0bf3c6 | Back in Black | Zoey Dean | 9/1/2005 | {"/m/0dwly": "Children's literature", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction", "/m/05hgj": "Novel"} | Back in Black finds the A-List crew in Las Vegas! They have decided to forgo the school sponsored trip to Washington D.C. in favor of a far more exciting adventure. The trip starts with a "tacky outfit" contest, suggested by who else than Cammie that ends in its own interesting way. During this whole adventure Anna is pining for Ben who is away at school, and trying to convince him to join them in Vegas. Anna's best friend Cyn turns up with her boyfriend Scott Spencer. The crew decides to visit a hypnotist, this book is also and secrets and surprises are revealed, that no one expected that leads to cat fights, and revelations that were much more appropriate kept inside. Dee of course has decided that instead of partaking in all the sinful action of the city that she is going to reform the sinners of the sin city, which leads to an ending and a breakdown that makes everyone forget what was said at the hypnotist. At the end, before they go back to Beverly Hills, Ben shows up and Anna stays behind with him. They have a chance to talk about what happened between them. Ben confesses that he's seeing someone at school, Blythe, but its not serious. In the end Anna and Ben decide to get back together. |
4043114 | /m/0bf3wv | The Short Reign of Pippin IV | John Steinbeck | 1957 | {"/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction"} | Pippin IV explores the life of Pippin Héristal, an amateur astronomer suddenly proclaimed the king of France. Unknowingly appointed for the sole reason of giving the Communists a monarchy to revolt against, Pippin is chosen because he was rumored to descend from the famous king Charlemagne. Unhappy with his lack of privacy, alteration of family life, uncomfortable housings at the Palace of Versailles and mostly, his lack of a telescope, the protagonist spends a portion of the novel dressing up as a commoner, often riding a motorscooter, to avoid the constrained life of a king. Pippin eventually receives his wish of dethronement after the people of France enact the rebellion Pippin's kingship was destined to receive. |
4046734 | /m/0bf96m | Gentlemen & Players | Joanne Harris | 10/1/2005 | {"/m/02n4kr": "Mystery", "/m/028v3": "Detective fiction"} | As the new school year starts in September, Roy Straitley is looking forward to his 100th term at St Oswald's, where he has been teaching for 33 years. Having never married, he lives alone and has devoted his life to his career. His sitting room walls are full of pictures of "his boys", and St Oswald's represents his only family. He is slightly overweight and ugly by conventional standards (his nickname among his pupils is "Quaz", short for "Quasimodo"). Popular with the students, he adheres to the old principle of being "firm but fair" where teaching and disciplinary matters are concerned. An incurable optimist, Straitley is only uncomfortable when he has to deal with the opposite sex. He is a keen observer, and hardly anything connected with life at the school, however insignificant, ever escapes his notice. A firm believer in the advantages and importance of a classical education, he shuns computers, resorts to Latin to swear and insult his colleagues (which they do not understand), and opposes the idea of any competition between schools other than the kind which is carried out on the playing fields. Smoking Gauloises in his empty form room is his "one concession to the influence of the Modern Languages", and there is long-standing enmity between Straitley and Dr Devine, the Head of German. The other masters are mostly set in their ways, St Oswald's having made an indelible imprint on their lives. There is Pat Bishop, the Second Master, who has also remained unmarried and who occasionally, at busy times, spends the night in his office doing administrative work. Always intent on mediating between rivalling factions, Bishop has been able to keep his affair with his secretary a secret so as not to blemish the school's reputation. There is Bob Strange, the Third Master, a bureaucrat unpopular with the pupils who has been trying for years to get rid of Straitley and force him into early retirement ("Young blood is cheaper."). There are the members of the German department ("Teutons", according to the old Latin master), among them Geoff and Penny ("League of") Nations, a married couple described by Straitley as hypocrites and sycophants. There is Tony Beard, head of computer science and eo ipso Straitley's natural adversary. And there is Isabelle Tapi, a part-time French teacher who is said to have made passes at each new male addition to the staff. At the beginning of the new term, it is the "freshers" on whom Straitley focuses his observations. There are five of them, among them Jeff Light, a Games master who has become a teacher because he thinks it is an easy job; Chris Keane, who teaches English but actually wants to be a novelist; and Dianne Dare, an attractive young woman who teaches French. The new term starts with a number of minor yet inexplicable occurrences. For the first time in his life, Straitley's register goes missing without ever turning up again. Also, his coffee mug is no longer at the place in the Common Room where it has sat for many years. Pupils report that various objects are missing from their classrooms or lockers. In particular, a 13 year-old Jewish boy from Straitley's form deplores the alleged theft of his expensive fountain pen, a Bar Mitzvah present. Presently, the boy's mother accuses the school and especially Straitley of anti-Semitism. Soon afterwards, a pupil in Straitley's class nearly dies, following another malicious trick, and closely guarded secrets in the lives of the St Oswald's staff are anonymously revealed. Life at St Oswald's begins to suffer a gradual disintegration. One morning, after the discovery of a computer virus on the school's computer system, Pat Bishop is arrested, because child pornography has been downloaded onto his computer and paid for with his credit card. Bishop denies this, but the damage to his career has been done. Meanwhile, a mysterious figure called "Mole" publishes in the local newspaper damaging allegations about St Oswald's. Straitley begins to suspect that, not only are all these incidents orchestrated by the same malicious individual, but that this person is deliberately trying to bring down St. Oswald's. The novel is written using Harris' typical split-narrative technique. The first narrator (indicated at the beginning of each chapter by a white King) is Straitley himself, and focuses on the day-to-day events at St Oswald's as the situation develops. The second is marked by a Black Pawn, and is the voice of the mysterious enemy within St Oswald's, whose identity is only revealed at the end of the book, and who, little by little, reveals the bitterness and hatred that drives a person to fake an identity, break the law and even to commit murder - all in the name of revenge. There is a twist ending to the novel which may or may not satisfy readers who long for poetic justice or a typically "Hollywood ending". http://www.joanne-harris.co.uk/v3site/books/gentlemen/index.html |
4049922 | /m/0bfjbd | Young Bond Book 5 | Charlie Higson | 9/3/2008 | {"/m/06wkf": "Spy fiction"} | In Lisbon, OGPU Colonel Irina Sedova, also known as 'Babuska' (Russian for 'grandmother'), visits the Russian cell leader in Portugal. However, she soon realizes that he isn't the cell leader. He vainly tries to kill her but Sedova's bulletproof vest protects her and she manages to kill the imposter. She then finds a sheet of paper with a name from the past on it: James Bond. During this time, Bond is on his way for a school skiing trip in Austria when he runs afoul of a group of Hitler Youth members who call him a cheater for having won a game of poker. He beats them, gives them back their money, and tells them to play with good grace. Some time later, he arrives in Austria where he realizes that he is being followed. When he arrives at his hotel, he is still being followed. There, he meets with his friend Andrew Carlton and his teacher Mr. Merriot. During a skiing outing, Bond goes after one of his classmates who is drunk and they get caught in an avalanche. After saving himself and his classmate, Bond is hospitalised and hears a man crying out about his cousin named Jürgen who is going to be killed. He later finds out this man was the Graf Von Schlick. A few days later, the boys return to Eton where Bond meets the new maid, Roan Power. He finds himself falling in love with her and starts to spend time with her. She takes him to meet her friend, an Irishman named Dandy O'Keefe. During this meeting, Bond accidentally meets the Princesses, Elizabeth and Mary but doesn't recognize them. A few days later, he is invited to a party given by the Prince of Wales where he meets the mysterious Graf Otto von Schlick. On the 4 June King George V comes to Eton and Bond spots Sedova among the crowd. Sometime later he is knocked unconscious, bound and gagged by Dandy, who is planning to assassinate the King by blowing up the church of Eton, while framing Bond for it as part of a plan to start a communist revolution. After preventing the attempt and escaping with a hidden knife, Bond goes after Dandy, who tries to kill him with his knife. Bond is saved by the man who followed him in Austria when he shoots Dandy, who takes him to Mr. Merriot. The teacher reveals that he works for MI6 and that they have been keeping an eye on him. He tells Bond that Dandy and Roan are working for a Communist cell and that they want to know all about the operation. They want Bond to get Roan to talk. Back at Eton, Roan tells Bond that they are working for a Communist agent who they know as 'Amethyst', who works for the Communist cell based in Portugal. This operation is being run by a man known as 'Obsidian'. Bond informs her that Dandy was captured and, after she begs him not to give her away, they share a kiss. However, unable to betray Roan, Bond tells her the truth and they run away to Austria together. During their crossing the country, they are pursued not only by MI6 but also by Sedova. When they arrive in Austria, Roan betrays Bond to Obsidian who is none other than Dr. Perseus Friend, whom Bond thought he had killed in Silverfin. It is revealed that Friend had assumed the identity of the Graf since the surgery and had met Bond at the party, and the original Graf had been killed. Also, it is revealed that Friend and Amethyst, a Russian named Vladimir Wrangel, are not working for the Russians but for the Nazis. The plan was to trick Dandy and Roan into believing that the King's death would inspire the workers of Britain to revolt against the government, into killing King George V. The King's death would, thus, have placed Edward VIII on the throne. As he was more sympathetic towards Hitler, and the fact that Dandy and Roan would have claimed to be working for the Communists, the UK would have formed an alliance with Germany, isolating the French and giving Germany an ally in the ensuing war against Communist Russia. Dr. Friend mocks Roan by saying that the British were too conservative to rise up against their monarchy. Bond and Roan are locked up and Friend plans to skin Bond alive as a revenge for having nearly killed him. However, they manage to escape and are pursued around the castle by Wrangel. As he is about to kill them, OGPU agents under the command of Colonel Sedova, who had followed the entire conspiracy since Lisbon, attacked the Germans. Roan kills Wrangel, saving Bond, and Sedova kills Friend. Sedova corners Bond and Roan just as Bond had cornered her in London. However, as she is about to take him to Russia as leverage against the British, MI6 arrive and rescue the two. However, Sedova tries to shoot Bond who is saved by Roan. Bond shoots Sedova, although she disappears shortly afterwards. Before dying, Roan reveals that she had been married to Dandy, but that she loved Bond. Subsequently Merriot informs Bond that, although the King was very grateful that he had saved his life, he would be unable to remain at Eton, so Bond is sent instead to Fettes College. |
4049930 | /m/0bfjc2 | What We Do Is Secret | Thorn Kief Hillsbery | 2005 | {"/m/02xlf": "Fiction", "/m/05hgj": "Novel"} | Rockets was ten years old when he first met Darby Crash, lead singer of LA punk band The Germs. He and Darby had a sexual relationship and Rockets, like many in the scene, looked up to Darby. Rockets was aware, however, that he was often manipulated by Darby's mind games and talent for controlling people. After Darby's death Rockets continues to hang out in the local punk scene, but things are changing and he considers leaving LA. Rockets' circle of close friends is composed of Siouxie, Squid, and Blitzer. Peripheral characters include Rory Dolores, Animal Cracker, Slade, and Hellin Killer. Despite his age, Rockets is accepted as one of the gang, but he is secretly scared of being returned to a group home. Blitzer, a young man, is very affectionate towards Rockets and the two gradually become more intimate, sexually and otherwise. Blitzer holds out the hope of a new life for the two of them together in Idaho. Blitzer gradually gets more intimate with Rockets, buying a double sleeping bag when they go camping and offering to hold his penis in the bathroom. Eventually, after a concert, they make love and Rockets welcomes Blitzer's advances. They then shower together and Blitzer comments on the bruises that Rockets got when he was arrested by the police]. Rockets admits to Blitzer, "My worst fear is like ending up in a boy's home." Blitzer then gives the boy his first shave and later on shaves his head as Rockets turns from punk to skinhead for his birthday. All four of the core group of friends make money by turning tricks of one sort or another and spend it on drugs, typically poppers, tabs, and the amphetamine derivative Desoxyn. Two gay tourists hire the group to show them around LA and are therefore also involved in much of the action of the book. |
4050227 | /m/0bfk54 | The Ice Harvest | Scott Phillips | 2000 | {"/m/0lsxr": "Crime Fiction", "/m/02n4kr": "Mystery", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction", "/m/0c3351": "Suspense"} | It is Christmas Eve in Wichita, Kansas and snowing steadily. The streets are deserted, traffic is light and most people have returned home for the start of the festivities. But family get-togethers are the last thing on Charlie Arglist's mind, and home is the last place he needs to be. For Charlie has to get out of town, having stolen nearly a million dollars. In nine and a half hours, to be precise. He has various misadventures before he is killed accidentally after nearly escaping cleanly. |
4050623 | /m/0bfl1b | Fire From Heaven | Mary Renault | 1969-06 | {"/m/0hwxm": "Historical novel"} | The novel, whose memorable opening line is "The child was wakened by the knotting of the snake's coils about his waist," portrays Alexander's complicated relationship with his father, Philip of Macedon, and his mother Olympias; his education under the philosopher Aristotle, whose later opposition to Alexander is foreshadowed; and his devotion to his lifelong companion Hephaistion, depicted as both a lover and an intimate friend. The novel contains a controversial portrait of the Athenian orator Demosthenes, portraying him as arrogant, cowardly and vindictive. The novel ends with the assassination of Philip, with Alexander, his heir, poised to begin his career of conquests. |
4051026 | /m/0bfl_x | Qadiani Problem | Sayyid Abul Ala Maududi | 1953 | {"/m/05h83": "Non-fiction"} | The book deals with some of the interpretations of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad. It discusses the finality of prophethood, the prophethood of Ahmad, and its consequences in Muslim society. It also mentions the status of the Ahmadiyya Community and its political plans. In one of the appendices of the book, a discussion between Allama Iqbal and Pandit Jawahar Lal Nehru is reproduced, in which Allama Iqbal has expressed his views regarding followers of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad and have rationalized his view that followers of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad be given a status of a different religious community in India. |
4051817 | /m/0bfncb | The Sound of the Mountain | Yasunari Kawabata | 1949 | {"/m/05hgj": "Novel"} | The novel centers upon the Ogata family of Kamakura, and its events are witnessed from the perspective of its aging patriarch, Shingo, a businessman close to retirement who works in Tokyo. Although only sixty-two years old at the beginning of the novel, Shingo has already begun to experience temporary lapses of memory, to recall strange and disturbing dreams upon waking, and occasionally to hear sounds heard by no one else, including the titular noise which awakens him from his sleep one night, "like wind, far away, but with a depth like a rumbling of the earth." Shingo takes the sound to be an omen of his impending death, as he had once coughed up blood (a possible sign of tuberculosis) a year before, but had not sought medical consultation and the symptom subsequently went away. Although he does not outwardly change his daily routine, Shingo begins to observe and question more closely his relations with the other members of his family, who include his wife Yasuko, his philandering son Shuichi (who, in traditional Japanese custom, lives with his wife in his parents' house), his daughter-in-law Kikuko, and his married daughter Fusako, who has left her husband and returned to her family home with her two young daughters. Shingo realizes that he has not truly been an involved and loving husband and father, and perceives the marital difficulties of his adult children to be the fruit of his poor parenting. To this end, he begins to question his secretary, Tanizaki Eiko, about his son's affair, as she knows Shuichi socially and is friends with his mistress, and he quietly puts pressure upon Shuichi to quit his infidelity. At the same time, he uncomfortably becomes aware that he has begun to experience a fatherly yet erotic attachment to Kikuko, whose quiet suffering in the face of her husband's unfaithfulness, physical attractiveness, and filial devotion contrast strongly with the bitter resentment and homeliness of his own daughter, Fusako. Complicating matters in his own marriage is the infatuation that as a young man he once possessed for Yasuko's older sister, more beautiful than Yasuko herself, who died as a young woman but who has again begun to appear in his dreams, along with images of other dead friends and associates. The novel may be interpreted as a meditation upon aging and its attendant decline, and the coming to terms with one's mortality that is its hallmark. Even as Shingo regrets not being present for his family and blames himself for his children's failing marriages, the natural world, represented by the mountain itself, the cherry tree in the yard of his house, the flights of birds and insects in the early summer evening, or two pine trees he sees from the window of his commuter train each day, comes alive for him in a whole new way, provoking meditations on life, love, and companionship. |
4053656 | /m/0bfrk9 | Loser | Jerry Spinelli | null | {"/m/0dwly": "Children's literature", "/m/03mfnf": "Young adult literature", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction", "/m/05hgj": "Novel"} | Jerry Spinelli's novel, Loser, takes place in a "small brick-and-hoagie town" in the United States and details the childhood of Donald Zinkoff, focusing on his life from the first through sixth grades. Zinkoff is usually the last person picked for athletic teams, his flute consistently hits the wrong note during concerts, and he is occasionally too eager at the wrong times. Donald Zinkoff is one unusual kid that some people just can't really understand, with uncontrollable laughter, uncommon enthusiasm, the love of going to school, acting childish when supposedly mature, not being good at sports, and a dream of becoming a mailman (after his father). Donald tries to fit in, but has trouble doing so. Even after being called "Loser", he goes on with life and remains happy, even though he doesn't have any friends. However, throughout the book we notice that these traits make him far more of a winner than his peers. Zinkoff is introduced to school in First grade and loves it, even though he is always seated in the rear of the classroom because his teacher sits students alphabetically. But Zinkoff hits his low point in fifth grade, when his team does not want him to participate in that year's field day because of his abysmal performance during last year's proceedings. Sixth grade is Zinkoff's first year of Middle School, where he reconnects with his former neighbor from second grade, Andrew. Andrew has changed his identity to become "Drew," a sixth grader who has confidence in the crowded halls and a cell phone in his book bag. This chance encounter sort of clues Zinkoff in as to how much of a difference there is between him and his peers. Even though they consider him to be a loser, he's not; in fact, Zinkoff has a heart of gold. This is shown through his interactions with his parents and the lonely, elderly lady in his neighborhood, as well as the hours he spends looking for a little girl from his neighborhood who becomes lost in a snowstorm. |
4055580 | /m/0bfv78 | Whortle's Hope | Robin Jarvis | 2007 | {"/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy"} | In the story, which takes place in the summer before the events of The Crystal Prison, it is almost the time of the Fennywolde games, when the young field mice compete to see who will have the honour of being the head sentry of the cornfield for the entire summer. Young Whortle longs to win the competition, but not if it means his friends are going to sabotage the other competitor's chances. He wants to win on his own merits, but soon realises winning isn't the most important thing as another mouse needs the prize more than he does. |
4055612 | /m/0bfv9r | Ogmund's Gift | Robin Jarvis | 2008 | {"/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy"} | Ogmund's Gift will be about the unruly nephew of Orfeo and Eldritch, two of the mystical bats in Deptford. Ogmund would rather be a mouse, but instead he must learn to harness his growing magical powers. |
4056272 | /m/0bfw5f | The Third Witch | Rebecca Reisert | 2001-10 | {"/m/03g3w": "History", "/m/05hgj": "Novel", "/m/02p0szs": "Historical fiction", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction", "/m/0fr3y1": "Parallel novel"} | The novel retells the story of Macbeth from the perspective of one of the witches, a young girl named Gilly. She has sworn revenge against Macbeth for murdering her father. Posing as a kitchen worker, Gilly wants to carry out her plan to kill him, and soon becomes involved in many important events from the play. |
4057669 | /m/0bfy7f | Ghost Tower of Inverness | null | null | {"/m/06c9r": "Role-playing game"} | The player characters go on a quest to find the fabled Soul Gem, a legendary artifact of great power. They must gather the four parts of a key granting them entrance to the Ghost Tower. |
4057741 | /m/0bfycb | White Plume Mountain | Lawrence Schick | null | {"/m/06c9r": "Role-playing game", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction"} | White Plume Mountain is set in the World of Greyhawk, a campaign setting for Dungeons & Dragons. The earliest known inhabitant of the volcano known as White Plume Mountain is the druid Aegwareth. Aegwareth is later slain by the evil wizard Keraptis, who took over the mountain with his gnomish servitors. The premise of White Plume Mountain is that thirteen hundred years ago, Keraptis descended into the volcanic mountain with a company of gnomes, and disappeared. The adventure is a dungeon crawl, to rescue the magical weapons from Keraptis' lair. The adventure's 16 pages are divided into 27 encounters. The player's characters begin in a cave at the base of White Plume Mountain. In the first numbered encounter, the characters find a spiral staircase in the cave which leads to a "mangy, bedraggled" gynosphinx. Encounter seven involves a large cave with a floor of boiling mud. Circular wooden platforms are suspended from the ceiling, and the characters must jump from platform to platform while dodging geysers of hot mud. In the eighth encounter, the characters confront a vampire who is guarding the magical war hammer Whelm in a room of permanent darkness. In encounter 17, a corridor leads the characters to a boiling lake. According to the adventure, "The corridor from the dungeon continues out into the lake under a rubbery magical forcefield that keeps out the waters by forming a sort of elastic skin of super-tension." The watery tunnel opens into a watery dome, where the characters must defeat a giant crab in order to collect the magical trident Wave. Encounter 22 involves a frictionless room with spikes, and in encounter 23, the characters kayak on a stream suspended in mid air. In the 26th encounter, the characters must fight various creatures in a magical ziggurat where each level is guarded by a different monster including sea lions, giant crayfish, giant scorpions, and manticores. In the last encounter, an ogre mage must be defeated in order to win the magical sword Blackrazor. An end note recommends that the Dungeon Master add an encounter with two efreet if the characters have succeeded in taking two or three of the magic weapons. |
4058199 | /m/0bfz1m | Forgotten Temple of Tharizdun | Gary Gygax | 1982 | {"/m/06c9r": "Role-playing game"} | The Forgotten Temple of Tharizdun is set in the World of Greyhawk. The player characters (PCs) follow a band of marauding norkers from the caverns, discovering the temple along the way. They must search through the dangerous mountain passes to find the norker lair inside the temple. The adventurers are drawn into the story by a gnomish community and travel to the temple. After battling their way in, the PCs explore the temple chambers, which contain mundane creatures and new monsters from the Fiend Folio supplement. During their exploration, the characters may reach chambers of the temple in which religious rituals were performed, and risk insanity and death as they encounter remnants of worshipers of the imprisoned god Tharizdun. To progress further, the characters must enact portions of the rituals of worship of Tharizdun, traveling into an underground sub-temple, and magically opening an inner sanctum called the Black Cyst. Having advanced this far, the characters are likely to be driven insane, killed outright, or permanently trapped within the underground temple. |
4058574 | /m/0bfzln | The Haunted Bookshop | Christopher Morley | 1919 | {"/m/01jfsb": "Thriller", "/m/03npn": "Horror", "/m/05hgj": "Novel", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/02n4kr": "Mystery", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction", "/m/0c3351": "Suspense"} | The narrative begins with a young advertising man, Aubrey Gilbert, stopping by a bookstore named "The Haunted Bookshop" in the hopes of finding a new client. Gilbert meets the proprietor, Roger Mifflin. Gilbert does not succeed in selling advertising copy, but is intrigued by Mifflin and his conviction concerning the value books and booksellers have to the world. Additionally, Gilbert is intrigued by the fact that his firm's biggest client, Mr. Chapman, is a friend of Mifflin and has asked Mifflin to undertake the education of his daughter, Titania Chapman, by hiring her on as an assistant. Gilbert returns to the book store, meets Titania, and falls in love with her. Meanwhile mysterious things begin happening: a copy of Thomas Carlyle's Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell disappears and reappears, Gilbert is attacked as he travels home, and a pharmacist neighbor of Mifflin is observed skulking in the alley behind the bookstore at night speaking to someone in German, an assistant chef at the Octagon Hotel has posted an ad in the New York Times promising a reward for a lost copy of Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell. Gilbert starts to sense that something nefarious is afoot and suspects that the gregarious Mifflin is involved in a plot to kidnap Titania, and he assigns himself the job of protecting her. Meanwhile, Mifflin begins to train Titania in the booksellers' trade. His focus is so centered on books and their content that he fails to note the unusual things that are occurring. Gilbert takes a room across from the bookstore in order to keep eye on things, and believes his suspicions confirmed when he sees the pharmacist let himself into the bookshop with his own key late at night. Gilbert breaks into the bookshop in an effort to find evidence to prove his suspicions, but only manages to frighten and anger Titania. Gilbert learns that Mifflin is to take a day trip to Philadelphia, and follows him in the belief that the trip is a part of the "kidnapping" plot. In Philadelphia Gilbert confronts Mifflin with his suspicions, telling him of all the things that have occurred. The two realize that a third party had lured Mifflin away from the shop. They call the bookshop and learn that the pharmacist has left a suitcase of books there for someone else to pick up. Mifflin tells Titania to hold onto the case until he returns. Mifflin and Gilbert return to the bookshop and find it locked. Inside, the pharmacist and an associate of his have tied up Mrs. Mifflin and are menacing Titania with a gun. A fight ensues, part of the bookstore is destroyed by a bomb, and the pharmacist escapes. The only casualties of the bomb are the pharmacist's partner and Mifflin's dog, Bock. Mifflin even affects to be pleased as the blast knocked down books he'd forgotten he had. In the final chapter of the book Gilbert and Mifflin learn what the true plot was: The pharmacist was a German spy who had been using the bookshop as a drop-off point. He was a specialist in making bombs, and had hidden a bomb in one of President Woodrow Wilson's favorite books. The pharmacist's co-conspirator was the assistant chef at the Octagon Hotel. He was to be part the crew on the ship Wilson was to travel on to peace talks in Europe, and was to plant the bomb in Wilson's cabin in an assassination plot. The pharmacist was captured by police, and killed himself. |
4058832 | /m/0bfzyp | There Are Doors | Gene Wolfe | 1988 | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | Mr. Green awakes to find that his girlfriend, Lara Morgan, has left their apartment. He battles a hangover to find a cryptic note left by her, dispensing little but a warning against entering certain "significant" doors and nonsensical instructions for leaving them if passed through. Green immediately leaves to search for the woman, whom he has known for only a few days but has already grown to love. His quest takes him through one such door to an alternate world, made apparent to Green by conspicuous elements such as its unusual currency. An accident lands Green in a psychiatric hospital, where he meets a radical from his world using the name William North (a patient), a boxer named Joe Joeseph and his manager Eddie Walsh (also a patient). North organizes an escape from the Hospital, accompanied by Green and exploited by Walsh, who makes his own escape. The two take refuge at the Grand Hotel in the outskirts of the city, while Green begins to realize what a dangerous man he has been indebted to. North brings him to a play accompanied by members of his revolutionary group which is raided by police. Green and North narrowly escape capture and death, though they lose each other. Green returns to his hotel paranoid of capture by the police. He finds that the doctor he consults for minor burns suffered during the raid and subsequent fire at the theater, the waitress at the hotel restaurant, and even the stylist at the hair salon beneath it all seem to work for the police organization that is tracking him. He leaves the hotel hoping to learn more, but is locked out upon his return and must accept a car ride from the waitress, Fanny. They go to an Italian restaurant which Green recognizes as being from his world. He and Fanny discuss the little they know about North's gang, the two worlds, and Lara. The alternate world is nearly identical to his, the one of contemporary America, save for a few societal and physical disparities. The people from "There" (as Green comes to think of it) are physically identical to those from Here, but for that the men naturally die from sex. Technology seems to be generally inferior There, although some anomalies such as seemingly magical and remarkably articulate robotic dolls exist, perhaps invented to suit matriarchal needs. Roads and buildings seem to be in similar places, though occupied by different establishments and patrons. Time passes much more quickly Here, although they both seem to be in the same general era. There is no indication when passing between the worlds, though the doors between them seem to be accessible only to certain people and those who they know. Objects can accompany people between the worlds, though they may eventually filter themselves back to the world of their origin. When they leave the restaurant, Green returns to his own world through its door, but Fanny inadvertently follows Lara's aforementioned instructions and remains in her own. Green finds that, though he had only been in the alternate world for perhaps four days, he has been missing from his own for over a month. He is told that he must receive a medical checkup before he can return to work, and in doing so it is revealed that he has now made eight visits to a psychiatrist for a "breakdown". He is hospitalized, but released after admitting that the alternate world was most likely a dream. Over the next few years he returns to his previous life as a salesman, forgetting about Lara and There. He is briefly returned to the other world while shopping and is reminded of its existence. Shortly after returning to his world he is contacted by Lara. They meet at the Italian restaurant and, after some coaxing, she reveals more to him about herself and the other world. Throughout the story Green had been exposed to hints that his girlfriend exists in both worlds. She had appeared as a doll he found in the other world, on his television at the first hospital, stepdaughter of Klamm (presidential cabinet member searching for North), as a famous actress and model There, and was also referred to There as 'the goddess'. Now she had taken the alias of receptionist Lora Masterman at his psychiatrist's office. She admits to being an immortal being from the other world, occasionally joining his world to enjoy relationships with men she could sleep with without killing, such as Green, Klamm, and a 19th century sea captain. Lara flees Green through the restaurant's door and they reenter the alternate world. They reunite at a boxing match where Joe is attempting to take the heavyweight title and North is using as a political publicity stunt. North interrupts the fight with gunshots, perhaps attempting to kill Green, but is subdued by Joe after a brief brawl. Green is taken to a hospital for injuries sustained and reunites with Fanny. She is instructed to keep watch of him, but he escapes her vise. The novel ends with Green exiting the city in a cab, still in the alternate world, eager to start a new life devoid of the burdens of his old. |
4059699 | /m/0bg0j2 | Daddy-Long-Legs | Jean Webster | null | {"/m/03mfnf": "Young adult literature"} | Jerusha Abbott was brought up at the John Grier Home, an old-fashioned orphanage. The children were wholly dependent on charity and had to wear other people's cast-off clothes. Jerusha's unusual first name was selected by the matron off a gravestone (she hates it and uses "Judy" instead), while her surname was selected out of the phone book. At the age of 18, she has finished her education and is at loose ends, still working in the dormitories at the institution where she was brought up. One day, after the asylum's trustees have made their monthly visit, Judy is informed by the asylum's dour matron that one of the trustees has offered to pay her way through college. He has spoken to her former teachers and thinks she has potential to become an excellent writer. He will pay her tuition and also give her a generous monthly allowance. Judy must write him a monthly letter, because he believes that letter-writing is important to the development of a writer. However, she will never know his identity; she must address the letters to Mr. John Smith, and he will never reply. Jerusha catches a glimpse of the shadow of her benefactor from the back, and knows he is a tall long-legged man. Because of this, she jokingly calls him Daddy-Long-Legs. She attends a "girls' college," but the name and location are never identified. Men from Princeton University are frequently mentioned as dates, so it might be assumed that her college is one of the Seven Sisters. It was certainly on the East Coast. She illustrates her letters with childlike line drawings, also created by Jean Webster. The book chronicles Jerusha's educational, personal, and social growth. One of the first things she does at college is to change her name to "Judy." She designs a rigorous reading program for herself and struggles to gain the basic cultural knowledge to which she, growing up in the bleak environment of the orphan asylum, was never exposed. At the end of the book, the identity of 'Daddy-Long-Legs' is revealed. |
4060573 | /m/0bg26r | Nadja | André Breton | 1928 | {"/m/05hgj": "Novel"} | The narrator, named André, ruminates on a number of Surrealist principles and ideologies, before ultimately commencing (around a third of the way through the novel) on a narrative account, generally linear, of his brief (10-day) affair with the titular character Nadja (whose is named so “because in Russian it’s the beginning of the word hope, and because it’s only the beginning,” but which might also evoke the Spanish ‘Nadie,’ which means ‘No one’). The narrator becomes obsessed with this woman with whom he, upon a chance encounter while walking through the street, strikes up conversation immediately. He becomes reliant on daily rendezvous, occasionally culminating in romance (a kiss here and there). His true fascination with her, however, is her vision of the world, which is often provoked through a discussion of the work of a number of Surrealist artists, including himself. Her understanding of existence subverts the rigidly authoritarian quotidian (and it is later discovered that she is mad and belongs in a sanitarium). After she begins narrating to the narrator over an account filled with too many details over her past life, she in a sense becomes demystified, and the narrator realizes that he cannot continue the relationship. In the remaining quarter of the text, he distances himself from her corporeal form and descends into a meandering rumination on her absence, such that one wonders if it is more her absence that inspires him than her presence. (It is, after all, the reification and materialization of her as an ordinary person that he ultimately despises and cannot tolerate to the point of inducing tears.) There is something about the closeness once held between the narrator and Nadja that indicated a depth beyond the limits of conscious rationality, waking logic, and sane operations of the everyday—there is something essentially “mysterious, improbable, unique, bewildering” about her, reinforcing the notion that the propinquity serves only to remind him of her impenetrability and her eventual recession into absence is the fundamental concern of this text, such that she may live freely in his conscious and unconscious, seemingly unbridled, maintaining the paradoxical role as both present and absent. With her past instated onto his own memory and consciousness, the narrator feels awakened to an impenetrability of reality, seeing a particularly ghostly residue peeking from under its thin veil. Thus, he might better put into practice his theory of Surrealism, predicated on the dreaminess of the experience of reality within reality itself. |
4070159 | /m/0bgjvl | Pigs Have Wings | P. G. Wodehouse | 10/16/1952 | {"/m/02yq81": "Comic novel", "/m/01z4y": "Comedy", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | Lord Emsworth, his brother Galahad and butler Beach, hearing that devious neighbour Sir Gregory Parsloe-Parsloe has done the unthinkable and brought in a new and enormous pig from Kent, are in turmoil. Galahad and Beach are desperate to secure their savings, confidently invested in a wager on the mighty Empress, while Emsworth is as ever suspicious of his gloating neighbour. Parsloe, meanwhile, is regretting becoming engaged to Gloria Salt, who has put him on a diet. His suspicions of Galahad lead him to put his pig man, George Cyril Wellbeloved, on a drink-ban too, a move of which Wellbeloved wholeheartedly disapproves; he also, on Connie's advice, orders a large quantity of "Slimmo", a slimming product, to aid his diet. Hearing about this suspicious purchase, a worried Galahad calls in Beach's niece Maudie, an old acquaintance and now proprietor of a Detective Agency, to keep an eye on things. Penelope Donaldson heads up to London for the day, planning to meet up with her man, under cover of a dinner with an old friend of her father's. Jerry Vail, however, is forced to entertain his old flame Gloria Salt and cancels the date. Salt tells him Emsworth needs a secretary, and suggests talking pig to the Earl will get him the cash he needs to buy into a health farm and make his fortune. Vail heads to Blandings, but Connie is suspicious, having heard his name when he called to cancel his date with Penny. Penny is furious, having been taken to Mario's by Orlo Vosper and seen Jerry with the attractive Gloria. When Jerry explains, she is suitably chastised, especially as, thinking her man had betrayed her, she had accepted Vosper's proposal of marriage. When Wellbeloved visits Blandings to ask Gally to provide him with a drink (all the pubs in Market Blandings having been forbidden to serve him), Gally takes the opportunity to snatch Parsloe's pig, stashing it in the hut in the West Wood. Wellbeloved, finding the pig gone, nabs the Empress and puts her in the pen at Parsloe's place to cover up. Vosper and Gloria Salt, their old love revived, run off together to be married, after Gally helps Vosper get out of being engaged to Penny, and Gloria writes to Parsloe ending their engagement. Wellbeloved spots Beach furtively heading for the shed, but his call to tell Parsloe of his discovery is intercepted by Gally, who has Beach move the pig to a nearby house, recently vacated by Gally's old friend "Fruity" Biffen. Meanwhile Emsworth, stricken with a cold, has been smitten by Maudie (posing as Mr Donaldson's old friend Mrs Bunbury), and writes a letter to her declaring his love, which he has Vail place in her room. She, meanwhile, pays a visit to Parsloe, with whom she once had an understanding, planning to give him a piece of her mind, but all is soon cleared up and the two become engaged. Emsworth, on hearing this, sends Vail to retrieve his letter, but has misdirected him into Connie's room; on finding Vail hiding in her closet, she promptly fires him. Finding the Emsworth Arms uncomfortable, Vail lets the cottage with the pig in it. Fearing he will give the game away, Gally dashes round, but Vail has already been visited by a policeman and Wellbeloved. Gally removes the pig by car, but soon returns, having found the Empress in the Queen's sty. They head back to Blandings to tell Emsworth, leaving Beach, exhausted from cycling over, sleeping in the cottage. On their return, Parsloe is there, having been told by Wellbeloved that the Queen was in the kitchen and had Beach arrested for stealing his pig. Gally explains to Parsloe that the Empress is in the kitchen, and the Queen in her sty, scuppering Parsloe. He then persuades Emsworth to invest in Vail's health farm, in gratitude for having found the pig, and Connie gives him another £500 for Beach, to prevent him suing Parsloe for wrongful arrest. Meanwhile Parsloe's butler Binstead, having been refused a refund on the Slimmo no longer needed by his master, feeds it to the pig in the sty, thinking she is still the Empress... |
4070403 | /m/0bgk8w | Wings | M. A. Kuzmin | 1906 | {"/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/05hgj": "Novel"} | The novel deals with teenager Vanya Smurov's attachment to his older, urbane mentor, Larion Stroop, a pederast who initiates him into the world of early Renaissance, Classical and Romantic art. At the close of the first part, Vanya is shocked to learn that the object of his admiration frequents a gay bathhouse. In order to sort out his feelings, Vanya withdraws into the Volga countryside, but his sickening experience with rural women, whose call on him to enjoy his youth turns out to be an awkward attempt at seduction, induces Vanya to accept his Classics teacher's proposal and accompany him in a journey to Italy. In the last part of the novel, Vanya and Stroop, who is also in Italy, are seen enjoying the smiling climate and stunning artworks of Florence and Rome, while Prince Orsini mentors the delicate youth in the art of hedonism. |
4070559 | /m/0bgkg5 | The Smell of Apples | Mark Behr | 1993 | {"/m/02xlf": "Fiction", "/m/05hgj": "Novel"} | Marnus Erasmus is an eleven-year-old boy who lives in the late sixties with his family in Cape Town, South Africa. The Erasmus' live as a white family in a country which is mostly inhabited by coloured people. The white people rule South Africa and Marnus' father is an important general in the army. The white population in South Africa descended from the British immigrants, who came while the country was a colony of Great Britain, and the Boers, who are descendants of the Dutch settlers. Marnus grows up believing that black people are second class people due to having been indoctrinated by the apartheid system and his parents' views. On the other hand we, the readers, see that all Marnus's encounters with black people have actually been good. Marnus´ father does not like black people because his father, Marnus´ grandfather, and his family were driven away and their land expropriated by the black masses from Tanganyika, today's Tanzania. They fled to South Africa and, with the white population, turned it into a modern state. Now Marnus´ father thinks that the black people are going to destroy all that they have built and that the white people have to prevent this by controlling the native Africans. Marnus´ best friend is Frikkie, who is also white. They attend the same school and every minute in their free time they meet up with each other. In the summer holidays Frikkie stays with Marnus in the Erasmus´ house, where Marnus' father often meets generals from other countries. He tells Marnus that he is not allowed to tell anybody else that there is a soldier from another country there, and that he shall call the visitors Mr. Smith. During the summer, a Mr. Smith from Chile visits the family. At dinner Marnus´ father and the general speak about the political situation in the world. Mr. Smith says that he is relieved that his army has overthrown the government of Allende due to cooperating with the Communists. Marnus´ father tells the general South Africa is also in a very bad position because the world is "against his country". He explains that the other states are against them and claim that the white people in South Africa are discriminative against the black population. Marnus makes an agreement with Frikkie that they will tell each other all their secrets, which is why Marnus ignores his father's warning not to tell anybody that he speaks with Mr. Smith. Marnus tells Frikkie that the whole world is against South Africa and that the coloured people are to blame for that. One night Marnus wakes up and he notices that Frikkie is not in his bed. He can see the spare room through the floor-boards in his room and witnesses Frikkie being raped. He assumes the rapist is Mr. Smith who is supposed to have left that night, and goes downstairs to wake his parents, but finds his father is not in bed. He goes back upstairs and observes that the man who is raping Frikkie does not have a scar on his back like the General (Mr. Smith) and realises that it is his father. The next day he asks Frikkie if something happened during the night but Frikkie does not tell Marnus anything. Frikkie says that he has decided to go home and he does not want to stay longer. Marnus reassures himself that Frikkie will never tell anyone what happened.. |
4071305 | /m/0bglzf | Pigeon Post | Arthur Ransome | 1936 | {"/m/0dwly": "Children's literature", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction", "/m/08sdrw": "Adventure novel"} | The Swallows, Amazons and Ds are camping in the Blackett family's garden at Beckfoot. The Swallow is not available for sailing. James Turner (Captain Flint) has sent word that he is returning from an expedition to South America prospecting for gold, and has sent Timothy ahead. As he can be let loose in the study, they deduce that Timothy is an armadillo and make a box for him, but he does not arrive. Slater Bob, an old slate miner, tells them a story about a lost gold seam in the fells. As Captain Flint has been unsuccessful in his prospecting trip, plans are made to prospect for gold on High Topps instead. They are allowed to move camp to Tyson's Farm, up near the fells, to be closer to the prospecting grounds, after proving that they can stay in touch with home using the homing pigeons that give the book its name. But when they get there, they find this little improvement as Mrs Tyson does not allow them to cook over a campfire because of the drought conditions and her fear of fires. Titty eventually finds a spring by dowsing and they move closer to the Topps. To keep in touch with Beckfoot, they send one of the homing pigeons with a daily message. While exploring the ground, they notice a rival they call Squashy Hat who is prospecting too. After days of prospecting, a seam of gold-coloured mineral is found in a cave made by the old miners, and they mine and crush enough to melt down into an ingot in a charcoal furnace. Unfortunately it disappears when the crucible breaks and Dick Callum has only a small amount to test. Captain Flint returns home, and finds Dick doing chemical tests on the putative gold in his study. Dick has read that gold dissolves in aqua regia, Captain Flint explains that aqua regia dissolves almost every substance but gold does not dissolve in any other solvent. He shows Dick by other tests that they have found copper ore, pyrites. A pigeon arrives with an urgent message FIRE HELP QUICK from Titty. Captain Flint rings Colonel Jolys who musters his volunteer fire fighters, and they all rush to help save the Topps. The fire on the fells is extinguished. Squashy Hat is revealed as Captain Flint's friend Timothy, who has been too shy to introduce himself to the children. Captain Flint is pleased to find copper, as he had talked with Timothy above Pernambuco in South America about new ways of prospecting for copper on the fells, and in fact prospecting for copper, not gold, had been the purpose of the expedition to South America in the first place. |
4072839 | /m/0bgq2y | The Visitation | null | null | {"/m/03npn": "Horror"} | Centered around the life of Travis Jordan, The Visitation begins when miracles, ranging from a healing, weeping crucifix to sights of Jesus in the clouds, start occurring, giving way to the arrival of a man who calls himself Brandon Nichols. Nichols begins healing people; giving a man who lost the use of his legs in the Vietnam War the ability to walk, and performing various other "healings". Most of the townspeople — who are portrayed as disillusioned, post-Pentecostal farmers — begin to believe in Nichols as a Messiah. Brandon Nichols begins to hold "revival meetings" on a large ranch outside of town every Sunday, and many churchgoers in town stop going to Sunday morning mass/services and instead listen to Brandon talk and watch him "heal". It is at this point that Nichols arouses the ire of one of the local ministers, Kyle Sherman. Enlisting the help of Travis Jordan, he seeks to prove that the so-called Brandon Nichols is not in fact a "better" Christian Messiah, but a puffed-up egomaniac using occult powers. In the end, the team (along with the help of a few others) uncover a host of pseudonyms and a hefty helping of deception surrounding Nichols' past. Startling parallels are revealed with the life story of Travis Jordan, all of which come to light as the story progresses. |
4079528 | /m/0bg_5y | Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit | P. G. Wodehouse | 10/15/1954 | {"/m/02yq81": "Comic novel", "/m/01z4y": "Comedy", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | Bertie finds himself once more at Brinkley Court, sampling the delights of Anatole's cooking while attempting to help Aunt Dahlia sell off her magazine Milady's Boudoir to the Liverpudlian Trotters, avoiding trouble in the shape of ex-fiancee Florence Craye, her hulking beau Stilton Cheesewright and the equally fearsome Spode. |
4079737 | /m/0bg_j6 | Metal fırtına | null | null | {"/m/05hgj": "Novel"} | In the novel, set in the year 2007, the United States Military invades Turkey to gain control of its deposits of an important strategic resource, borax. After securing the principal cities in Turkey, the United States attempts to re-enact the Treaty of Sèvres by dividing Turkey up between its historic rivals Greece and Armenia. Turkey responds by forming a military alliance with China, Russia and Germany. A Turkish agent then steals an American nuclear bomb and detonates it in Washington, D.C., killing millions of people. This however, backfires and U.S. troops increase their abuse of occupied Turkish citizens and the invasion picks up in pace. When U.S troops reach Istanbul, the conflict degrades to urban combat between the U.S. forces, Turkish armed citizenry, Turkish Army remnants and police forces. The climax turns out to be anticlimactic; the occupation of Istanbul agitates Russia, the European Union and China to sign a military alliance and threaten the United States with nuclear warfare in order to stop the invasion. The war comes to a close; U.S. forces retreat, and Turkey is saved. The agent, a member of a secret Turkish intelligence agency named "The Grey Team", trained from birth as obedient and amoral orphans, kidnaps the mastermind behind the invasion, the CEO of a corporation funding the President, and the book ends with a Central Asian torture scene with said CEO. The U.S. Government in the novel is led by a nameless President reminiscent of George W. Bush and portrayed as an Evangelical zealot. It also includes real-life U.S. Cabinet members Condoleezza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld. The novel also features then-current real-life political leaders at the helm of their respective nations. |
4081329 | /m/0bh23d | Allies of the Night | Darren Shan | 2002 | {"/m/03mfnf": "Young adult literature", "/m/0dwly": "Children's literature", "/m/03npn": "Horror", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | *Darren Shan *The Saga of Darren Shan Darren, Harkat, and Mr. Crepsley (Vancha going back to Vampire Mountain to inform the other Princes and Generals of their encounter with the Vampaneze Lord) go to Mr. Crepsley's hometown once again to investigate if Vampaneze had set up territories there. But soon after their arrival Darren is discovered by the police and forced to attend school. He has trouble with most of his subjects as he only has a middle school education, but luckily (or perhaps unluckily?) his English teacher is Debbie, his old girlfriend from his first visit to this city. Mr. Crepsley has to go back to Vampire Mountain again for Paris Skyle's funeral, leaving Darren and Harkat to continue the investigations alone. One night on his way back to the hotel room the three are staying in, Darren encounters a Vampaneze with hooks for hands and a mask wrapped around his face. The Vampaneze attacks, but Darren is saved by his old friend Steve. Steve joins Darren for the hunt of the Vampaneze, claiming he's changed his ways and now understands who the real enemy is and dropped his desire for vengeance against Darren and Mr.Crepsley long ago. Darren later reveals himself as a vampire to Debbie, and after a long explanation and a day's contemplating she joins Darren and Steve for the fight. Mr. Crepsley comes back and helps Darren pursue the Vampaneze, but understandably doesn't trust Steve. Darren does convince him, however, that Steve will be a big help for them and lets him come with them. Vancha also joins them again a few days later. They chase the hooked Vampaneze to the sewers at night, but the Vampaneze led them to a trap. Darren and his team are soon surrounded and the Vampaneze Lord make his second appearance. Darren tries to kill him, but is stopped by Steve, who shows his true side as being a half-vampaneze and betraying Darren and his friends. The hooked Vampaneze is also revealed to be RV (Previously known as Reggie Veggie, but now claims it stands for Righteous Vampaneze). A fight begins between the Hunters and the Vampaneze. Vancha charges through the Vampets, scattering them and Mr. Crepsley follows, slicing with his nails to bring down many Vampaneze. Darren soon beats Steve and is about to finish him off, but RV uses Debbie as a hostage. RV, Gannen Harst, and the Lord soon leave with the threat that they will kill Debbie if they are followed. Darren and Vancha take a Vampet and Steve as their hostage and are given a warning by Gannen to leave the tunnels immediately or he'll send Vampaneze to finish them off. |
4081828 | /m/0bh2z2 | The Courtship of Princess Leia | Dave Wolverton | null | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction"} | At the opening of the novel, Han Solo, who from aboard the Mon Remonda has been prosecuting the search for this hidden fastness, wearily returns to the recently captured Coruscant expecting an end to the long separation between him and his beloved, Princess Leia, head of the New Republic. To his great surprise, when his vessel drops out of hyperspace and into the Coruscant system, what appears are a number of fearsome Imperial Star Destroyers, Hapan Battle Dragons, and Hapes Nova Class battle cruiser. Eventually, Han learns that the Hapes cluster had sent a delegation of some manner to the New Republic. He lands and enters the Imperial Palace, where, with the help of C-3P0, who translates and comments on the formal diplomatic reception, he watches the Hapes delegation present to Leia a number of stunning gifts: the dozen Star Destroyers Han had seen, a Hapan gun of command, a small plant resembling a bonsai which promotes longevity and intelligence, and the hand of the Hapes cluster's ruler Ta'a Chume's son, Prince Isolder, in holy matrimony. The effect is devastating; Leia nearly accepts, driving Han into a frenzy of fear and jealousy. Han eventually wanders into a cantina in the lower reaches of Coruscant, where he participates in a high-stakes sabacc game. One of his opponents runs out of liquid financial instruments and instead proffers real estate: a deed to an entire habitable planet, Dathomir. Han thinks he has found a gift which would prove his worthiness to Leia and compare favorably with the gifts of Isolder (and provide a place to resettle the expatriates of Alderaan). When Leia examines his gift and points out that he has been conned (since Dathomir was in the section of the galaxy controlled by Zsinj), Han is further devastated. Isolder compounds insult with injury by denigrating the Millennium Falcon and offering Han a Nova battle cruiser if he abandons his quest to win Leia's heart. Han snaps. He abducts Leia using the Gun of Command, and flees with her and Chewbacca aboard his recently refitted Millennium Falcon to Dathomir. Prince Isolder pursues him with his Hapan fleet. He arrives at Dathomir shortly after Han despite Han's headstart, as Isolder is aided by the Jedi Master Luke Skywalker who uses his Force powers to navigate a shorter (but still safe) path through hyperspace, shaving time off accepted conventional routes. There they both discovered that Zsinj had truly laid claim to Dathomir—in orbit around it was the Iron Fist, a number of other capital ships, and the complete orbital shipyard Han had hunted for so long. The Millennium Falcon had been forced to land on Dathomir itself, where it is captured by the Imperial garrison Zsinj had marooned on the surface years ago. Isolder sets out in his Miy'til fighter accompanied by Luke's X-wing while the Hapan fleet fights a covering action before it retreats into hyperspace to inform the New Republic, Imperial Remnant, and the Hapes Consortium of the whereabouts of Zsinj heretofore secret redoubt. On the surface, Isolder and Luke discover the remnants of the star-borne Jedi training academy, the Chu'unthor. Luke had seen recordings noting how Yoda and a number of other Jedi knights had failed to retrieve the library of the Chu'unthor, due to interference by the Witches of Dathomir. The best they had been able to do was seal the vessel thoroughly, so thoroughly that only centuries later the first intruder would need a lightsaber to gain access. As they peruse the vessel, however, Isolder and Luke are captured by a Dathomiri witch, who enslave them and take them to her village. Having learned about Han Solo's presence on the planet, Zsinj had dictated a combination of ultimatum and deal with the head of the Nightsisters, Gethzerion: they would give him Solo to torture and execute as he liked, and he would give them an Imperial shuttle to pilot where they like. If they did not, he would keep his "nightcloak" (an interconnected network of geostationary satellites, which reflected all solar emissions back into space) intact, which would slowly freeze Dathomir, ending all life on the planet. Eventually, they infiltrate the Imperial garrison and steal the Falcon, piloting it out into the ongoing Battle of Dathomir. Solo allows the Iron Fist to acquire the Falcon with a tractor beam; once it is within the deflector shields, he breaks it free of the beam lock, piloting his vessel over the superstructure of the gigantic vessel. Arriving upon the main bridge, he launches two concussion missiles, destroying the bridge, killing Zsinj, and knocking out the ventral shields. With Iron Fist so exposed, the Hapan Battle Dragons move into position with their ion cannons, disabling Iron Fist.Defeated, Zsinj's empire soon crumbles. Shortly thereafter, Solo and Leia marry, having realized during their intrepid journey together that they loved each other. Isolder is consoled by the fact he has fallen in love with his captor, Teneniel Djo. |
4082237 | /m/0bh3hq | The Lady From Dubuque | Edward Albee | null | null | The play's first act finds three young couples (Sam + Jo hosting Fred + Carol and Lucinda + Edgar) engaging in party games like Twenty Questions. Jo's angry bitterness becomes apparent earlier than its source, which is the terminal disease that tortures her and will soon claim her life. At the end of the act, after the mounting tension drives the guests to leave, Sam carries Jo up to bed. Suddenly, a fourth couple appears from the wings: a glamorous older woman (Elizabeth) and her black companion (Oscar). She asks the audience, "Are we in time? Is this the place?" and answers her own questions: "Yes, we are in time. This is the place." The curtain falls. In Act One, the recurrent theme of the game was "Who are you?" Now that question becomes more serious, as Sam, shocked by the appearance of these strangers in his house, repeatedly demands that Elizabeth reveal her identity. She eventually insists that she is Jo's mother, come from Dubuque, Iowa "for her daughter's dying". However, Sam knows Jo's mother as a small, balding woman with pink hair, who lives in New Jersey and is estranged from Jo, and Elizabeth is clearly not she. Unfortunately for Sam, who vigorously protests the veracity of Elizabeth's claims, Jo runs into Elizabeth's arms and never questions her appearance or identity. Whoever she and Oscar may—or may not—be, they clearly represent the coming of Death, something familiar and unknown. At the end of the play, Oscar carries the dying Jo upstairs one last time. As the devastated Sam demands once more to learn Elizabeth's true identity, she ends the play with this line: "Why, I'm the lady from Dubuque. I thought you knew. [to the audience] I thought he knew." Elizabeth's curtain lines, quoted above, both typify the Pirandellian style of the play's dialogue, in which characters frequently make comments directly to the audience. (The first occurs very early, when Jo, observing the Twenty Questions game in progress, looks out at the audience and asks, "Don't you hate party games?") |
4082312 | /m/0bh3lv | The Black Gryphon | Larry Dixon | 1995 | {"/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | As the book begins, Skandranon Rashkae, the Black Gryphon, creeps into an enemy encampment. A Seer has warned Urtho of a new, magical weapon that has caused the capture of one of Urtho's key garrisons. Skan grabs one of the weapons and leaves, hotly pursued by makaar, creatures created by Kiyamvir Ma'ar to match Urtho's gryphons. After a long chase, Skan crash-lands in friendly territory. Meanwhile, in Urtho's camp, Kestra'chern Amberdrake and Gesten, a hertasi, are waiting for the return of their friend Skan. Drake is sitting in the surgery tent in the area where the Healers live and work, when a seriously injured Skan is carried in. While Skan is recovering in the Healer's tent, Urtho makes a visit to his friend and "son". He tells Skan that the weapon has been analyzed and that a counter to this weapon is already being created. Urtho then offers to give Skan a reward for his work, his choice in a mate and the ability to make offspring. Skan tells him that he will think on this matter. During Urtho's visit, a commanding officer of Urtho's army appears and asks for a moment of Urtho's time. He would like Urtho to reward another gryphon for her ability to take on three makaar, single-handedly. Skan is immediately interested in meeting this female and demands that she be brought to the tent. The commander brings in a timid and shy gryphon named Zhaneel. After her account of the battle with the makaar, Urtho rewards her with a coin that can be traded for any service around the area. Skan suggests that she use her coin for the services of Amberdrake, because Skan believes that Drake is the only one that can help her get past her shyness. Skan is also furious with the trondi'irn, person that takes care and heals the non-human creatures fighting for Urtho, that takes care of Zhaneel for letting her get so bad in the first place. Meanwhile, Amberdrake is dealing with his own problems with a particular client. Conn Levas, a mage mercenary, is using some of his built up coins to pay for Drake's service. The real reason that Conn Levas is visiting a kestra'chern is to make his lover, Winterhart, jealous. Amberdrake being the skilled kestra'chern that he is does not say anything to Levas, but secretly is very upset with this mage for using him in such a way. Also, he wonders about this Winterhart, because of her relationship with this man in the begin with. While Skan is still recuperating, another gryphon is brought in to be healed. Aubri is an old gryphon from the sixth wing, the same wing as Zhaneel. Aubri did some scouting while on leave because Shaiknam refused to believe or double check a report of a fire flinger. He comes out of the skirmish badly burned. At first the hertasi, lizard-like creatures used to forage and help with certain problems, are helping to heal Aubri, but the trondi'irn for the sixth wing, Winterhart, walks in and tells them that Shaiknam and Garber have ordered them to work only with uninjured personnel. The treatment of the hertasi, leads to Gesten getting involved and fixing the problem. Winterhart's appearance is not a welcome sight, especially for Skan. Skan does not know who this is, but he knows she is the trondi'irn is the same for Zhaneel. Also, he does not like the way she completely ignored him as though he were just some brainless animal. Cinnabar and Tamsin are the only things that stop Skan from physically harming Winterhart. Winterhart is callous, but she also knows how to heal a fallen gryphon. Zhaneel's visit with Amberdrake did not go according to Drake's plans. Drake assumed a female gryphon would want a feather painting session in order to make herself more desirable to a male gryphon. After meeting Zhaneel, Drake realizes that this "gryfalcon," would need a boost in confidence. He suggested that she take her "flaws" and use them as advantages. He encourages her to use her hands for things that a human usually would. She takes his advice and creates her own training course. With the help of Gesten, Amberdrake's hertasi, and Vikteren, a mage, she develops a training course with many traps and dangers. As Zhaneel continues her training, many of the other gryphons, humans, and non-humans begin showing up to watch her. At the same time, Garber, the second in command of the sixth wing, has learned of Zhaneel's training and has decided that Winterhart needs to go put a stop to it. Winterhart confronts Zhaneel stating, "You (Zhaneel) had no orders and no permission", but Winterhart is caught off guard when the normally quiet Zhaneel stands up and shrills, "Orders? I am on leave time! These who help me are off-duty! What need have we of orders, of permissions? Are we to request leave to piss now?" After Zhaneel's attack on Winterhart, Skan joins the attack as well, before Winterhart is finally asked by Zhaneel to speak in private. Meanwhile, Shaiknam and Garber have really messed up their positions. While in battle, many of the mages of the sixth wing used so much magic that they were put into a coma. The only way for them to come out of the coma alive was to be sent to a healer, unfortunately, Shaiknam said they were just being lazy and left them to die where they lay. Due to Shaiknam's callousness, the mages called for a meeting with Urtho. They demanded that either Shaiknam went, or they would. During this time, Vikteren declares that he is an Master Mage and that he would have a vote in the matter. Also, the reason that most gryphons continued to fight was because Urtho controlled their ability to mate and have children. Upon learning of this, Vikteren, Amberdrake, Tamsin, Cinnabar and Skan decide that the gryphon's should make those decisions for themselves. Vikteren gives Amberdrake a set of "mage keys" that will unlock any mage locking spells. While Urtho is away dealing with the mages, Amberdrake, Cinnabar, Tamsin, and Skandranon, go up into Urtho's tower and seek out the formula for gryphon mating. While Skandranon is in the library, he senses another gryphon. Due to Skan's curious nature he uses the key to unlock a door protected by a special mage lock. Behind the door, Skan discovers models of all the different types of gryphons floating in the air. Then he senses another gryphon in the room. Kechara a "misborn" gryphon is kept in the room because of her deformities. She is childish in nature, and has wings that are too large for her body. She attacks Skan at first, but after a while they start talking and Skan learns a lot about her and she recognizes his form among the models in the sky. Skan realizes he must leave, but promises Kechara that he will return some day. After the confrontation with Zhaneel, Winterhart is sent to see Amberdrake. Amberdrake heals a back injury she sustained while helping an injured gryphon some time ago. While he is helping with her physical injuries, he is learning of the new feelings that she is experiencing due to Zhaneel's outspokenness. Winterhart had set herself up to believe that just because they were animals, gryphons were unintelligent and only good for taking orders. She also starts questioning her relationship with Conn Levas, and her allegiance to Shaiknam and Garber. Cinnabar and Tamsin begin working on the understanding of the gryphon mating process. When Skan arrives they inform him that they had figured out how gryphons could have children and it did not even need magic. The females would have to fast for two days and then gorge themselves on food the day before the mating flight. The male gryphons would need to spend two days in a very cold climate in order for their seed to become active. Skan is at first angry at Urtho for keeping this hidden from the gryphons, because he believes Urtho only did it to control the gryphons. The real reason that Urtho gave in his book: "Too often have I seen human parents who were too young, too unstable, or otherwise unfit or unready for children produce child after doomed, mistreated child. I will have none of this for these, my gryphons. By watching them, and then training others what to watch for, I can discover which pairings are loving and stable, which would-be parents have the patience and understanding to 'be' parents. And in this way, perhaps my creations will have a happier start in life than most of the humans around them. While I may not be an expert in such things, I have at least learned how to observe the actions of others, and experience may give me an edge in judging which couples are ready for little ones. Those who desire children must not bring them into our dangerous world out of a wish for a replica of themselves, a creature to mold and control, a way to achieve what they could not, or the need for something that will offer unconditional love. For that, they must look elsewhere and most likely into themselves." Skan begins spreading the information that has been obtained of the mating formula. He also begins training on Zhaneel's training course, another attempt to get close to the interesting gryfalcon. With the information gathered by Skan on his trip at the beginning, Urtho has created a box that can diffuse the weapons of Ma'ar. With her special hands, Zhaneel is chosen to fly this box into the battle. Amberdrake plans a "victory" feast for Zhaneel's return from her first mission. He invites Skan and Zhaneel, but doesn't tell either of them that the other was invited. After the celebration, Skan talks with Zhaneel and they learn of their mutual feeling for one another. There is a huge battle, and many are injured. Healers and trondi'irns are rushing around trying to heal hundreds of injured creatures and humans. Amberdrake is brought into the healing also and ends up over-exerting himself in the healing. Cinnabar at one point helps Winterhart to heal a gryphon. Cinnabar tells her that all in all she is starting to look much better, and that all she lacked now was to get rid of Conn Levas. Cinnabar then calls Winterhart, Reanna. Reanna was at one time a lady of the High King's palace. Cinnabar suggests that Winterhart tell Amberdrake of her true name and history. After their talk, Winterhart is laying in her tent relaxing after the hours of healing. Conn Levas comes by and Winterhart pretends to sleep so that he'll go away without getting what he really wanted from her. After his departure, she sees a shadow around her tent and recognizes it as Amberdrake. She calls him inside and they relax together. Winterhart confesses to her true name and why she had been hiding the entire time. Amberdrake reveals to Winterhart that Ma'ar had implanted a device that threw off negative energy causing those without shields to have a large amount of fear. It was too late for the king because he was already dead, but Urtho sent Skan to retrieve the device and destroy it. This revelation of the events caused by Ma'ar, helps Winterhart to understand that it is not her fault that she deserted the palace in its time of greatest need. During this time, more battles are fought and the general consensus is that Urtho is losing. Conn confronts Winterhart and says some demeaning things about her. She later goes to Amberdrake to talk and he finally confesses his feelings to her. Shaiknam and Garber are put back into command of the Sixth Wing because of the assassination of the commander that replaced them. After they are put back into position, the gryphons decide that they will revolt and Skan is left with the task of telling Urtho. To Skan's surprise, Urtho already knows of the gryphon revolt. Urtho still believes that he can control the gryphons because he is the only one holding the secret to their mating abilities. Skan surprises him by telling him that the gryphons have learned how to have their own children, but it's out of respect and love to him that keeps them in his services. After the revelation that the gryphons knew how to reproduce, Skan explains the reason for revolting against Shaiknam and Garber. After looking at the map, Urtho determines that Shaiknam is a fool, and Urtho will split the non-humans among the other commanders. Urtho also surprises Skan by assigning Skan to be the commander of the gryphons and to report to Urtho. Urtho reveals to Skan the plan to evacuate the area, as a matter of fact some families have already been evacuated from the city. Skan also tells Urtho that he saw the models and met Kechara. We find out that Kechara was being kept in the tower because she is a very powerful Mindspeaker. Skan requests that Urtho give Kechara to Zhaneel and himself. All noncombatants were evacuated along with several of Urtho's artifacts and books. On the last day, there is a battle. Aubri is circling the field heading back to his position when he notices the people of the Sixth Wing backing out and allowing Ma'ar's forces into the land. Aubri sees the tent that Shaiknam and Garber use, and he listens into a conversation between Shaiknam, Garber, and an unknown person, who later turns out to be Conn Levas. Aubri is captured and given to Ma'ar's forces. Conn Levas goes to the tower to have a meeting with Urtho. Conn Levas walks in and throws Miranda thorns, a very deadly device created by Ma'ar. Skan and Vikteren are fetched by a hertasi and Skan complains to the hertasi as to why he left Urtho alone with Conn Levas. When the doors are opened, Skan sees the shape that Urtho is in and using a single talon he rips Conn Levas' throat open and on the backhand of the original slash sends Conn across the room snapping his spine on a table. Vikteren rushes over to Urtho and tries to help as much as he could until Tamsin and Cinnabar come in to help. Urtho tells Skan of a device he has created that will kill Ma'ar. Skan takes the device and leaves. Skan goes to Snowstar, an old mage, and has him open a gate into a safe place in the palace. Snowstar tells him that he has a good idea of a place that would have no guards directly in it. Skan goes through and ends up in a stable. When he exits from the room he was gated into, he finds Kechara, who was kidnapped by Conn Levas, and a bag containing Aubri. They all go through a secret passage into the palace. Meanwhile, Urtho has decided that he will try to convince Ma'ar to attack him in the tower. Urtho knew he was dying and that if he died and Ma'ar happened to be there then he'd die as well. Urtho opens a gate and starts taunting Ma'ar enticing him to come fight. While Urtho is doing this, Kechara, Skan, and Aubri come into the room from the secret passage surprising Ma'ar. Skan sets the device and Kechara flies towards Urtho, with Aubri and Skan right behind her. Aubri gets stuck in the gate until Skan pushes him through. Urtho closes the gate and asks "why they went to Ma'ar like that." Skan just blushes and Urtho tells them that they don't have much time. Skan asks him if he can open a gate into the land where they were to evacuate to, and Urtho says he will try. The people who have evacuated see an explosion in the distance, signaling the death of Urtho. At the same time, a gate opens and Kechara and Aubri pop out. The gate begins collapsing on itself and Aubri tells them that Skan is still inside. Vikteren holds the gate open long enough for Skan to make through, but he does not appear as the once Black Gryphon, but as the White Gryphon. After the collapse of the gate, the mages have to put up shields to protect the people because of the mage storm created due to the death of both Ma'ar and Urtho. |
4085876 | /m/0bh98d | Thousand Cranes | Yasunari Kawabata | 1952 | {"/m/05hgj": "Novel"} | Set in a post World War II Japan, the protagonist, Kikuji, has been orphaned by the death of his mother and father. He becomes involved with one of the former mistresses of his father, Mrs Ota, who commits suicide seemingly for the shame she associates with the affair. After Mrs Ota's death, Kikuji then transfers much of his love and grief over Mrs Ota's death to her daughter. The ending is ambiguous where the reader is not sure whether Fumiko has committed suicide like her mother. |
4086669 | /m/025szgb | O-zone | null | null | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction"} | Missouri is a nuclear wasteland after leakage of stored radioactive waste, off limits to all but the very rich. Eight of them, referred to as 'Owners', visit this O-Zone as their personal playground. Some of them come to the disturbing realizations that the life-forms outside of their walled in cities, assumed to be just 'things', seem as human as the Owners themselves. |
4089573 | /m/0bhg1b | A Buyer's Market | Anthony Powell | 1952 | {"/m/02xlf": "Fiction", "/m/05hgj": "Novel"} | The first part is taken up with various debutante balls in the early summer of 1928/9, notably at the Huntercombes', where Barbara Goring (a flame of Nick's) pours sugar over Widmerpool. Leaving the ball, Widmerpool and Jenkins bump into Mr Deacon and Gypsy. Stopping together at a tea stall they encounter Stringham, who takes Nick, Widmerpool, Deacon and Gypsy to a party at Mrs Andriadis's. During that summer Jenkins spends weekends in the country and lunches at Stourwater, home of magnate Sir Magnus Donners, where he again meets Jean Templer, now married to Bob Duport. Widmerpool, who now works for Donners, appears during a tour of the Stourwater dungeons and later manages to wreck one of his master's ornamental urns with his car. That autumn Stringham is married to Lady Peggy Stepney; Mr Deacon dies after his birthday party; Jenkins sleeps with Gypsy after Deacon's funeral. *Adapted in part from material published by the Anthony Powell Society with consent |
4092149 | /m/0bhl0r | Service With a Smile | P. G. Wodehouse | 10/15/1961 | {"/m/02yq81": "Comic novel", "/m/01z4y": "Comedy", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | Myra Schoonmaker is in durance vile at Blandings Castle, her London season having been cut short by Connie to put a stop to Myra's unfortunate entanglement with impoverished East End curate Bill Bailey. Her misery adds to Lord Emsworth's woes, already weighing heavily thanks to the efficiency of his latest secretary Lavender Briggs and the presence of both the Duke of Dunstable, on another of his long visits to the castle, and a party of Church Lads, camping out by his beloved lake. When Connie reveals plans to spend a day having her hair done in Shrewsbury, Myra at once contacts Bailey, arranging to meet in a registry office and tie the knot. Bailey, with his friend Pongo Twistleton and Pongo's Uncle Fred in tow, waits at the selected spot, but Myra doesn't turn up. Uncle Fred, an old friend of Myra and her father and taking to Bailey from the off, runs into Emsworth (in town to attend the Opening of Parliament), and wastes no time in inviting himself to Blandings, with Bailey in tow in the guise of "Cuthbert Meriweather", an old friend newly returned from Brazil. At the castle, Bailey and Myra are reunited, and the wrinkle in their love caused by the registry office mix-up easily smoothed out by Uncle Fred. The Church Lads trick Emsworth into diving into the lake to rescue one of their number, which turns out to be a log. This leads the Duke of Dunstable to once again question Emsworth's sanity, blaming the amiable peer's affection for his pig for his apparently crumbling mental state; while Emsworth, at Fred's suggestion, takes his revenge on the Church Lads by cutting the ropes of their tent in the small hours. Recalling hearing Lord Tilbury saying he would pay £2000 for such a superb specimen, Dunstable arranges to pay Lavender Briggs £500 to steal her for him, Briggs in turn hiring the untrustworthy Wellbeloved to help and claiming she has a second assistant available. Uncle Fred hears from Myra that her beloved Bill is being blackmailed by Briggs, who has recognised him, into helping with the pig scheme, but before Fred can come up with a plan, Bailey has confessed all to Lord Emsworth, who in his wrath sacks both Briggs and Wellbeloved, but lets slip Bailey's true identity to Connie. Fred keeps Connie quiet by threatening to reveal to the county that Beach cut the tent ropes, which would lead to embarrassment in the county and the loss of a superlative butler, but Connie contacts James Schoonmaker, urging him to come to her aid. When George Threepwood tells Dunstable that he has photographed his grandfather in the act of cutting the tent ropes, Dunstable realises that the sacked Briggs is no longer needed, as he can blackmail Emsworth into parting with the pig. He meets up with Tilbury at The Emsworth Arms, where Lavender Briggs, returned from a day out in London ignorant of the change in her situation, overhears him telling Tilbury he has cancelled her cheque; he also proposes to charge Tilbury £3000 for the pig. Briggs later approaches Tilbury, her former employer, offering to undercut Dunstable and steal the pig for Tilbury; he accepts and pays up, but on leaving the inn, Briggs meets Uncle Fred, who tells her of her sacking and advises her to head straight to London and pay in Tilbury's cheque. Schoonmaker arrives, answering Connie's request, but Fred intercepts him too, and takes him to the Emsworth Arms, where they catch up on old times and Fred informs his old friend of Myra's engagement to Archie Gilpin (she having broken things off with Bailey after his rash confession). Schoonmaker reveals he loves Connie, but lacks the courage to propose, and later Gilpin tells Fred he has once again become engaged to Millicent Rigby, with whom he had had a minor falling out, and now finds himself engaged to two girls at once; he also wants £1000, to buy into his cousin Ricky's onion-soup business. Uncle Fred tricks Dunstable into thinking Schoonmaker is broke, and persuades him to pay out £1000 to get his nephew out of his engagement to Myra; he helps Schoonmaker build up the nerve to propose to Connie, and persuades him that Bill Bailey is a more suitable match for Myra; and on a tip-off from Lavender Briggs, he shows Dunstable that he has proof (in the form of a tape-recording) that Dunstable schemed to steal the pig, thus extracting from him the compromising photos of Lord Emsworth. With Bill and Myra off to a register office, Archie back with Millicent and set up in business, Connie and Schoonmaker engaged and Dunstable well and truly scuppered, Fred smiles at the services he has done to one and all. |
4092943 | /m/0bhm3m | My Mother's Castle | Marcel Pagnol | 1957 | {"/m/012jgz": "Autobiographical novel"} | Following the summer holiday which features in La gloire de mon père, the family returns to Marseilles but Marcel still yearns for the hills. His wish is granted when they return for the Christmas holiday, much to Marcel's delight. Although only a few kilometers outside Marseilles the journey to the holiday home is time consuming as public transport takes them a short portion of the way and the rest is a walk along a long, winding road. Marcel then tells of an encounter with a girl, Isabelle. He meets her whilst exploring the countryside of the Provence with Lili, and they plan to meet at her house in the future to play. On his first visit to her house, he meets her father and mother, who are both very eccentric. Isabelle herself is also a bit strange, always dressing up in different dresses, and demanding Marcel to dress up as a dog, a soldier, or other things at various times. When they play, Isabelle commands Marcel around to do various things. At one point, she tells him to close his eyes and open his mouth. She then feeds him a grasshopper. Lili and Paul, Marcel's younger brother, observe this, and they report it to Marcel's father. He then forbids Marcel to continue meeting "with that crazy girl". Marcel later observes the departure of Isabelle and her family. One day, when travelling to their house, the family encounters one of Marcel's father's former pupils,Bouzigue, who now works in maintaining a canal which runs from the hills into Marseilles. The canal runs across private estates and so he is issued with a key which allows him to pass through several locked doors along the towpath. The employee points out to the family that this is a shortcut which will allow them to reach their house in a fraction of the journey time and offers them his spare key. Marcel's father, being honest and upright realises that this would amount to trespassing. He nevertheless accepts the key after much persuasion from his family for use in an emergency. Despite his reservations, the family use the key more and more and the reduced journey time allows them to visit the holiday home every weekend. They still have an apprehension each time they unlock a door fearing they will be caught. As time passes, however, they encounter the owner of one property and the groundsman of another, who are friendly and quite happy that they cross their land. At the beginning of the summer holidays they make the journey again and Marcel's mother feels a great fear and trepidation of meeting the owner. When they reach the final door they discover it has been padlocked. They are confronted by the caretaker of the final property who has been watching them for some time and who decides to make an official report. Marcel's father is devastated, believing a complaint could damage his career prospects and he could possibly lose his job as a school teacher. The employees of the canal however, confront the caretaker threatening him with prosecution for having unlawfully padlocked one of the company's doors. The caretaker withdraws his complaint against Marcel's family and the matter is concluded. During the ordeal between the canal workers and the caretaker they take the padlock, put it around the gate, and feed the key to his dog so he can't leave the estate. The epilogue mentions that uncle Jules hired a carriage for the family. The film jumps 10 years to the future, telling of the death of Marcel's mother. It also tells of Lili and Paul: Paul was a goatherd in the countryside of the Provence, until his sudden death at the age of 31. Lili is killed in 1917, during the First World War. Marcel is the only one left of their childhood company, now a successful film director. His company has purchased a large old house in the Marseilles area to turn into a film studio. When walking through the grounds he sees a familiar door and realizes that this is the last property on his childhood journey to his holiday home. In a burst of rage he picks up a rock and smashes the door and thus ends a bad spell. |
4096072 | /m/0bhsv8 | Sir Thursday | Garth Nix | 3/1/2006 | {"/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/03mfnf": "Young adult literature", "/m/0dwly": "Children's literature"} | The book begins with Arthur Penhaligon and Leaf attempting to return to Earth after their adventures in the Border Sea. While Leaf is able to pass through the front door and return to Earth, the presence of a Nithling duplicate of Arthur prevents him from doing so, and he is forced to remain in the Lower House. Dame Primus then informs him that Mister Monday and Grim Tuesday have been assassinated. Moments later, he is drafted into the Glorious Army of the Architect – wherein everyone living in the House must serve for 100 years – which is based in the chessboard-like demesne called the Great Maze. The leader of the army is the Fourth Trustee of the Will, Sir Thursday, a Denizen afflicted with the deadly sin of wrath. The army is currently involved in a campaign against the Piper, who is trying to claim the Fourth Key. Within the army, Arthur is soon mistaken for a Piper's child and has his memory wiped, along with his friend Fred Initials Numbers Gold – a real Piper's child. One month later and during the first battle against the Piper's New Nithling army, Arthur begins to recall his identity. The entirety of it is recovered later in the book when an officer mentions his name and title. On Earth, Arthur's double, known as the Skinless Boy, has thrown a hospital near Arthur's home into panic by infecting staff and patients with a fungoid, extraterrestrial life-form which allows him to read and eventually control their thoughts and actions. This fungus, nicknamed Grayspot, is mistaken for a biological weapon, and the hospital put under quarantine. Leaf infiltrates the hospital, seeking to obtain and destroy the magical object used to create the Skinless Boy: a pocket torn from one of Arthur's shirts. She succeeds, but is infected by Grayspot in the process. She then leaves the hospital, only to find that the House has appeared above it and cannot be reached from the ground. With the help of a retired pharmacist named Sylvie, Leaf makes her way to Arthur's house where she uses a special telephone to contact Arthur's friends and get help, just as the fungus gains full control of her body. Suzy Turquoise Blue arrives and takes the pocket to the House. There, she finds Arthur and Fred, and joins them in a raid led by Sir Thursday to find and destroy the New Nithlings' weapon, which is preventing the mechanical floor of the Great Maze from shifting. Arthur destroys the weapon by throwing the pocket into it, simultaneously destroying the Skinless Boy. As Arthur escapes from the Piper with Sir Thursday, he distracts Thursday enough for the fourth part of the Will, a snake embodying the virtue of justice, to break free, whereupon it makes Arthur the Bearer of the Fourth Key – a sword or baton depending on whether or not the wielder is in combat – and Commander of the Glorious Army of the Architect. With help from Dame Primus and others from the lower demesnes, Arthur defeats the New Nithling army. On Earth, Leaf wakes up in a hospital a week after the Skinless Boy was defeated. She soon learns from a nurse that the Grayspot has disappeared and that Lady Friday, another Trustee, has become a doctor on Earth. |
4096083 | /m/0bhsv_ | Across The Zodiac | Percy Greg | 1880 | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction"} | The book details the creation and use of apergy, a form of anti-gravitational energy, and details a flight to Mars in 1830. The planet is inhabited by diminutive beings; they are convinced that life does not exist elsewhere than on their world, and refuse to believe that the unnamed narrator is actually from Earth. (They think he's an unusually tall Martian from some remote place on their planet.) The book's narrator names his spacecraft the "Astronaut." |
4096510 | /m/0bhthg | Dragonsinger | Anne McCaffrey | 1977-02 | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/0dwly": "Children's literature", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/03mfnf": "Young adult literature", "/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | The novel follows Menolly, now apprenticed into the Harper Hall, a type of music conservatory for harpers (minstrels/educators) and other music professionals, as she begins her musical training to become a harper herself one day. The story begins within hours of the final events of Dragonsong, rounding out the tale of Menolly's coming of age. Menolly finds life in the Harper Hall challenging, and through the events of the novel struggles to make a place for herself. Although she is glad to be accepted as a musician and encouraged to play and write music by most of the authority figures at Harper Hall, she must still deal with those who dislike her for her talents or don't believe she has any real talent at all. At first she is placed in living quarters and classes with a group of paying female students who are, in the majority, extremely unpleasant. She also finds herself torn between master musicians who have conflicting emphases and who want her to specialize in their techniques, instead of developing her own. The situation is complicated by her nine fire lizards, small dragon-like creatures whose properties are still being explored at the time of the story; while some members of the Pern communities want her help in learning what fire lizards can do, many of her teachers in the Harper Hall see them as a nuisance and a distraction that will keep her from developing her musical gifts. Even through her struggles she gains a handful of faithful friends beyond her fire lizards, including Piemur a fellow apprentice and Journeyman Sebell. Over time she finds her place as a musician within the harper system and is sped through the apprenticeship system in near-record time. |
4096828 | /m/0bhv08 | The People That Time Forgot | Edgar Rice Burroughs | 1963 | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | The novel begins with the organization of an expedition to rescue Bowen J. Tyler, Lys La Rue, and the other castaways marooned on the large Antarctic island of Caprona, whose tropical interior, known to its inhabitants as Caspak, is home to prehistoric fauna of all eras. Tyler's recovered manuscript detailing their ordeal is delivered to his family, and the relief effort is put together by Tom Billings, secretary of the Tyler shipbuilding business. The expedition's ship, the Toreador, locates Caprona, and while the bulk of the crew attempts to scale the encircling cliffs Billings flies over them in an aircraft. Billings' plane is attacked by flying reptiles and forced down in the interior of Caspak. He saves a native girl, Ajor, from a large cat and a group of ape-men, and undertakes to accompany her back to her people, the fully human Galus, while she educates him in the language and mysteries of the island. They travel north, encountering various creatures of the Mesozoic and Cenozoic eras, as well as additional primitive subhuman races. They pass through the lands of the Neanderthal Bo-lu (club men) and the more advanced Sto-lu (hatchet men), who are easily cowed by gunfire, but in the country of the Band-lu (spear men) he is taken captive, and despairs until rescued in turn by Ajor. They resume their journey, re-encountering and befriending Tomar, a Band-lu newly become Kro-lu (bow man). Tomar and his mate So-al are the first examples Billings has actually seen of Caspakian evolutionary metamorphosis in action. After an interlude in which Ajor's back story is related the new friends separate. Billings and Ajor enter Kro-lu territory and save Chal-az, a Kro-lu warrior, from a group of Band-lu. Visiting the Kro-lu village as his guest, they are parted again when Billings is attacked through the machinations of the chief Du-seen, who has designs on Ajor. They escape individually, making for the Galu country. Du-seen goes after Ajor with some of his warriors. Billings catches and tames an ancestral horse, with the aid of which he rescues Ajor from Du-seen. Pursued, they resign themselves to death, but are relieved by a force consisting of Bowen Tyler, Galu warriors, and the rescue crew from the Toreador, which had successfully scaled the cliffs and entered Caspak after Billings' ill-fated airplane flight. All are reunited in the Galu village, where Tyler and Lys La Rue have been formally married by the captain of the Toreador. Billings and Ajor also desire to wed, but Ajor may not leave Caspak due to her status as cos-ata-lo – she was born a fully evolved Galu rather than attaining that form through metamorphosis, and hence is treasured by her people. Billings elects to remain in Caspak to be with her. |
4097001 | /m/0bhv89 | The Solitaire Mystery | Jostein Gaarder | 1990 | {"/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy", "/m/0dwly": "Children's literature"} | The book follows two seemingly separate stories: A 12-year-old boy, Hans-Thomas, and his father are driving through Europe on a journey to locate and bring home the boy's estranged mother. Whilst on their journey, a strange little bearded man gives Hans-Thomas a magnifying glass, saying mystically: "You'll need it!". Not long afterwards, Hans-Thomas and his father stop in a roadside café where Hans-Thomas gets a giant sticky bun from a kind baker to eat on his journey. To Hans-Thomas's great surprise, hidden inside the sticky bun is a tiny book, with writing so small it cannot be read with the naked eye. Hans-Thomas begins to read the tiny book using his new magnifying glass, and the story then alternates between Hans-Thomas' journey and the story in the sticky bun book. The sticky bun book tells the story of an old baker whose grandfather gave him a drink of a wonderful liquid he called Rainbow Fizz (Rainbow Soda in the American edition). It came from an island which the grandfather had been shipwrecked on as a young man. On the island lived an old sailor called Frode, and fifty-three other people; the fifty three other people did not have names though, they referred to themselves as the numbers on playing cards (52 cards plus a Joker). The Ace of Hearts was particularly enchanting, and Frode had quite a crush on her, even though she was forever "losing herself". The two stories of Hans Thomas's journey, and the events in the sticky bun book start to overlap: :The cards in the sticky bun book take part in a game, where each says a sentence, and Frode tries to interpret its bizarre meaning. But sentences such as "the inner box unpacks the outer at the same time as the outer box unpacks the inner" and "destiny is a snake so hungry it devours itself" seem devoid of meaning for Frode. However, the cards' predictions as told in the tiny book begin to reveal details about Hans Thomas's own plight to find his mother. It occurs to Hans Thomas that his mother bears a striking resemblance in her personality to the Ace of Hearts in that she 'loses herself' (disappears) for long periods. Also, throughout Hans Thomas's journey, he has seen the same odd little bearded man following him about (the man who gave him the magnifying glass which proved so useful to read the sticky bun book). But whenever Hans Thomas approaches the little man, he seems to dash away and vanish. The baffling thing for Hans Thomas is that he stopped for the cake merely by chance, and chose to eat a sticky bun by chance - how is it possible that a tiny book from a random bun is telling him things about his own life? |
4097091 | /m/0bhvgz | The Sign of the Beaver | Elizabeth George Speare | 1983-02 | {"/m/0dwly": "Children's literature", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction", "/m/0hwxm": "Historical novel"} | The Sign of the Beaver tells the story of a 13-year-old boy, Matthew Hallowell, and his father, who, as early settlers, together build a wooden cabin in Maine in 1768. However, Matt's father must head back to Quincy, Massachusetts, to get Matt's mother, sister, and newborn baby, who were all left behind so Matt and his father could build shelter, plant crops and stock supplies. Matt's father promises to return in seven weeks. Before Matt's father leaves, he gives him his watch to tell time and a hunting rifle to guard the crops and the newly built cabin. Unfortunately, Matt finds himself enduring many hardships for which he is unprepared. His hunting rifle is stolen by a stranger named Ben, his crops are eaten by the wildlife, and his food supplies are pillaged by a bear. Wanting to sweeten his bland diet, Matt raids a honeybee hive for honey and is attacked by the furious bees. Attempting to escape the swarm, he jumps into a creek, losing a shoe and hurting his ankle in the process. Luckily, Matt's foolhardy adventure has not gone unnoticed and he is pulled from the water. Ironically, the native Indians he has learned to fear through tales of kidnapping have saved his life. His numerous stings are treated by the elderly Penobscot Indian chief named Saknis. After recovering, the thankful Matt offers his only book, Robinson Crusoe, as a gift to Saknis, and his grandson Attean. However they cannot read English. Saknis instead commands that Matt teach Attean to read, in return they will provide him with food. Uncertain of how to teach anyone, especially the unwilling boy, Matt accepts the task out of gratitude and courtesy, as he owes his life to the man. Matt does not immediately befriend Attean, although the two young boys eventually form a strong friendship as they help each other through difficult circumstances. Attean goes off to find his manitou, which is a sign of becoming a man. Attean is afraid because he fears it will take him a very long time. Although Matt longs for Attean to stay he is happy for his friend. Matt asks the question: "What if Attean's manitou doesn't come?" Although this offends Attean because in his culture without it he cannot become a man, he answers "Even if I have to wait many winters I get manitou to become a man". When Attean returns from searching for his manitou, he invites Matt, whose family has not yet returned after many months, to join his tribe, who are moving north to new hunting grounds. Although Matt is good friends with Attean and enjoys Indian culture, he has not forgotten his family. Matt has to decide whether to join the Indian tribe, or return to his cabin and continue to wait for his family to return. He decides to wait, although parting from his new friend, Attean, is difficult. The two boys trade gifts; Matt gives Attean his treasured watch that his father gave him before he left, and Attean leaves his dog behind with Matt. Attean's grandmother gives Matt some maple sugar, and Saknis gives Matt a pair of snowshoes. After he cut the last notch on the last stick, Matt waits for his family, using the survival skills he had learned with Attean. In the winter, Matt's family finally returns, though Matt's little sister (who he hadn't met) died. Matt decides he would tell them about Attean and the whole Indian tribe. *1983 Josette Frank Award (won) *1984 Christopher Award (won) *1984 A Booklist Editors' Choice (won) *1984 Horn Book Fanfare (won) *1984 Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction (won) *1984 An American Library Association Notable Children's Book citation *1984 An American Library Association Best Book for Young Adults (won) *1983–1984 Young Hoosier Book Award (nominee) *The New York Times Best Book of the Year |
4098609 | /m/0bhxp6 | The Walking Drum | Louis L'Amour | 5/1/1984 | {"/m/0hwxm": "Historical novel"} | Forced to flee his birthplace on the windswept coast of Brittany to escape the Baron de Tournemine, who killed his mother, and to seek his lost father, Kerbouchard looks for passage on a ship and, although forced to serve as a galley slave initially, travels the coast and attains the position of pilot, frees a captured Moorish girl, Aziza, and her companion, then frees his fellow slaves and with their help sells his captors into slavery and escapes to Cádiz in Moorish Spain, where he looks for news of his father. Hearing that his father is dead, Mathurin goes inland and poses as a scholar in Córdoba, but his scholarship is interrupted when he becomes involved in political intrigue surrounding Aziza and is imprisoned by Prince Ahmed. Scheduled to be executed, Mathurin escapes eastward to the hills outside the city, but before he leaves soldiers arrive and ransack and burn the place where he is staying, leaving him for dead. Mathurin returns to Córdoba and, aided by a woman he chances upon named Safia, he takes a job as a translator. However, the intrigue in which she is involved threatens their lives, and they must flee the city. Safia, through connections of her own, has gathered news of Mathurin's father, and tells him that his father may be alive but was sold as a slave in the east. Leaving Spain, they take up with a merchant caravan and travel by land across Europe, stopping along the way at various places to trade or to fight off thieves. Reaching Brittany, the caravan tempts a raid from the Baron de Tournemine, but they are ready for his attack and, routing his forces, press on, joined by another caravan, to sack the baron's castle. Mathurin personally kills his enemy, avenging his mother, and, leaving the caravan, takes Tournamine's body and throws it into a fabled swamp rumored to be a gate to Purgatory. Riding eastward, Mathurin befriends a group of oppressed peasants before rejoining the caravan as it approaches Paris. Safia has learned that Mathurin's father is at Alamut, the fortress of the Old Man of the Mountain (Assassin), but warns that going there is dangerous. She leaves the caravan and remains in Paris, but Mathurin must go on and seek his father. Both caravans will travel eastward and cross the Russian steppes together. In Paris, Mathurin talks with a group of students but offends a teacher and must flee again for his life. Chancing upon the fleeing Comtesse de Malcrais, he assists her in escaping from Count Robert. They meet up with the caravans again at Provins, where they are joined by a company of acrobats (including Khatib) and additional caravans from Italy, Armenia, the Baltic, Venice, and the Netherlands. The caravans join together and travel to Kiev to trade their woolen cloaks and other goods for furs. Denied passage down the Dnieper by boat, the caravans head southward from Kiev. Crossing the Southern Bug and approaching the Chicheklaya, they encounter hostile Petchenegs. Stalling for time as the caravan drives south toward the Black Sea, Kerbouchard exchanges pleasantries with the Khan, fights a duel with Prince Yury, and receives a drink, but as he leaves the camp the Khan warns him that the Petchenegs will attack the caravan in the morning. Kerbouchard returns to the caravan, which has nearly reached the Black Sea, and assists as they contrive rudimentary fortifications, hoping to hold their ground against the Petchenegs until boats arrive to take them to Constantinople. A protracted battle ensues, by the end of which most of the caravan merchants are killed, but Suzanne may have escaped in a small boat, and Mathurin, wounded, hides in the brush and nurses himself gradually back to health, barely surviving to emerge, reclaim his horse, and ride to Byzantium by land, clothed in rags. Casting out Abdullah, a fat storyteller, and taking his place in the market in Constantinople, Mathurin makes a couple of gold coins and an enemy named Bardas. Leaving the market with a man named Phillip, he spends the coins on clothing. In a wine shop, he meets Andronicus Comnenus and captures his interest. Perceiving that rare books are valuable in the city, Mathurin then takes to copying from memory books that he copied in Córdoba. Contacting Safia's informant, he learns that his father is indeed at Alamut, but that he attempted to escape and may be dead. Nevertheless, he is determined to go and find out. Going to an armorer who maintains a room for exercising with weapons, he meets some of the Emperor's guard and drops hints to one of them of the books he is copying, so that the emperor will hear of him. Invited to meet the emperor, Mathurin offers him advice and a book and tells the Emperor of his desire to rescue his father from Alamut. Two weeks later, the emperor supplies Mathurin with a sword, three horses he had lost when the caravan was taken, and gold. Invited to dinner with Andronicus, Mathurin learns from him that Suzanne has returned safely to her castle and strengthened its defenses with survivors from the caravan. Bardas makes trouble, and Mathurin and Phillip must leave the party, but Mathurin has a vision and foretells Andronicus' death. Mathurin advises Phillip to leave the city and go to Saône, and he himself receives a warning note from Safia, telling him not to go to Alamut. Leaving Constantinople, Mathurin travels by boat across the Black Sea to Trebizond and adopts the identity of ibn-Ibrahim, a Muslim physician and scholar, travelling over land to Tabriz, where he finds Khatib, who tells him rumors that his father is being treated terribly by a powerful newcomer to Alamut named al-Zawila. Invited to visit the Emir Ma'sud Kahn, Mathurin presents a picture of himself in his identity as ibn-Ibrahim, physician, scholar, and alchemist, and, learning that ibn-Haram is in the city, decides to pass on from Tabriz toward Jundi Shapur, the medical school that provides his pretense for travelling through the area. Leaving Tabriz, Mathurin and Khatib travel alongside a caravan as far as Qazvin, where ibn-Ibrahim receives gifts and an invitation to visit Alamut. Before he leaves for Alamut, Mathurin makes the acquaintance of the princess Sundari, from Anhilwara, and, learning that she is being forced to marry a friend of the king of Kannauj, promises, if he escapes Alamut alive, to come to Hind and rescue her from this fate. Traveling with Khatib to a valley outside Alamut, where they arrange to meet again afterward, Mathurin packs rope, nitre crystals, and other ingredients from a Chinese recipe he had seen in a book in Córdoba, and gathers also various medicinal herbs, before riding up to the gates of Alamut. He is admitted but immediately taken captive and brought before Mahmoud, who reveals that he ran into trouble with Prince Ahmed, and that the prince and Aziza are both dead. According to Mahmoud, Sinan does not know that Mathurin has been brought to Alamut. Locked in his quarters, Kerbouchard finds the rope has been removed from his pack. Unable to escape, he speaks out his window to a guard, hoping that Sinan's spies will report his presence, and that Sinan will want to meet with an alchemist and physician such as himself. The next morning, after mixing the saltpeter, charcoal, and sulfur from his saddlebags, repacking the resulting powder, and mixing several preparations from the herbs, he is confronted by Mahmoud and provokes him. Brought before Sinan, Mathurin reveals to him some of the details of his past that Mahmoud had kept secret and broaches the subject of alchemy, hoping to be kept around a little longer. Promising to see him later, Sinan sends him back to his quarters and also sends a copy of a book he had requested of Ma'sud Kahn in Tabriz. Mathurin does get to see Sinan for most of a day, performing alchemy experiments and exchanging ideas. Afterward, Mahmoud comes for him with armed guards and escorts him (along with his bags, which contain his surgery equipment) to a surgical room, telling him that he has been brought to Alamut on an errand of mercy to save a slave's life, by making him a eunuch. The slave is his father. Pretending to cooperate, Mathurin covertly cuts his father's bonds with a scalpel then, spilling boiling water on some of the guards, draws his sword and engages the remaining guards. Other soldiers, presumably those of Sinan, break into the room, and Mathurin and his father escape down the corridor and through an aqueduct into the hidden valley. In the garden among some spare pipes, Mathurin packs his prepared powder into pipes, plugs the ends, and fashions wicks from fat-soaked string, and they hide there until the middle of the next day. Meeting a young girl in the rain, Mathurin trusts her with the gist of his situation and asks if there is any way out. She tells of a gate whereby the gardener, closely guarded, takes out the leaves he rakes up, and, eager to escape, she agrees to meet them near the gate. Soldiers searching the garden pass by their hiding place, and that evening they rush the gate and, assisted by a handful of slaves who are present, slay the guards, but the gate is closed on them. Placing his prepared pipe bombs, Mathurin lights the fuses and, as soldiers approach, tells everyone to stand back. With the gate destroyed and the soldiers stunned by his blast, they escape out and down the side of the mountain. Slaying another dozen soldiers, Mathurin and his father, with the girl in tow, meet Khatib with the horses and ride off. Reaching the city where Khatib had been hiding, they are confronted by Mahmoud and another dozen soldiers. Mathurin fights a quick duel with Mahmoud and kills him. At the end of the book, the girl from the valley, whose home was near the gulf, rides toward Basra with Mathurin's father, who will seek the sea again. Mathurin rides toward Hind, to fulfill his promise to Sundari. |
4100266 | /m/0bh_88 | Her Infinite Variety | Louis Auchincloss | null | null | Born in New York in 1917, attractive Clarabel Hoyt, the heroine of the book, is encouraged by her ambitious mother to marry "a great man," a man able and willing to make a success of his life. She succeeds in persuading her daughter to end her relationship with a young teacher with a promising career ahead of him and marry into one of the pre-eminent, old money families instead. Eventually succumbing to her mother's wishes, Clara, still a virgin, marries Trevor Hoyt, a banker, and in due course their daughter Sandra is born. Clara, however, is not content spending her husband's money and living a life of luxury and ease. When her old school friend Polly suggests that she should work for Style, a fashion magazine, Clara eagerly accepts the offer and soon becomes a household name as a trendy journalist. During World War II, while Hoyt is stationed in London and Clara remains in New York, both spouses are unfaithful to each other. On her husband's return, however, Clara is faced with the double standards of morality which exempt the man from any consequences of his infidelity while ascribing to the woman the role of sinner, of the "war wife who cheats on her fighting husband" or, as Trevor puts it, of the "cool bitch". Subsequently, and much to her mother's dismay, Clara divorces her husband, a generous divorce settlement ensuring that she does not quite have to "face the chilling prospect of depending on her own talents to support herself". She becomes editor-in-chief of Style by exposing her predecessor's alcoholism and eventually starts an affair with Eric Tyler, the owner of the magazine. At the same time she gently but firmly turns Tyler Publications into an empire aligned with the Democratic Party. She also pulls the strings in making Eric Tyler a candidate for the U.S. Senate. However, driven by some inexplicable force, Tyler holds the "wrong" speech on tax reform, voicing what he really thinks on the matter and thus forfeiting all his chances of ever becoming a politician. It is with considerable difficulty that Clara answers Tyler's question whether she loves him—she is aware of the fact that her rather forced "Of course, I love you" is actually a lie. At this point in her life she very strongly questions her ability to love at all. Nevertheless Clara marries Eric Tyler, but the ailing tycoon suffers two strokes and dies. Clara is now faced with a lengthy lawsuit brought on by Tony Tyler, Eric's son by his first wife, who feels cheated out of the family money. Determined to fight to the end rather than compromise, Clara justifies, and also disguises, her luxurious lifestyle by continuing her late husband's foundation and openly and generously supporting philanthropic causes so that her public image turns into that of an "angel of beneficience". Clara also likes to see herself as a patron of the arts, and it is in this capacity that she meets, and gets to know more intimately, Oliver Kip, an expert on the Italian Renaissance. She genuinely falls in love with him and wants to "belong to Oliver, to be appreciated by his cool, appraising eyes, to be added to his collection of beautiful objects". Their affair, however, is short-lived because he informs her that his life "is not the kind that can be improved by being shared" and also because the abuse of his power within the Tyler Foundation forces her to pay him off and hush up the scandal in order to save the foundation's reputation. In the final scene of the novel, set in 1961, Clara is on the phone with John F. Kennedy, whose election she has supported, accepting Kennedy's offer to be made ambassador to the (fictional) island of Santa Emilia in the Caribbean. |
4103655 | /m/0bj5_s | Do Butlers Burgle Banks? | P. G. Wodehouse | null | null | Bond's Bank, which Mike Bond has inherited from his over-enthusiastically philanthropist uncle Horace, is insolvent. With the examiners due shortly and no solution in sight, Mike faces the prospect of a stretch in the clink for not revealing this earlier. If the criminal mastermind Appleby had known this, he probably wouldn't have insinuated his way into the temporary butler vacancy. But then he probably wouldn't have fallen in love with Ada. And Chicago mobster Charlie Yost wouldn't have come along to settle his score with Appleby. |
4103689 | /m/0bj62l | A Pelican at Blandings | P. G. Wodehouse | 9/25/1969 | {"/m/02xlf": "Fiction", "/m/05hgj": "Novel"} | Lord Emsworth is in clover at Blandings, with the only guest, Howard Chesney, easily avoided by eating alone in the library. His peace is shattered by the arrival of his sister Connie, along with a friend she has met on the boat over from America, Vanessa Polk, and the news that Dunstable is soon to descend upon the castle adds to his misery. Desperate, he calls on his brother Gally for aid. Gally is in London, meeting his godson Johnny Halliday, who announces his engagement to Dunstable's niece Linda. He hurries to the castle, sharing a train carriage with Dunstable, who tells Gally how he has bought a painting of a reclining nude, having heard how anxious the wealthy Wilbur Trout is to buy it; Dunstable plans to bring Trout to Blandings to sell him the picture at a large profit. At the castle, Connie urges Dunstable to cosy up with Vanessa Polk, her father's wealth proving an easy lure, and Emsworth's woes are compounded by his beloved Empress' refusal to eat a potato. Gally hears from Linda that her engagement to Halliday is no more, and Halliday himself visits, to explain the incident, a grilling he was obliged to give Linda as a witness in a court case he was defending, which led to their split. He begs Gally to invite him to the castle, but Gally, explaining his position in Connie's bad books, sends him home, promising to do his best on his behalf. Wilbur Trout arrives, and we learn that Vanessa Polk was once engaged to him, and still harbours tender feelings. He tells her the tale of Dunstable's treachery, and she hatches a plan to steal the painting. In London, Halliday hears from his partner Joe Bender that the painting sold to Dunstable was a fake, and he calls in Gally's help. The capable old Pelican arranges to swap the real picture for the fake, but decides to take a bath before replacing the original in the empty frame. Emsworth, visiting his pig after a worrying dream, falls into the muddy sty, then finds himself locked out, Gally having turned the key on his return from meeting Johnny. He enters the house via Dunstable's rooms, waking up the Duke when surprised by a cat, and later returns to wake the Duke again when he sees the empty frame. When the rest of the household see the picture, now replaced by Gally, the Duke's low opinion of Emsworth's sanity persuades him to call in psychiatric help; with Sir Roderick Glossop out of the country, Gally recommends his junior partner, Johnny Halliday. Vanessa Polk, having spotted him for a crook, persuades Chesney to help her steal the painting, but he recognises Halliday, newly arrived at the castle, as the attorney who defended him after an earlier crime went wrong. He plans to leave to avoid being unmasked and return by night for the painting, but seeing Halliday at the top of the stairs, pushes him down. Halliday falls, taking Dunstable with him, and while he angers the Duke he endears himself to Linda, who finds herself kissing his face as he lies prone in the hallway. Linda, now firmly in favour of Halliday, reveals she cannot marry without Dunstable's consent, which he refuses after the stairs incident, and also having recalled Halliday's father, who he never got on with. Connie calls Glossop's office, finds Halliday is an imposter and ejects him from the castle. Trout and Vanessa meet up in the night to steal the painting, but Chesney fails to turn up, having crashed his car on the way. The two realise they love each other, and leave next morning to get married. Connie insists Dunstable writes to Vanessa proposing marriage, but the letter is intercepted by Gally, who knows Vanessa's true story and makes the Duke allow the wedding of Linda and Johnny, under threat of a breach of promise suit. Connie is recalled to America by her husband, and the Duke returns home, leaving Emsworth once again master of his domain. |
4103745 | /m/0bj67j | The Girl in Blue | P. G. Wodehouse | null | null | More Wodehousian romance and intrigue are on the cards when the fate of the titular painting, a Gainsborough miniature, gets tangled up in the lives of some young lovers. |
4103852 | /m/0bj6f3 | Bachelors Anonymous | P. G. Wodehouse | 10/15/1973 | {"/m/02xlf": "Fiction", "/m/05hgj": "Novel"} | Much married, much divorced movie mogul Ivor Llewellyn (friend of Monty Bodkin), and his long-suffering lawyer Ephraim Trout, find the idea of a support group for bachelors appealing. The members can watch each other's backs, keeping them safe from roving females. With spring in the air, however, romance is never far behind... |
4104044 | /m/0bj6mt | Sunset at Blandings | P. G. Wodehouse | null | null | The story is, as the poignant name suggests, another tale set at Blandings Castle, filled as ever with romance and imposters. Galahad Threepwood uses his charm and wit to ensure his brother Clarence continues to lead a quiet and peaceful life. |
4105047 | /m/0bj9lf | The Day My Bum Went Psycho | Andy Griffiths | 2001 | {"/m/0dwly": "Children's literature", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | Zack Freeman's bum is constantly detaching itself from his body and running off. One night, when he follows his bum, he learns that there is a plot by bums to take over the world. Specifically, the bums plan to create a huge, worldwide fart by building up a massive quantity of methane gas in the "Bumcano". When the Bumcano blows, all humans will be rendered unconscious. While they are unconscious, the bums will seize their chance and switch places with their heads. Fortunately, Zack meets the "Bum-hunter" Silas Sterne and his daughter, Eleanor, and is introduced to the realities of life in a world where bums are constantly a threat. To prevent the Bumcano eruption, the friends enlist the help of the Kisser, the Kicker, the Smacker and Ned Smelly. The characters encounter a variety of bum-related places and things, including the "Great Windy Desert", "flying bum squadrons", Stenchgantor The Great Unwiped Bum and the Great White Bum. Naturally, every possible opportunity for toilet humour is milked in this book for children, which won a number of Children's Choice awards in Australia. It is followed by Zombie Bums from Uranus (2003) and Bumageddon: The Final Pongflict (2005). |
4105368 | /m/0bjbhb | Other People's Money and How the Bankers Use It | null | null | null | The book attacked the use of investment funds to promote the consolidation of various industries under the control of a small number of corporations, which Brandeis alleged were working in concert to prevent competition. Brandeis harshly criticized investment bankers who controlled large amounts of money deposited in their banks by middle-class people. The heads of these banks, Brandeis pointed out, routinely sat on the boards of railroad companies and large industrial manufacturers of various products, and routinely directed the resources of their banks to promote the interests of their own companies. These companies, in turn, sought to maintain control of their industries by crushing small businesses and stamping out innovators who developed better products to compete against them. Brandeis supported his contentions with a discussion of the actual dollar amounts—in millions of dollars—controlled by specific banks, industries, and industrialists such as J. P. Morgan, noting that these interests had recently acquired a far larger proportion of American wealth than corporate entities had ever had before. He extensively cited testimony from a Congressional investigation performed by the Pujo Committee, named after Louisiana Representative Arsène Pujo, into self-serving and monopolistic business dealing. |
4106620 | /m/0bjffx | Convergence | Charles Sheffield | null | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | The book takes place millennia in the future with the same group of explorers introduced in the first two books of the series, Summertide and Divergence. After millions of years of apparent inaction, the Builder artifacts are changing quickly. After exploring several new artifacts, rediscovering the existence of a race thought to be dead for millennia, and finding that race's home planet in the midst of an enormous artifact, the adventures of this eclectic team become even stranger. In this book the characters explore several old artifacts to find that they have changed. These changes all seemed to be linked to a seemingly new artifact, which may affect the future of the entire Orion arm of the galaxy. The sequel to this book and series finale is Resurgence. |
4106807 | /m/0bjfzk | Tar Baby | Toni Morrison | 3/12/1981 | {"/m/02xlf": "Fiction", "/m/05hgj": "Novel"} | This novel portrays a love affair between Jadine and Son, two Black Americans from very different worlds. Jadine is a beautiful Sorbonne graduate and fashion model who has been sponsored into wealth and privilege by the Streets, a wealthy white family who employ Jadine's aunt and uncle as domestic servants. Son is an impoverished, strong-minded man who washes up at the Streets' estate on a Caribbean island. As Jadine and Son come together, their affair ruptures the illusions and self-deceptions that held together the world and relationships at the estate. They travel back to the U.S. to search for somewhere they can both be at home, and find that their homes hold poison for each other. The struggle of Jadine and Son reveals the pain, struggle, and compromises confronting Black Americans seeking to live and love with integrity in the United States. |
4110084 | /m/0bjn43 | Greatheart Silver | Philip José Farmer | null | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction"} | Greatheart Silver, the thirty-year-old first mate on Acme Zeppelin 8, is the sole survivor of an attack by the Mad Fokker, an air pirate and World War I veteran who was mothballed by the United States government because it could not undo his mental conditioning. Bendt Micawber (the CEO of Acme Corporation and the descendant of Mr. Micawber from David Copperfield) cites his survival as dereliction of duty. Receiving a plastic prosthetic leg as well as his pension as compensation, Greatheart is fired from Acme. During his recovery, Greatheart's fiancee breaks up with him and his Sioux grandmother sends his a birdcage with two ravens inside. He names them Huginn and Muninn after the Norse god Odin's all-seeing ravens. Using his skills with computers to alter his records and receive a glowing reference from Micawber, Greatheart is soon employed by the Phoenix branch of Acme Security-Southwest. Under the tutelage of Fenwick Phwombly (who describes himself, though is never identified, as the Shadow), Greatheart journeys to the town of Shootout, where many aging villains have gathered for a last great crime. However, they are stopped by a group of aging heroes including Phwombly in an action similar to the gunfight at the OK Corral. Two years later, Greatheart (named for the character in Pilgrim's Progress) is disguised as an employee of Acme W-W Cleaners and narrowly avoids averting a kidnapping. The victim of the terrorist group turns out to be Micawber's estranged daughter, Jill Micawber, who went under an assumed name so she would not be associated with her ruthless father. Greatheart traces the kidnappers, despite the efforts of Micawber to trail him, to the Fokker D-LXIX Press building, specializers in erotica owned by Acme Zeppelin. Using a DRECC computer, executive Rade Starling can transform any printed work into a sensually appealing one (e.g. Glinda of Oz becomes The Secret Life of Glinda of Oz, or The Good Witch Goes Bad) and after knocking Greatheart out reveals his plan, with a microchip embedded in the books' front covers, to overwhelm readers' emotions and make them euphoric and suggestible. With the help of Jill, a previous acquaintance of his from UCLA, Greatheart enables Starling's project to overwhelm him and his associates. Since the project was conducted on Acme-owned property, Greatheart has sufficient blackmail on Micawber to prevent his harassing him again. With Jill's leverage, Greatheart marries her and (with Micawber's grudging blessing) becomes captain of Acme Zeppelin 49. On a trans-Pacific journey to Minerva with a cargo of iridium and platinum, another group of kidnappers attempts to abduct Jill and encounters a Brittany separatist group on board. When gunshots go off and penetrate the airbag as well as short out the computers on the bridge, the groups must work together to reach land. |
4112471 | /m/0bjs1p | The Beggar | Naguib Mahfouz | 1965 | {"/m/0l67h": "Novella"} | The book opens with the main character Omar going to visit a doctor, who was one of his friends from his youth, because he has become sick of life. The doctor tells him that there is nothing physically wrong with him, and tells him that he won’t be ill if he goes on a diet and takes regular exercise. Both the diet and a vacation make no difference to him though. In his youth Omar was a poet and a socialist. He gave up both in order to become a lawyer, and now that he has reached the age of forty-five he can no longer find meaning in his life and he has effectively given up working. He met his wife Zeinab in his youth. She was a Christian called Kamelia Fouad and she converted to Islam, and lost her family in order to marry him. He promised that he would never desert her. She took up the role of supporting him and has proved to be the backbone of their bourgeois life together. As his malady grows he becomes more distant from her. He tries to escape his condition through love. He first meets a foreign singer called Margaret. When she unexpectedly leaves Egypt, he gets together with an oriental dancer called Warda. He falls in love with her, and she with him and they set up home together. Initially Omar’s illness seems to pass in the excitement of love. Zeinab, who is pregnant, is first suspicious and then is told of his new lover. Omar moves out to be with Warda, who quits her job to be with him. This love however fails to lift him out of his illness for long, and he makes contact with Margaret again when he sees her back at her club. He then goes through a succession of women, including prostitutes, trying to pull himself out of his sickness, but it is all to no avail. One dawn he is out near the pyramids and he feels a momentary joy, which connects him to all life. He feels light and at peace, but he soon feels the illness again. Although he tries to win this feeling again he is never able to. He returns home but feels suffocated there. One day Othman Khalil turns up in his office. Othman had been his socialist comrade in his youth who had been caught by the police, but hadn’t given out his connections with Omar, despite having been tortured. He has only just been released from prison. Othman is disconcerted to find Omar as a sceptic, as he has hung onto all of his socialist orthodoxies. As writing poetry has also failed to cure him, in an attempt to regain the peace he felt by the pyramids, Omar goes off to live by himself in the countryside. He slips into delirium but still the calm he desires escapes him. After a year and a half Othman, who has got involved in politics again, turns up at the house escaping from the police, but Omar thinks he is an illusion. Omar is shot and wounded as the police catch Othman. Omar feels he is returning to the world as he is brought back to Cairo. fa:گدا (رمان) |
4112539 | /m/0bjs55 | The Fifth of March | Ann Rinaldi | null | {"/m/0dwly": "Children's literature", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | Rachel Marsh helps a young British Private, Matthew Kilroy, and continues to help him even after he is sent to jail for murder. During the cold winter in Boston, she sneaks food from the dinner table to Matthew. One day her friend Jane comes to her bedroom window, tells her to get dressed and follow her. In the center of Boston there were massive riots against the British soldiers, guns are being fired and people are being killed. In particular, in self defense, Matthew Kilroy shoots a Bostonion. In the meantime, Rachel is being swept away by the crowd and has lost Jane. She visits the book keeper, Henry Knox. Rachel wants the Adams' to know nothing of her being there as that could loose her her position. Later in the book she has to tell Mr. Adams because she wants him to do the right thing for Matthew. Mr. Adams is angry, but understands why she did it. While Matthew was in jail, she secretly brings him food. This, Mr. Adams doesn't really like. She wants the people she works for, John Adams, to help him and 6 other soldiers out of jail, but that would ruin his career. In the end John Adams does help the soldiers, but two of them including Matthew are accused of manslaughter. Matthew is branded and shipped back to England. Matthew proposes matrimony to Rachel but she refuses him. Mr. Adams feels that it would be best to let go of Rachel when they move back to Braintree. He gets Rachel a position in Pennsylvania that he thinks would suit her. She is about to start a new chapter in her life and wants to be heard in |
4112587 | /m/0bjs7m | The Sleeper Awakes | H. G. Wells | 1899 | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction", "/m/026ny": "Dystopia"} | The story follows the fortunes of a late nineteenth century Englishman identified only as Graham. He falls into a strange "trance" in 1897, due to his dabbling in drugs to cure a prolonged and serious insomnia, awakening two hundred and three years later to find that he has inherited sizeable wealth from his cousin Warmings and a friend of his, Ibsister, whose sons died in a boating accident. His money had been put into a trust. Over the years, the trust, known as the White Council, used Graham's unprecedented wealth to establish a vast political and economic world order. Upon first awakening, Graham is extremely confused and suffers from severe culture shock. The individuals who had been charged with minding him during his sleep react to his awakening with surprise and alarm. No one had seriously expected Graham to ever arise from his slumber. Somehow, word spreads to the general populace that the sleeper has awakened. This leads to a great deal of distress among Graham's stewards which only increases when large mobs begin crowding around the building housing Graham. They shout and chant demands to see the fabled sleeper. All of this confuses Graham and his naturally inquisitive nature is compelled to ask questions of everyone in sight. The people around him are reluctant to give him answers and act in a very evasive manner. They only explain that the society in which they live is beset by troubles, and elaborate no further. They keep Graham from leaving and insist that, for his own well-being, he stay in the quarters provided for him. Graham is effectively under house arrest, able to understand the society of the future mainly by what little information he can get from those allowed to see him. He learns from his guardian, Howard, that around this time that he is, by the order of things, the legal owner and master of the world. He also learns that a rebellious figure known as Ostrog seeks to overthrow this established order. After returning to his quarters, Graham is liberated by individuals who identify themselves as agents of Ostrog. They briefly explain that the people of the world are preparing to stage a revolt against the White Council and require his leadership. Uncertain about their story but unwilling to remain a prisoner, Graham leaves with them. After a perilous journey over the rooftops of future London and a mad flight from aeroplanes searching for him, Graham arrives at a massive hall where the workers and underprivileged classes have gathered to prepare for the revolution. It is at this time that Graham meets Lincoln, Ostrog's brother. Ostrog himself, Lincoln explains, is busy making the final preparations for the revolt. The assembled workers chant the Song of the Revolution and begin to march against the White Council. Graham is caught up in the mob, which soon engages in a battle with the state police. In the ensuing confusion, Graham is separated from the revolutionaries and wanders the streets of London alone. London itself is in a panic as the revolt spreads across the world. The power is cut and order begins to dissolve as the fighting intensifies. During this time, he meets an old man who recounts to him the history of the sleeper, how the White Council used him as a figurehead to gain power and how, by investing his wealth in various companies and political parties, grew his inheritance and subtly bought the industries and political entities of half the world, establishing a plutocracy and sweeping the remains of democratic parliament and the monarchy away. The old man also shares his cynical views on how he believes that the sleeper is not real but a made-up figure to brainwash the population. Eventually Graham makes his way to the mysterious figure of Ostrog, who explains to him that the revolution is a success. All that remains is to accept the surrender of the White Council. Ostrog also explains how the people were dissatisfied with the administration of the White Council and demanded the fortune to be returned to the Sleeper. Graham is hailed as the savior of the people and is nominally restored to his rightful place as master of the world. He is given comfortable quarters and his every pleasure is fulfilled on a whim. The governorship of society is left in Ostrog's hands. Graham contents himself with learning as much about this new world as he can. He especially takes an interest in aeroplanes and insists on learning how to operate the flying machines. His carefree life soon comes to an end when a young woman named Helen Wotton explains that the people are suffering as badly under Ostrog as they did under the White Council. For the lower class, the revolution has changed nothing. Inspired by Helen's words, Graham begins to ask Ostrog questions about the condition of the world. Ostrog admits that the lower classes are still dominated and exploited but defends the system. It is clear that Ostrog has no desire to change anything, that the revolution was merely an excuse to toss the White Council out and seize power himself, using Graham as a puppet. After pressing Ostrog, Graham learns that, in other cities, the workers have continued to rebel even after the fall of the White Council. To suppress these insurrections, Ostrog has used a police force, Black Africans recruited from Senegal and South Africa, to get the workers back in line. Graham is furious to learn of this and demands that Ostrog keep his police out of London. Ostrog agrees and promises to help Graham assume direct control over the world's affairs. Meanwhile, Graham decides to examine this new society for himself. Graham and a valet travel through London in disguise and examine the daily life of the average worker. London is portrayed as a dehumanized, industrialized quagmire caught in perpetual darkness. The lower classes are forced to work day and night in the factories, having nothing more to look forward to than some cheap amusements. As he examines this grim scene, Graham learns that Ostrog has ordered his troops to London to disarm the remaining revolutionary workers. The workers rise up once more and Graham makes his way back to Ostrog, who attempts to subdue Graham. With the help of the workers, Graham escapes Ostrog. He runs into Helen who, it is revealed, was the one who learned about Ostrog's treachery and made it public. With her by his side, Graham oversees the liberation of London from Ostrog. Ostrog himself manages to narrowly escape London. He joins the air fleet carrying the black troops to London. While most of London is secure, Ostrog's men still hold a few airports to land the African soldiers. The workers find anti-aircraft guns Ostrog had built for his own use and intend to turn them against Ostrog's air fleet. However, they need time to set up the weapons. To delay the air fleet, Graham decides to fly the one remaining aeroplane in possession of the revolutionaries against Ostrog and his air force. He bids farewell to Helen and departs. Over the skies of London, Graham uses his aeroplane as a battering ram to knock down several of the negro-transporting aeroplanes in Ostrog's fleet. Down below, the revolutionaries manage to get the anti-aircraft guns in place and begin shooting down the air fleet. Graham attempts to take down Ostrog's personal aeroplane, but he fails. However, Graham's aeroplane is critically damaged in an airport bombing and he plummets to earth. As the story closes, Graham's fate is left uncertain. |
4113955 | /m/0bjt_w | Prayers for the Assassin | Robert Ferrigno | 2006-02 | {"/m/01jfsb": "Thriller", "/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction", "/m/0c3351": "Suspense"} | The book starts off during the second American Civil War between the Islamic States and the seceding Bible Belt, with a Muslim soldier dying in 2017 at the battle of Newark, after a bloody battle with Bible Belt paramilitaries that are attempting to capture the city. Flash forward to the Super Bowl in 2042 in Seattle, the capitol of the new Islamic Republic, the majority of whose inhabitants have converted to Islam. The nation's culture is a fusion of traditional American and Islamic: the Super Bowl is still played, but the cheerleaders are sword-wielding men and the participants break at half-time for afternoon prayers. As the story opens, the country is facing a crisis, with competing political and religious factions threatening to destroy the fragile peace that exists within the Islamic States of America. At the same time, behind the scenes, a messianic figure known as the Wise Old One contrives to seize power for himself, and fulfill the ancient prophecy of the restoration of the Caliphate. The story's protagonist is Rakkim Epps, a Fedayeen warrior who is devoted to his cause, even if he has lost his faith. Epps must risk everything to save the life of Sarah Dougan, the young historian he loves. It becomes known that it was in fact Muslim extremists who launched the attacks, including the dirty bomb in Mecca. A fourth, more powerful bomb (later found in China) was scheduled for detonation but the small group of Muslim extremists assigned the task succumbed to radiation poisoning before it could be put into play. Once the truth was exposed, the parties stepped back from the brink and sought to find a common ground from which to start a more trusting, more open-minded dialog. There is a final showdown between Darwin, the "evil" assassin and Rakkim in which Darwin is slain via a knife throw to the face, but the remainder of the ending sets up conditions for a possible sequel. |
4114033 | /m/0bjv3n | Demon in My View | Amelia Atwater-Rhodes | null | {"/m/0kflf": "Vampire fiction", "/m/0dwly": "Children's literature", "/m/03npn": "Horror", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/03mfnf": "Young adult literature", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction", "/m/039vk": "Gothic fiction"} | The book is set in the non fictional town of Ramsa, New York, and centers around teenager Jessica Ashley Allodola. Jessica is gorgeous and has a perfect body, but the people in her town avoid her. At Ramsa High, many students are afraid of her and some think she's a witch. Instead of trying to bond to people, Jessica writes books about vampires and witches. She has just published her first book, "Tiger, Tiger", under the pen name Ash Night. As her senior year starts, there are two new students, Caryn Rashida and Alex Remington. Jessica is instantly stunned by the fact that Alex looks exactly like Aubrey, a character in "Tiger, Tiger." However, since Jessica believes vampires aren't real, she convinces herself that he's not Aubrey. Both Caryn and Alex show an interest in Jessica. Jessica finds Alex fascinating but considers Caryn a nuisance. After a few clues, Jessica finds out that the books she has been writing are completely true. That Alex is actually the vampire Aubrey and Caryn is a Smoke witch. Many of the vampires wish to kill her for exposing their secrets. Aubrey had initially planned to kill her, but after meeting her, he's uncertain of what to do. After Jessica is attacked by Fala, another vampire, Aubrey changes Jessica into a vampire. Throughout the story, Jessica pieces together clues regarding her birth. Her mother was Jazlyn and had been offered immortality numerous times by Siete, the creator of the vampires. After her husband's death, the pregnant Jazlyn accepted the offer in a moment of desperation and Siete changed her. However, after years of life as a vampire, her regret became too strong. A Smoke witch, Monica, offered to give her back her humanity. Monica died in the process, but she succeeded. A few months later, Jazlyn's child was born. However, the child, Jessica, held no resemblance to either of her biological parents. Instead, after almost two decades in an undead womb, she resembled Siete. Her green eyes, black hair, pale skin, and vampiric traces in her aura were all from him and Jazlyn could not look at her. So Jazlyn gave Jessica up for adoption. |
4114043 | /m/0bjv3_ | Shattered Mirror | Amelia Atwater-Rhodes | null | {"/m/039vk": "Gothic fiction", "/m/0kflf": "Vampire fiction", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/03mfnf": "Young adult literature"} | The book is set in Acton, Massachusetts, the neighboring town to the author’s hometown of Concord, and follows the story of Sarah Tigress Vida, youngest daughter in a long line of vampire-hunting witches who see the world in a good-evil paradigm in which if you are not with them then you are against them. Her line of witches are the most powerful of the mortal vampire-hunting witches and are very attack oriented. In the hunt for Nikolas, a vampire that killed a Vida a century ago, Sarah finds Christopher and Nissa, sibling vampires who don’t kill when they need to feed. Instead, they feed on animals and willing humans. As Sarah’s friendship with Christopher begins to turn into something more, she is forbidden to see him by her domineering mother, Dominique. Ultimately, when Sarah discovers Christopher’s true identity and his tie to Nikolas, Sarah finds that she may have to re-think her attitude and her whole world view. After intense internal debate Sarah decides to reveal her identity to Christopher and a wall appears between them. This whole event finally garners her mother's attention and Sarah's mother binds her powers and calls a trial for Sarah's violations( which include associating with vampires and revealing her identity). She manages to escape with the help of her sister Adianna. Christopher's attitude towards her pushes her further into the Vida mind-set and she decides to hunt down Nikolas through Christopher. She gains an opportunity to kill Nikolas but hesitates when she thinks it is Christopher(as Nikolas and Christopher are twin brothers). Nikolas then over-powers Sarah and marks her. Sarah's pride is seriously injured and after an encounter with Christopher and a very traumatized victim of another vampire, Sarah receives an invitation from Nikolas to a party. Sarah decides to go against the warnings of Nissa and attends the party. There she attempts to fight Nikolas but without the full use of her bound powers she stands little chance. Adianna shows up and attempts to rescue Sarah but finds her-self unable to defeat Nikolas. Nikolas uses Adianna as a hostage for Sarah to surrender all her weapons(which are the only way for her to use her magic to kill vampires). Christopher shows up and attempts to talk them down but he eventually loses control due to Sarah's attempts to fight back and he begins fighting Sarah as well. Christopher and his brother overpower Sarah and attempt to blood-bond her to them. However, Sarah's witch blood rejects the vampires' blood and Adianna, her older sister, tells them it will kill her. Christopher is in love with Sarah and can't bear what he's done. In the end, he turns her into a vampire and asks her to live with them, because he loves her. Sarah accepts to stay a vampire, but says that she isn't ready to be with them yet.She refuses to stay with them because she can't follow their trail of killing people everytime she feeds. Sarah resolves to find a way for herself to live her life. |
4114054 | /m/0bjv4b | Midnight Predator | Amelia Atwater-Rhodes | null | {"/m/039vk": "Gothic fiction", "/m/0kflf": "Vampire fiction", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/03mfnf": "Young adult literature"} | Though she was once a happy teenager with a wonderful family and a full life, Turquoise Draka is now a hunter, committed to no higher purpose than making money and staying alive. In a deadly world of vampires, shape-shifters, and powerful mercenaries, she'll track any prey if the price is right. Her current assignment: to assassinate Jeshickah, one of the cruelest vampires in history. Her employer: an unknown contact who wants the job done fast. Her major obstacle: she'll have to mask her strength and enter Midnight, a fabled Vampire realm, as a human slave. Vulnerable and defenseless, she faces her greatest challenge ever. |
4114492 | /m/0bjv_s | The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales | Jon Scieszka | 1992 | {"/m/016475": "Picture book", "/m/0dwly": "Children's literature"} | The star of the book is Jack of Jack and the Beanstalk, who tells the stories and deals with the rest of the cast. There's a very annoying Little Red Hen - a parody of the fairy tale of the same name - who comes in to complain about no one helping her make her bread and because she doesn't have a story in this book. Chicken Licken believes that the sky is falling, but it is the table of contents tumbling on her head. Jack introduces Little Red Running Shorts, a counterpart of Little Red Riding Hood, by blurting out the entire story -- including the ending -- so she refuses to be in it. The Stinky Cheese Man, a counterpart of The Gingerbread Man, is afraid to be near anyone because he thinks they will eat him . . . though they are really trying to get away from his horrid smell... A smell of dank cabbage. In the middle of the book, the Little Red Hen comes up to complain that there's still no one to help make her bread and ask again for her story. Jack ignores her and starts to introduce his story, when the giant climbs down the beanstalk to gripe that he doesn't like the story. The giant then tells an extremely nonsensical story using random sentences and picture clippings from parts of a book. Jack jeers at this improvisation, and tells an excruciatingly long story (that never ends until the end of the book) in order to not have the giant grind his bones. Also in the book are "The Princess and the Bowling Ball", "The Other Frog Prince", "The Really Ugly Duckling", "Cinderumplestiltskin" and "The Tortoise and the Hair". In the first, a retelling of The Princess and the Pea, the Prince finally finds a girl he really loves. Sick of his parents rejecting potential wives when they don't feel a pea under one hundred mattresses, he slips his bowling ball under her mattresses when his parents have her over. In "The Other Frog Prince", the princess kisses the frog: he says "I was just kidding," and hops back in the lake. "The Really Ugly Duckling" is Hans Christian Andersen's The Ugly Duckling, where the ugly duckling grows up to be a really ugly duck, rather than a swan. "Cinderumplestiltskin" combines Cinderella and Rumplestiltskin into a tale where an imp comes to Cinderella and offers to spin straw into gold. Cinderella rejects his offer, and when he wants her to guess his name she shoos him out, saying she's not allowed to talk to strangers. In "The Tortoise and the Hair", a telling of The Tortoise and the Hare, the Hare says he can grow his hair (one on the top of his head) faster than the Tortoise can run. So they race, and race and race, this story has no ending, the last words of it being "not the end". At the very end of the book Jack successfully lulls the giant to sleep and is about to sneak away when the Little Red Hen pops in, griping that she still never got her story or her loaf of bread, and asking who will help her eat the bread now. The giant wakes and uses the bread to make a sandwich out of the Hen, Jack flees, and the book ends. The foreword includes a parody of Goldilocks and the Three Bears as an example of a "Fairly Stupid Tale". Also, the table of contents includes the title, "The Boy Who Cried Cow Patty," a story nowhere in the book. The latter story was printed on the back of the dust jacket for the book's tenth anniversary edition (whereas the original edition had the Little Red Hen complaining about buying this book while asking who "this ISBN guy" is and complaining that she's only in three of the pages as a book pun). There are lots of other book puns such as one of the pages being upside-down. Also a surgeon general's warning saying "It has been determined that these tales are fairly stupid and probably dangerous to your health." The title for the Other Frog Prince is crooked because it's on the frog's sticky tongue. When Little Red Running Shorts quits her story she walks right out of her own story. The Giant talks in uppercase letters when he says "I'LL GRIND YOUR BONES TO MAKE MY BREAD!" The Giant and Jack make a cameo in Cinderumpelstiltskin. |
4115106 | /m/0bjwzk | The Emigrants | W. G. Sebald | 1993 | {"/m/05hgj": "Novel"} | In The Emigrants Sebald's narrator recounts his involvement with and the life stories of four different characters, all of whom are German emigrants (to England and the United States). As with most of Sebald's work, the text includes many black and white, unlabeled photographs and strays sharply from general formats of plot and narrative. Dr. Henry Selwyn is the estranged husband of Sebald's landlady, who fought in the First World War and has a propensity for gardening and tending to animals. He confides in Sebald about his family's immigration to England from Lithuania, and suspects that it is this secretive, alien past that helped dissolve his relationship with his wife. He commits suicide. Paul Bereyter was the narrator's childhood teacher in a town referenced in the text only as "S". A quarter Jewish, he found employment difficult in the period leading up to the Second World War, although he eventually served in the Wehrmacht. Teaching in the small school after the war, Bereyter found a passion for his students while living a lonely, quiet life. In later years, his eyesight began to fail and he moved to France, where he met and spent much time with Mme Landau, from whom the narrator obtains most of his information about Bereyter. The narrator's great uncle, Ambros Adelwarth, was the travelling companion of an affluent young aviator gifted with much luck at gambling and a wayward attitude towards life. In his youth, he accompanied this man across Europe, and into Turkey and Asia Minor, before his companion fell ill and was sent to a mental institution. Afterwards, Adelwarth was the butler of the young man's family, living on Long Island until their death. As a young man in Manchester the narrator befriends an expatriate German-Jewish painter, Max Aurach. Years later the artist gives the narrator his mother's history of her idyllic life as a girl in a Bavarian village. It was written as she and her husband awaited deportation to the East and death. This section is written as a gradual discovery on the narrator's part of the effects of the Holocaust on Aurach and his family. |
4117334 | /m/0bk10h | The Quillan Games | D.J. MacHale | 5/16/2006 | {"/m/0dwly": "Children's literature", "/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy"} | Like the other Pendragon books, the plot of The Quillan Games is two subplots: One featuring Bobby's adventures on Quillan, the other featuring Mark and Courtney's adventures as they read Bobby's journals and occasionally battle Saint Dane from their homes on Second Earth. The story begins when Bobby arrives on Quillan in the flume, straight from Zadaa where in the sixth book, he helped Loor save Zadaa and mysteriously raised her from the dead. Bobby appears in a huge empty warehouse and is promptly attacked by quigs, Saint Dane's assassins, which on Quillan turn out to be giant spiders the size of kittens. After killing a quig, he finds that it's a robot. Upon escaping the quigs, he finds his way out of the warehouse and discovers a huge arcade filled with games. He soon learns that games of Quillan are much more serious than on Second Earth, because the losers are often killed. He also puts on a silver bracelet called a loop, which he soon finds out is a tracking device that is nearly impossible to slip off. After being chased by, and escaping from robot policemen called dados, he finds himself in the middle of a city he later finds out to be called Rune. He notices that the word BLOK seems to be posted everywhere, but he has no idea what the word means. While he is trying to be inconspicuous and escape from the dados, he notices a strange incident; a man is running away from two dados (apparently he has lost a game) and a woman crashes her "scoot", which is a Quillan-ized motor scooter, into the dado. Then, a man shows up to save her from being taken by the dados. Then the two people grab their left biceps as a strange gesture. However, he is soon distracted by a game being played on the big screens; he sees two challengers playing a game called Tato together; he notices that one of the challengers is wearing a Traveler ring. Unfortunately, the Traveler loses and dies, which makes Bobby angry and determined to avenge this death. However, Bobby is soon captured by the android dados, who drive him to a castle. Bobby soon realizes that the bright red shirt he is wearing sets him apart as a challenger, a contestant of the games. Bobby is greeted by the siblings LaBerge and Veego, who are very hospitable to Bobby. Bobby, however is not friendly to them, and spends his first evening in his new room in the castle writing his journals and reflecting on how he doesn't have any idea what's wrong with Quillan and how Saint Dane fits into the mix. Soon, Bobby learns of how much Challengers are forced to play games; he immediately has to beat a game called Hook just to get to dinner and then promptly afterwards he is rushed into another game called Tock to prove his competitiveness and worth. After he managed to win the game, he meets Nevva Winter, a Blok assistant. Later he is introduced to Nevva and learns she is really the Traveler from Quillan, while the Traveller who died playing Tato was named Remudi, and was the Traveler from the territory of Ibara. Unfortunately, before Nevva can explain more, she has to leave Bobby stranded in the strange territory, trapped with LaBerge and Veego in the challenger's castle with no idea what to do next. Bobby spends a few weeks at the castle, and learns a lot about challengers and games; unfortunately he still doesn't come close to finding Saint Dane as he does not learn anything more about the rest of Quillan. Finally, after a long time at the castle, Nevva takes Bobby to a meeting outside of the castle in the Blok office. There Bobby learns how Blok is a corporation that, over many generations, has gradually taken over Quillan and forced people to live a harsh life. He also finds out that Saint Dane has been pretending to be one of the ten leaders of Blok, called Mr. Kayto. There Saint Dane makes an offer to Bobby; he says that if Bobby will compete in the Grand X, an upcoming series of games, then he will tell Bobby the most hidden secret of the Travellers's true nature. Though Saint Dane's offer is tempting, Bobby decides not to risk his life in any more games and refuses it. When Bobby is driving back to the castle, he is kidnapped by some mysterious people wearing black and is taken to an underground hideout. He finds out that they are a secret group called the revivers, and that their goal is to save Quillan from the control of Blok and make it a free territory again. Nevva is one of them. They want Bobby to compete in the Grand X, in order to stir the majority of the people into a revolt against Blok. To help convince Bobby to make this choice, they show him to a top-secret hidden library they call Mr. Pop, which contains the history of Quillan. Bobby finally agrees and is sure that his decision will be the turning point for Quillan and will save the territory. Bobby turns himself in to LaBerge and Veego, then immediately starts competing in the Grand X, against a champion called Challenger Green, the challenger who killed Remudi in the Tato match. During the game, Bobby learns some astonishing secrets; he learns that LaBerge and Veego are from the territory of Veelox, but were taken here by Saint Dane. He also learns that Saint Dane has taken them to many different territories, including Cloral, Eelong, and Zadaa, and got the ideas for some of their games from those territories. In the end, Bobby wins, not only the game, but also the hearts of the people, and they start revolting against Blok, just like Bobby and the revivers wanted. However, just when he thinks the territory of Quillan is saved, he is captured by Saint Dane and finds out that Nevva had been with Saint Dane all along. He then learns that, though both of them were blindfolded, Nevva gave away the location of the huge library since she carried a loop to "Mr. Pop" which allowed Blok to discover the location of Mr. Pop. The dados would later incinerate it, causing the people of Quillan to lose hope return to betting on the Quillan Games as the only way of life. This causes Bobby to lose the territory of Quillan to Saint Dane. He also learns that Challenger Green was really Saint Dane in disguise. Saint Dane also mentions something called the Convergence, which he believes is inevitable. Nevva reveals that she is on Saint Dane's side, and says that she thinks she will take the Traveler from Ibara's place because he is dead. Nevva and Saint Dane escape, and it is revealed that Saint Dane has taught Nevva how to transform; they both turn into giant birds and fly away after hypnotising some revivers into jumping out of a window. The journal ends with Bobby telling Mark and Courtney that before he goes off to fight Saint Dane again, he will return to Second Earth, to take a break, but also to find out what has been happening there. Just before Bobby leaves for the flume, he talks to a woman named Elli Winter, who is Nevva's mother. Elli tells Bobby how his Uncle Press told her she was supposed to be the Traveller from Quillan until Nevva was ready, but was dealing with the loss of her husband, and didn't want the added responsibility. Uncle Press told her that he would make Nevva the traveller then, but to keep the traveller ring he had given her. Now she feels she is ready to take on the responsibility of being the travaller for Quillan. As on Veelox, the territory has a last vestige of hope. It does not seem likely though, that Quillan will resurrect itself. The Rivers of Zadaa ended with Courtney beginning recovery from her car accident when Saint Dane tried to kill her in the form of Whitney Wilcox. Courtney continues to recover, but it takes her all fall to recover physically. Meanwhile, Mark studies science with Andy Mitchell, a former bully but now Mark's friend. By Thanksgiving in November, she is ready to begin school again. Mark and Andy show Courtney their new invention: A cube shaped device called Forge that can transform its shape when the user talks to it as demonstrated when Andy turned it into a sphere and a pyramid. Andy and Mark say that it is still in its prototype stages and has only assumed three different shapes. While Courtney is enjoying her first days at school since the accident, Mark finds out he can go to Orlando, Florida to enter his invention in a contest; however, because of an accident with Mitchell's flower shop, Mark's parents end up taking one plane flight to Florida while Mark is scheduled to take a different one. Later, Courtney discovers that the flight that Mark's parents had taken had disappeared over the ocean while going out to sea to dump some fuel because of engine trouble.The reason of this is unknown; all passengers have disappeared. Courtney goes to the flume entrance, and there discovers that Mark had gone into the flume to another territory. There, Saint Dane comes out of the flume. She also discovers that Andy Mitchell had been Saint Dane all along, even since her childhood. She also realizes that she was a pawn in Saint Dane's plan to gain Mark's trust as Andy Mitchell, as saving Courtney formed a bond between the two. Saint Dane mysteriously takes Courtney through the flume right back to Second Earth. Courtney soon finds that although most of her home is still intact, there are some strange new technologies which were not there when Courtney had left such as a life like cat robot, and a high tech computer. When Bobby comes back to Second Earth, he and Courtney discover that these technologies were made by a company called Dimond Alpha Digital Organization. They suspect that it may have something to do with Mark, whose last name is Dimond, and they also realize that the initials spell the word DADO, the name of the robot police from Quillan. Bobby and Courtney decide the next step is to find out how this has changed the Earth territories' history, so the story ends with Bobby and Courtney going into the flume for Third Earth together. |
4117720 | /m/0bk1m4 | The Deed of Paksenarrion | Elizabeth Moon | 2/1/1992 | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction", "/m/03qfd": "High fantasy"} | The Deed of Paksenarrion was written as one long story, but published as three separate books. A number of people have pointed out resemblances between the story setting and Dungeons & Dragons, in particular alleged similarities between Moon's town of Brewersbridge and Hommlet (a village in The Temple of Elemental Evil module for AD&D) and between Moon's religion of Gird and the faith of Saint Cuthbert of the Cudgel in Greyhawk. However, such themes may often be similarly found in many brands of high fantasy, and are not unique to any one fictional world. The Deed of Paksenarrion revolves around the adult life of Paksenarrion Dorthansdotter, known as Paks, of Three Firs. It takes place in a fictional medieval world of kingdoms of humans, dwarves, gnomes and elves. The story begins by introducing Paks as a headstrong girl of 18, who leaves her home in Three Firs (fleeing a marriage arranged by her father) to join a mercenary company and through her journeys and hardships comes to realize that she has been gifted as a paladin, if in a rather non-traditional way. |
4117946 | /m/0bk1yq | Dragon's Kin | Todd McCaffrey | 2003-11 | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy"} | The story tells how the people of the fictional planet Pern discover the special abilities of the watch-whers or whers, a distant relative of the dragons. Subsequently, these beasts are used in mines to warn miners of gas pockets and also to locate stranded miners, should there be a cave-in. The story begins some years before the 3rd Pass in Camp Natalon, a mining camp. There, the reader is introduced to a young boy Kindan, whose father owns a watch-wher called Dask. During a mining cave-in, Kindan loses his entire family as well as Dask, and is adopted by the Master Harper Zist, who begins to train him to be both an entertainer and a spy, something that Harpers do. This is how Kindan learns that the camp is divided into two parties, Natalon's and his uncle, Tarik's. Meanwhile, the camp is without a watch-wher and minor accidents keep delaying the work. Despite the protests from Tarik and his group, Natalon decides to trade an entire winter's worth of coal for a chance for Kindan to ask a queen watch-wher for an egg. He succeeds and begins the difficult task of raising a nocturnal animal. As no records exist on how to raise or train the watch-wher, Kindan has no clue but is luckily aided by the mysterious Nuella. Together, they train Kisk and, in the process, learn a great deal about this species. This proves to be vital as, towards the end of the novel, Kisk's abilities will save many lives, including that of the camp leader, Natalon. |
4118354 | /m/0bk2rz | A Spell for Chameleon | Piers Anthony | 1977-09 | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/0dwly": "Children's literature", "/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | At the beginning of the novel Bink is facing imminent exile from the magical land of Xanth and separation from his fiancee Sabrina for his lack of a magic talent. All human residents of Xanth possess some unique form of magic that ranges from incredibly powerful (such as the current King Aeolus's ability to summon and control storms) to relatively useless (such as the ability to make a spot appear on a wall). In the hopes of discovering his talent Bink sets out to see the Good Magician Humfrey, a magician whose talent has to do with the gathering of information. While on his way Bink fights his way through the perilous wilderness of Xanth, having several run-ins with dangerous plants and animals but always being saved by apparent coincidence. On this journey he meets several people, among them Chester Centaur and Cherie Centaur and Crombie The Soldier. Of particular interest are three different women he meets: Wynne who is pretty but stupid, Dee an average girl and the sorceress Iris whose power is the creation of illusions. Wynne and Dee are actually different aspects of the same woman, Chameleon although Bink does not realize this at the time. Chameleon's intelligence and beauty vary inversely according to the time of the month and she has been unable to find a man who is willing to be with her through all 3 phases. When she meets Bink she falls in love with him and begins to follow him. Although Iris possesses magic of the same caliber as the Storm King she is barred from the throne because she is a woman. After saving Bink from an illusory trap, Iris offers him the chance to remain in Xanth as a figurehead king: Iris will use her power to make it appear as if Bink has magician caliber magic. Loyal to Xanth and realizing that he would be nothing more than a slave, Bink refuses her offer and continues on his journey. Bink finally arrives at the Good Magician's castle and fights his way past three challenges to gain an audience with him. Humfrey is able to determine that Bink possesses magician-caliber magic but is prevented from fathoming its exact nature. Realizing that some powerful force is at work, Humfrey decides to leave well enough alone and sends Bink on his way with a signed note to the King saying that Bink does indeed possess magic. Bink returns to the North Village to plead his case before the King but is exiled anyway due to the King's senility and jealousy of Humfrey. Bink heads north to the isthmus that connects Xanth to Mundania and is allowed to pass through the magical shield that separates the two regions. The shield was designed to kill any life form, magical or not, that passes through it. As soon as he leaves Xanth he is captured by the Evil Magician Trent the Transformer, who was exiled 20 years ago for attempting to overthrow the Storm King. Trent is trying to invade Xanth with his Mundane army to usurp the throne but has always been prevented from entering by the magical shield that Bink just passed through. He believes that Bink can help him get into Xanth by providing information on the location of the source of the magical barrier (the Shieldstone), and attempts to coerce this information from him. Trent has prepared a special elixir that can temporarily nullify magic and has a special catapult that can hurl this elixir into the land of Xanth. All that Trent needs now are the exact coordinates of the Shieldstone. Bink refuses to cooperate and is thrown into a pit with a woman from Xanth that has followed him there named Fanchon. In actuality this is Chameleon in the last of her guises, hideously ugly and extremely intelligent, but Bink does not know this yet. Chameleon had gone to see the Good Magician Humfrey immediately after Bink, and Humfrey told her that if she went to Mundania and stayed there long enough, she would eventually settle permanently into her Dee phase (which possesses average beauty and average intelligence). Hearing that Bink was to be exiled, Chameleon followed him in the hope of making a life with him in Mundania, free of her curse. Bink and Fanchon escape to the sea but are pursued by Trent's forces. Eventually, Bink, Trent, and Fanchon are all swept into Xanth via a whirlpool but Trent's forces are left behind. Washing up on a beach far from any human settlement the trio declare a truce until they can safely make their way out of the wilderness. While traveling, the group discovers Castle Roogna, a castle built 800 years ago by one of the early Kings of Xanth but abandoned 400 years later. Here, Bink finally learns that Fanchon, Wynne, and Dee are all the same person but resists the temptation to take advantage of her while she is in her stupid/beautiful phase. Castle Roogna is haunted by relatively benign ghosts and zombies and is an area of heightened magical power. The castle in fact seems to possess some form of awareness and had actually used its control of the surrounding area to herd the trio onto its grounds. It had detected the presence of two magician-caliber talents in the group (Bink and Trent) and lured them there in the hopes that one of them could become king and restore the castle to its former glory. Over the course of the journey the trio has gotten to know each other quite well and Bink has discovered that he actually likes the evil magician, who has matured considerably during his exile. Trent now has a strict sense of honor and refuses to renege on his word; nevertheless, he still wants the throne and is determined to do anything necessary to attain it. Trent promised Castle Roogna that he would return when he was King to restore the place to glory, so the castle finally allowed the trio to leave. The group eventually exits the wilderness, but is then discovered by the sorceress Iris. Iris offers to marry Trent and help him become King and Trent accepts her offer. Bink, who still refuses to betray Xanth, challenges Trent to a duel: if Bink loses then he will stay out of Trent's way, but if he wins, then Trent will cease his efforts to gain the throne. Fearing that this was his last chance to do so, Bink declares his love for Chameleon and the two of them make love in the forest. But the duel has already started, and Iris tells Trent of their location. Trent finds them both soon thereafter, but then calls for a restart of the duel since Iris had interfered. In the course of the next duel Trent deduces Bink's unknown talent: he cannot be harmed by magic. Because Bink is still vulnerable to non-magical harm his talent has gone to great lengths to conceal itself over the years, making it appear he is only saved from magical harm by a series of coincidences. Trent is an excellent swordsman, however, and manages to defeat Bink without magic. He is about to kill Bink when Chameleon dives in front of the sword. She is seriously wounded and Bink launches a counterattack against Trent, but to no avail. Trent cannot bring himself to kill Bink, however, and instead offers to help save Chameleon. Trent transforms Bink into a bird so that he can fly to Good Magician Humfrey's castle and retrieve a healing elixir. Bink manages to obtain healing elixir from Humfrey, but the Good Magician is obligated to inform the authorities of Trent's return. Upon arriving at the royal palace, they discover that the Storm King has died. All the officials of Xanth, including the Council of Elders (which includes Bink's father Roland), are then dispatched to deal with Trent. The Council captures Trent and heals Chameleon, and then put Trent on trial for violating his sentence of exile. The Council reviews Trent's recent actions using scrying magic, and at first Bink is worried that they will execute him for his scheming to take the throne. But the Council is moved by Trent's displays of honor and mercy, and they decide that he will be spared execution on two conditions: 1) he must marry, and 2) he must accept the kingship of Xanth. The Storm King was allowed to remain King well past his prime because there was no suitable successor and by forcing Trent to marry (and presumably produce magician-caliber offspring), the Council hopes to prevent that state of affairs from occurring again. Trent's first act as King is to deactivate the magical barrier between Xanth and Mundania and to abolish the requirement that all human citizens of Xanth must prove that they have a magical talent. To note, Trent had discovered that the magical shield was causing harm to the humans in Xanth because, over time, the magic of Xanth changed humans into other creatures, and the only way to prevent that was to allow periodic inflows of pure blood humans from Mundania. Trent's army, who consisted of Mundanes who wished to immigrate to Xanth, begin to settle peacefully in various regions of the magical land. Bink then breaks up with Sabrina (who he had discovered was not right for him anyway) and marries Chameleon, as he has realised that he wants "variety" in a girl, and only Chameleon with her never-ending change in looks and intelligence will give him what his heart desires. Trent and Iris take up residence in Castle Roogna and set to work making it the new centre of government. Bink and Chameleon obtain a cottage just outside the Castle and Bink is given the title of Official Researcher of Xanth. King Trent gives Bink his first task: to discover the source of magic in Xanth, setting up the plot for the next book, The Source of Magic. |
4118394 | /m/0bk2vq | Centaur Aisle | Piers Anthony | 1982-01 | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | Xanth's King Trent has left for drear Mundania, leaving Dor to practice governing the magical kingdom of Xanth. Dor's magical talent is communication with the inanimate which for information gathering is very helpful, but for dealing with citizens needing discipline it leaves room for improvement. But when Trent goes to establish trade routes with Mundania, Dor and his friends (a golem named Grundy, the centaur Chet, Smash the ogre, and Dor's love interest Irene) must keep the land in line. However, former King Trent does not return after the week he was supposed to. After three weeks, Dor gathers his gang and decides to go on a quest to help rescue Trent from what is surely a horrible fate of imprisonment in non-magic Mundania. This mission leads them to Centaur Isle, to find an unknown Centaur Magician. Centaurs are very negative on the concept of having magical talents, so when they find Arnolde the Centaur and discover his talent, he is exiled and willing to help them rescue Trent. Arnolde's talent is a magical aisle, creating a field of magic around him that allows anyone to use magic in Mundania. The whole gang (minus Chet) travel by rainbow north to Mundania. While in Mundania, they find a scholar named Ichabod. From him, they learn that they are in the wrong time strand and must go back to Xanth and re-cross the border. Eventually Dor and his friends find the correct time and go to the castle where they think Trent and his wife Iris were last. After a nice dinner and a little betrayal, they get captured and locked in a dungeon. After escaping, they smash down a couple walls to find Trent and his new friend King Omen, the proper king of this area. The group (plus the new additions) struggle to get Omen into his rightful throne. After exchanging farewells, they decide to return to Xanth with King Trent and Queen Iris. pl:Przesmyk centaura |
4118403 | /m/0bk2w1 | Ogre, Ogre | Piers Anthony | 1982-10 | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | The book starts off with Tandy the half-nymph being harassed by the nasty demon Fiant while trying to sleep. She has the talent of throwing tantrums that can stun or destroy, but her talent is ineffective against the demon, so she decides to visit her father Crombie at Castle Roogna to see if he can help. Having no means of travel, however, she decides to catch a night mare to take her there. She succeeds, at the price of being battered, except the mare takes her to the Good Magician's castle instead, where she is admitted without challenges due to the difficulties she went through riding the mare. Cut to a year later, we find Smash the half-ogre traveling to the Good Magician Humfrey seeking to solve a vague dissatisfaction about himself. Using the best of his ogre qualities (strength and naive stupidity), plus his clumsy knowledge of human customs, as well as the occasional bright flash of human intelligence, he navigates his way into the Magician's castle passing various obstacles such as a basilisk and a pond of firewater. Once Smash gains entrance, though, he forgets all about his question. Magician Humphrey gives him an answer anyway, telling him to travel to the Ancestral Ogres and take Tandy with him, and guard her. On their travels, Smash and Tandy blunder into an Eye Queue vine, which embeds itself into Smash's head and provides him with human intelligence so he converses in the human way instead of spouting simple ogre rhymes. He soon discovers that the vine also helps give him good ideas, as not all the problems he and Tandy encounter can be bashed to pieces. After the vine, they encounter an assortment of females of various magical races each needing to fulfill a personal quest...a dryad who needs to protect her tree from woodsmen, wingless fairy John looking for her similarly incorrectly named counterpart to switch back, Centaur Chem, a longtime friend with the talent of magic mapping who wants to chart more of Xanth, Blythe Brassie who wants to leave her hypnogourd homeworld to come to the real Xanth, a mermaid looking for love, and others. Unfortunately also during their travels, Tandy gets trapped in the hypnogourd world and has her soul wrenched from her, though she is later freed by the others. Smash enters back into the gourd and forages a deal with the world spokesperson (in the form of a coffin): Smash will give his soul to the gourd under a 90-day lien in exchange for Tandy's soul. He then has 90 days to find the dread Night Stallion, ruler of the gourd world, and negotiate to void the lien. As the travels continue, each female does find what she is looking for, eventually, although Smash's strength saps out of him a little at a time as his soul is gradually recalled as the days pass. Smash makes periodic forays into the gourd world, with the help of a magical and infinite ball of string to mark his way, in search of the Night Stallion, overcoming various world challenges, most of which require both his ogre strength and human intelligence to solve. Finally, when only Chem and Tandy are left with Smash, they come upon the dread Elements region and face a flood in the water region that washes off the Eye Queue vine from Smash's head, right before they enter the most dangerous Void region. As they enter the void, they come to realize that they are trapped and must find a way to get out, which they can't do without Smash's useful intelligence. Smash, using the Void's properties, manages to get his illusion of intelligence back (though at this point it is no longer illusory), and enter the gourd one last time, where he finally finds the Night Stallion and faces new challenges that require all his newfound human intelligence as well as his ogre strength and stubbornness to overcome. Once Smash conquers the Night Stallion's challenges and wins back his soul, he realizes his human side and falls in love with Tandy, putting his own soul in jeopardy again in order to save her, but through another deal ends up with only half a soul and half his ogre strength. He finally does arrive at the home of the Ancestral Ogres but notes how stupid and ugly they really are and decides he does not want to stay with them, though when they threaten Tandy he commits to fighting to save her. After Tandy sacrifices her own soul mid-battle to save Smash (giving him full ogre strength) so he can defeat the ancestral ogres, Smash finally comes to true terms with his human side, even transforming himself into a human so he can make love to Tandy properly. As Smash and Tandy journey home, they again run into Demon Fiant. As a man, Smash is no match for the demon, but manages to transform back to ogre form and is able to defeat Fiant permanently, though again his human intelligence is needed to win this battle. ru:Огр! Огр! (книга) |
4118412 | /m/0bk2wd | Dragon on a Pedestal | Piers Anthony | 1983-10 | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | When the book begins, the Good Magician Humfrey, and his son Hugo, run into the Gap dragon while filling a vial with water from the Fountain of Youth. Humpfrey tells Hugo to douse the dragon with the water, and Hugo does so but accidentally sprays Humpfrey as well. Humpfrey regresses to the age of a baby, as does the dragon. Queen Irene realizes Princess Ivy has wandered off, and begins a quest to find her daughter. Luckily, Ivy comes across Humfrey's 8-year-old son Hugo, and - due to her as-of-yet unknown talent of enhancement - Hugo temporarily becomes smarter, braver, and stronger when she tells him he is. Ivy also manages to enhance the positive qualities of the Gap Dragon, and names him Stanley Steamer. In Castle Roogna, Dor accidentally put a forget spell on the Gap Chasm (the huge rift that splits Xanth in two), while trying to escape a horde of harpies and goblins, with the result being that everyone forgot the Gap Chasm existed, with the exception of the people who live near it. In this book, the forget spell is beginning to disintegrate into "forget whorls" spinning off into the nearby forest (due to the Time Of No Magic caused when Bink released the Deamon X(A/N)th), causing confusion and memory loss. Ivy ends up walking through a forget whirl and it causes her to forget how to get home. Near the end of the novel, all the characters join forces against a swarm of wiggles, which threaten the welfare of Xanth by burrowing through anything and everything in their path. pl:Smok na piedestale |
4118475 | /m/0bk2z6 | Crewel Lye: A Caustic Yarn | Piers Anthony | 1984-01 | {"/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy"} | Princess Ivy, who is now a 5 year old in this book, asks one of Castle Roogna's ghosts to tell her how he became a ghost. Ivy uses her talent of enhancement - and some caustic Crewel Lye to strip off centuries of accrued grime - to improve the range and clarity of Castle Roogna's magical Tapestry. The Tapestry is a woven hanging which allows anyone to view recent or historical events (although it cannot violate the Adult Conspiracy, nor does it include sound). The ghost, known as Jordan the Barbarian when he was alive 400 years ago, begins his story by recounting how he set off on an adventure with his horse Pook. Jordan had the magical talent of self-healing — which came in handy as he was cut, stabbed, and dismembered during his travels. In one case, a woman finds him gravely injured and hauls him to her cottage, not knowing of his talent. Jordan ends up falling in love with this woman, Threnody. Unfortunately, the evil magician Yin-Yang had already claimed Threnody to be his wife, and was willing to do anything to have her. Intending to keep Jordan safe from Yin-Yang, Threnody makes it appear that she has betrayed Jordan. She cuts him into pieces and buries each piece in a different remote location — knowing that if the pieces were reattached, he would be able to heal himself. However, she is never able to break free of Yin-Yang long enough to collect Jordan's dismembered body and eventually kills herself. After hearing Jordan's story, Ivy decides to gather his body parts herself. Once placed near each other, the pieces mend together and cover back up with muscle and skin (greatly sped up due to Ivy's enhancement). Jordan is alive again — but he wants his new love, the ghost Renee, to be brought to life again too. When Ivy and Jordan use a regenerating potion on Renee's remains (after accidentally teleporting Stanley Steamer the baby Gap Dragon away), Threnody emerges from her grave. Threnody explains that her "cruel lie" had been done to protect Jordan. After some time, he forgives her and they get married. pl:Okrutne kłamstwo |
4118477 | /m/0bk2zx | Golem in the Gears | Piers Anthony | 1986-02 | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | pl:Zakochany golem |
4118482 | /m/0bk2_l | Vale of the Vole | Piers Anthony | 1987-10 | {"/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | On his way to the Good Magician's castle, Esk meets Chex, the winged centaur daughter of Xap Hippogryph and Chem Centaur. Despite having wings, Chex is unable to fly due to her solid equine weight; she is going to ask Humfrey how she can fly. Later, the two of them meet up with Volney Vole, who always replaces S's with V's during speech. Volney has a demon problem of his own, as his home by the Kiss-Me River has become unbearably infested with bugs ever since the demons decided to straighten out the river's undulating curves. When they discover the Good Magician is missing, they decide to look for him. On the way, they go through a Hypnogourd, where bad dreams are manufactured. Esk meets Bria Brassie, a heavy brass woman, and they fall in love. The team discovers that Chex can make items temporarily light when she flicks them with her tail, which provides a solution to her problem of how to fly. pl:Dolina kopaczy |
4118485 | /m/0bk30n | Heaven Cent | Piers Anthony | 1988-10 | {"/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | The story begins with Prince Dolph lying in his sister, Ivy's, bed watching her magical tapestry which shows images from the past and present of Xanth. Dolph is the son of King Dor and Queen Irene, and he has the powerful talent of being able to shapeshift, giving him the power to change into any animal he chooses. While watching the images of the magical tapestry Dolph begins to think about the disappearance of the Good Magician Humphrey. Dolph gets so enraptured with the thought of finding the Magician that he eventually asks his father and mother permission to set out on a quest to find the answers. Queen Irene decides that Dolph is at a fine age to set out for a quest, but as long as he takes with him an adult companion. After some debate and arguing over who should accompany Dolph, Dolph suggests that Marrow Bones accompany him. Marrow is a walking, talking skeleton who has the ability to transform his skeletal body into many shapes as long as Dolph gives him a good kick in the tail bone first. Once Dolph and Marrow set out on their journey they realize their first stop must be at the Good Magician Humphrey's castle to investigate for any clues to his disappearance. Once in the castle Dolph and Marrow find a hidden room that can only be viewed through a clear rock from above. In the hidden room is a message that reads "Skeleton Key to Heaven Cent". Marrow distinguishes that there is a pun in the message, and a Skeleton Key is really an island made of coral. So Dolph and Marrow set out to find the isle and find the Heaven Cent to bring back the Good Magician Humphrey. Throughout Dolph and Marrow's adventures through the land of Xanth they encounter many different creatures. There are the always rhyming ogres, bone hungry and smelly harpies, the cruel merwomen, and many others. One of the major creatures that come into play in the book are the nagas. The nagas are a snake-human people who have the power to transform into either a full snake, full human, or mixed form. Dolph and Marrow encounter the nagas when trying to get through a goblin kingdom where the goblins are holding Nada, the naga princess, prisoner. After rescuing Nada, Dolph and Marrow return to the naga kingdom, where Dolph, even though too young, becomes unintentionally betrothed to Nada through a naga tradition. Nada joins Dolph and Marrow on their quest to find the Heaven Cent, and their romantic relationship blossoms until Nada reveals to Dolph that she is actually many years older than he is. Although Dolph is taken aback by this information, his love for Nada does not waver and he keeps the betrothal intact. When Dolph, Marrow, and Nada finally find the right island where the Heaven Cent is supposed to be they encounter a magical castle where a maiden has been under a magical sleep for 900 years of a 1000 year sentence. The sleeping maiden is named Electra, and she was put under the sleeping spell because 900 years ago she accidentally activated the Heaven Cent. Dolph kisses the sleeping Electra and awakens her, but to Dolph's surprise Electra cannot survive unless she marries the person who broke the spell on her. Once the entire party returns to Castle Roogna Dolph is left with the decision about what to do with his two betrothed women. After much debate with both women and the King and Queen, Dolph asks for the test of the roses. Dolph chooses the yellow rose for Electra showing friendship and the red rose for Nada representing love. Electra is the first of the betrothed to attempt the test and she quickly chooses the red rose for Dolph representing love. Nada goes second and tries to pick the red rose, but she cannot because she does not truly love him and she is pricked by a rose. Nada then tries to pick a black rose and commit suicide, but Dolph jumps over to her and stops her. Dolph explains that he loves Nada even though the love is not returned. In the end Dolph remains betrothed to each girl even though the King and Queen do not believe in it, but Dolph and the girls believe that, in the next seven years before Dolph can marry, they will work out all the problems. |
4118487 | /m/0bk30_ | Man from Mundania | Piers Anthony | 1989-10 | {"/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | Princess Ivy sets off with her younger brother's co-fiancees Nada Naga and Electra to retrieve the magic mirror that had been stolen by the evil machine Com-Pewter, in preparation for her quest to find Good Magician Humfrey. After besting Com-Pewter in a battle of wits, Ivy uses the charged-up Heaven Cent to transport her to Humfrey's location. Meanwhile in Mundania, an average college boy named Grey Murphy runs a computer program that claims that it will help him meet women. Sure enough, after installing the "Worm" program, Grey meets a series of appropriately-named girls who move into the neighboring apartment, starting with Agenda and moving on through Dyslexia and Euphoria. When Ivy arrives, disorientated to find herself in Mundania, Grey starts to fall for her despite her claims that she is a princess from a fantasy world called Xanth. When Ivy wants to go home, Grey agrees to go with her, even though he doesn't believe that Xanth exists. Even when they've entered Xanth, Grey finds a scientific basis for the fantastical things he sees. His feelings for Ivy grow stronger, although Ivy knows that her regal parents won't allow her to marry a non-magician. The two of them take a trip through the Hypnogourd, where bad dreams are manufactured. After exiting the gourd, Grey, still skeptical of Xanth's magic, turns the Maenads' wine spring into water, Nada realizes his talent: magic nullification - which is a magician-caliber talent. It emerges that Grey is the son of Evil Magician Murphy and Vadne, both banished from Xanth in the book Castle Roogna, although they had never revealed their origins to him. |
4118490 | /m/0bk31b | Isle of View | Piers Anthony | 1990-10 | {"/m/0dwly": "Children's literature", "/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | The book begins in mid-crisis: Che Centaur has been foalnapped. Jenny Elf, wandering in a myopic haze through the World of Two Moons with her cat Sammy, accidentally stumbles through a giant hole between dimensions and ends up in Xanth. Jenny eventually discovers Che being held hostage by a group of goblins, and her attempt to rescue him results in them both being captured by another band of goblins. Nada Naga, Electra, and the original goblin gang work together and succeed in retrieving Che, Jenny, and Sammy from the new goblin kidnappers. Nada and Electra play a game of chance with the goblins to determine to whom Che goes; the goblins win. The four goblins, Che, Jenny, and Sammy go back to Goblin Mountain where Che is to live. There, Che and Jenny learn why the goblins had kidnapped Che in the first place: they wanted him to be the tutor and companion to Gwendolyn, a young goblin princess who was lame and mostly blind. Because the goblins only respect strength and power, Gwendolyn needed to be able to conceal her physical disabilities by riding on Che's back - otherwise she would be overthrown and killed. As Che and Jenny are getting to know Gwendolyn, Che's parents call together all the winged monsters in Xanth to start a siege on Goblin Mountain. After much chaos, it is decided that Che will return to his parents, provided that they will take care of Gwendolyn as well. Prince Dolph finally has to decide which one of his fiancees to marry: Electra or Nada. |
4118507 | /m/0bk32q | Demons Don't Dream | Piers Anthony | 1993-02 | {"/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy"} | Dug, a Mundane, is transported in to the magic land of Xanth when he plays a computer game introduced to him by his friend for a bet. The game consists of the player having a companion, who is usually a well known Xanth character, and being led through the magical world of Xanth, defeating challenges along the way and eventually winning the ultimate prize of a magic talent. The catch with the companions is that there is a chance that your companion is false, meaning that at the point where you might finally win, the companion will cause your ultimate downfall. The game also has a way of becoming 3D to the player, and, if the player believes in magic, eventually real. Dug, being a mundane boy of sixteen, picks Nada Naga as his partner, because of her beauty. Nada Naga begins to lead Dug in the world of Xanth, at first trying to convince him that the magical world is real, but giving up after realizing that Dug stubbornly refuses to believe in magic. Dug travels to the Isthmus village, where he learns the town is being controlled under a horrible censorship. He sets out to destroy the ship. After defeating the censorship, he is kicked out of the game twice, once only temporarily from trying to look at Nada's panties, the second time for good after being defeated by Com Pewter. He comes back to the game and picks Nada to be his partner again but fails to remember that there is a chance that Nada will be a False Companion, which she is. He again has to go through the first part of his adventure, but this time his starting point has changed to the Black Village, home to the new Black Wave. Sherlock, one of the members of the Black Wave, joins Nada and Dug on their journey. Later in Xanth he meets Kim, another Mundane playing the game. Kim is with Bubbles—a dog she found in a bubble—Sammy Cat, and Jenny Elf (her companion). While Dug was completing the first part of his adventure, Kim was having her own. She first was captured by ogres and had to play a mind game with them in order to escape. She then traveled to the Water Wing, where her and Jenny met Cyrus Merman, who is trying to find a wife. He accompanies them on their journey in hopes of finding a wife on the way. When Kim and Dug meet, Kim develops a crush on Dug, but at first Dug does not return the feeling. The two parties attempt to cross the Gap Chasm, but split up, after Dug and Kim decide to switch companions. Kim, Nada, Cyrus, and Bubbles go toward the ocean where Cyrus ends up meeting the merwoman who ends up being his wife, Merci Merwoman, Mela's daughter. Dug, Jenny, and Sherlock head on down the Gap Chasm, where Dug fights a brief battle with the Gap dragon. The teams both go on to the Good Magician's Castle by different routes. |
4118509 | /m/0bk331 | Harpy Thyme | Piers Anthony | 1994-01 | {"/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy"} | Gloha Goblin-Harpy is searching for love, and decides to ask the Magician Humfrey where she can find it. He tells her to ask his second son Crombie the Soldier. Gloha goes on a quest for love, accompanied by Magician Trent and Cynthia, a winged centaur filly. |
4118516 | /m/0bk34f | Geis of the Gargoyle | Piers Anthony | 1995-02 | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | SUMMARY: Seeking a spell that will restore the polluted river Swan Knee to a state of purity, guardian Gary Gargoyle finds himself face-to-face with the Good Magician Humfrey. |
4118520 | /m/0bk34s | Roc and a Hard Place | Piers Anthony | 1995-10 | {"/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | One year after the events of Geis of the Gargoyle, Demoness Metria, whilst making her husband Veleno deliriously happy, finds that the stork will not acknowledge her summons. Seeking to summon the stork, Metria (and her worser half, D. Mentia) are sent on a quest by the Good Magician Humphrey. Metria is then given a task by the Simurgh: Deliver a bag's worth of summons to their respective citizens of Xanth in order to hold a trial for Roxanne Roc. All that remains is to find out why Roxanne Roc is being held trial as Metria meets with many old Xanth characters, Grundy Golem, Sorceress Iris, Magician Trent, Gray Murphy, Jordan the Barbarian, Desiree Dryad, and many more! |
4118539 | /m/0bk37k | Xone of Contention | Piers Anthony | 10/1/1999 | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | Dug, the Mundane who had had an adventure in Xanth through the Companions of Xanth computer game, is now happily married to Kim. His friend Edsel on the other hand is on the rock with his marriage to Pia, Dug's old girlfriend, who wants a divorce. Edsel, not wanting to lose her strikes a deal with her, they take a two week vacation in Xanth, switching with Nimby and Chlorine who want to learn about Mundania, and if she doesn't change her mind, he won't fight it. |
4118544 | /m/0bk387 | The Dastard | Piers Anthony | 2000-10 | {"/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | Becka was a crossbreed - the daughter of Draco Dragon and a lovely human woman who met, by chance, at a Love Spring. Now fourteen, Becka was beginning to wonder where in Xanth she belonged, on the ground with her mother's people or flying the skies with her father's kind. So she journeyed to the Good Magician Humfrey to discover her true purpose in life. Much to her astonishment and surprise, the Magician told her that a great Destiny awaited her, one that would affect the future of all of Xanth. To unravel the mystery of her Fate, Becka did as Humfrey bade her: traveling on foot to the statue of the dreaded Sea Hag to meet the man who would be waiting for her there, and offering him her assistance. But to her dismay, Becka discovered that the one who awaited her there was a dangerous, despicable libertine who called himself the Dastard. Once a common country boy, the Dastard had sold his soul to a detestable demon in exchange for the power to erase events and rewrite history to suit his own devious ends. Lacking a conscience and filled with craven self-loathing, he roamed the width and breadth of Xanth in search of anyone happier than he was. Once he found them, he used his malevolent talent to "unhappen" their happiness so that others could share in his misery. Determined to honor her vow but despairing of her ability to help this man and still preserve her virtue, Becka set out on a wide and perilous journey that led from the mists on Xanth's distant past to the tiny planetoid of Ptero, where everyone in Xanth who might have been actually existed. There she discovered a magic that was far stronger than the Dastard's: the awesome power of the human heart. |
4118548 | /m/0bk38l | Swell Foop | Piers Anthony | 2001-10 | {"/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | Cynthia Centaur and her companions must find the Six Rings of Xanth (Air, Earth, Fire, Water, Void, and the Idea) in order find the Swell Foop and use it to rescue the Demon E(A/R)th from the thrall of the Demoness Fornax. |
4118553 | /m/0bk39z | Cube Route | Piers Anthony | 2003-10 | {"/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | In the magical land of Xanth, wishes are far more than mere words. So when a Plain Jane called Cube whispers a wistful wish to be beautiful, she finds herself leading a company of colorful companions on a search for the mysterious Cube Route--a perilous path that leads to danger, adventure, and perhaps her heart's desire as well. This curious quest takes them all over Xanth, into the mythical realm of Phaze, and even to our own world, where Cube rescues a beautiful human woman from a very ugly situation, ending at last in a mysterious Counter-Xanth where things can be transformed into their opposites in the wink of an eye. |
4118557 | /m/0bk3b9 | Currant Events | Piers Anthony | 2004-10 | {"/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy"} | The plot follows Clio the Muse of History as she finally leaves the mountain where she and her sisters live, to find the currant that can clarify her volume of Xanth's history. |
4118558 | /m/0bk3bn | Stork Naked | Piers Anthony | 2006 | {"/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | Surprise summons the stork with Umlaut, only to discover with dismay that the stork refuses to deliver her baby due to a clerical error. Off on an adventure to find her child, she seeks the aid of Pyra, who wields a tool that can find, and enter, alternate realities. As Surprise and her entourage search for the correct world, the sinister mechanisms behind the whole adventure is revealed. |
4118565 | /m/0bk3cb | Air Apparent | Piers Anthony | 10/16/2007 | {"/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | Piers Anthony has stated that the book is set as a murder mystery. It has, typical for Xanth books, many puns. Readers also get a better understanding of the nature of Ida's moons. Air Apparent includes a character known as a Debra who is a 13-year-old girl who is constantly pressured to take off her bra. To De-Bra so to speak. She is based on a real girl. Debra Kawaguchi was a huge fan of the Xanth series and after her death in 2004, her father wrote Piers and asked him to include Debra in his cast of characters. After Piers explained to Debra's father that the only way he could think to include Debra in the book was through the De-Bra-ing pun, Mr. Kawaguchi agreed that Debra would have been delighted to be a character in Xanth and would have loved the pun. Piers mentions Mr. Kawaguchi in the author notes as the inspiration for Debra. Debra is depicted on the front cover of the hardback book as a flying centaur. Review "The Xanth books constitute Anthony's longest and most successful series . . . . They are intended to be kind-spirited, fun reading, a series of wondrous beasts and beings, and most of all, an endless succession of outrageous puns"--Lee Killough, Wichita Eagle |
4119421 | /m/0bk4pf | The Fall of the King | null | null | null | Begins at around 1497 and ends with the defeat of the Danish army at Dithmarschen in 1500. Takes place twenty years later, from the Stockholm Bloodbath in 1520 to the fall of the king in 1523. The third and last part opens twelve years after, at the time of the Count's Feud in 1536, and ends at Mikkel's death. |
4120326 | /m/0bk5wj | The Island | Peter Benchley | null | {"/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | Blair Maynard, a divorced journalist in New York City, decides to write a story about the unexplained disappearance of yachts and other small boats in the Caribbean, hoping to debunk theories about the Bermuda Triangle. He has weekend custody of his preteen son Justin, and decides to mix a vacation with work, taking his son along. They fly from Miami to the Turks and Caicos island chain but, while on fishing trip, are captured by a band of pirates. The pirates have, amazingly, remained undetected since the establishment of their pirate enclave by Jean-David Nau, the notorious buccaneer L'Olonnais, in 1671 (in reality, however, L'Olonnais is known to have died four years earlier). The pirates have a constitution of sorts, called the Covenant, and have a cruel but workable society. They raise any children they capture to ensure the survival of the colony, but kill anyone over the age of thirteen. In short order, Justin is virtually brainwashed and groomed to lead the pirate band, much to Maynard's horror. Maynard tries repeatedly to escape, and finally attracts the attention of the passing United States Coast Guard cutter New Hope. The pirates attack and capture it, but Maynard is able to use a machine gun aboard to kill most of the pirates and to win Justin's and his own freedom. |
4123854 | /m/0bkbp3 | The Shape of Things to Come | H. G. Wells | 1933-09 | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | As a frame story, Wells claims that the book is his edited version of notes written by an eminent diplomat, Dr. Philip Raven, who had been having dream visions of a history textbook published in 2106, and wrote down what he could remember of it. It is split into five separate sections or "books": #Today And Tomorrow: The Age of Frustration Dawns - The history of the world up to 1933. #The Days After Tomorrow: The Age of Frustration - 1933-1960. #The World Renascence: The Birth of the Modern State - 1960-1978. #The Modern State Militant - 1978-2059. #The Modern State in Control of Life - 2059 to New Year's Day 2106. Wells predicted a Second World War breaking out with a European conflagration from the flashpoint of a violent clash between Germans and Poles at Danzig. Wells set the date for this as January 1940. Poland proves the military match of Nazi Germany and engages in an inconclusive war lasting ten years. More countries are eventually dragged into the fighting, France and the Soviet Union are only marginally involved, Britain remains neutral, the US fights inconclusively with Japan. The war drags on until 1950 and ends with no victor but total exhaustion, collapse and disintegration of all fighting states (and also of the neutral countries, equally affected by the deepening economic crisis). Europe and the whole world descend into chaos: nearly all central governments break down, and a devastating plague in 1956-57 kills a large part of humanity and almost destroys civilization. Wells then envisages a benevolent dictatorship—'The Dictatorship of the Air' (a term likely modelled on 'The Dictatorship of the proletariat' and concept similar to Kipling's Aerial Board of Control )—arising from the controllers of the world's surviving transportation systems (the only people with global power). This dictatorship promotes science, enforces Basic English as a global lingua franca, and eradicates all religion, setting the world on the route to a peaceful utopia. When the dictatorship chooses to murder a subject, the condemned person is given a chance to take a poison tablet. Eventually, after a century of reshaping humanity, the dictatorship is overthrown in a completely bloodless coup, the former rulers are sent into a very honourable retirement, and the world state "withers away" (as was predicted by Friedrich Engels in his 1877 work Anti-Duhring). The last part of the book is a detailed description of the Utopian world which emerges, in some ways reminiscent of Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward. The ultimate aim of this utopian world is to produce a world society composed entirely of polymaths, each and every one of its members the intellectual equal of the greatest geniuses of the past. As noted by Neville, while The Shape of Things to Come was written as a future history, seen in retrospect it can be considered as an alternate history diverging from ours in late 1933 or early 1934, the Point of divergence being U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt's failure to implement the New Deal and revive the US economy (and also Adolf Hitler's failure to revive the German economy by re-armament). Instead, the worldwide economic crisis continues for three decades, concurrently with the war. The war is prosecuted by countries already on the verge of collapse and ends, not with any side's victory, but with universal collapse and disintegration (including non-combatant countries). There follows the complete collapse of capitalism and the emergence of the above-mentioned new order. The book displays one of the earliest uses of the C.E. (Christian Era or Common Era) calendar abbreviation, which was used by Wells in lieu of the traditional A.D. (Latin Anno Domini). |
4124568 | /m/0bkdwj | Sister of the Bride | Beverly Cleary | 1963 | {"/m/0dwly": "Children's literature", "/m/03mfnf": "Young adult literature", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction", "/m/05hgj": "Novel"} | The plot revolves around sixteen-year-old Barbara MacLane, a girl grappling with disappointing romantic prospects, her worries about not being accepted into the University of California, Berkeley, and the fact that she will never catch up to her sister, Rosemary, who is two years older (and a student at Berkeley). Barbara's feeling of being left in the dust by her sister only intensifies when Rosemary calls home and announces quite suddenly that she is getting married, to her college sweetheart Greg. Although this news comes as an unexpected and less-than-pleasant shock to their parents, Barbara becomes enthralled with the romantic details of the wedding, and promptly decides that if she is to be caught up to Rosemary in two years, she needs to step up her search for a boyfriend. Her two potential prospects are Tootie Bodger (Robin to his folks), a tall and rather gloomy trombone player who is more fond of Barbara than she is of him, and Bill Cunningham, a handsome classmate with a Vespa whom Barbara woos with homemade cookies (this somewhat misfires, as he comes to think of her as the "domestic" type and tries to get her to mend a shirt he ripped). Tootie is presented as plodding yet thoughtful, while Bill is conversely dashing but thoughtless. However, as the stresses of Rosemary's wedding begin to pile up (tension between the lower-middle-class MacLanes and Greg's wealthy parents; the cost of the wedding and the short time frame granted to plan it in; and the sacrifices Rosemary and Greg must make, such as becoming landlords of a dumpy tenement to save on rent), Barbara begins to think that maybe she's not ready to live the life of a serious adult just yet. At Rosemary's wedding, the sisters' elderly grandmother offers Barbara a bit of advice: "Have a good time while you are young," which Barbara apparently means to follow, focusing less on finding a special sweetheart and more on enjoying socializing with a variety of company and friends. |
4124738 | /m/0bkf3z | The Book and the Sword | Louis Cha | 2/8/1995 | {"/m/08322": "Wuxia", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction"} | The Red Flower Society is a secret society that aims to overthrow the Manchu-led Qing Dynasty and restore Han Chinese rule in China. The society is led by a total of fifteen leaders with Chen Jialuo as chief. The fourth leader Wen Tailai is ambushed by a group of soldiers and arrested on the Qianlong Emperor's order because he knows a secret about Qianlong's birth and the emperor wants to silence him. The story's development is mostly based on the society's repeated attempts to rescue Wen Tailai. The heroes encounter some Islamic tribesmen, who are pursuing a convoy of hired escorts, who have robbed them of their holy artefact, a Quran. Chen Jialuo aids them in defeating the mercenaries and recovers the holy book. He earns the respect and admiration of Huoqingtong, the daughter of the tribe's leader. Throughout the story, some of the heroes eventually find their rights after braving danger together. The couples Xu Tianhong and Zhou Qi, Yu Yutong and Li Yuanzhi, are married after two lengthy subplots. Chen Jialuo and the heroes follow the trail of the convoy escorting Wen Tailai and arrive in Hangzhou. There, Chen Jialuo coincidentally meets the Qianlong Emperor, who is disguised as a rich man, and they strike up a friendship. However later when they discover each others' true identities, they become wary and suspicious. Qianlong's best warriors are defeated by the society's leaders in a martial arts contest and the emperor feels humiliated. He wants to summon his army to eradicate the society, but refrains from doing so as he is aware of their strong influence and connections in Hangzhou. When Chen Jialuo finally rescues Wen Tailai, he is shocked to learn that the Qianlong Emperor is not a Manchu, but in fact, a Han Chinese. Even more shockingly, Wen reveals that Qianlong is actually Chen's older brother, who was replaced at birth with the Yongzheng Emperor's daughter. Chen Jialuo and the heroes take Qianlong hostage and try to persuade him to acknowledge his ethnicity. They suggest that he use his authority to drive the Manchus out of the Central Plains and assure him that he will still remain as emperor after that. Qianlong reluctantly agrees and takes an oath of alliance with the heroes. At the same time, the Qing army invades northwestern China, where the Islamic tribe lives, and Chen Jialuo travels there to help his friends. He meets Huoqingtong again and her younger sister, Kasili (Princess Fragrance). Chen falls in love with Kasili and finds himself entangled in a love triangle, because Huoqingtong also has romantic feelings for him. The Islamic tribe is eventually annihilated by the Qing army and Kasili is captured and brought back to the capital Beijing. The Qianlong Emperor is attracted to Kasili's beauty and tries to force her to become his concubine but she refuses. Chen Jialuo infiltrates the palace to meet Qianlong and remind him about their pact, whilst affirming that he will persuade Kasili to marry the emperor. Kasili later discovers that Qianlong has broken his promise and is secretly plotting to destroy the Red Flower Society, so she commits suicide to warn Chen. The society's members are angry with the emperor for renouncing his oath and they storm the palace. Qianlong is defeated and forced to come to a truce with the heroes. Chen Jialuo and his friends then return to the western regions after paying respects at Kasili's tomb. |
4125096 | /m/0bkfrx | Otis Spofford | Beverly Cleary | 1953 | {"/m/0dwly": "Children's literature", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction", "/m/05hgj": "Novel"} | Otis Spofford is a young boy with a promensity for causing trouble. He does not have any brothers or sisters and he lives with his mother. One the reasons why Otis likes to cause trouble is because he yearns to make life more exciting. Unfortunately, his behavior means that he does not have any close friends and his classmates are reluctant to form close bonds with him. The book is also about how Otis torments his classmate, Ellen Tebbits. She annoys him because she performs well in school and exhibits excellent behavior. Thus, Ellen is often the victim of Otis's bad behaviour. Each chapter revolves around a prank of Otis's, which often backfires. In one instance, he sabotages the class science project, which consists of feeding cafeteria food to one rat and bread and soda to another, and monitoring their growth. Otis feeds the underfed rat himself, hoping that it will get soda pop served in the cafeteria. His teacher, Mrs. Gitler, becomes wise to this and tries to get the culprit to confess. Otis opens his mouth and is stunned when Ellen steps forward. Ellen was secretly feeding the rat as well. Subsequently, it is Ellen who is allowed to take the rat home at experiment's end, much to Otis's displeasure (although she gives it to him when her mother will not allow her to keep it). Otis's pranks are typically innocuous, such as firing spitballs in class. Near the end of the book he finally "gets his comeuppance," as Mrs. Gitler has long predicted. In order to impress his classmates on a dare, he cuts off a chunk of Ellen's hair, which she had been painstakingly trying to grow "long enough for pigtails". This act turns nearly the entire class against him, and for the first time Otis does not relish the attention he receives from his actions. Otis eventually feels bad about what he did to Ellen when she bursts into tears and flees the classroom. Ellen and her best friend Austine manage an act of retribution by stealing Otis's shoes while he is skating at the pond, forcing him to walk home in his ice skates. The two girls later accost a dejected Otis on the steps of his apartment and offer him his shoes in exchange for an apology to Ellen, and a promise that he will stop pestering her. Otis concedes, but only after the girls are leaving reveals he had two fingers crossed behind his back the entire time; clearly, he means to pester Ellen for a long time to come. |
4125310 | /m/0bkg4r | Plan B | Chester Himes | null | null | The story differs somewhat from the other volumes of the cycle in being less a detective story and more a surrealistic tale of a racial apocalypse in America. The story hinges on the efforts of community leader Tomsson Black to stir up racial tension in Harlem in order to force a radical change in race relations. |
4125717 | /m/0bkgp2 | King of Shadows | null | null | {"/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/0dwly": "Children's literature", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | Nat Field is recruited by Arby, whose real name is Richard Babbage and is a producer intent on a reenactment of the Globe Theatre in London reproducing Shakespeare's plays the way they were 400 years ago. The company of boys, said to be the best, are members handpicked by Arby from all over America. Nat acts as an aerial sprite, Puck, from Midsummer Night's Dream. However, he suddenly falls ill and is taken to the hospital with fear of having the bubonic plague. During the night before he goes to hospital, he dreams of being tossed high above the earth and then pulled firmly back. He wakes up in a different room with a boy talking to him in a heavy Elizabethan accent. He has time traveled back 400 years, to the year 1599, when the Globe theater was first built. He meets William Shakespeare, acting with him in the play he had rehearsed for in his own time, and experiences theater as it was originally intended. He becomes a very good friend to William Shakespeare, almost like a son to him. And before he knows it, he is back in the hospital bed awake and not knowing if what has just happened is true or not. Later in the book, Gil Warmun and Rachel Levin, his actors from present time come by and try to find out who he was 400 years ago. Nat undergoes a series of interesting events that open his eyes to the world. |
4129042 | /m/0bkncd | Crossing the Line | Karen Traviss | 2004-11 | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction"} | The year is now 2376. Shan Frankland is trying to cope with the new changes that seem to appear every day in her body almost everyday. She turns herself into the Wess'har authorities after they discover she is infected by monitoring the human communications. Aras has already been taken into custody. Shan is taken to Wess'ej, to the city of F'nar, where she seeks out Chayyas, the head Matriarch, to ensure Aras' safety. In the confrontation, Shan uses a gun to try and intimidate Chayyas to release Aras to Shan. When this didn't work, Shan resorted to threatening with directional-blast grenade. This caused Chayyas to back down and release Aras into Shan's custody. In deferring to Shan, Chayyas lost her dominance and this made Shan the dominant Matriarch of F'nar. Shan, upon learning the significance of her actions, refuses the position and cedes her rights as head Matriarch to Mestin, even though hormonally Shan still retains that position. Lindsay Neville, meanwhile, is still being torn apart inside from her son's death. She blames Shan and is determined to get revenge. She knows she must keep this fact secret or the commander of Actaeon will not let her anywhere near their target, Shan. After discovering that Mohan Rayat is on board Actaeon and not on Thetis heading for home, she knows something is up. She goes to Actaeon's commander and learns that the whole Thetis crew was kept back just in case any of them were infected with the much coveted biotech. Lindsay also gets put in charge of being the negotiator (even though no negotiations really take place) to the Wess'har by Malcolm Okurt, commander of Actaeon. Lindsay then meets up with Adrian Bennett in one of the ship's bars, and discovers that Earth, in its desperation to get a hold of the biotech, is endeavoring to initiate a back-door mission down to Constantine to exhume the remains of her son, to see if he was contaminated. Fortunately, this never comes to pass and David's body remains left alone. Lindsay comes to realize why Shan would not give up the biotech and even starts to sympathize with her, but she is even more determined to kill Frankland. Shan and Aras are sharing each others past memories from when they exchanged genetic material when Aras infected Shan. They learn more about each other's past, about Aras' time as a Isenj POW and about Shan's time as a copper and the things she saw and did. These seem to make them grow closer and strengthen their bond. Something else that is growing stronger, because of their personal bond and their physical attraction, is their desire to copulate. Shan is having a more difficult time mentally coping with these desires. She struggles with the fact that despite what her body is telling her, her mind alternates between seeing Aras as a man and alien. She eventually chooses to accept that she herself is no longer human and gives herself to Aras. There are difficulties at first but the c'naatat sort that out eventually. Eddie Michallat is finding it difficult, impossible even, to stay an objective journalist. He learns that another ship, the Hereward has been sent to Cavanaugh's Star, with the possibility of more to come. He has an idea on how the Wess'har will react to learning this and frankly, he agrees with them. He manages to secure permission to travel to F'nar and visit the Wess'har and also Shan, though this was only possible with both Shan and Lindsay using their influence as well. Eddie is given a brief tour of F'nar and Shan and Aras' home. Eddie tells Shan about the Hereward, despite depriving himself of a story and objectivity. This prompts Shan to have a meeting with the head Matriarchs from some of the other cities of Wess'ej; Imeklit from Iussan, Hachis from Cekul'dnar, Mestin from F'nar, and Bur from Pajatis. Also in attendance were Vijissi and Bisatilissi of the Ussissi and Chayyas. The meeting was confrontational between Shan and Bisatilissi, but Shan unconsciously exerted her dominance and took control. This meeting is also the first time Shan acknowledges Aras as her jurej (male). Shan and Chayyas then meet with Eddie and Shan lets him know about The World Before; the original homeworld of the Wess'har. Those on Wess'ej are basically the tree-huggers of the World Before. Eddie is given a tour of the underground facilities where F'nar keeps their aircraft and other weapons. He is free to take as much footage as he wants and also talks to Aras about different issues off the record including c'naatat, the Bezer'ej situation and Aras' relationship to Shan. Shan holds a surprisingly quick council of war with all the head matriarchs of the different Wess'har cities and the consensus is given that they will use bioweapons designed to kill gethes (humans) on the planet Bezer'ej to keep humans off world. This causes a minor complication because of the Constantine colony already living there. It is agreed that they will be relocated to a contained environment on Wess'ej where they can rebuild. Aras has mixed feelings when he learns of the decision and finds that he is having difficulty sorting his feelings concerning human society and about Shan herself. Shan is enjoying her newfound power with c'naatat. She is learning to control some of her changes, such as giving off scent and manipulating the bioluminescence in her skin. Knowing that almost whatever she goes up against can't hurt her for long and will only strengthen her resilience by bio-modifications from her c'naatat. On Actaeon, Lindsay has come up with a plan to eliminate Shan Frankland. She has coordinated with Mohan Rayat, who it turns out is not only a pharmacologist but is also working for Earth's government and has orders to destroy c'naatat because of the threat it poses to human society, to drop down to the surface of Bezer'ej with nukes and most of the Royal Marines to destroy Christopher Island. This is supposed to be the only place where c'naatat is found in nature. Rayat also plans to get a tissue sample from Shan by any means necessary to take back to the government to be put into safe keeping but Lindsay has her other plans. She plans on destroying Shan without getting a sample. It is unclear whether or not she also plans to destroy Aras at this time. Shan tells Eddie about the bioweapons that are to be employed on Bezer'ej against humans and that they want to use them against the Isenj on Bezer'ej as well. The only requirement is they need some whole Isenj DNA. Eddie agrees to see what he can do and in a subsequent visit to Jejeno, the capital city of the Ebj landmass, he visits Ual, an Isenj leader, and manages to get some material handed to him (without Ual knowing what it would be used for). Shan and Aras have returned to Constantine to advise them of the need to relocate. They stay and personally oversee the moving process. Shan visits the Bezeri to let them know of the plan to use the bioweapons. Rayat and Lindsay and her Royal Marines, Barencoin, Qureshi, Chahal, and Bennett, drop to the surface of Bezer'ej in Once-Only suits. Suits that wrap around the individual and their gear with a firm, foam mold. It acts as a heatshield through the atmosphere and then a parachute opens to soften the landing. Upon landing, the team comes into some trouble when Lindsay finds herself still trapped in the remains of her Once-Only suit looking down the barrel of a very upset Josh Garrod. Lindsay tells him why she is there and Josh agrees that the c'naatat must be destroyed. He agrees to help her and her team to take the bombs to Christopher and leave her to her own means of finding Shan. He then takes Lindsay and Rayat to Christopher where they set 5 of the 6 bombs they brought on timers to blow up the island. Lindsay sees the beauty of the island and begins to doubt her reasoning for the destruction but not the destruction itself. Shan, in the Temporary City, received a call from Okurt offering assistance in the transfer of the Constantine colonists. Shan detects in conversation that he has another reason for calling and correctly deduces that someone made the descent to the planet. When they are not able to find Josh, Shan confronts his son and through coercion finds out who has come and what Josh has done. They find that some other colonists have captured Qureshi and Chahal. Shan learns of the bombs and has Chahal communicate with Lindsay that they will meet at Constantine. Aras goes with Qureshi to try and stop the bombs before it's too late. En route, they see the bombs go off and Aras realizes, to his horror, that the fallout of the nuclear explosion will poison the water and effect the Bezeri. Lindsay, Rayat, Bennett, and Barencoin make it to Constantine in their search of Shan. They are ambushed by Shan and Vijissi. Barencoin is wounded in the leg, Vijissi is shot and Bennett's nose is broken by a headbutt from Shan. It takes more than one clip to even slow her down but she is subdued and bound. Lindsay tells the rest of the group of her intention to kill Shan to prevent the spread of the symbiot c'naatat. Bennett forces Lindsay at gun-point to change her mind, for the time being. Aras is seeing the devastation brought about by the nuclear fallout and is enraged. The Bezeri are very sensitive to changes in the water and are already starting to die. Even as he looks out at the ocean, the lights of the bezeri are flashing in a way that can only be interpreted as screaming. Shan is taken in a shuttle up towards Wess'ej to throw off suspicion but then they turn to Actaeon. Shan knows that she must not fall into their hands and so she plans to take matters into her own. She covertly cooperates with Lindsay to be taken aft where Shan throws herself out an airlock into space. Vijissi tries to watch over her until the end and is expelled as well. Aras goes back to Constantine where the Ussissi are waiting to collect Josh if he appears. Josh makes no effort to conceal his arrival and he is escorted to Aras. The other colonists gather around to await the outcome. Josh apologizes but Aras cannot put aside the betrayal and kills Josh, after which the colonists flee. Aras then learns of the shuttle that left and that they are trying to transfer to Actaeon with a prisoner. Aras knows it is Shan and his rage increases. In space, Lindsay's shuttle is trying to connect to the Ussissi shuttle but they are denied when they are confronted but the Ussissi pilot. Lindsay is informed that the nukes used were salted weapons. She reveals that Shan and Vijissi are dead. Bennett asks the Ussissi pilot to allow him to board and be tried for their deaths. Mestin's daughter Nevyan, when she learns of Shan's death, exerts her dominance and deposes her mother as head Martriarch. She declares that the gethes need to be punished for their crimes and the World Before needs to be contacted for assistance. They send a fighter out signal to Okurt that they are responsible for the destruction and are to be destroyed themselves. The single fighter destroys Actaeon with only 3 missiles. Eddie had been on the Isenj homeworld, Umeh, in the preserve called Umeh Station that the Isenj had set aside for the humans, when Actaeon was destroyed. Actaeon was in orbit around Umeh and the pieces fell to the surface, killing thousands of Isenj. The Ussissi that were at Umeh were impressed with Eddie that he had faced them after the destruction of Christopher. They offered him transport to Wess'ej to avoid repercussions from the Isenj. He accepts their offer but knows that he needs to establish contact with Earth to let the public know that he was not on Actaeon when it blew. He needs to tell them what really happened and not let the bureaucrats make the public believe that humans did nothing wrong. Using the help of Minister Ual, he reaches the military on Earth but cannot speak to the public. He does get a message passed to his fellow reporters that clues them to the fact that the government isn't telling the right story. He then is evacuated to Wess'ej where he requests asylum and hands over the DNA sample he obtained from Ual. He is accepted to live in the Wess'har community with Aras. Also living with Aras is Ade Bennett. Bennett reveals that he was exposed to c'naatat After a few days, Aras tries to find some grenades that Shan had left behind, in order to blow himself up and end his misery. Eddie though, anticipated that this might happen and hid them from Aras. Eddie and Bennett manage to persuade Aras to go on living for Shan. Eddie also finally receives a response from Earth that he will have 1 hour on primetime to say his peace. He shows clips of the destruction on Bezer'ej, tells that it was Lindsay and Rayat who did it and even interviews Aras but doesn't even mention Shan or c'naatat. Bennett gives to Nevyan the information stored in his biotech, of his locations while in space in an effort to allow Shan's and Vijissi's bodies to be recovered. Nevyan makes it her personal goal and project to do so. Nevyan also receives word from the World Before, also known as Eqbas Vorhi to its occupants, that they will support their fellow Wess'har in fighting the gethes. |
4129056 | /m/0bkngm | The World Before | Karen Traviss | 2005-10 | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | The Bezeri are no more. The effects of the cobalt-salted nuclear weapons have had devastating effects on their population and has wiped them out completely. Aras and the rest of the Wess'Har have a strong desire to see those responsible punished. They have already destroyed the Actaeon and its crew that refused to abandon ship. Those who did are now the occupants of the habitat called Umeh Station on the planet Umeh, as it is called by the Isenj who live there. Aras is battling his conflicting loyalties and genetics. Part of him wants to blame Bennett for Shan's death as he was involved and another part recognizes that Bennett now shares genes with himself and Shan. Aras and Bennett take a trip to the transplanted colony from Constantine, now called Mar'an'cas. Aras feels the need to see the Garrod family and see to the colony's well-being. He finds, unsurprisingly, that he is no longer welcome. The admit him as they do not have the force to stop him but they make their feelings clear. Eddie Michallat is increasingly becoming more involved in the politics of the different worlds interacting. He is friends with the Isenj Minister Ual; who is finding that as he fights to preserve his world from the potential wrath of Eqbas Vorhi, so Umeh seems intent on its own destruction. He is inescapably bound to Wess'ej as tries to honor the memory of Shan Frankland and her sacrifices for everyone involved and his growing friendship with Aras, Bennett and the Wess'Har community. He still is a reporter at heart but that seems to be changing as his conscience affects his decisions for stories more and more. The information he provides now has the power to create war on Earth and the realization is sobering. Eddie decides to tell the real reasons for the destruction of Christopher, the death of Shan Frankland and also of the coming of the World Before and its possible ramifications, to the people of Earth. Wess'Har has demanded the delivery of Mohan Rayat and Lindsay Neville. Minister Ual has been told by his government that they will only do so only if the Destroyer of Mjat (name given to Aras for the destruction of the Isenj city on Bezer'ej) is turned over to them. Ual, knowing that the Wess'Har do not negotiate, has decided to oppose his government by secretly allying with Eddie and the Royal Marines at Umeh Station to capture Neville and Rayat and turn them over to the Wess'Har. He knows this will be the end of his career and possibly his life but for the sake of Umeh, he feels he must do this. The Wess'Har scouts have discovered the body of Shan Frankland. Nevyan takes a shuttle out to recover her body. To her surprise and astonishment, they discover, once her body is aboard, that Shan is still alive. She has been floating, frozen in the depths of space for months and her c'naatat has somehow kept her dormant but alive. Her body appears as a mummy; waxy and emaciated. They return to F'nar and reveal this to Bennett, Aras, Eddie, and the rest of the F'nar community. They immediately set about taking care of her to nurse her back to health. She does eventually recover enough to wake up. Meanwhile, the World Before has come. A patrol ship lands and disgorges a crew of only males. They are the first ship and advise that another will be along as well. The Wess'Har do what they can to be accommodating but Nevyan does not like the way the Eqbas males seem interested in c'naatat. Eventually the second ship from Eqbas Vorhi arrives and it is massive. The ship itself rearranges and two smaller ships split off from it; one to reconnoiter Bezer'ej and the other for Umeh. The tension on Umeh heightens with this and the Isenj try to make the Wess'Har withdraw but to no avail. Shan is filling out and getting stronger thanks to the care of Ade and Aras. She finds that she has feelings for both men and Aras, whose people practice polyandry, finds this acceptable and would like a house brother but fears that Shan will come to prefer Ade because of their shared homeworld. Ade is having a harder time contemplating a polyandric relationship but is coping as best he can. As Shan gets stronger she begins getting involved in the politics and the goings-on of F'nar. She also makes a trip to Bezer'ej to view the destruction and what the Eqbas are doing to repair the damage. While there, they discover that the blast did not destroy the c'naatat and that there are some survivors of Bezeri. The Bezeri only want to talk to Aras, though. When Aras journeys to the world, the Bezeri tell him that they want those responsible turned over to them for "balancing". Aras knows that the Bezeri would include the Royal Marines in their list of those responsible, so to protect Ade, Aras lies and says that it was just Neville and Rayat. The Bezeri also want Aras to come stay with them underwater to help them rebuild and recover what they've lost. Aras is torn by his duty to the Bezeri and his duty to stay with Shan and make her happy. The Eqbas are moving right into their roles as peacekeepers and environmental control. They advise both Earth and Umeh to prepare for their coming and the changes that will entail. In the instance of Umeh, population control and environmental cleansing—and in the case of Earth, they plan to restore the plants and animals held in the gene bank; whether Earth likes it or not. They are also cleaning up the damage on Bezer'ej in record time. On Wess'Har, one Eqbas named Shapakti, is performing miracles. He has found a way to separate c'naatat from its human host, using sample tissue from Shan, but not from its wess'har host. He also started creating a jungle habitat using DNA and genomes from the gene bank. Aras decides that he will go live with the Bezeri in spite of the pain it will cause him to be separated from Shan. Ade wants Shan to be happy and feels that he is in the way of Shan's and Aras' happiness so he decides to force Aras not to go. The solution presents itself in the form of Mohan Rayat and Lindsey Neville. Lindsey wants to redeem her self (and not die) and feels that the best way to accomplish this is to live underwater and serve the Bezeri. This would mean becoming infected with c'naatat. Ade agrees to this and infects both her and Rayat and send them to the depths with the Bezeri. Shan knows nothing of all this at this point and seems to finally accept her role as an isan to Ade and Aras in their polyandric relationship. |
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