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Concluding | Henry Green | 1,946 | The school has been run since its inception ten years earlier by two elderly educators, Mabel Edge and Hermione Baker, who are regarded by many as old spinsters hopelessly out of touch with reality, especially with what their teenage charges really think and feel. The 300 or so students are virtually indistinguishable from one another, a fact which is stressed by their names all starting with the letter M: Margot, Marion, Mary, Melissa, Merode, Midget, Mirabel, Moira. Their budding but suppressed sexuality—they are all between 16 and 18 years of age and "going to be attractive"—is constantly alluded to in the novel. ("They're only children, the girls I mean, and sex is unconscious at their age. It's such a temptation for a man.") Of the teaching staff, only few characters are mentioned. There is Miss Winstanley, young, colourless, and secretly in love with one of the few male teachers at the academy, economics tutor Sebastian Birt. Birt, however, a short and stout man in his late twenties, is having an affair with Elizabeth Rock, a 35 year-old woman recovering from a nervous breakdown who temporarily also lives on the school grounds, in her grandfather's cottage. That man, 76 year-old Mr Rock, is a retired scientist who has been granted the privilege to live there for the remainder of his life for past services rendered to the State. The aging Rock, who is referred to as "the sage" by some (including the narrator) and as "Gapa" by his granddaughter, spends his time mainly with, and for, his pets—his albino sow, Daisy, his cat, Alice, and his goose, Ted. He describes himself as "a bit stiff about the joints these days", he has some difficulty climbing steps, has poor eyesight, is deaf in one ear and almost deaf in the other, and has recently had problems with his memory. In addition, one of his idiosyncrasies consists in putting all the post he gets in a big trunk without opening any of it, ever. Edge, one of the principals, has for some time wanted to thoroughly "spring-clean" the whole place and get rid of Rock, his granddaughter, and Birt, partly in order to secure the sage's cottage for the use of additional school staff. In other matters, she is more hesitant. When in the morning some girls report Mary and Merode missing, pointing out that neither of their beds has been slept in, Edge turns out to be very reluctant to use the official channels to inform relatives, the school supervisor, or the local police. Naturally it occurs to her and her colleague Baker that Mary and Merode might have eloped with two young men ("At the station much of their time was taken up with young women adrift, who, after fourteen days, returned brown and happy from a fortnight with a boy by the ocean."), but, rather than fearing the worst, they assume the girls will be back for that night's entertainment, a ball in honour of the academy's founder—without men of course. At the same time Edge turns down some of the staff's requests to be allowed to go swimming in the nearby lake, which is interpreted as a sure sign that one of the girls' bodies could turn up any time floating in the water. In the course of the day, especially where Rock is involved, lots of people talk at cross-purposes, deliberately as well as accidentally misunderstanding what others are saying, in many instances only hinting at facts or, worse, spreading rumours. Around noon Merode is found, right on the compound but somewhat dazed, under a fallen beech in the vicinity of Rock's cottage—the very beech tree used by Sebastian Birt and Elizabeth Rock when they want to have some fun. According to school regulations, Merode must not be interrogated before she has submitted a written statement about what has happened, and she is immediately locked away for her own good. The rest of the afternoon is mainly taken up with preparations for the dance. As usual, the Founder's Day Ball is held without any guests from outside the school. However, Rock and his granddaughter turn up unexpectedly but appropriately dressed, without having been invited by anyone. While Mary is still missing (the reader never learns where she is or what has happened to her), Elizabeth Rock and Sebastian Birt start dancing together cheek to cheek and, generally, appear glued to each other, a "display of animalism" Edge is not willing to put up with any longer. Almost at the end of her tether, she secretly indulges in a cigarette or two in her office. Meanwhile Mr Rock is accosted by several of the girls who first want to dance with him and later drag him downstairs into the cellar of the building where they take turns kissing him and where they introduce him to the "Institute Inn", their secret club. Although Rock initially enjoys the girls' attentions, he quickly becomes appalled by their lack of morals and leaves the "club." He comes upon his nemesis, Miss Edge, but after his experiences with the girls he is more sympathetic to her difficulties maintaining order at the school. For her part, Edge is impressed with the courtly bearing Rock has affected in the Ball's formal setting and also consumed by a tobacco-fueled lassitude. The two older adults have a pleasant conversation which comes to a head when Edge, almost without realizing, finds herself proposing marriage to Rock. The sage is astounded, and politely but firmly rejects her suggestion. He then leaves the ball and returns home to his animals. At the end of the day no one has reached any conclusions, and everything remains undecided. |
Household Gods | Judith Tarr | null | The story focuses on Nicole Gunther-Perrin, a young lawyer in late 20th Century Los Angeles who is dissatisfied with her hectic life, which includes balancing her career with being a mother and dealing with her deadbeat ex-husband and sexist coworkers. Believing the past was a better time, one evening, after a particularly distressing day, she makes a wish before a plaque of two Roman gods, Liber and Libera. The next morning, she finds herself waking up in the body of one of her ancient ancestors running a tavern in 2nd century Carnuntum, in what is now Austria. In general, she finds out the hard way that life in the past was not quite what she thought it would be: slavery is taken for granted, there are no women's rights, no effective medicine or clean medical practices, little entertainment, and no tampons. Over the course of a year and a half, she is forced to revise many of her long-held modern prejudices, including those against alcohol and corporal punishment. She survives epidemic disease (the Antonine Plague) and a Germanic invasion that is part of the Marcomannic Wars. She finds that early Christianity was uncomfortably zealous and apocalyptic; and, after a brutal rape by a Roman soldier, discusses the role of government and its duties to abused citizens with Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius. Eventually Liber and Libera fulfil her desire to return home. She wakes from a six-day 'coma' to discover that she can improve both her working and family life. Not only have her hard-won skills given her more empathy and self-confidence, but she now has greater appreciation for the life that modern conveniences allow. With this new perspective, she can more easily and successfully deal with the stress and difficulties of her existence. |
Camouflage | Joe Haldeman | 2,004 | A million years prior to the dawn of Homo sapiens, two immortal, shapeshifting aliens roam the Earth with little memory of their origin or their purpose. Later in the year 2019, an artifact is discovered off the coast of Samoa, buried deep beneath the ocean floor. The mysterious find brings two alien beings–the "changeling" and the "chameleon"–together again, to ponder the meaning of the object and its relationship to each of them. Both immortals try to seek each other out and use the artifact to find their origins, one harbouring good intentions while the other is extremely hostile. |
Exit to Eden | Anne Rice | 1,985 | Lisa Kelly manages an isolated BDSM resort called The Club that offers its high-end clients an exclusive setting in which they can experience the life of a Master or Mistress. Prospective sex slaves, paid at the end of their term at Eden (which varies from six months to two years), are presented at auctions by the most respected Trainers from across the world. As Head Female Trainer and co-founder Lisa gets first pick of the new slaves, and chooses Elliot Slater — with whom she shares an immediate and undeniable chemistry that intensifies throughout their time together, eventually resulting in love. |
The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman | Angela Carter | 1,972 | The novel presents the story from the perspective of Desiderio, a bureau member in the main city currently under the attack of Doctor Hoffman’s desire machines. With these machines, Doctor Hoffman expands the dimensions of time and space, allowing ever-changing mirages to inhabit the same dimension as the living. Desiderio, though indifferent to the haunting apparitions, finds himself visited nightly by a glass woman, the manifestation of Albertina, Hoffman’s daughter and Desiderio’s lover-to-be. Unlike Desiderio, many people go crazy in response to the apparitions, and the city, severed from communication with the outside world, becomes a place of rampant insanity and crime, thereby prompting a state of emergency. Under the command of the Minister of Determination, Desiderio embarks on an undercover journey to find and assassinate Doctor Hoffman. On his way to the first stop on his journey, Desiderio encounters Doctor Hoffman’s former physics professor who now works as blind peep-show proprietor. During the story, Desiderio visits the sexualized exhibits of the peep show a number of times to find that they bear uncanny resemblance to the events that occur within his own life. Upon reaching his first destination, the Mayor’s Office of town S., Desiderio finds that the Mayor has disappeared. Thereupon he visits the Mayor’s home where he has sex with the Mayor’s somnambulist daughter, Mary Anne, while she remains unconscious. When Mary Anne turns up dead, dirty members of the Determination Police charge Desiderio, but he escapes. From there on, Desiderio finds himself involved in a number of wild adventures in which the novel features many graphic scenes of eroticism that include sexual taboos. On these adventures, Albertina secretly accompanies Desiderio. Desiderio spends time living with the river people, Amerindian families that live on barges. He later joins a traveling carnival in which he becomes enthralled with the mind-boggling performance of the Acrobats of Desire. Following a tragic event, a Lithuanian count, in flight from the wrath of a black pimp, takes Desiderio into his company. With the count, Desiderio narrowly escapes becoming the victim of cannibalism on the African coast before Albertina reveals herself and leads Desiderio through the landscape of Nebulous Time where a community of centaurs adopts the two. However, the couple’s lives become endangered yet again and they must flee to Hoffman’s castle, where Doctor Hoffman explains his plans to reduce the world into its most basic constituents with the help of Desiderio and Albertina. While Desiderio loves Albertina, he ultimately chooses reality over the fulfillment of desire when he kills both Doctor Hoffman and his daughter. As a result, Desiderio becomes the proclaimed hero of the Great War. Nevertheless, he continues to long for his dead lover. |
My Ántonia | Willa Cather | 1,918 | The book's narrator, Jim Burden, arrives in the town of Black Hawk, Nebraska, on the same train as the Shimerdas, when he goes to live with his grandparents after his parents have died. Jim develops strong feelings for Ántonia, something between a crush and a filial bond, and the reader views Ántonia's life, including its attendant struggles and triumphs, through that lens. The novel is divided into five books, some of which incorporate short stories Cather had previously written, based on her own life growing up on the Nebraska prairies. The volumes correspond roughly to the stages of Ántonia's life up through her marriage and motherhood, although the third volume, "Lena Lingard," focuses more on Jim's time in college and his affair with Lena, another childhood friend of his, who is also Ántonia's friend. The five books, in order, are: # The Shimerdas - the longest book within the novel. It covers Jim's early years spent on his grandparents' farm, out on the prairie. # The Hired Girls - the second longest section of the novel. It covers Jim's time in town, when he spends time with Ántonia and the other country girls who work in town. Language, particularly descriptions, begin to become more sexualized, particularly concerning Ántonia and Lena. # Lena Lingard - this chronicles Jim's time at the university, and the period in which he becomes reacquainted with Lena Lingard. # The Pioneer Woman's Story - Jim visits the Harlings and hears about Ántonia's fateful romance with Larry Donovan. This is the shortest book. # Cuzak's Boys - Jim goes to visit Ántonia and meets her new family, her children and husband. |
Sutherlin Alliance | null | null | The novel opens as an experimental star ship tests a deadly weapon on an uninhabited world, devastating the surface. From here the story essentially follows the two main characters as they are recruited by the Sutherlin Alliance in their bid to overthrow the Alcon Empire. The junior of the two opens the story as a pilot in the Empire’s prestigious Devil Squadron. The senior recruit had also once served in this fighter group only to resign years early and take up the life of a mercenary and bounty hunter. With these two skilled men added to their backbone of ex-Imperial soldiers and raw youth from around the galaxy the Alliance takes the fight to the Empire. With the threat of the Alliance growing the Empire learns of their location and decides to unleash the power of their world killing star ship. The two recruited men learn of the ship’s existence and its target just days before its use and develop a plan of attack to cripple both the ship and the sizable force escorting it. One of the themes that is expressed throughout the story is attachment and the human need to belong; both main characters fight with these needs in their own ways. The elder of the two battles the desire with his own wishes to stay separate from the needs of the others while the younger fights to keep his distance, not wanting to feel the loss of war. |
The First Man in Rome | Colleen McCullough | 1,990 | The main plot of the novel is generally concerned with the rise of Marius, his marriage to Julia, his success in replacing Metellus as general in charge of the Numidian theatre of war, his defeat of King Jugurtha of Numidia, his re-organization of the Roman Army system, his unprecedented consecutive consulships, his defeat of a massive invasion of German tribes (the Teutones, the Cimbri and the Marcomanni/Cherusci/Tigurini), and the details of his relationship with his subordinate and close friend Sulla. However, although Marius can be considered the protagonist, Sulla occasionally becomes the central figure of the narrative; there are several lengthy sections dealing with his plot to murder the two wealthy women with whom he lives, his use of the newfound wealth in establishing himself politically, his homosexual relationship with the Greek child-actor Metrobius, and his marriage to the (possibly fictitious) younger daughter of 'Julius Caesar Grandfather', Julilla. McCullough explains that, while it is certainly known Sulla's first wife was a Julia, it is not known to which branch of the Julii she belonged, but she was certainly a relation of Marius's better-known Julian wife, hence the decision to assign her the role in the novel of a younger sister. A third storyline is focused on the figures of Marcus Livius Drusus and his sister Livia Drusa who both feature more prominently in The Grass Crown: and their own growing friendship with the Servilius Caepio family resulting in a double marriage, which proves disastrous when Quintus Servilius Caepio Senior is not only accused of embezzling more gold than there was in the Roman Treasury, but also is responsible for Rome's most disastrous military defeat for generations - a defeat which so ruins the credibility of the conservative leaders of the Senate that it lets Marius into power far earlier than he expected, and for a longer time. Much of the narrative is also told in the form of letters between the protagonists - Marius, Sulla, Old Caesar and frequently their friend, Publius Rutilius Rufus - himself a man somewhat torn in allegiance: conservative by instinct, but partisan of Marius by friendship. The novel closes with Marius's sixth consulship, in which he proves not to be as adept politically as he is militarily: and the tribune whose help he needs, Lucius Appuleius Saturninus, has an agenda of his own, leading to an armed insurrection which Marius himself has to put down. To cap it all, he also suffers a minor stroke during the summer, although he makes a full recovery. Tarred by association, his political career seems over: but after fighting many battles together, there is some reason for Marius and Sulla to hope that Rome will have peace for a few years. de:Die Macht und die Liebe es:El Primer Hombre de Roma |
Simulacron-3 | Daniel F. Galouye | 1,964 | Simulacron 3 is the story of a virtual city (total environment simulator) for marketing research, developed by a scientist to reduce the need for opinion polls. The computer-generated city simulation is so well-programmed, that, although the inhabitants have their own consciousness, they are unaware, except for one, that they are only electronic impulses in a computer. The simulator’s lead scientist, Hannon Fuller, dies mysteriously, and a co-worker, Morton Lynch, vanishes. The protagonist, Douglas Hall, is with Lynch when he vanishes, and Hall subsequently struggles to suppress his inchoate madness. As time and events unwind, he progressively grasps that his own world is probably not “real” and might be only a computer-generated simulation. Symbolically, the title term "Simulacron-3" refers to the just-built virtual reality simulator and ostensibly references a third attempt at "simulectronics" (the reality-simulating technology), however, the "3" also refers to the novel’s three levels of "reality," or three levels of computer simulation — if the final, "real" world is simulated. Moreover, "simulacron" is closely derivative of simulacrum, a superficial image representing a non-existent original. |
Rakkety Tam | Brian Jacques | 2,004 | From a region known only as the Land of Ice and Snow emerges Gulo the Savage, a vicious wolverine in command of a horde of a hundred white vermin (foxes and ermine) who eat the flesh of their enemies. After murdering his father, Dramz, Gulo assumed control of his father's territory. However, only he who possess the Walking Stone may rule, and after his father's death, Gulo's brother, Askor, steals the stone and sails to Mossflower Woods. Gulo pursues his brother with the vermin under his command. Most notably was his Captain the white fox named Shard and his mate the vixen Freeta. Although Shard was the Captain of this horde, it is Freeta that held the real power, intelligence and sway. Meanwhile, the mercenary squirrel Rakkety Tam MacBurl, along with his companion Wild Doogy Plumm, find themselves at odds with their current rulers, Squirrelking Araltum and Idga Drayqueen, both arrogant, foolish creatures who spend more time on ceremonies in their honor than ruling the kingdom. When the forces of the Squirrelking are ambushed by Gulo and 30 squirrels are slaughtered, Tam and Doogy are given the chance to escape the trivialities of the kingdom and track the invaders. Gulo had stolen the king's new Royal Banner, so Tam and Doogy are sent off to find it. The king promises to release them of their bonds after long minutes of persuasion from Idga (they had sworn allegiance to him some seasons before) if they succeed in finding, and returning, the banner. They eventually meet up with the Long Patrol and continue their hunt. The Long Patrol, however, has its own problems. Eight hares were ambushed and lost a precious drum, which was supposed to be going to Redwall Abbey as a present. It turns out that Gulo has possession of the drum as well as the banner. At Redwall, the cousin of the Abbot and his traveling companion arrive with a story and a riddle. When two maidens, Sister Armel (the infirmary sister), a squirrel, and the niece to Skipper of Otters, Brookflow (often called Brooky), try to solve the riddle, the spirit of Martin the Warrior appears to Armel, telling her to take his sword and bring it to 'the Borderer who sold and lost his sword', that being Rakkety Tam. Armel and Brooky head out into the woods, but are captured by Gulo's army. Meanwhile, a volethief named Yoofus Lightpaw is up in a tree when he sees Gulo's army beneath with the king's banner. He steals it from them and flees with it. Tam, Doogy, and the goshawk Tergen are sent to find Gulo's army. There, they find Sister Armel and Brooky held captive, and upon rescuing the two maids, Armel gives Tam the Sword of Martin, taken back from Gulo's captain, Shard. The freed captives and the rescuers then return to Redwall. When the army of hares reaches Redwall, a brief skirmish takes places in which one hare is killed and the Long Patrol Brigadier Crumshaw is wounded by arrows. Rakkety Tam takes command of the force and splits them into two groups: one to constantly harass the flesh-eating enemy, and the other to guard Redwall. Tam and Doogy take the harassment force out to find Gulo's army, encountering the Guosim, Log-a-Log Togey, and Yoofus. They join forces to fight off Gulo. However, when crossing the pines, they lose Doogy and Yoofus. Yoofus and Doogy end up in the house of one of Yoofus' neighbours, a dormouse named Muskar Muskar, and his family, who are being held as servants by a small group of thick-headed but violent vermin. Yoofus and Doogy fight off the vermin in there. They want to go back to Yoofus's cave before continuing back to Redwall. When the two arrive, the volewife feeds the hungry travelers sausages and they meet Rockbottom, a tortoise (who is actually the Walking Stone). They head back to Redwall with Rockbottom for safekeeping. At Redwall, the other part of Gulo's army attacks the Abbey after slipping past the Long Patrol, led by Shard's mate, Freeta. It is she that is responsible for entrance of the Abbey for it was her cunning that thought up the plan. The vermin are all killed by armed Redwalls led by Armel and Brooky, but in a fierce battle, Freeta mortally wounds Crumshaw. Meanwhile, Tam and the rest of his force are buying time for their Guosim allies to clear the Broadstream of a massive fallen tree. Tam's force is ambushed on the banks of a river by Gulo's forces, resulting in the death of Corporal Butty Wopscutt. They swim for their Guosim allies who manage to free the Broadstream and pull the hares on board. Then, they lure Gulo (who is in pursuit on the recently moved tree trunk) so that he tumbles over a waterfall. Thinking Gulo is gone for good Tam's forces head for home. Surprisingly, Gulo doesn't die. The wolverine even manages to capture Doogy, who was escorting Yoofus and his wife back to Redwall. In order to save his friend, Tam challenges Gulo to single combat. The winner would gain possession of the 'walking stone'. In the end, Tam wins by launching Gulo onto his shield, onto which he had carved a sharp edge, and decapitating him. Tam eventually marries Sister Armel, and they have a daughter, Melanda. Together, they journey back with Doogy, Brooky, and Tergen to the Squirrelking and Queen, who have had a son named Roopert. When Doogy and Tam are freed of their old bonds and the Squirrel monarchs are overthrown, two old friends of Tam's, Hinjo and Pinetooth, ask Tam and Armel to be the new king and queen, but Armel takes the crowns and throws them into the sea. Then they all continue on to Salamandastron, where Tergen stays, and all the others return to Redwall. |
Deadhouse Gates | Steven Erikson | 2,000 | There's a convergence in the Seven Cities. Rebellion, assassins, Ascendants and those nearing it or desiring it all converge on the region. Slaves escape to rule, the once rebellious fight rebellion, a god falls to the mortal realm and heroes are made on a Chain of Dogs. In the city of Unta, capital of the Malazan Empire, a cull of the nobility has been ordered by Empress Laseen to rip the heart out of what is seen as a growing corruption. The young Felisin Paran (youngest sister of Ganoes Paran, Captain of the Bridgeburners) is among those sent into slavery in the mines of Otataral Island off the north-eastern coast of Seven Cities, excavating the magic-resisting mineral of the island. Along the way she meets Heboric, an excommunicated priest of Fener who has had his hands severed, and Baudin, a strong warrior. Unbeknown to her, her sister Tavore, the Empress' Adjunct, has appointed the latter as her guardian to help her survive the horrors of the mines. On Otataral Island, Felisin finds herself only able to survive by offering her body in exchange for the protection of a trusted senior slave, Beneth. Eventually she comes to crave his attention, to the disgust of Heboric and Baudin. Meanwhile, on the subcontinent of Seven Cities, the long-held prophecy of Dryjhna the Apocalyptic is believed to be at hand. The native tribes are preparing to overthrow the Malazan occupiers in an uprising known as the Whirlwind, which will be led by the seer Sha'ik from her camp in the heart of the Holy Desert Raraku. Simultaneously, the Path of Hands has been activated. The Path leads to Ascendancy - godhood - and is attracting Soletaken and D'ivers, shape-shifters of immense power. Soletaken can veer into one other form whilst D'ivers can split their consciousness among many beasts, potentially hundreds, or even thousands. In the wastes of the Pan'potsun Odhan, Mappo Trell and Icarium encounter a friendly Soletaken named Messremb and then encounter a man named Iskaral Pust and his minion, Servant. Pust, a High Priest of Shadow, offers them shelter in his nearby temple and they accept. Although Pust acts in a highly eccentric manner, Mappo and Icarium realize he is powerful and likely highly intelligent. In the city of Hissar, the Malazan garrison and the encamped 7th Army are preparing to fend off the rebellion, and are joined by a large contingent of Wickans, skilled horse-warriors from Quon Tali. The Wickan commander, Coltaine, assumes command of the 7th and has them running unusual exercises. His orders are to escort all Malazan civilians from the east coast cities and march them to Aren, the Imperial Capital on the continent, a march of over 500 leagues. High Fist Pormqual has refused to evacuate the civilians by sea, recalling Admiral Nok's fleet to defend Aren Harbour instead. Duiker, the Imperial Historian, has been attached to the 7th to witness its withdrawal to Aren. He also plans to effect the rescue of a colleague, Heboric, and manages to convince a Malazan mage named Kulp to go to the coast of Otataral Island to await Heboric's pre-arranged escape. Duiker becomes separated from Malazan forces and soon learns that the largest of the Whirlwind armies is gathering in strength near Hissar, preparing to pounce on the 7th once it gets underway. A ship arrives at Ehrlitan on the north coast of Seven Cities. On board are travelers from Genabackis: Crokus, a thief of Darujhistan; a fisher-girl named Apsalar; Fiddler, a sapper in the Bridgeburners; and Kalam, the Bridgeburners' resident assassin. Kalam has his own mission to undertake and soon slips into the desert as he has acquired the Book of the Apocalypse which must be delivered to Sha'ik. Kalam sets out for Raraku, unaware he is being trailed by a Red Blade (Malazan loyalists from Seven Cities), Captain Lostara Yil, and her squad who have orders to kill Sha'ik. Fiddler, Crokus and Apsalar reach the city of G'danisban to find it in the hands of the Army of the Apocalypse, who have not bothered to wait for the official start of the Whirlwind. Taking the appearance of a Gral warrior, Fiddler is able to bluff their way through the city and continue into the wastelands. Kalam reaches the borders of Raraku and is immediately apprehended by two warriors, Leoman of the Flails and a Toblakai, of the Laederon Plateau of Genabackis. They escort him to Sha'ik herself and he hands over the Book of the Apocalypse. In gratitude, Sha'ik gives him an aptorian demon she ensnared earlier as bodyguard (An aptorian demon has 3 legs, one compound eye and is intelligent). Kalam and the aptorian depart and Sha'ik prepares for the ritual opening of the book. She is then killed by a crossbow bolt to the skull when the Red Blades attack, Lostara Yil's forces bolstered by reinforcements led by Commander Tene Baralta. In the melee that ensues, Leoman and Toblakai wipe out a number of the attacking Red Blades, forcing them to withdraw, but oddly they are not pursued. Baralta rides for the city of Pan'potsun, leaving Lostara Yil to pursue Kalam. The rebellion is unleashed in Skullcup, the mining town on Otataral Island. Baudin and Heboric take Felisin to safety by fleeing into the desert to the west. The three of them cross the Otataral Desert but along the way find a huge statue: a jade hand jutting out of the earth. Heboric touches the statue and there is a massive exchange of power. Heboric acquires a pair of spiritual hands, while a backwash of energy goes through Heboric into his god, Fener, who is torn from his realm and pulled down to the mortal world (Fener materializes not far from the jade statue but then flees in terror, as in the material world gods are mortal once more). Heboric is left reeling from this event. They reach the coast of the island and are rescued by Kulp, who has won the support of a group of Malazan marines: Gesler, Stormy and Truth. Out at sea is a mage who has been driven mad by the magic-deadening otataral and lost control of his warren which now wreaks havoc around him. Kulp and the escapees run the gauntlet of the sea to avoid the mage's random spells, but in the process they are transported into a warren. They find a lone ship in the still waters of the warren. They board it to find that it is manned by headless corpses animated by a magical whistle (their heads eerily lie on deck, still alive and seeing). They also find several more recent corpses belonging to grey-skinned tall beings reminiscent of Tiste Andii; Heboric identifies them as Tiste Edur, the shadow-aspected cousins of the Andii. Heboric also finds charts suggesting the Tiste Edur originated from a landmass on their world unknown to the Malazan Empire. Hissar has been 'liberated' by the Army of the Apocalypse and Duiker rides hard to reunite with Coltaine's army. Nearly 50,000 civilians are being escorted westwards towards Aren, harried by an army several times their own size. However, Coltaine is achieving the impossible by keeping them at bay. Crokus, Fiddler and Apsalar behold an awesome sight: a solid circular wall of sand has arisen around the Holy Desert of Raraku, a literal Whirlwind to announce the beginning of the true rebellion. They press on and learn Fiddler's plan: to find Tremorlor, the Azath House in the heart of Raraku, and use it to transport themselves to the Deadhouse in Malaz City, which will put them near their intended destination, Apsalar's home of Itko Kan and more specifically the Empress Laseen whom Kalam and Fiddler intend to kill. In the chaos of the Whirlwind they are attacked by Soletaken and D'ivers, but are saved by Mappo and Icarium, who take them to Pust's nearby temple to recuperate. There they tell Mappo, Icarium and Pust of their plans to find Tremorlor and the former two agree to help them find it. |
Memories of Ice | Steven Erikson | 2,001 | Memories of Ice takes place simultaneously with the events of Deadhouse Gates, beginning about four months after the events of Gardens of the Moon. On the continent of Genabackis, the Malazan 2nd Army under High Fist Dujek Onearm has turned renegade and is now known as 'Onearm's Host'. Fearing the advance of a powerful new empire in the south-east of Genabackis, the Pannion Domin, Dujek and his second-in-command, Whiskeyjack, forge an alliance with their former enemies - Anomander Rake and the Tiste Andii of Moon's Spawn, and the warlord Caladan Brood. They also seek the aid of the White Face Barghast tribes. Meanwhile, the former Claw agent Toc the Younger and the T'lan Imass Tool find themselves lost in the southern wilds of Genabackis and must undertake a daring journey through Pannion territory, whilst the famed Grey Swords of Elingarth must defend the city of Capustan against a vast, overwhelming Pannion army. |
House of Chains | Steven Erikson | 2,002 | House of Chains takes place immediately after the events of Deadhouse Gates on the subcontinent of Seven Cities. The Chain of Dogs - the evacuation of 50,000 Malazan civilians across 1,500 miles of hostile territory - has ended in the tragic loss of the entire 7th army and its heroic commander, Coltaine. However, with their sacrifice was bought the lives of nearly 30,000 refugees. Meanwhile, the Chain of Dogs has become a legend spreading across Seven Cities, cowing even those responsible for its destruction. Now Adjunct Tavore Paran has arrived at the head of the 14th Army, largely consisting of untried recruits. Their mission is to advance into the heart of the Holy Desert Raraku, the very heart of the rebellion known as the Whirlwind, and destroy Sha'ik and her forces once and for all. The rebels outnumber the Malazans vastly. However, all is not well in Sha'ik's camp and internal conflicts threatens to destroy her army before the Malazans can. Meanwhile, a mighty warrior named Karsa Orlong descends from his mountain fastness on Genabackis, beginning a journey that will live in legend, and the thief Crokus and assassin Apsalar find themselves drawn into a desperate struggle for control of the Throne of Shadow. Finally, a warrior named Trull Sengar is rescued from certain death with news of a terrible new foe arising to trouble all the world... |
Midnight Tides | Steven Erikson | 2,004 | The novel begins with the aftermath of a massive battle between an alliance of Tiste Edur, led by Scabandari Bloodeye, and Tiste Andii, led by Silchas Ruin, against some K'Chain Che'Malle. The scheming Scabandari massacres his former allies to take the land for his own people. Later, a swordsmith named Withal is washed up on a beach, where he enters the service of the Crippled God to forge a sword. Many years after this, the Tiste Edur tribes, recently unified under the Warlock King, are to meet with a delegation from the Kingdom of Lether to discuss a treaty. The Letherii are an expansionist society with a reputation for treachery. This reputation is shown to be well-earned when letherii merchant ships begin an illegal seal harvest on Edur territory. Trull Sengar witnesses this and carries word to the Warlock King, who with the aid of his apprentices, destroys the ships. The Edur have acquired many slaves over the years, including Letherii. One evening, while the Edur are at a council meeting, a seer slave called Feather Witch holds a casting, where a Sengar family slave named Udinaas is injured by a Wyval. In the meantime, in Letheras, the Letherii capital city, Tehol Beddict lives in a house with his manservant, Bugg. Tehol made a fortune on the Letherii equivalent of the stock exchange, but then mysteriously lost it. He now sleeps on the roof of this house, with his possessions gradually dwindling. What no one else in Lether knows is that Tehol only appeared to lose his money and still controls numerous businesses in Lether. He is running a plot to bring down Lether's economy. Tehol's brother Brys is the King's personal bodyguard. The city of Lether is preparing for the fulfillment of a prophecy which states that at the Seventh Closure the King shall become Emperor. To increase his power, the Warlock King sends Trull Sengar and his brothers Fear, Binadas and Rhulad on a quest to recover a sword that they will find and bring it back to him without letting it make contact with the skin. They eventually reach a spar of ice holding the sword, where they are attacked by a tribe of Soletaken known as Jheck. Rhulad takes up the sword in combat and is killed while bearing it. The Sengar brothers return bearing Rhulad's corpse. The corpse will not relinquish the sword, causing a feud between the Warlock King and the Sengars. While his body is being prepared for its funeral, Rhulad returns from the dead through the machinations of the Crippled God. With the aid of the slave Udinaas, Rhulad regains his sanity and seizes power over the Edur. He expels the Letherii delegation and begins preparations for war. Hull Beddict, however, stays and swears his allegiance to Rhulad, giving the Edur valuable information for the war against the Letherii. Rhulad dies in combat against Iron Bars, a soldier of the Crimson Guard, and returns again thanks to the Crippled God. Tehol Beddict's plans begin to come into fruition. He evacuates non-Letherii citizens, outmaneuvers Gerun Eberict, and keeps his partners outwitted. King Diskanar crowns himself Emperor while Letherii forces under the Queen and Prince are routed and destroyed in battle. Unknown to most of the city, trouble is brewing in the Azath House there. The house, which contains Silchas Ruin along with many other powerful individuals, is dying, and entrusts an undead child containing the dormant soul of a Forkrul Assail to feed it blood to keep it alive. She is contacted by Bugg, who has more knowledge than one would suspect for a lowly manservant. He gives her advice. Later, a number of beings escape, only to be dealt with by the mysterious Bugg. Simultaneously, the Edur enter the city and march on the Eternal Domicile (the palace). On their way there, the Wyval that inhabits Udinaas takes control of him and forces him to leave the Edur party. Rhulad is later killed in combat and returned to life. Abandoned by Udinaas, he falls into a state of insanity. The Edur successfully take the Eternal Domicile, despite resistance by the Ceda and Brys Beddict. Trull Sengar kills the Ceda and Brys challenges Rhulad. Brys incapacitates Rhulad without killing him. The rest of the Edur cannot bring themselves to kill their emperor, so he lies on the ground screaming. Newly crowned Emperor Diskanar committed suicide using poisoned wine, as he expected to lose. Upon maiming Rhulad, Brys is pushed by the Errant, an Ascendant, to drink from the poisoned chalice, and thus dies. During the course of his life, Brys had once saved a guardian of dead souls who lived beneath the sea. Upon his death, the guardian came to take him away, and while doing so killed Rhulad out of mercy. However, Feather Witch finds a finger Brys lost in his battle with Rhulad. Trull and Fear flee, though not together. Back in the Azath house, in the midst of a fierce battle, Udinaas arrives and frees Silchas Ruin. Ruin helps destroy the other creatures. Trull decides to return to Rhulad to aid him in finding his sanity. Tehol, meanwhile, is attacked and nearly killed. His brother Hull is murdered for betraying the Letherii, leaving only lowly Bugg to protect him. Bugg, revealing himself as the Elder God of the Seas, Mael, saves Tehol. Bugg/Mael later leaves to confront the Crippled God as the book ends. |
The Bonehunters | Steven Erikson | 2,006 | The Bonehunters begins two months after the events of House of Chains. The Malazan Fourteenth Army has destroyed the army of the Whirlwind, and Adjunct Tavore Paran has executed Sha'ik. The Fourteenth is now pressing westward, pursuing the remnants of the Whirlwind rebellion (under Leoman of the Flails), as it seeks refuge in the fortress city of Y'Ghatan, where the Malazan Empire had previously faced its greatest defeat. Meanwhile, Onearm's Host, restored to the favour of Empress Laseen, has landed on Seven Cities' north coast to complete the task of subduing the rebellion, but a deadly plague has been unleashed. Ganoes Paran, the new Master of the Deck of Dragons, arrives from Genabackis to help deal with the chaos. Elsewhere, the balance of power is shifting in the Malazan Imperial Court, and strange black ships have been sighted in the waters surrounding Quon Tali and Seven Cities. The quest of the expeditionary force of the Letherii Empire to find warriors worthy of facing Emperor Rhulad Sengar in battle is about to be answered twice over. |
Toll the Hounds | Steven Erikson | 2,008 | In Darujhistan, the saying goes that Love and Death shall arrive together, dancing... It is summer and the heat is oppressive, yet the discomfiture of the small rotund man in the faded red waistcoat is not entirely due to the sun. Dire portents plague his nights and haunt the city's streets like fiends of shadow. Assassins skulk in alleyways but it seems the hunters have become the hunted. Hidden hands pluck the strings of tyranny like a fell chorus. Strangers have arrived, and while the bards sing their tragic tales, somewhere in the distance can be heard the baying of hounds. All is palpably not well. And in Black Coral too, ruled over by Anomander Rake, Son of Darkness, something is afoot - memories of ancient crimes surface, clamouring for revenge, so it would seem that Love and Death are indeed about to make their entrance. |
The Poison Belt | Arthur Conan Doyle | 1,913 | Challenger sends telegrams asking his three companions from The Lost World - Edward Malone, Lord John Roxton, and Professor Summerlee - to join him at his home outside of London. The cryptic telegrams also instruct each of them to bring a tank of oxygen. When they arrive they are ushered into a sealed room, along with Challenger and his wife. In the course of his research, Challenger has predicted that the Earth is about to come into contact with a belt of poisonous ether, which will, based on its effect on the people of Sumatra earlier in the day, cause the end of humanity. Challenger seals them in the room with the cylinders of oxygen, which he (correctly) believes will counter the effect of the ether. The sealing is not to keep the ether out - it permeates everything - but "to keep the oxygen in". The five of them wait out the Earth's passage through the band as they watch the world outside die, and machines run amok. (In an interesting display of Victorian values - or, at least, Doyle's take on them - Challenger does not even consider including his servants; they are left outside the room to die, and continue to perform their duties until the ether overtakes them.) Finally, the last of their oxygen cylinders runs dry, and they open a window, ready to face death. To their surprise, they do not die, and they wander through the dead countryside in Challenger's car, eventually making it to London. They encounter only one survivor, who is an elderly, bed-ridden woman prescribed oxygen for her health. After going to London and back, they make plans for the fate of the world at their hands—when suddenly, people start to wake up again. The effect of the ether turns out to be temporary, and the world wakes up again after a little over a day in a coma, with no knowledge that they have lost any time at all. Eventually Challenger and his companions manage to convince the world what happened - a task made easier by the tremendous amount of death and destruction caused by runaway machines and fires that took place while the world was asleep - and humanity is shocked into placing a higher value on life, and how well we spend what little time we are given. |
Bodily Harm | Margaret Atwood | 1,981 | The novel's protagonist, Rennie, is a travel reporter. After surviving breast cancer, she vacations on the fictional Caribbean island St. Antoine. The island, however, is on the brink of revolution. Rennie tries to stay away from politics, but is drawn into events through her romance with Paul, a key player in the uprising. |
Lady Oracle | Margaret Atwood | 1,976 | The novel's protagonist, Joan Foster, is a romance novelist who has spent her life running away from difficult situations. The novel alternates between flashbacks from the past and scenes from the present. Through flashbacks, the reader sees her first as an overweight child whose mother constantly criticizes her, and later, hiding her career, her past as the mistress of a Polish count, and her affair with a performance artist called The Royal Porcupine from her bipolar husband Arthur. In the present, she has recently published a volume of feminist poetry which becomes a breakthrough success and is overwhelmed by the pressures of sudden fame. Joan panics after receiving a blackmail attempt from someone who has found out about her secrets. With the help of two acquaintances, she fakes her own suicide and then flees to Italy. |
The Good Shepherd | C. S. Forester | 1,955 | The hero of The Good Shepherd is Commander Krause, the captain of a US Navy destroyer in World War II. Krause is in overall command of an escort force protecting an Atlantic convoy in the Battle of the Atlantic. He finds himself in a difficult position. The voyage in question occurs early in 1942, shortly after America's entry into the war. Although he is an experienced officer, with many years of seniority, this is Krause's first wartime mission. The captains of the other escort vessels are junior to him, and much younger, but they have been at war for over two years. His relative inexperience troubles him. The hero broods over his career; his wife left him partly because of his strict devotion to duty. He is troubled when the press of duty forces him to neglect his prayers. (Unlike most of Forester's other heroes, Krause is devout.) And he is troubled by recollections that the Navy review board had twice passed him over for promotion, returning a judgement of fitted and retained. His promotion to Commander only came when the United States entered the war, leading him to fear that he may be unsuited to his command. The book illustrates the difficulties of the Atlantic war: the struggle against the sea, the enemy, and the exhaustion brought on by constant vigilance. It also details the problems of the early radar and ASDIC equipment available and the poor communications between the fleet and Admiralty. |
Brown on Resolution | C. S. Forester | 1,929 | The novel opens with Brown, wounded and dying, on Resolution Island. The story is then told in flashback. The first part of the story tells of Brown's birth, as a result of a liaison between his mother, Agatha Brown, and a Royal Navy officer, Lt Cdr Richard Saville-Samarez. It describes his upbringing, with Agatha as a single mother in Edwardian England, and her instilling into him of a sense of duty to the Navy and to his country. As soon as he is old enough, Brown joins the Navy, and on the eve of World War I is serving on the (fictitious) cruiser HMS Charybdis in the Pacific. In the second half of the story Charybdis is sunk by the German cruiser Ziethen on a raiding mission in the central Pacific, and Brown, with 2 or 3 wounded men, is picked up by the raider. As the Ziethen was damaged in the exchange, her captain plans to pull into an isolated Pacific anchorage to try to repair his vessel. In the novel, he chooses (fictitious) Resolution Island, in the Galápagos Islands. The resourceful Brown escapes, steals a rifle and a small amount of ammunition, and makes his way ashore. Her captain having already careened his vessel, the vessel's main battery could not be brought to bear on Brown, and he was able to pick off exposed crew-members who are trying to repair her punctured hull plates. In Forester's description Resolution is an impenetrable tangle of scrub and thorn bushes, making it difficult for shore parties to run the hero to ground. Brown is eventually mortally wounded by a lucky German shot. He never learns that his actions delayed the repairs long enough to ensure that the German vessel fails to escape her British pursuers. Ironically, the senior British naval officer of the force which sinks Ziethen and benefits from Brown's action, is none other than now Captain Saville-Samarez, Brown's father, although they do not know of each other. |
One for the Morning Glory | John Barnes | 1,996 | There is a saying in the land that someone who drinks the Wine of the Gods before he is ready is only half a man thereafter. Amatus, the prince, manages to swig down a significant amount of the Wine of the Gods, and his entire left half vanishes. His father, the normally gentle King Boniface, orders the executions of the four people responsible for this travesty—the maid, the alchemist, the witch, and the captain of the guard—and then begins the long and arduous process of interviewing to fill these four positions. A year and a day later, four strangers arrive in the kingdom. This is a magical time, and noted by all as being very auspicious. The strangers are hired by the king and become known as the prince's Companions. The rest of the tale deals with Amatus's growth into manhood, kingship, and love. It is filled with adventure, laughter, tragedy, unexpected reunions and royal pomp. |
Stations of the Tide | Michael Swanwick | 1,991 | Stations of the Tide is the story of a bureaucrat with the Department of Technology Transfer who must descend to the surface of Miranda to hunt a magician who has smuggled proscribed technology past the orbital embargo, and bring him to justice before the world is transformed by the flood of the Jubilee Tides. |
The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature | Steven Pinker | 2,002 | Pinker argues that modern science has challenged three "linked dogmas" that constitute the dominant view of human nature in intellectual life: * the blank slate (the mind has no innate traits) — empiricism * the noble savage (people are born good and corrupted by society) — romanticism * the ghost in the machine (each of us has a soul that makes choices free from biology) — mind/body dualism Much of the book is dedicated to examining fears of the social and political consequences of his view of human nature: * "the fear of inequality" * "the fear of imperfectibility" * "the fear of determinism" * "the fear of nihilism" Pinker claims these fears are non sequiturs, and that the blank slate view of human nature would actually be a greater threat if it were true. For example, he argues that political equality does not require sameness, but policies that treat people as individuals with rights; that moral progress doesn't require the human mind to be naturally free of selfish motives, only that it has other motives to counteract them; that responsibility doesn't require behavior to be uncaused, only that it respond to praise and blame; and that meaning in life doesn't require that the process that shaped the brain must have a purpose, only that the brain itself must have purposes. He also argues that grounding moral values in claims about a blank slate opens them to the possibility of being overturned by future empirical discoveries. He further argues that a blank slate is in fact inconsistent with opposition to many social evils since a blank slate could be conditioned to enjoy servitude and degradation. Evolutionary and genetic inequality arguments do not necessarily support right-wing policies. Pinker writes that if everyone was equal regarding abilities it can be argued that it is only necessary to give everyone equal opportunity. On the other hand, if some people have less innate ability through no fault of their own, then this can be taken as support for redistribution policies to those with less innate ability. Further, laissez-faire economics is built upon an assumption of a rational actor, while evolutionary psychology suggests that people have many different goals and behaviors that do not fit the rational actor theory. Raising living standards, also for the poor, is often used as an argument that inequality need not be reduced, while evolutionary psychology may suggest that low status itself, apart from material considerations, is highly psychologically stressful and may cause dangerous and desperate behaviors, supporting a society reducing inequalities. Finally, evolutionary explanations may also help the left create policies with greater public support, suggesting that people's sense of fairness (caused by mechanisms such as reciprocal altruism) rather than greed is a primary cause of opposition to welfare, if there is not a distinction in the proposals between what is perceived as the deserving and the undeserving poor. Pinker also gives several examples of harm done by the belief in a blank slate of human nature: * totalitarian social engineering. If the human mind is a blank slate completely formed by the environment, then ruthlessly and totally controlling every aspect of the environment will create perfect minds. * Inappropriate or excessive blame on and guilt for parents since if their children do not turn out well this is assumed to be entirely environmentally caused and in particular due to the behavior of the parents. * release of dangerous psychopaths who quickly commit new crimes. * construction of massive and dreary tenement complexes since housing and environmental preferences are assumed to be culturally caused and superficial. * persecution and even mass murder of the successful who are assumed to have gained this unfairly. This includes not only individuals but entire successful groups who are assumed to have become successful unfairly and by exploitation of other groups. Examples include kulaks in the Soviet Union; teachers and "rich" peasants in the Cultural Revolution; and city dwellers and intellectuals under the Khmer Rouge. |
Death to the French | C. S. Forester | 1,932 | The hero is Matthew Dodd, a rifleman in the 95th Regiment of Foot of the British Army. The novel takes place in Portugal early in the Peninsular War. The British had sent a small force of about 10,000 men to the aid of her ally, Portugal. Rather than face the overwhelming numbers of the opposing French forces under Marshal André Masséna, the British commander, Lord Wellington, secretly constructed the Lines of Torres Vedras and withdrew behind them, leaving the French force no options but to lay siege to the lines, or retreat. For three months the French encamped outside the lines, waiting for reinforcements from the other side of the Tagus River, but in the end hunger and disease forced them to retreat. During the course of the British withdrawal, Dodd becomes separated from his regiment and is cut off from the British forces, with the entire French army between him and the lines at Torres Vedras. In an attempt to get around the French, he heads for the Tagus River, hoping to follow it to Lisbon. However, the French are there ahead of him and he has no option but to live off the land and try to survive. He joins a group of Portuguese guerrillas and spends two months with them, harassing the encamped French army, killing sentries and laying ambushes for scouting parties and supply animals. After two months of guerrilla fighting, Dodd hears artillery fire from about ten miles away. He can tell by the sound that it is neither a battle nor a siege. He knows that anyone exchanging artillery fire with the French is an ally of his, so he takes his friend Bernardino and sets out to see what is happening. They meet another Portuguese guerrilla, whose name they never learn, who leads them to the site of the firing. There he sees British soldiers on the other side of the Tagus firing rockets at the town of Santarém, and the French returning cannon-fire to stop them. Dodd deduces that there must be something in the town that the British want to set on fire; furthermore it must be something near the river. From this he can guess what the target must be: the French are trying to construct a pontoon bridge across the Tagus, and the British are firing the rockets to try to burn the pontoon boats, rope, timber, and paint that are warehoused by the river. Unable to dislodge the British rocketeers from their entrenchments on the far side of the river, the French gather up all the bridge-building supplies and move them farther up the river, to a position where the British can neither see them nor fire on them. Dodd determines to destroy the bridge materiel himself. He, Bernardino, and the unnamed guerrilla return to their band's headquarters, only to find that while they were gone the French had discovered and destroyed the whole band, hanging the men on trees and taking away the women and the food. The three have nothing to eat so the unnamed guerrilla visits the French encampment that night, kills a sentry and steals a pack mule. They slaughter the mule and smoke the meat, giving them enough food in their packs for several weeks. Then they set out to find the new bridge-building headquarters. Before they find it they are surprised by a French patrol; they run for cover, but Dodd's two friends fall and are captured. From the safety of the rocks Dodd looks back to see his friends hanged. He resolutely goes on alone, and finds the French encampment. He patiently hides in the rocks watching the business of the camp for several days. Finally he goes in by night, kills two sentries, and spreads highly flammable grease and oil (kept in cauldrons by the French for tarring rope, greasing cordage, and waterproofing their boats) over the pontoons and timber and rope, and sets it all on fire. From his hideout in the rocks he sees the whole encampment burn, and is pleased with his success; he never learns that orders had arrived only that day for the French to burn the encampment themselves, since Masséna had ordered a retreat. Dodd avoids the retreating French army and happily rejoins his regiment, unacknowledged, unthanked and unconcerned about his months of demanding effort. |
Tom Sawyer Abroad | Mark Twain | 1,894 | In the story, Tom, Huck, and Jim set sail to Africa in a futuristic hot air balloon, where they survive encounters with lions, robbers, and fleas to see some of the world's greatest wonders, including the Pyramids and the Sphinx. Like Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, Detective, the story is told using the first-person narrative voice of Huck Finn. It is a sequel, set in the time following the title story of the Tom Sawyer series. |
War for the Oaks | Emma Bull | 1,987 | Walking home one night through the streets of Minneapolis after quitting her rock band and breaking up with her boyfriend, Eddi McCandry discovers that she is being pursued by a threatening man and an even more threatening black dog. They turn out to be one and same: a shapeshifting prankster faerie known as a phouka, who drafts Eddi to be the key linchpin in the ongoing battle between faerie's good and noble Seelie Court and the evil Unseelie Court, ruled by the Queen of Air and Darkness. Eddi soon finds herself in a struggle for survival against the Unseelie Court, all while trying to put a new rock band together. Meanwhile, her initial feelings of resentment toward the phouka develop into gratitude for his efforts to protect her against the dark queen, and ultimately turn into love. The novel climaxes in a rock concert playoff between Eddi and the Queen of Air and Darkness, which decides the fate of both faerie courts, as well as the fate of her loved one. |
The Garden of Eden | Ernest Hemingway | 1,986 | The novel is fundamentally the story of five months in the lives of David Bourne, an American writer, and his wife, Catherine. It is set mainly in the French Riviera, specifically in the Côte d'Azur, and in Spain. The story begins with their honeymoon in the Camargue. The Bournes soon meet a young woman named Marita, with whom they both fall in love, but only one can ultimately have her. David starts an affair with Marita, while his relationship with his wife deteriorates. The story continues until the apparent separation of David and Catherine. |
Marabou Stork Nightmares | Irvine Welsh | 1,995 | Roy Strang narrates the book from an (at first) unexplained coma, which he has been in for the previous two years. His life in this state is a miserable affair, surrounded by uncaring doctors and his extremely dysfunctional family. In his fantasy life, however, he is an adventurer in the wilds of South Africa, where he and his loyal guide, Sandy Jamieson, hunt for an elusive, deadly creature called the Marabou Stork. When not hallucinating, Strang tells his life story, beginning in a "scheme" (local authority housing) in Leith, Scotland, with his violent, delusional parents, two half-brothers (one a womanizer, the other flamboyantly gay), and his promiscuous sister, all of whom he despises. The family relocates to apartheid-era South Africa when he is an adolescent, where he is repeatedly molested by his uncle. When his father is jailed for the violent assault of a taxi driver, the Strangs are forced to return to Scotland — a mere 18 months after they left. Over the next few years, Strang grows into a violent, misogynistic thug. He maintains a full-time job in as a systems analyst for the fictional investment group, 'Scottish Spinsters' (a probable reference to the real Scottish Widows firm). He joins a gang of football hooligans who are attached to Hibernian F.C., the Capital City Service, and led by the fearsome Lexo. Strang enjoys his life as a "top boy," feared by the entire town, until the gang kidnaps a young woman who rejected their advances and gang rapes her; Strang informs the reader that he is horrified, but too intimidated to try and stop them, even though he himself does not join in. The gang evades prison, but Strang is stricken with guilt and withdraws completely into depression. He briefly revives a few months later when he meets a woman and genuinely feels love for the first time. Around the same time he begins to take ecstasy, and even befriends his gay half-brother. The memory of what he has done continues to haunt him, however, and his depression soon completely engulfs him, taking him away from his lover and his drug-driven escapism. He attempts suicide but survives, putting him in the coma he began the novel in. One day, the gang's rape victim visits him in the hospital. She tells him that she has been murdering her rapists one by one, and now she has come for him, saying that he was by far the most brutal; it is left ambiguous whether or not this is true. She then castrates him and stabs him to death. In his final moments, Strang realizes that the only person he has ever really hated is himself, and makes peace with everyone he has wronged and who has wronged him. The novel's other, more stream-of-consciousness narrative, intertwined with the story of Strang's past, takes place in the fantasy world he creates for himself in the coma. At first a bizarre but rousing adventure, it gradually becomes darker as Strang reveals the uglier parts of his life and personality, involving surreal images of brutality and sexual violence. |
The Word for World is Forest | Ursula K. Le Guin | 1,976 | "The Athshean word for 'world' is the same as their word for 'forest'." Raj Lyubov, one of the novel's major characters. Colonists from Earth take over a planet that the locals call Athshe, which means "forest," rather than "dirt," like their home planet. They follow the 19th century model of colonization: cutting down trees, planting farms, building mines, and enslaving indigenous peoples. The natives are ill equipped to comprehend this, since they're a subsistent people who rely on the forests, and have no cultural precedent for tyranny, slavery, or war. The invaders take the land of these tiny forest people without any resistance. Earth has suffered some environmental disasters and people in North America have known starvation. The military culture has some familiar aspects, but there have been cultural shifts. Both drug-use and homosexuality are acceptable, even in the military. Some Terrans feel a rivalry with the other humanoid cultures, especially the Cetians. Former national rivalries have faded, with North Americans, Vietnamese and Indians working together harmoniously. (The book was written during the Vietnam War, of which Le Guin was an outspoken opponent; the depiction of Americans and Vietnamese as cooperation in the conquest and subjugation of a forest-dwelling people could hardly be accidental.) The innocent, ingrained obedience of the Athsheans and the fact that they never seem to sleep makes them seem to be ideal slaves, practicing what in humans is called polyphasic sleep. One of the worst slave-masters is Captain Davidson (who is not the leader of the Terrans, a common misconception), who regularly beats the "creechies", as he calls the Athsheans. But the fact is that they take a few dreamless catnaps spread throughout the day and go into a state of lucid dreaming at will, and quite often. They also see the "dream-time" as a world just as real as the "world-time" and hate hallucinogens which the humans use, because they have no control over the dreams generated by the "poisons". Most of the "yumens" make no effort to understand this and drive them harder when they catch the Athsheans "daydreaming." Deprived of REM sleep, the slaves' mental and physical health deteriorates. The only human who begins to understand this is the colony's anthropologist, Raj Lyubov, who saves several slaves from grisly deaths at Davidson's hands. When a tiny native woman is raped by Davidson and dies of her wounds, her husband, Selver, begins to dream of war. No one has dreamed of war before, but Selver is able to share his dream and sing his plans with the rest of his people. He organises a raid on a logging camp, killing more than 200 humans and humbling Davidson. To his people, he has becomes a sha'ab, a word that means both "translator" and "god". Meantime, a starship arrives bringing an ansible intended for another nearby world, and also two non-Terrans, a Cetian and a man of Hain. Via ansible, they learn that there is now a "League of All Worlds" and that Terran colonial policies have changed. The ansible is left at the colony so that the Terrans can be controlled by their own superiors. Instructions are issued to free the Athshean slaves and generally moderate the policies. Outraged by all this, and suspecting that the "ansible" is a fraud or controlled by Cetians, Davidson secretly organises a raid and mass slaughter of a nearby Athshean tree-city. The Athsheans respond by staging a massive raid on "Central", the main Terran base, which they manage to overrun. Particularly shocking is that the Athsheans intentionally kill the Terran women, reasoning that the women will otherwise establish a fast-breeding Terran colony. This is indeed the intention; the settlers plan to make a permanent home on "New Tahiti", not just to take its logs. For their part, the Athsheans have no tradition of warfare and therefore no rules, and anyway, their own women take part in the fighting. The revolution upends the Athshean culture but succeeds in ending Terran domination. For the atrocities he has committed, Davidson is exiled to an island of bare rock, which had been a thriving forest village before his rule, to be given food and medicine but no human contact for the rest of his life. The surviving humans (not including Lyubov, who was accidentally killed in the revolt) return home on the next ship to arrive. |
Darwinia | Robert Charles Wilson | 1,998 | In March 1912, in the event some people called the "Miracle," Europe and parts of Asia and Africa, including its inhabitants, disappear suddenly overnight and are replaced with a slice of an alien Earth, a land mass of roughly equal outlines and terrain features, but with a strange new flora and fauna which seems to have followed a different path in evolution. Seen by some as an act of divine retribution, the "Miracle" affects the lives of people all around and transforms world history. The book describes the life and the adventures of Guilford Law, a young American photographer. As a 14-year-old boy, Guilford Law witnessed the "Miracle" as shimmering lights moving eerily across the ocean sky. As a grown man, he is determined to travel to the strange continent of Darwinia and explore its mysteries. To that end, he enlists as a photographer in the Finch expedition, which plans to travel up the river that used to be known as the Rhine and penetrate the bizarre new continent's hidden depths as far as possible. He lands in the middle of the jungle in the midst of nationalistic skirmishes, in which partisans attack and wipe out most of the party of the Finch expedition on the continent that they believe to belong to them. Law brought an unwanted companion with him, a mysterious twin who seems to have both lived and died on an alternate Earth unchanged by the Miracle. The twin first appears to Guilford in dreams, and he brings a message that Darwinia is not what it seems to be, and Guilford is not who he seems to be. A startling revelation soon arrives. By the end of the story, it is revealed to all the characters that it is really now the End of Time and that the Universe, the Earth, and all the consciousness that ever existed are really being preserved in a computer-like simulation known as the Archive. The Archive was built by a coalition of all the sentient beings in the Universe in an effort to save consciousness from death. However, "viruses" (parasitic artificial life-forms) known as Psions have invaded the system of the Archive. Guilford Law eventually learns that he and those like him serve as instruments in a cosmic struggle against the Psions for the survival of consciousness itself. |
Blood and Chocolate | Annette Curtis Klause | 1,997 | The book starts out with a description from the main character Vivian, a sixteen year old loup-garoux. She explains about her father, the old leader of the pack, and her group of best friends, the Five. The Five consist of Rafe, Finn, Willem, Ulf, and Gregory. They are the only pack members of Vivian's age and their group used to include another boy called Axel. In their old town, the Five started to become more feral, using their wolf forms to scare humans. Vivian was afraid they might betray the pack's secret, but in the end it was Axel who lost control. Axel killed a human girl and someone saw him change back from his wolf form to human after he did it. When Axel was in prison, the Five killed another human to make it look like the "real" killer was still loose, and he was released. Vivian's father killed Axel for endangering the pack, but she pleaded with him to let the Five live. Not long after, a group of suspicious neighbors set fire to the pack's house. Vivian's father, Rafe's mother, and a few others were killed and the pack quickly had to relocate. A year later, Vivian starts high school in the new town, where she has no friends because of her reserved and secretive nature. Many girls she attends school with find her intimidating and are jealous of her beauty. Yearning for acceptance, she goes after a boy named Aiden who wrote a poem about werewolves that was surprisingly accurate with regard to their transformation. She soon figures out Aiden is fully human, but she is still attracted to him and pursues a relationship in spite of her mother Esmé's disapproval. It becomes clear that the pack is restless in their new location. Rafe's father Lucien goes around getting drunk and the Five are growing out of control. To Vivian's embarrassment, Esmé and another woman named Astrid, who is also Ulf's mother, are continuously fighting over a man named Gabriel, despite his being twenty-four while they're both in their forties with children. Vivian hates Gabriel because he seems the most likely candidate to take over her father's position as alpha male of the pack. In addition to that, Gabriel is attracted to her and doesn't bother to hide it or listen to her rejections. When Astrid, Lucien, and a few other pack members run around near the suburbs in their wolf skins, it becomes evident the pack badly needs a leader. Since there is no agreement over who it should be, it is decided to elect the leader in the Old Way. This involved a ceremony called the Ordeal, a free-for-all brawl where any male who is of age can participate. Anyone who has blood drawn is disqualified, the last two left standing can fight to the death if they wish. The winner automatically becomes leader. After he is declared, the pack females can start the Bitch's Dance, a fight to determine who will be the new leader's mate. Gabriel wins the Ordeal, and Astrid instantly starts the Bitch's Dance by attacking Esmé. While Vivian is watching, it becomes clear that Astrid is out to kill. Without realizing what she's doing, Vivian leaps in to save her mother's life, she seriously wounds Astrid and takes out one of her eyes. However, in doing this Vivian has declared herself Queen Bitch and Gabriel's mate. Once she realizes this she runs away to her home, terrified of Gabriel. The next day Gabriel makes it clear that he'll wait as long as he has to, but eventually Vivian will belong to him and he won't give up on courting her. The pack thinks Vivian will eventually come around, but she keeps rejecting Gabriel and pursues Aiden with even more effort. When she and Aiden start to get to the point where they might have sex, she decides she wants him to know the truth before they get intimate. When she reveals her beast form to Aiden, he crouches into a corner in fear and starts to throw things at her to chase her away. Hurt and afraid of losing her self-control, she jumps out of his window. She wakes up in her own bed the next morning, with human blood on her nails and no memory of what happened after revealing herself to Aiden. Later on, watching the news, police describe the death of a man. It seems as though he was killed by a "wild animal." Another murder occurs and again Vivian wakes up with no memory of the incident but finds a human hand on the floor of her bedroom. Sure that she is the murderer, Vivian decides to commit suicide for the sake of the pack. She manages to douse herself in kerosene but before she can light the match she is apprehended by Gabriel, Willem, and Ulf. Willem makes Ulf tell her that his mother, Astrid, and her new lover Rafe were setting her up for the murders. Astrid still carried a grudge against Vivian for winning Gabriel and ripping out her eye in the process, and Rafe was mad at her for acting like a human. They'd committed the murders and put blood on Vivian to make it look like she was the killer. Earlier, Aiden had sent Vivian a note asking Vivian to meet him "for the sake of what we used to have." Remembering this, Vivian realizes that Astrid and Rafe must have found the note, which was carried by Aiden's friend and the two killers' latest victim. Vivian goes to meet Aiden and try to get him out of danger while Gabriel, Willem, and Ulf go to gather the pack so they can be there when Judgment is passed on Astrid. When Vivian gets to the meeting place, Aiden points a gun at her, explaining he has a silver bullet made from the pentagram that he had once given her. Vivian tries to explain she wasn't the killer, but since Aiden doesn't know there are other werewolves he refuses to believe her. Just as he's about to shoot her, Astrid and Rafe show up in their half forms. Astrid says that they're going to kill both Aiden and Vivian and pretend they "did what they had to do." She also explains that it's mainly because of her grudge over Gabriel that she wanted to do this to Vivian. Rafe didn't realize she meant to kill Vivian and he's hurt when she mentions she wanted Gabriel, and the two of them start arguing. In the middle of it Vivian tells Aiden to shoot Rafe while she leaps for Astrid. Aiden's shot works and Rafe falls dead. Just as Vivian and Astrid's fight start to get serious, Gabriel steps in and two other pack members apprehend Astrid. Gabriel explains that they have no prisons and no jailers, there is only one sentence for endangering the pack. He then steps forward and snaps Astrid's neck, killing her. Aiden is terrified from seeing so many werewolves and shoots at Gabriel but Vivian leaps in front to take the bullet. After a furious threat from Gabriel, Aiden runs away in terror. The pack's healer manages to get the bullet out but Vivian ends up stuck in her half-form, neither human nor wolf and unable to fully change into either one. Two weeks later, Gabriel enters Vivian's bedroom, where she is mourning about being trapped between forms. The pack leader explains his past, telling Vivian that he once loved a human whom he ended up killing by accident before he realized they couldn't truly be together. Vivian and Gabriel share a kiss, and Vivian is finally able to transform again. The books ends with Vivian accepting Gabriel as her mate and therefore her position as alpha female of the pack. |
Whisky Galore! | Compton Mackenzie | 1,947 | During World War II, a cargo vessel (S.S. Cabinet Minister) is wrecked off a remote fictional Scottish island group — Great Todday and Little Todday — with fifty thousand cases of whisky aboard. Due to wartime rationing, the thirsty islanders had nearly run out of the "water of life" and see this as an unexpected godsend. They manage to salvage several hundred cases before the ship sinks. But it is not all clear sailing. They must thwart the efforts of the authorities to confiscate the liquor, particularly in the shape of misguided, pompous English Home Guard Captain Paul Waggett. A cat-and-mouse battle of wits ensues. Although the wreck and the escapades over the whisky are at the centre of the story, there is also a lot of background detail about life in the Outer Hebrides, including e.g. culture clashes between the Protestant island of Great Todday and the Roman Catholic island of Little Todday. (Mackenzie based the geography of these islands on Barra and Eriskay respectively, but in real life they are both Catholic islands). There are various sub-plots, e.g. two couples who are planning to get married. Mackenzie's prose captures the various accents of the area and also includes much common Gaelic that was in use at the time. The book comes with a useful glossary of both the meaning and approximate pronunciation of the language. |
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner | Alan Sillitoe | null | When he is caught by the police for robbing a bakery, Colin Smith is sentenced to be confined in Ruxton Towers, a borstal (prison school) for delinquent youths. Taken there in handcuffs and detained in bleak and highly restrictive circumstances, he seeks solace in long-distance running, attracting the notice of the school’s authorities for his physical prowess. Long-distance running offers Smith a welcome distraction from the brutal drudgery of the Borstal regime and he is offered the prospect of early release from Borstal, if he wins in an important cross-country competition against a prestigious public school. For Ruxton Towers to win the cross-country race would be a major PR boost for the establishment, and Smith has an obvious incentive to cooperate. However, when the day of the race arrives Smith throws victory away: after speeding ahead of the other runners he deliberately stops running a few metres short of the finishing line, even though he is well ahead and could easily win. Seconds tick by as Smith stands there, in full view of the amazed race spectators who shout at him to finish the race. However, he deliberately lets the other runners pass him and cross the finishing line, thereby losing the race in a defiant gesture aimed against his Borstal captors, and the repressive forces that they represent. In deliberately losing the race, Smith demonstrates his free spirit and independence. The response of the Borstal authorities to Smith's action is heavy-handed. With the prospect of early release gone, Smith resigns himself to the drudgery of the soul-destroying manual labour he is forced to do. However, looking back on his actions he has no regrets. This helps show independence in his life as he breaks away from the thoughts of the borstal. |
The Bourne Legacy | Robert Ludlum | 2,004 | :For a more detailed background of the main character, see Jason Bourne. With the climactic events of The Bourne Ultimatum behind him, Jason Bourne is able to once again become David Webb, now professor of linguistics at Georgetown University. However, this serenity does not last for long and, when a silenced gunshot narrowly misses Webb's head, the Bourne Persona awakens in him yet again. Bourne's first objective is to get to his long time friend and handler at the CIA, Alex Conklin. However, unbeknownst (as yet) to Bourne, a Hungarian by the name of Stepan Spalko has now drawn Jason into a web—one which he cannot escape as easily as his professorial façade. Finding Alex dead along with Doctor Morris Panov, Bourne realizes the trap as soon as he hears the police arriving. With his car outside and his fingerprints in the house, he immediately understands that he has been framed. So, with only Conklin's cell phone and a torn page from a notebook to go on, Jason Bourne sets off to find out who's trying to kill him and who killed his friends. After warning Marie and his two children, Jamie and Alyssa, to proceed immediately towards their safe house, he slips through the CIA cordon and makes his way to an independent agent who was talking to Alex Conklin when he was killed. Having received travel plans to Hungary and a mission to meet Janos Vadas, Conklin's contact in Hungary, he proceeds to unravel the truth behind why Alex and Morris Panov were killed. Meanwhile, a group of Chechen terrorists have been fighting a losing battle against Russian invaders when a man named Stepan Spalko appears to solve their problems. Spalko, we later discover, had Conklin and Panov killed and kidnapped a doctor by the name of Felix Schiffer. Schiffer is an expert in bacteriological particulate behavior. Spalko intends to release a bacteriological weapon during peace negotiations between many world leaders to be held in Reykjavík, using the terrorists he is cultivating as a diversion. The book charts Bourne's course from the United States, to France and then to Budapest in Hungary where he learns the final thing he needs to do—to stop Spalko's attack in Iceland. This, of course, all has to be done in the face of a CIA sanction for him to be immediately terminated, as he is believed responsible for the deaths of Conklin and Panov. There is also the matter of Spalko's hired assassin, Khan, who is preternaturally able to track Bourne where everyone else cannot. Khan is revealed In the Bourne Legacy; he is Joshua, David's son from his first marriage, who believes erroneously that he was left for dead by his father in Vietnam. Bourne, however, refuses to believe that Khan is Joshua, convinced that Joshua was killed decades ago, and continually tries to avoid him and the truth. Though Khan is at first working for Spalko, he eventually realizes that he has been used as a pawn in Spalko's personal game. After revealing later on to Bourne that Annaka Vadas, the daughter of Janos Vadas, is a traitor, he begins to feel that Bourne is not the hateful father that he had imagined. Unfortunately, Bourne is still unable to believe Khan is Joshua—until he hacks into the CIA database and discovers that Joshua's body had never been found. In a fit of rage, he attacks Khan, first believing that it is a conspiracy to hurt him, but is later captured by Spalko. After rescuing Bourne from Spalko, Khan makes an uneasy peace with his father. While on the plane to Iceland, however, Khan reveals a piece of information that finally convinces Bourne that Khan is his son. When Bourne subsequently reveals that he lost his memory while undercover as Cain, Khan begins to rethink his views regarding his father. After completing the operation and stopping Spalko, Khan—Joshua—makes up with his father and realizes that his hatred was always a reflection of his personal struggles and that, in truth, he truly loved Bourne. He requests Bourne, however, not to reveal his identity to Marie, in whose life he feels he has no place. |
Journey to the East | Hermann Hesse | 1,932 | Journey to the East is written from the point of view of a man (in the book called "H. H.") who becomes a member of "The League", a timeless religious sect whose members include famous fictional and real characters, such as Plato, Mozart, Pythagoras, Paul Klee, Don Quixote, Puss in Boots, Tristram Shandy, Baudelaire, and the ferryman Vasudeva, a character from one of Hesse's earlier works, Siddhartha. A branch of the group goes on a pilgrimage to "the East" in search of the "ultimate Truth". The narrator speaks of traveling through both time and space, across geography imaginary and real. Although at first fun and enlightening, the Journey runs into a crisis in a deep mountain gorge called Morbio Inferiore when Leo, apparently a simple servant, disappears, causing the group to plummet into anxiety and argument. Leo is described as happy, pleasant, handsome, beloved by everyone, having a rapport with animals - to a discerning reader, he seems a great deal more than a simple servant, but nobody in the pilgrimage, including the narrator, seems to get this. Nor does anyone seem to wonder why the group dissolves in dissension and bickering after Leo disappears. Instead they accuse Leo of taking with him various objects which they seem to be missing (and which turn up later) and which they regard as very important (and which later turn out not to be very important), and they blame him for the eventual disintegration of the group and failure of the Journey. Years later the narrator tries to write his story of the Journey, even though he has lost contact with the group and believes the League no longer exists. But he is unable to put together any coherent account of it; his whole life has sunk into despair and disillusionment since the failure of the one thing which was most important to him, and he has even sold the violin with which he once offered music to the group during the Journey. Finally, at the advice of a friend, he finds the servant Leo and, having failed in his attempt to re-establish communication with him or even be recognized by him when he meets him on a park bench, writes him a long, impassioned letter of "grievances, remorse and entreaty" and posts it to him that night. The next morning Leo appears in the narrator's home and tells him he has to appear before the High Throne to be judged by the officials of the League. It turns out (to the narrator's surprise) that Leo, the simple servant, is actually President of League, and the crisis in Morbio Inferiore was a test of faith which the narrator and everyone else flunked rather dismally. H. H. discovers that his "aberration" and time spent adrift was part of his trial, and is allowed to return to the League if he can pass any new test of faith and obedience. What he chooses, and the final dénouement, is a stroke of Hesse's typical Eastern mysticism at its finest. de:Die Morgenlandfahrt it:Il pellegrinaggio in Oriente nl:Reis naar het Morgenland (roman) uk:Паломництво у країну Сходу |
True West | Sam Shepard | null | True West is about the sibling rivalry between two estranged brothers who have reconnected. Austin, the younger brother, is a Hollywood screenwriter writing a screenplay while house sitting for his mother, who is vacationing in Alaska. His older brother, Lee, appears at the house after the two have not seen each other for years. Lee is a drifter and thief and has been living in the desert. The two are not on good terms, but Austin attempts to appease his older brother, who is more dominant. The play starts out with the two characters, Austin and Lee, sitting in their mom’s house-this is the first time they’ve seen one another in five years. We learn that their Mom is on vacation in Alaska and Austin is house-sitting for her. Austin is trying to work on his screenplay but Lee continually distracts him with non-sense questions. The two brothers seem on edge with one another and at one point Austin suggests Lee leaves but Lee threatens to steal things from their mother’s neighborhood. Austin tries to calm him down and the night ends with the two of them on neutral terms. Austin and Lee sit in their mother’s house and Lee talks about the security level of their mother’s house, and how Lee went into the desert to find their dad. Austin then tells Lee that he needs to leave the house because a film producer is coming by to look at Austin’s screenplay about a “period piece.” Lee says he will leave if Austin gives him the keys to his car. Austin is reluctant at first but eventually gives Lee the keys to his car and Lee promises that he will have it back by six. Lee departs. Saul and Austin have a conversation discussing the agreement they have made when Lee suddenly walks in with a stolen television set. Saul and Lee start up a conversation about golfing and make plans to go the next day. Austin is embarrassed because he does not know how to play golf, and he also does not want Lee to be involved in the relationship he has with Saul. Lee proposes a script idea to Saul and Saul likes it. Austin begins writing Lee’s story as he tells it out loud. Austin stops Lee and tells him that his story is bad because it doesn’t resemble real life. The two brothers begin to fight and eventually Austin asks Lee for his car keys back. Lee assumes this means Austin is trying to kick him out, and Lee makes the point that he can’t be kicked out. Austin says he wouldn’t kick him out because he’s his brother, and Lee suggests that being brothers means nothing because in family murders are the most common. Austin says they couldn’t be driven to murder over a movie script. The two admit to being jealous of each other’s lives, and Austin kindly returns the car keys. The scene closes with Austin typing Lee’s story again. Lee returning from his game of golf with Saul. He continues to tell Austin that Saul is going to give him an advance and continue with his idea from the outline that Austin had written for him. They begin celebrating but the celebration comes to a halt when Lee informs Austin that he is going to also be writing the screenplay for his idea. Austin questions this knowing he has his own work to be completed but Lee continues to inform him that Saul has chosen to drop Austin's idea for a screen play and just continue forward with his own idea. Austin informs Lee that he needs to be careful with who he messes with in this line of work and tells Lee that he has a lot at stake on his own project. The scene ends with Austin threatening to leave and go to the desert as Lee tries to calm him down before the lights go out and the scene ends. Austin confronts Saul about his decision to buy Lee’s screenplay. He argues that Saul only offered to buy the screenplay because he lost a bet. Saul wants Austin to write both his and Lee’s story but Austin refuses to do both. Austin thinks that Lee’s story is illegitimate and not relevant to the time period. Due to Austin’s rejection to the job, Saul decides to drop Austin’s story and to find a different writer for Lee’s story. The scene ends with Saul making plans for lunch with Lee and then exiting. Austin is drunk and annoying Lee, who is now the one trying to concentrate and create a screenplay. Lee makes a bet with Austin and Austin appears to be going crazy. Austin resolves to leave the house and they continue to bicker about the authenticity of Lee's ability as a screen writer. Lee finally gets frustrated and asks for Austin's help writing the script and starts drinking with him. Austin is polishing toasters that he stole while Lee is smashing a typewriter early in the morning. The two continue to do this while they are carrying on a conversation. Austin is proud of what he has done. Lee wants to see a woman, but Austin refuses because he is married. Lee throws a fit while on the phone with the operator because he cannot find a pen to write down what the operator is saying. Austin begs Lee to go to the desert with him because he thinks there is nothing for him where he is. The brothers make a deal that Austin will write the play for Lee if Lee takes him to the desert. In the final scene, the house is ransacked and Lee and Austin are working vigorously on their script. The mom comes in and Lee first takes notice to her. She seems confused by her son’s appearances and the state of her house. Austin tells her that he and Lee are going to take off into the desert, but then Lee says they might have to postpone the trip. He doesn’t think Austin is cut out for the desert life-style. Austin gets upset and starts strangling Lee. The mother is in disarray and storms out of the house. Austin finally lets go of Lee, and is worried for a second that he’s killed his brother. As Austin moves for the door, Lee rises. The two brothers face one another as the lights fade. |
Narcissus and Goldmund | Hermann Hesse | 1,930 | Narcissus and Goldmund is the story of a young man, Goldmund, who wanders around aimlessly throughout Medieval Germany after leaving a Catholic monastery school in search of what could be described as "the meaning of life", or rather, meaning for his life. Narcissus, a gifted young teacher at the cloister school, quickly makes friends with Goldmund, as they are only a few years apart, and Goldmund is naturally bright. Goldmund looks up to Narcissus, and Narcissus has much fondness for him in return. After straying too far in the fields one day, on an errand gathering herbs, Goldmund comes across a beautiful Gypsy woman, who kisses him and invites him to make love. This encounter becomes his epiphany; he now knows he was never meant to be a monk. With Narcissus' help, he leaves the monastery and embarks on a wandering existence. Goldmund finds he is very attractive to women, and has numerous love affairs. After seeing a particularly beautiful carved Madonna in a church, he feels his own artistic talent awakening and seeks out the master carver, with whom he studies for several years. However, in the end Goldmund refuses an offer of guild membership, preferring the freedom of the road. When the Black Death devastates the region, Goldmund encounters human existence at its ugliest. Finally he is reunited with his friend Narcissus, now an abbot, and the two reflect upon the different paths their lives have taken, contrasting the artist with the thinker. The timeline and geography of the narrative is left somewhat vague, as the tale is largely metaphorical and makes little attempt at historical accuracy. For example, some of Narcissus and Goldmund's discussions of philosophy and science sound too modern to have taken place during medieval times. |
The Winds of War | Herman Wouk | 1,971 | The story revolves around a mixture of real and fictional characters, all connected in some way to the extended family of Victor "Pug" Henry, a middle-aged Naval Officer and confidant of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The story begins six months before Germany's invasion of Poland, which launched the European portion of the war, and ends shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor, when the United States and, by extension, the Henry family, enters the war as well. Mixed into the text are "excerpts" from a book written by one of the book's fictional characters, German general Armin von Roon, written while he was in prison for war crimes. Coming across the German version, a retired Victor Henry "translates" the volume in 1965. The text provides the reader with a German outlook at the war, with Henry occasionally inserting notes as counterpoint to some of von Roon's statements. As the story begins, Navy Commander Victor "Pug" Henry has been appointed naval attache in Berlin. During the voyage to Europe on the S.S. Bremen, Victor befriends a British radio personality, Alistair "Talky" Tudsbury, his daughter, Pamela, and a German submarine officer, Commodore Grobke. In the movie version, he also meets German General Armin von Roon. Von Roon later becomes the viewpoint character for the German side of the war and witnesses the worsening of the German government's discrimination against the Jews. Through his work as the attache, Pug recognizes the intent of the Germans to invade Poland. Realizing that this would mean war with the Soviet Union, he concludes the only way for Germany to safely invade is to agree not to go to war with the Soviets, even though the Communists and Fascists are sworn, mortal enemies. Going over his supervisor's head, he submits a report predicting the Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact before it takes place. When the pact is made public, the report draws President Roosevelt's attention to him, and the President asks Pug to be his unofficial eyes and ears in Europe. This assignment delays again his desired sea command, but later will give him the opportunity to travel to London, Rome, and Moscow and meet Winston Churchill, Benito Mussolini, and Joseph Stalin in addition to Adolf Hitler, whom he met in Berlin. Due to Pug's increasing amount of travel and his aversion to many of the cultural events enjoyed by his wife, Rhoda, she spends increasing amounts of time alone. Through Pug, she meets a widowed government engineer named Palmer Kirby, who later will be involved in the first phase of the Manhattan Project. Rhoda and Palmer begin to spend time together attending the opera and other events, but soon this leads to a romantic relationship. For his part, Pug begins a platonic but very close and borderline romantic relationship with Pamela, but can't decide to leave his wife Rhoda for her. After having finally obtained command of a battleship, the USS California, he leaves for Pearl Harbor from Moscow, where he has discussed lend-lease issues and observed a battle. He flies over Asia and spends time in Manila listening to the radio broadcast of the annual Army-Navy football game. When his flight is approaching Pearl Harbor, they receive message that an attack is under way. Arriving at the base, they see the burning ships, including his own. Pug's three children each have their own story lines. His older son, Warren, is a United States Naval Academy graduate who enters Navy Flight School in Florida. His daughter, Madeline, begins a job in American radio. The child most prominent in the story is middle child and younger son Byron, named after Lord Byron, the English poet. Though a Columbia University graduate and holding a naval reserve commission, Byron has not committed himself to a career. In 1939 he accepts a job as a research assistant for an expatriate Jewish author, Aaron Jastrow, who is best known for his book A Jew's Jesus and lives in Siena, Italy. Byron also meets Jastrow's niece, Natalie, and her soon-to-be fiance, Leslie Slote, who works for the Department of State. Readers later discover that Natalie and Slote are also close friends of Pamela Tudsbury from their time in Paris together. Byron is three years younger than Natalie, but catches her attention by heroically saving her uncle from being trampled by a stampeding horse during a festival in Siena. Byron and Natalie visit her family's native town in Poland, Medzice, for a wedding, which occurs the night prior to the German invasion of Poland. They are awakened early the next morning to evacuate as the town citizens flee from the invaders. They travel from Medzice to Warsaw ahead of the invading German army, and at one point the refugees are strafed by the Luftwaffe and many are killed and injured. As they approach Warsaw, they encounter Polish soldiers who attempt to confiscate their automobile and leave them stranded. Finally, they are in Warsaw as the Germans begin the siege and are evacuated along with other Americans and citizens of neutral countries. During the encounters with the German and Polish soldiers, Byron repeatedly behaves heroically. Leslie behaves in cowardly fashion under artillery fire, but stands up to the Germans when they attempt to separate Jewish Americans. When Natalie receives the proposal of marriage from Leslie that she has been eagerly awaiting, she realizes that the experience in Poland has changed her heart and that she is now in love with Byron. After much beating around the bush, she admits this to Byron, who promptly offers his own proposal of marriage, which Natalie accepts. She returns to America upon receiving word that her father is quite ill and is able to also attend Warren's wedding. Her father dies of a heart attack upon hearing of the invasion of Norway and Denmark on April 9, 1940. In January 1941, she marries Byron and devotes herself to getting her reluctant uncle out of Europe to escape the Nazis, soon discovering she is pregnant. All of the story lines are left as a cliffhanger as the United States is drawn into the war by the attack on Pearl Harbor. Rhoda makes and then retracts a request for a divorce. With the USS California damaged and out-of-action, Pug is given command of a cruiser, the USS Northampton. Byron has been trained as a submarine officer. Warren has graduated from Pensacola, married a Congressman's daughter, Janice Lacouture, and is assigned to the USS Enterprise. Aaron, Natalie, and Natalie's infant son Louis are trapped in Europe as the war begins. These storylines continue through War and Remembrance. |
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World | Haruki Murakami | 1,985 | The story is split between parallel narratives. The odd-numbered chapters take place in the 'Hard-Boiled Wonderland', although the phrase is not used anywhere in the text, only in page headers. The narrator is a "Calcutec," a human data processor/encryption system who has been trained to use his subconscious as an encryption key. The Calcutecs work for the quasi-governmental System, as opposed to the criminal "Semiotecs" who work for the Factory and who are generally fallen Calcutecs. The relationship between the two groups is simple: the System protects data while the Semiotecs steal it, although it is suggested that one man might be behind both. The narrator completes an assignment for a mysterious scientist, who is exploring "sound removal". He works in a laboratory hidden within an anachronistic version of Tokyo's sewer system. The narrator eventually learns that he only has a day and a half to exist before he leaves the world he knows and delves forever into the world that has been created in his subconscious mind. The even-numbered chapters deal with a newcomer to "The End of the World", a strange, isolated walled Town depicted in the frontispiece map as being surrounded by a perfect and impenetrable wall. The narrator is in the process of being accepted into the Town. His Shadow has been "cut off" and this Shadow lives in the "Shadow Grounds" where he is not expected to survive the winter. Residents of the Town are not allowed to have a shadow, and, it transpires, do not have a mind. Or is it only suppressed? The narrator is assigned quarters and a job as the current "Dreamreader": a process intended to remove the traces of mind from the Town. He goes to the Library every evening where, assisted by the Librarian, he learns to read dreams from the skulls of unicorns. These "beasts" passively accept their role, sent out of the Town at night to their enclosure, where many die of cold during the winter. It gradually becomes evident that this Town is the world inside of the narrator from the Hard-Boiled Wonderland's subconscious (the password he uses to control different aspects of his mind is even 'end of the world'). The narrator grows to love the Librarian while he discovers the secrets of the Town, and although he plans to escape the Town with his Shadow, he later goes back on his word and leaves his Shadow to escape the Town alone. The two storylines converge, exploring concepts of consciousness, the unconscious mind (or as it incorrectly referred to, subconscious) and identity. In the original Japanese, the narrator uses the more formal first-person pronoun watashi to refer to himself in the "Hard-Boiled Wonderland" narrative and the more intimate boku in the "End of the World". Translator Alfred Birnbaum achieved a similar effect in English by putting the 'End of the World' sections in the present tense. |
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle | Haruki Murakami | null | The novel is about a low-key unemployed man, Toru Okada, whose cat runs away. A chain of events follow that prove that his seemingly mundane life is much more complicated than it appears. |
Memories of My Melancholy Whores | Gabriel García Márquez | 2,004 | An old journalist, who has just celebrated his 90th birthday, seeks sex with a young prostitute, who is selling her virginity to help her family. Instead of sex, he discovers love for the first time in his life. |
Maia | Richard Adams | 1,984 | Maia, at 15, lives in the Beklan Empire's province of Tonilda with her mother Morca, her three younger sisters, and her stepfather, Tharrin. Their small, poor farm is on the edge of Lake Serrelind, and Maia tends to shirk her chores by swimming in the lake all day. Although Morca is pregnant with Tharrin's child, he secretly seduces Maia. When Morca discovers the affair, she is doubly embittered and sells Maia to agents of the slave-dealer Lalloc. Maia is almost raped by Genshed, one of Lalloc's employees but is saved by Occula, a black slave girl. Maia and Occula become very good friends and even lovers. To avoid debasement by being bundled in with a detachment of more ordinary slaves, Occula enlists Maia in frightening their captors with apparent supernatural powers. The two girls are sent to the city of Bekla. Occula relates her own past: her father, a jewel-merchant, brought her across the desert to Bekla. They were received by Fornis, a noblewoman whom a coup would shortly elevate to the priestess-like status of "Sacred Queen". Fornis had Occula's father murdered and his emeralds incorporated into the Sacred Queen's crown. Occula was to be killed as well, but the household steward saw a chance to profit by selling the girl as a slave; since then, she has been employed in prostitution. Adams outlines Bekla's political situation in several chapters that bypass Maia. The "Leopard" faction led by the High Baron Durakkon, Fornis, the Lord General Kembri, and the High Counsellor Sencho came to power by ceding Suba, a western province, to the neighboring kingdom of Terekenalt. They legalized slavery, and the capital's finances are now heavily based on taxation of it, including farms for breeding slaves as well as the enslavement of freeborn people such as Maia and Occula. The Beklan army's central authority has largely withdrawn from the provinces unless paid to come enforce the law. Pockets of rebellion have sprung up around the empire. High Counsellor Sencho is the spymaster of the Beklan Empire. He buys both Maia and Occula as "bed-slaves". Terebinthia, the woman in charge of Sencho's household, supervises and trains them. At intervals, a peddler named Zirek visits and exchanges cryptic conversations with Occula. Beautiful, young, and fun-loving, Maia shows promise of going far, and finds some professional satisfaction in providing Sencho's decadent pleasures. She is even surprised that she enjoys the spectacle when a fellow bed-slave, the tempestuous Meris, is whipped and sold for dereliction of duty. Terebinthia rents out the girls to other rich and powerful men. Using this means of contact, Lord General Kembri secretly enlists Maia and Occula as agents and charges Maia with gaining the trust of Bayub-Otal, the dispossessed heir to Suba and a potential ally of the rebels. Bayub-Otal is the son of a dancer nicknamed "Nokomis" ("dragonfly") and the baron of a neighboring province, whose jealous wife arranged Nokomis' death when Bayub-Otal was a boy. When Sencho becomes drastically ill, he comes to depend almost solely on Occula's intense caretaking. During a garden party, Occula lures Sencho out of sight of everyone else and signals her rebel confederates (by implication Zirek and Meris) to stab Sencho to death. Maia and Occula are imprisoned in the Great Temple on suspicion of colluding in Sencho's murder. Queen Fornis takes Maia from the temple priests. As Maia fails to satisfy her sexual needs, Fornis gives her to Kembri; Maia seizes on this chance to interest the queen in Occula, hoping to save her friend from execution. Kembri sends Maia to Bayub-Otal with a cover story of having escaped from the temple. Bayub-Otal takes her with him as he secretly makes his way back to Suba. Maia learns that one reason for his extraordinary standoffish respect for her is that she looks (and dances) like his dead mother, Nokomis, who is still revered throughout the province. Bayub-Otal hopes to use the resemblance to rally Suban patriotism on behalf of an alliance with Terekenalt. At the rallying site, Maia falls passionately in love with the handsome young Zen-Kurel, an officer of Terekenalt. Zen-Kurel accepts her invitation to bed, but leaves quickly because of a surprise attack scheduled for that very night. The River Valderra, the boundary between the two countries, is thought to be uncrossably swift and rocky, but the Terekenalters plan to ford it with heavy ropes and strong men, thus surprising the detachment of Tonildan soldiers guarding the other side. In hopes of saving her fellow Tonildans' lives as well as her lover's, Maia swims the river by herself. Despite serious wounds, she warns the Beklan commander and thwarts the Terekenalter and Suban invasion. Maia returns to Bekla, freed and celebrated as the luck of the city, a great heroine whom the soldiers vote a house, money, and property. She gains an informal title as the "Serrelinda" after Lake Serrelind. Hoping to reunite with Zen-Kurel, she takes no lovers, despite expectations that she will find a rich husband or become an expensive courtesan. Her popularity and single status bring her under threat from Fornis, who is resisting pressure to retire as Sacred Queen; since the position is filled by popular acclaim, Maia is an obvious rival despite not wanting the crown. Maia sees her stepfather, Tharrin, dragged into Bekla as a rebel informant. He is condemned to be sacrificed by the Queen. Maia does her best to free him, but Fornis foils her plan and causes his death. However, during Tharrin's last conversation with Maia, he reveals to her that Morca had not been her real mother. A pregnant girl had fled to Morca's cottage and died there in childbirth; Maia deduces she is the daughter of Nokomis' younger sister. In grief at Tharrin's death, Maia makes a desperate attempt to kill Fornis, but is thwarted by Occula, who was indeed inducted into the queen's household. Occula intends to take her own revenge on Fornis when the time is right; meanwhile she is performing the sort of sado-masochistic services of which Maia had been incapable and which show how deranged Fornis can be. As civil war breaks out in the city, Maia learns that Anda-Nokomis and Zen-Kurel have been brought to Bekla as prisoners. In flight from Fornis' murderous fury, Maia frees the two men, and with them and Zirek and Meris (who have been hiding since assassinating Sencho), she flees Bekla. The former prisoners are bitterly angry at Maia for betraying them at the Valderra, which she had idealistically considered an attempt to save their lives. Nevertheless, they agree to return with her to Suba or Terekenalt. Maia and her companions recover on a remote farm, then travel for a time with rebel freebooters. Meris, always a troublemaker, gets herself killed by one of them. Maia gradually regains Zen-Kurel's and Anda-Nokomis' trust by her sincere efforts to help them. After an arduous boat escape from the Beklan Empire to Terekenalt, Anda-Nokomis is killed and Maia receives a marriage proposal from the man she loves most. Two years later, Maia (with her little son) visits the capital of her new country and by chance meets Occula. Occula describes at length how she killed Fornis, aided by supernatural forces. She tells Maia that the rebels succeeded in overthrowing the Leopards' regime. The story ends with Maia refusing Occula's plea to go back to Bekla; she would rather help Zen-Kurel and his father manage their farm. |
The Pendragon Adventure | D.J. MacHale | null | Robert "Bobby" Pendragon, an everyday athletic junior high school student from Stony Brook, Connecticut discovers that he is a Traveler: someone who is able to use mystical flumes to journey among ten distinct spacetime realities, called "territories." His Uncle Press, the lead Traveler, tells him that they have a crucial mission: to stop the efforts of the shapeshifting demon Saint Dane, a supporter of the darker side of human nature who believes that everything there is or was, collectively called Halla, must be destroyed so that he may rebuild it, according to his own designs. As each territory reaches a critical turning point, Saint Dane arrives, hoping to lead its people toward self-destruction. Bobby travels to the ten territories to thwart Saint Dane's plans, sending journals to his home (Second Earth) to be received by his best friends Mark Dimond and Courtney Chetwynde, who become sometimes involved with the action and are deemed Bobby's "acolytes." There is one Traveler from each territory and Bobby soon realizes that his role is to replace his uncle as the lead Traveler, pursuing Saint Dane across Halla, and helping to guide the territories back toward stability with the assistance of the other Travelers, their acolytes, and further allies. The turning points of the territories, in order, occur on Denduron, Cloral, First Earth, Veelox, Eelong, Zadaa, Quillan, Ibara, Second Earth, and Third Earth. Not only does Bobby come up against the forces of Saint Dane, but he also learns the skills of martial arts and how to respect the diverse peoples of the territories he encounters, which wildly differ in their social structures, technologies, philosophies, traditions, and other cultural aspects. He also has to adapt to each territory's environments to get to Saint Dane. As the saga progresses, Bobby begins to learn the nature of what it really means to be a Traveler, that Saint Dane's ultimate goal includes a mysterious event called "the Convergence," and how different he actually is from a normal American teenager. By the ninth book, Bobby successfully prevents the destruction of six territories, but on Second Earth, Veelox, and Quillan the Travelers fail, allowing Saint Dane to claim victory. Even worse, by taking over Second Earth, Saint Dane manages to reverse all previous Traveler victories, founding an elitist, genocidal cult called Ravinia that marches its robot army of humanoid soldiers freely throughout the territories. In the last book, Bobby and the Travelers learn that they are not actually humans, but rather, spirits created by Solara, the source of all accumulated human knowledge. Reuniting one last time, they manage to defeat Saint Dane in a final battle on Third Earth, thus reviving Halla and beginning its process toward recovery. |
Perceforest | null | null | Alexander, having conquered Britain according to this accounting of origins, departs for Babylon, leaving Perceforest in charge. Perceforest, king of Britain, introduces Christian faith and establishes his Franc Palais of free equals, the best knights, with clear parallels to the Round Table. "Thus the romance would trace back the model of ideal civilization that it proposes, a model also for the orders of chivalry created from the 14th century onwards, to a legendary origin where the glory of Alexander is united with the fame of Arthur." (Voicu 2003) Perceforest, concerning the hardy king errant who dared "pierce" the evil forest, was first printed in Paris in 1528, as La Tres Elegante Delicieux Melliflue et Tres Plaisante Hystoire du Tres Noble Roy Perceforest in four volumes and soon (1531) printed in Italian. A Spanish translation is also known. |
Peter Simple | Frederick Marryat | null | The novel is an insight into the naval career of a young gentleman during the period of British Mastery of the seas in the early 19th century. The hero of the title is introduced as 'the fool of the family', son of a parson and heir presumptive to the influential Lord Privilege. This forms a sub plot among several others that run alongside the main narrative which mainly concerns the young man's journey from adolescent to adulthood amidst a backdrop of war at sea, and paints at firsthand a detailed picture of the people and character of that period. One of the key components of the tale is Peter's relationship with the various shipmates he meets, mainly that of an older officer who takes young Simple under his wing and proves invaluable in his sea education, and also includes a post captain who suffers from Munchausen syndrome among others. The whole is a series of adventures and encounters that shape Peter and suck the reader into his world of privileges and hardships, courage and cowardice and generally steals time as effectively as a modern bestseller with the added bonus of being written by an experienced and noted sea officer of the period and is therefore very well informed. |
Absolute Power | Ray Russell | 1,996 | An experienced burglar, Luther Whitney, breaks into a billionaire's house with the intent of robbing it. While there, he witnesses the President of the United States and the billionaire's wife having sex; however, their lovemaking turns violent and Secret Service agents burst in and kill the woman. Whitney escapes, but not before the Secret Service learns of his presence; they blame the wife's murder on Whitney. Whitney goes on the run from the President's agents while a detective tries to piece together the crime. |
The Original of Laura | Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov | null | Based on discussions with unidentified scholars, The Times summarizes the plot as follows: Philip Wild, an enormously corpulent scholar, is married to a slender, flighty and wildly promiscuous woman called Flora. Flora initially appealed to Wild because of another woman that he’d been in love with, Aurora Lee. Death and what lies beyond it, a theme which fascinated Nabokov from a very young age, are central. The book opens at a party and there follow four continuous scenes, after which the novel becomes more fragmented. It is not clear how old Wild is, but he is preoccupied with his own death and sets about obliterating himself from the toes upwards through meditation, a sort of deliberate self-inflicted self-erasure. |
Shatterglass | Tamora Pierce | 2,003 | Trisana (Tris) Chandler meets Kethlun (Keth) Warder, a glass mage with a dangerous power: lightning. During their first meeting, he was unconsciously using his ambient powers and accidentally created a living dragon out of glass. Tris saves the dragon from being smashed by Keth, and names it Chime. She later finds out that he had been struck by lightning less than a year ago, and this left him paralyzed and with a great fear of lightning. He learned to walk again, but his speech is a little slow, and he lost his ease at glass-blowing. A twenty-year-old man just as stubborn as Tris, Keth won't accept Tris or any of her teachings. He argues with her constantly, and refuses to learn about his lightning abilities, fearing a relapse into paralysis. Tris is surprisingly patient with him as she guides him through meditation and control over his powers. Eventually, Keth learns to trust Tris' instincts, and grudgingly accepts her as his teacher. Meanwhile, mysterious murders are taking place. All the murdered women are Yaskedasi, female entertainers who are looked down upon in the town for their immodesty. But when one of the murdered Yaskedasi turns up in the town's central fountain, everyone starts to take notice. The town has a culture of thanatophobia, an irrational fear of death. Each time a person dies, the place must be cleansed by the town's priests when they perform the traditional cleansing ceremony. This ceremony is not only religious, but magical as well, effectively erasing all traces of the murderer, making it impossible for the authorities to track the killer, nicknamed the 'Ghost' by locals. Keth has been asked to attempt to find the Ghost by way of glass balls that only he can make. These balls hold scenes of past crimes in them, causing him to be a suspect at first. Keth and Tris struggle, first against the local authorities, then against each other in the creation of these globes. When Keth's friend Yali is killed by the Ghost, the race takes on new meaning. |
Nausea | Jean-Paul Sartre | null | Written in the form of journal entries, it follows 30-year-old Antoine Roquentin who, returned from years of travel, settles in the fictional French seaport town of Bouville to finish his research on the life of an 18th-century political figure. But during the winter of 1932 a "sweetish sickness," as he calls nausea, increasingly impinges on almost everything he does or enjoys: his research project, the company of an autodidact who is reading all the books in the local library alphabetically, a physical relationship with a café owner named Françoise, his memories of Anny, an English girl he once loved, even his own hands and the beauty of nature. Over time, his disgust towards existence forces him into self-hatred and near-insanity. He embodies Sartre's theories of existential angst, and he searches anxiously for meaning in all the things that had filled and fulfilled his life up to that point. But finally Antoine comes to a revelation into the nature of his being when he faces the troublesomely provisional and limited nature of existence itself. In his resolution at the end of the book he accepts the indifference of the physical world to man's aspirations. He is able to see that realization not only as a regret but also as an opportunity. People are free to make their own meaning: a freedom that is also a responsibility, because without that commitment there will be no meaning. |
Abarat: Days of Magic, Nights of War | Clive Barker | 2,004 | The entire book is spread out over eight weeks of time, compared to the two or three in Book 1, titled simply Abarat. The book picks up several weeks after the original had left off; weeks wherein Candy Quackenbush and Malingo the Geshrat (a character introduced in the first book) have traveled from Hour to Hour to evade the bounty hunter Otto Houlihan. Christopher Carrion's whereabouts are revealed only in the second quarter of the book, wherein he plots with the Sacbrood in the Pyramids of Xuxux. Sacbrood are terrifying insects of all shapes and sizes which Christopher Carrion has been breeding in order to help him create Absolute Midnight. Under the cover produced by the Sacbrood, he expects, the destroyers called the Requiax will emerge from under the Sea of Izabella (which surrounds the Abarat) and annihilate everything they see, giving Carrion the opportunity to re-organize the world according to his will. Candy begins to develop powers of great magic, with which she frees the mysterious beings called Totemix from their imprisonment in the Twilight Palace on the island of Scoriae. Malingo, separated from her on the carnival island of Babilonium, joins with others of Candy's acquaintance to form a force of resistance against the armies of Midnight. Candy is eventually captured by Letheo, the lizard-boy servant of Christopher Carrion, and taken to the island Efreet. The enchantress Diamanda, having died of an encounter with a monster, travels as a ghost to the human world, where she finds her also ghostly husband Henry and with him works to prepare Candy's home town for the flood resulting from its imminent meeting with the Abarat. When this meeting occurs, Henry's opening of the factory farm which is the town's only industrial outlet is used as a comment on the variety-deprived lives of chickens raised in such factories. This book introduces readers to new characters including Finnegan Hob, the would-be husband of Princess Boa, who is discovered by other characters in search of himself. Having persuaded him to give up his vendetta against the Abaratian dragons, whom he blames for his fianceé's death, the seekers travel to Efreet, where Candy is held prisoner by Christopher Carrion. They rescue Candy and at her request return her to the human world, where she intends to hide from the Abarat's perils. The two worlds meet in a dramatic climax, wherein it is revealed by the magician Kaspar Wolfswinkel that Princess Boa's soul is contained within Candy's body, having been placed there by the Fantomaya in obedience to the belief that Princess Boa, or her reincarnation, could halt the Abarat's progressive degradation and revitalize the Abarat as a whole. Christopher Carrion clashes with his grandmother Mater Motley, having learned that she had concealed Candy's dual nature from him, and is severely wounded in the process (whether he dies or not is unclear). Candy and most of the major characters return to the Abarat when it is withdrawn from the human world. There, Mater Motley assumes control of Gorgossium Island, where she executes all of Christopher Carrion's living supporters. Kaspar Wolfswinkel's five hats, the source of his power, are left in the human world. |
Brigitta | null | null | The first person narrator, a German-speaking man, is sent a letter by a man called the Major who asks the narrator to visit him for a while in Hungary. He invites him to perhaps stay for months or years. The narrator accepts this invitation and wanders for a while through Hungary in order to gain some insight into the land. The two men had gotten to know each other during a trip in Italy and were, for a time, inseparable. The narrator meets a woman dressed and riding her horse like a man, and he first mistakes her for the Major himself. The woman guides him to the home of the Major. After their reunion, the Major shows the narrator around his land and the narrator becomes familiar with his surroundings. The Major is beloved by the people working his land and has a greenhouse in which he grows and sells various grains. He also has vines and cornfields. In Hungary, the Major finally accomplished his goal of finding fulfilling work. The Major tells the narrator that he had considered becoming an artist, but that he lacks the large and simple heart needed to inspire humanity with deep and penetrating words. The Major therefore satisfies himself with practical work. The Major was inspired to do his work on the land by a woman named Brigitta Maroshely, who had begun turning the previously barren landscape in that part of Hungary into something fruitful. The narrator finally is introduced to this energetic and capable woman himself after hearing about her from the Major. The Major spoke of Brigitta with the highest praises. The narrator notices that the Major and Brigitta act almost as if they were in love. This is unremarkable at first, but becomes more and more noticeable as the story progresses. Brigitta’s life story is thrown into the overall story as its own chapter in order to provide background and to make this remarkable woman more understandable. Brigitta lived with her family in a castle, but she more or less lived in her own apartment, isolated from the rest of the family. The development of Brigitta’s strong character is a result of almost complete lack of physical beauty. Brigitta grew up with two lovely younger sisters. As children, Brigitta was ignored by guests, who would always just ask how her more attractive sisters were doing. Brigitta was never noticed by anyone and played by herself most of the time, rejecting pretty dolls and bringing bits of wood and stones into bed with her. Brigitta was, however, clever and learned to ride. The beauty of her sisters attracted much attention when the girls grew older. Brigitta, on the other hand, was just strong and silent. She made her own plain dresses and strange headpieces for herself. A young man, recently returned from travels to the town of his birth, called Stephan Murai, came to one of the family’s social parties. This man was rumored to be one of the finest men that people had ever seen. The parents of Brigitta hoped to attract him to one of the two pretty sisters. Surprisingly, the handsome young man was fascinated by Brigitta and her ways. Murai fell in love with her. It takes Brigitta a long time to be convinced of Murai’s love and tells him it will only lead him to his downfall. She is eventually convinced and loves him immeasurably. They marry with the approval of both sets of parents and bear a son. During his work of the land, Murai meets the beautiful young daughter of a man from the area. They flirt, race horses and joke together and Murai feels drawn to her beauty and light manner. She is quite the opposite of Brigitta. One day Murai lets his feelings out and heartily embraces the young woman. The relationship between the girl and Murai ends after the embrace, but Brigitta had some idea of Murai’s fascination for the girl and confronts him. He clasps both of Brigitta’s hands and tells her that he hates her. Murai leaves and Brigitta must raise her son alone. Brigitta migrates to the region in which the story takes place and starts working the land with her son. Once as Brigitta lay sick with fever in bed, the Major came and cared for her during her illness. He stayed day and night by her bedside. Since that time, the Major and Brigitta experienced a true friendship. Often discussed are the Major’s watchdogs that are supposed to protect his houses from wolves. After a hard winter, the wolves begin to go after people. During a ride one night, the narrator and the major come across a pack of wolves attacking Gustav, Brigitta’s son. Gustav is bitten in the leg and loses much blood. The Major brings Gustav back to his lodgings and calls for a doctor and for Brigitta. The doctor says that Gustav will be fine, but in a fever for several days. Brigitta stays by her son’s bedside in the Major’s house. The Major, observing the love of Brigitta for her son, begins to cry. The Major tells the narrator that he had always wished to have a son himself. Brigitta overhears, looks at the Major, and they suddenly embrace passionately. The narrator learns that the Major is actually Stephan Murai. After running away from Brigitta, he could not forget about her and could never really think about another woman. He went the Hungary, where Brigitta was living and finds her feverish. She recognizes him as the father of her son when her illness is cured, and they promise to remain just friends. Tense feeling of more than friendship lurked under the surface for many years. When Brigitta’s son is ill, the Major’s heartfelt emotion breaks the treaty of friendship between Brigitta and the Major. Brigitta says that he has finally become a good person and they embrace, verifying the complete fulfillment of their love. All the while, the narrator stands somewhat awkwardly thereby (like he has for much of the story). He stays with the newly reunited family for the entire winter in Hungary and becomes almost like a member of the family himself. At the end, the narrator returns to his fatherland. de:Brigitta (Stifter) |
Kidnapped | Robert Louis Stevenson | null | The full title of the book gives away major parts of the plot and creates the false impression that the novel is autobiographical. It is Kidnapped: Being Memoirs of the Adventures of David Balfour in the Year 1751: How he was Kidnapped and Cast away; his Sufferings in a Desert Isle; his Journey in the Wild Highlands; his acquaintance with Alan Breck Stewart and other notorious Highland Jacobites; with all that he Suffered at the hands of his Uncle, Ebenezer Balfour of Shaws, falsely so-called: Written by Himself and now set forth by Robert Louis Stevenson. The central character and narrator is a young man named David Balfour (Balfour being Stevenson's mother's maiden name), young and naive but resourceful, whose parents have recently died and who is out to make his way in the world. He is given a letter by the minister of Essendean, Mr. Campbell, to be delivered to the House of Shaws in Cramond, where David's uncle, Ebenezer Balfour, lives. On his journey, David asks many people where the House of Shaws is, and all of them speak of it darkly as a place of fear and evil. David arrives at the ominous House of Shaws and is confronted by his paranoid Uncle Ebenezer, armed with a blunderbuss. His uncle is also niggardly, living on "parritch" and small ale, and indeed the House of Shaws itself is partially unfinished and somewhat ruinous. David is allowed to stay, and soon discovers evidence that his father may have been older than his uncle, thus making himself the rightful heir to the estate. Ebenezer asks David to get a chest from the top of a tower in the house, but refuses to provide a lamp or candle. David is forced to scale the stairs in the dark, and realizes that not only is the tower unfinished in some places, but that the steps simply end abruptly and fall into the abyss. David concludes that his uncle intended for him to have an "accident" so as not to have to give over his inheritance. David confronts his uncle, who promises to tell David the whole story of his father the next morning. A ship's cabin boy, Ransome, arrives the next day, and tells Ebenezer that Captain Hoseason of the brig Covenant needs to meet him to discuss business. Ebenezer takes David to Queensferry, where Hoseason awaits, and David makes the mistake of leaving his uncle alone with the captain while he visits the shore with Ransome. Hoseason later offers to take them on board the brig briefly, and David complies, only to see his uncle returning to shore alone in a skiff. He is then immediately struck senseless. David awakens bound hand and foot in the hold of the ship. He becomes weak and sick, and one of the Covenant's officers, Mr. Riach, convinces Hoseason to move David up to the forecastle. Mr. Shuan, a mate on the ship, finally takes his routine abuse of Ransome too far and murders the unfortunate youth. David is repulsed at the crew's behaviour, and learns that the Captain plans to sell him into servitude in the Carolinas. David replaces the slain cabin boy, and the ship encounters contrary winds which drive her back toward Scotland. Fog-bound near the Hebrides, they strike a small boat. All of its crew are killed except one man, Alan Breck {Stewart}, who is brought on board and offers Hoseason a large sum of money to drop him off on the mainland. David later overhears the crew plotting to kill Breck and take all his money. The two barricade themselves in the round house, where Alan kills the murderous Shuan and David wounds Hoseason. Five of the crew are killed outright, and the rest refuse to continue fighting. Alan is a Jacobite who supports the claim of the House of Stuart to the throne of Scotland. He is initially suspicious of the pro-Whig David, who is also loyal to King George. Still, the young man has given a good account of himself in the fighting and impresses the old soldier. Hoseason has no choice but to give Alan and David passage back to the mainland. David tells his tale of woe to Alan, and Alan explains that the country of Appin where he is from is under the tyrannical administration of Colin Roy of Glenure, a Campbell and Government agent. Alan vows that, should he find the "Red Fox," he will kill him. The Covenant tries to negotiate a difficult channel without a proper chart or pilot, and is soon driven aground on the notorious Torran Rocks. David and Alan are separated in the confusion, with David being washed ashore on the isle of Erraid near Mull, while Alan and the surviving crew row to safety on that same island. David spends a few days alone in the wild before getting his bearings. David learns that his new friend has survived, and has two encounters with beggarly guides: one who attempts to stab him with a knife, and another who is blind but an excellent shot with a pistol. David soon reaches Torosay where he is ferried across the river and receives further instructions from Alan's friend Neil Roy McRob, and later meets a Catechist who takes the lad to the mainland. As he continues his journey, David encounters none other than the Red Fox (Colin Roy) himself, who is accompanied by a lawyer, servant, and sheriff's officer. When David stops the Campbell man to ask him for directions, a hidden sniper kills the hated King's agent. David is denounced as a conspirator and flees for his life, but by chance reunites with Alan. The youth believes Breck to be the assassin, but Alan denies responsibility. The pair flee from Redcoat search parties until they reach James (Stewart) of the Glens, whose family is burying their hidden store of weapons and burning papers that could incriminate them. James tells the travellers that he will have no choice but to "paper" them (distribute printed descriptions of the two with a reward listed), but provides them with weapons and food for their journey south, and David with a change of clothes (which the printed description will not match). Alan and David then begin their flight through the heather, hiding from Government soldiers by day. As the two continue their journey, David's health rapidly deteriorates, and by the time they are set upon by wild Highlanders who serve a chief in hiding, Cluny Macpherson, he is barely conscious. Alan convinces Cluny to give them shelter. The Highland Chieftain takes a dislike to David, but defers to the wily Breck's opinion of the lad. David is tended by Cluny's people and soon recovers, though in the meantime Alan loses all of their money playing cards with Cluny, only for Cluny to give it back. As David and Alan continue their flight, David becomes progressively more ill, and he nurses anger against Breck for several days over the loss of his money. The pair nearly come to blows, but eventually reach the house of Duncan Dhu, who is a brilliant piper. While staying there, Alan meets a foe of his, Robin Oig—son of Rob Roy MacGregor, who is a murderer and renegade. Alan and Robin nearly fight a duel, but Duncan persuades them to leave the contest to bagpipes. Both play brilliantly, but Alan admits Robin is the better piper, so the quarrel is resolved. Alan and David prepare to leave the Highlands and return to David's country. In one of the most humorous passages in the book, Alan convinces an innkeeper's daughter from Limekilns that David is a dying young Jacobite nobleman, in spite of David's objections, and she ferries them across the Firth of Forth. There they meet a lawyer of David's uncle, Mr. Rankeillor, who agrees to help David receive his inheritance. Rankeillor explains that David's father and uncle had once quarrelled over a woman, David's mother, and the older Balfour had married her, informally giving the estate to his brother while living as an impoverished school teacher with his wife. This agreement had lapsed with his death. David and the lawyer hide in bushes outside Ebenezer's house while Breck speaks to him, claiming to be a man who found David nearly dead after the wreck of the Covenant and is representing folk holding him captive in the Hebrides. He asks David's uncle whether to kill him or keep him. The uncle flatly denies Alan's statement that David had been kidnapped, but eventually admits that he paid Hoseason "twenty pound" to take David to "Caroliny". David and Rankeillor then emerge from their hiding places and speak with Ebenezer in the kitchen, eventually agreeing that David will be provided two-thirds of the estate's income for as long as his wicked uncle survived. The novel ends with David and Alan parting ways, Alan going to France, and David going to a bank to settle his money. At one point in the book, a reference is made to David's eventually studying at the University of Leyden, a fairly common practice for young Scottish gentry seeking a law career in the eighteenth century. |
True at First Light | Ernest Hemingway | 1,999 | The book is set in mid-20th century Kenya Colony during the Mau-Mau rebellion. In his introduction to True at First Light, Patrick Hemingway describes the Kikuyu and Kamba tribes at the time of the Mau-Mau rebellion. He explains that if the Kamba had joined the rebellion, Ernest and Mary Hemingway "would have then stood a good chance of being hacked to death in their beds as they slept by the very servants they so trusted and thought they understood." The book takes place in December while the narrator, Ernest, and his wife, Mary, are in a safari camp in the Kenyan highlands on the flank of Mt. Kilimanjaro, where they find themselves temporarily at risk when a group of Mau-Mau rebels escape from jail. The blend of travel memoir and fiction opens with the white hunter Philip Percival leaving the safari group to visit his farm, handing control of the camp to Ernest, who is worried about being attacked and robbed, because there are guns, alcohol, and food in the camp. Deputized as an assistant game warden, he makes daily rounds in the game reserve, and maintains communication with the local tribes. He is accompanied by two African game scouts, Chungo and Arap Meina and, for a period, the district game warden G.C (Gin Crazed). Other camp members include Keiti, who runs the camp, the safari cook, Mbebia, and two stewards, Nguili and Msembi. For six months Mary has been tracking a large black-maned lion, determined to finish the hunt by Christmas. In subsequent chapters, Ernest worries that Mary is unable to kill the lion for various reasons: she is too short to see the prey in the tall grass; she misses her shots with other game; and he thinks she is too soft-hearted to kill the animal. During this period, Ernest becomes entranced with Debba, a woman from a local village, whom the others jokingly refer to as his second wife. From her and the villagers he wants to learn tribal practices and customs. When Mary's lion is finally killed at the book's halfway mark, the local shamba (village) gathers for a ngoma (dance). Because she has dysentery, Mary leaves for Nairobi to see a doctor; while she is gone Ernest kills a leopard, after which the men have a protracted ngoma. When Mary returns from Nairobi, she asks Ernest for an airborne sightseeing tour of the Congo Basin as a Christmas present. Ernest describes his close relationships with the local men; indulges in memories of previous relationships with writers such as George Orwell, and D.H. Lawrence; and satirizes the role of organized religion. Subjects as diverse as the smell of the pine woods in Michigan, the nature of Parisian cafés , and the quality of Simenon's writing are treated with stream of consciousness digressions. The back of the book includes a section titled "Cast of Characters", a Swahili glossary, and the editor's acknowledgments. |
Airport | Arthur Hailey | 1,968 | The story takes place at Lincoln International, a fictional Chicago airport based very loosely on O'Hare International Airport. The action mainly centers on Mel Bakersfeld, the Airport General Manager. His devotion to his job is tearing apart his family and his marriage to his wife Cindy, who resents his use of his job at the airport as a device to avoid going to various after-hours events she wants him to participate in, as she attempts to climb into the social circles of Chicago's elite. His problems in his marriage are further exacerbated by his romantically-charged friendship with a lovely divorcee, Trans America Airlines passenger relations manager Tanya Livingston. The story takes place mainly over the course of one evening and night, as a massive snowstorm plays havoc with airport operations. The storyline centers on Bakersfeld's struggles to keep the airport open during the storm. His chief problem is the unexpected closure of primary Runway 30 (runway 29 in the subsequent film), caused when a landing airliner turns off past the wrong side of a runway marker light, burying the plane's landing gear in the snow, and blocking the runway. This becomes a major problem as another airplane, Trans America Flight Two, experiences a midair emergency and returns to Lincoln. This requires that runway 30 be made operational---at any cost. The closing of runway 30 requires the use of shorter runway 25 (runway 22 in the subsequent film), which has the unfortunate consequence of causing planes to take off over a noise-sensitive suburb, whose residents picket the airport in protest. The shorter runway 25 is also later inadequate to land the returning airplane, which has suffered major structural and mechanical damage due to explosive decompression caused by the detonation of the bomb brought on board. The book presents an overview of the vast and complex operations involved in operating a major commercial airport, much of which is still applicable over 40 years later. Several major and minor characters appear, illustrating the vast complexity of the airport and its operations. They include Customs officers, lawyers, snow clearers, airport police, doctors, clerks etc. |
One Touch of Venus | S. J. Perelman | null | A long-lost, priceless statue of the goddess Venus is found and placed on display in an art museum in New York. A slow but good-hearted window dresser, Rodney Hatch, kisses the statue when intoxicated. The sculpture comes to life, and the two fall in love, although Rodney is already engaged. Farcical complications ensue, and Rodney takes "Venus" to the model-display house in the store, where the store's boss finds her. He, too, falls in love with her and makes her Glamour Girl Number One. Rodney and Venus dance in Central Park, but Rodney is arrested for stealing the statue. Venus then goes to the boss to convince him to drop charges against Rodney. Unfortunately, she must return back to her marble state, so Venus goes back to her pedestal and Rodney is released. While Rodney is sadly preparing for another unveiling of a now-marble Venus, a new employee asks him a question where the model-display house is. She tells him her name is Venus Jones, and she is an exact double of the sculpture Venus. Surprised, Rodney takes her to see the model home himself. |
The Death of Ivan Ilyich | Leo Tolstoy | 1,886 | Ivan Ilyich lives a carefree life that is "most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible." Like everyone he knows, he spends his life climbing the social ladder. Enduring marriage to a woman whom he often finds too demanding, he works his way up to be a magistrate, thanks to the influence he has over a friend who has just been promoted, focusing more on his work as his family life becomes less tolerable. While hanging curtains for his new home one day, he falls awkwardly and hurts his side. Though he does not think much of it at first, he begins to suffer from a pain in his side. As his discomfort grows, his behavior towards his family becomes more irritable. His wife finally insists that he visit a physician. The physician cannot pinpoint the source of his malady, but soon it becomes clear that his condition is terminal. Confronted with his diagnosis, Ivan attempts every remedy he can to obtain a cure for his worsening situation until the pain grows so intense he is forced to cease working and spend the remainder of his days in bed. Here, he is brought face to face with his mortality, and realizes that although he knows of it, he does not truly grasp it. During the long and painful process of death, Ivan dwells on the idea that he does not deserve his suffering because he has lived rightly. If he had not lived a good life, there could be a reason for his pain; but he has, so pain and death must be arbitrary and senseless. As he begins to hate his family for avoiding the subject of his death, for pretending he is only sick and not dying, he finds his only comfort in his peasant boy servant Gerasim, the only person in Ivan's life who does not fear death, and also the only one who, apart from his own son, shows compassion for him. Ivan begins to question whether he has, in fact, lived a good life. In the final days of his life, Ivan makes a clear split between an artificial life, such as his own, which masks the true meaning of life and makes one fear death, and an authentic life, the life of Gerasim. Authentic life is marked by compassion and sympathy; the artificial life by self-interest. Then "some force" strikes Ivan in the chest and side, and he is brought into the presence of a bright light. His hand falls onto his nearby son's head, and Ivan pities his son. He no longer hates his daughter or wife, but rather feels pity for them, and hopes his death will release them. Insodoing, his terror of death leaves him, and as Tolstoy suggests, death itself disappears. |
The 12.30 from Croydon | Freeman Wills Crofts | null | Set in Yorkshire and London in 1933, The 12.30 from Croydon is about 35 year-old Charles Swinburn, the owner of a factory in Cold Pickerby, Yorkshire, in which electric motors are produced. Swinburn has inherited the works from his father and uncle. While the former has been dead for many years, Andrew Crowther, his uncle, leads a retired life in the same town. At 65, his health has recently started to deteriorate. In particular, Crowther is suffering from indigestion. Swinburn's business is hit by the Great Depression just like any other company, but when he asks his uncle for a loan to be able to avoid bankruptcy he is appalled to find that the old man, obviously no longer able to understand trends in the world economy, is unwilling to grant him a substantial sum to overcome his financial difficulties. Swinburn knows that he and his cousin Elsie will each inherit half of Crowther's fortune, so he does not see why he cannot have some of the money a bit earlier—"an advance on his legacy". At this point the first thoughts that it might be feasible to kill his uncle without being found out occur to Swinburn. His unrequited love for a young woman called Una Mellor helps him come to a quick decision. "It seems a beastly thing to say", she tells him, but I may as well tell you at once that under no circumstances would I marry a poor man. This is not entirely mercenary and selfish. I shouldn't be happy without the things I am accustomed to and my husband wouldn't be happy either. To marry where there would be shortage and privation would mean misery for both of us. It would be simply foolish and I'm not going to do it. [Chapter IV] After thinking the matter over again and again, Swinburn resolves to poison his uncle with potassium cyanide. He takes all kinds of precautions when he buys the poison. Then he makes a pill that looks like one of Crowther's anti-indigestion tablets. He buys a bottle of those pills, buries the poisoned pill in that bottle, and, over dinner at his uncle's, spills a glass of wine which gives him the opportunity to exchange bottles without anyone noticing. Charles Swinburn is particularly proud of his perfect alibi. On the following morning he books a three-week cruise of the Mediterranean. When he is informed of his uncle's death, he is in Naples, Italy. To his surprise, his uncle took the pill not at home but on his first (and last) flight, the 12.30 from Croydon: The family had been alarmed by a report stating that Elsie had had an accident in France, and Crowther had insisted on coming with Elsie's father and their daughter. On arrival in France he had been found dead. An inquest is held, but Swinburn feels quite safe when no one seems to implicate him in the case. However, some time later he is approached by Weatherup, Crowther's butler, who claims he has seen him exchange the bottles, and who starts blackmailing him. Again, Swinburn sees no other solution than to "take that desperate remedy" and kill the butler. This time he cannot be as subtle as when planning his uncle's death. He brutally slays Weatherup with a piece of lead pipe and dumps his body in a nearby lake. Soon afterwards he is arrested, tried, and hanged. One of the interesting aspects of the novel is the insight the reader gains into the workings of a criminal mind. In particular, Swinburn's rationalization along utilitarian argumentative patterns must be mentioned in this context: Then he told himself that all this morality business was only an old wives' tale. He, Charles, wasn't tied up by these out-of-date considerations! What was politic was right. What was the greatest good of the greatest number? Why, that Andrew should die. What about all the men that were going to be thrown out of employment? What about the clerks? What about poor old Gairns? What about Gairns's invalid wife? Andrew Crowther's useless life could count for nothing against such a weight of human suffering. [Chapter VII] Crofts's Detective-Inspector Joseph French, who appears in several of his novels, keeps in the background during the action of The 12.30 from Croydon. He does solve the case, and explains how he did it in the final chapters of the novel, but the emphasis of the book is on the thoughts and deeds of the criminal. |
The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar | Edgar Allan Poe | 1,845 | The narrator presents the facts of the extraordinary case of Valdemar which have incited public discussion. He is interested in Mesmerism, a pseudoscience involving bringing a patient into a hypnagogic state by the influence of magnetism, a process which later developed into hypnotism. He points out that, as far as he knows, no one has ever been mesmerized at the point of death, and he is curious to see what effects mesmerism would have on a dying person. He considers experimenting on his friend Ernest Valdemar, an author whom he had previously mesmerized, and who has recently been diagnosed with phthisis (tuberculosis). Valdemar consents to the experiment and informs the narrator by letter that he will probably die in twenty-four hours. Valdemar's two physicians inform the narrator of their patient's poor condition. After confirming again that Valdemar is willing to be part of the experiment, the narrator comes back the next night with two nurses and a medical student as witnesses. Again, Valdemar insists he is willing to take part and asks the narrator to hurry, for fear he has "deferred it for too long". Valdemar is quickly mesmerized, just as the two physicians return and serve as additional witnesses. In a trance, he reports first that he is dying - then that he is dead. The narrator leaves him in a mesmeric state for seven months, checking on him daily. During this time Valdemar is without pulse, heartbeat or perceptible breathing, his skin cold and pale. Finally, the narrator makes attempts to awaken Valdemar, asking questions which are answered with difficulty, his voice seemingly coming from his swollen, blackened tongue. In between trance and wakefulness, Valdemar's tongue begs to quickly either put him back to sleep or to wake him. As Valdemar's voice shouts "dead! dead!" repeatedly, the narrator takes Valdemar out of his trance; in the process, Valdemar's entire body immediately decays into a "nearly liquid mass of loathsome—of detestable putrescence." |
Against the Fall of Night | Arthur C. Clarke | null | Diaspar is a seemingly ageless city in the year 10 billion AD; the last child, Alvin, was born seventeen years ago. Alvin is a child curious about the outside world, which, according to the earliest histories, was destroyed by the Invaders, leaving only Diaspar. Alvin's desire to see the outside world is considered an eccentricity. When Alvin wanders into a tower to watch a sunset, he finds a rock with the inscription: "There is a better way. Give my greetings to the Keeper of the Records. Alaine of Lyndar". Alvin takes the message to Rorden, the Keeper of the Records, who has access to "all the knowledge of Humanity." Rorden finds the record of the message but does not believe Alvin is ready to understand it. Three years later, Rorden discloses that not only has he been waiting for Alvin to age, but he has also been trying to find out how people in the past went outside. He and Alvin find a way out and Alvin finds a city called Lys. Expecting the city to be abandoned, Alvin is shocked when he finds a thriving place. The inhabitants are different than his own people, living short but full lives and have telepathic abilities. They know about Diaspar but they like their natural setting. Alvin is prevented from going home as the citizens do not want him to reveal Lys to the people of Diaspar. They contact Rorden, who already knew of Lys, and tell him that Alvin will stay three days to allow the council of Lys time to decide his fate. Alvin makes a friend called Theon, who has a pet giant insect (Krif). While Theon shows Alvin the woods, the boys realize they both know about the legend of Shalmirane, a fortress mentioned in the earliest human history; a fortress which defended against the invaders and signified the end of Man's conquest of space. The boys decide to find the fortress, only a day's travel away. At the fortress they discover that a large wall that defended the building survived, though its rocks were destroyed over time. When they venture into the fortress they find an old man with whom they share a meal and a story of his origins; he was a follower of the Master. This Master came from space during the recovery following the invasion, attracting followers with his powers and machines. When he was dying, he spoke of the "Great Ones" returning. His followers made this into a religion. The religion has been dying, and the old man is one of the few remaining followers; he also has a few of the Master's machines. Alvin asks to borrow one of the old man's robots so he can bring it to Rorden. The boys return to Lys, and Alvin is told to either stay in Lys forever, or return to Diaspar without his memories. Alvin agrees to the mind wipe, but programs the robot to grab him before his mind is wiped and take him to the transit station. He returns home, where he finds Rorden, and they look under the city, where robots are made and repaired by other robots. A repair robot tells them it cannot fix Alvin's robot, but duplicates it. The council questions Alvin and threatens to seal the path to Lys. Alvin shows Rorden a ship, buried under the sands outside the city, that was the Master's ship. Alvin decides to take the ship and go to Lys to return the robot. He meets Theon and speaks with Lys' Council, telling them that Diaspar knows about Lys. Lys realizes that through the appearance of the ship, both of their cultures will be forced to interact. Alvin travels to Shalmirane to return the robot, only to find the Old Man dead, with his robots left to forever guard him. Alvin takes his ship into space, towards an abnormal set of stars. He arrives at the middle star and meets an alien being that is no more than a child but has memories going back further than any human. The alien being, Vanamonde, is convinced that Alvin is the creator it has been waiting for. It follows Alvin home, where people from Lys and Diaspar meet to study it, each using their strengths to learn more about their history. They learn that the history they have known is false. Man only reached Persephone when space came to them, and they found species far greater than Man. They learned from them and decided to grow themselves as humanity before exploring space. They spent half a billion years perfecting the ability to live for infinite amount of time, like Diaspar, or with telepathic abilities, like those in Lys. After improving themselves, they tried to create a pure mentality, a being that was free from physical limitations. They succeeded in creating a pure being, but it was insane. The Mentality, called the Mad Mind, almost destroyed the galaxy, and is now locked up, waiting for the time when its bonds break again. After that they created Vanamonde who is destined to meet (and fight) the Mad Mind at the end of time. |
Jitterbug Perfume | Tom Robbins | null | A powerful and righteous 8th century king named Alobar narrowly escapes regicide at the hands of his own subjects, as it is their custom to kill the king at the first sign of aging. After fleeing, no longer a king but a simple peasant, he travels through Eurasia, and eventually meets the goat-god Pan, who is slowly losing his powers as the world turns toward Christianity. In India, he meets a girl, Kudra, who goes on to become his wife. As with most of Robbins' couples, their mutual libido is enormous, and their love quite like something out of a fairy tale. After an encounter with a mysterious group known as "The Bandaloop Doctors," Alobar is set down the path towards eternal life, which, according to Robbins, can be attained by a consistent ritual of controlled breath work, simple eating, sex, and bathing in extremely hot water. Alobar and Kudra, successful in their immortality, travel about Europe until the 17th century, when they attempt a sort of new transcendental meditation and become separated into different astral planes. Meanwhile, in present-day, a "genius waitress" named Priscilla struggles with a difficult job in a low-end Mexican restaurant. Priscilla is an amateur perfumer, and is obsessed with trying to locate the base note in recreating a fragrance, something she believes will be almost magical, from a three-hundred-year-old perfume bottle in her possession. While dealing with this, she juggles the unwanted advances of a lesbian co-worker, has a brief affair with an eccentric millionaire obsessed with eternal life, and contemplates the mysterious deliveries of beets to her apartment. In New Orleans, Priscilla's stepmother, the Madame Devalier, a once successful perfumer, is also working to recreate the same fragrance as Priscilla, after her assistant, V'lu re-liberated the ancient bottle . Madame Devalier is intent on restoring her name in the business, and discontinuing the production items one might construe as shady. She seeks something magical using the ultra ingredient Jamaican jasmine supplied by a mysterious man with the helmet of swarming bees, Bingo Pajama. In Paris, the LeFever Parfumaire is concerned about their eccentric leader, Marcel, who equates smell as the most important factor in the forward movement of the evolutionary process. After witnessing an eclipse, he is obsessed with his own scent. The story lines eventually converge into a climax in New Orleans, with a brief stop in another dimension. The main message is summarized in the dying words of Albert Einstein, spoken in Alobar's 8th century Bohemian dialect Erleichda, loosely translated as "lighten up". |
Kitchen | Banana Yoshimoto | 1,988 | In Kitchen, a young Japanese woman named Mikage Sakurai struggles to overcome the death of her grandmother. She gradually grows close to one of her grandmother's friends, Yuichi, from a flower shop and ends up staying with him and his transgender mother, Eriko. From Mikage's love of kitchens to her job as a culinary teacher's assistant to the multiple scenes in which food is merely present, Kitchen is a short window into the life of a young Japanese woman and her discoveries about food and love amongst a background of tragedy. In Moonlight Shadow, a woman named Satsuki loses her boyfriend Hitoshi in an accident and tells us: "The night he died my soul went away to some other place and I couldn't bring it back". She becomes friendly with his brother Hiiragi, whose girlfriend died in the same crash. On one insomniac night out walking she meets a strange woman called Urara who has also lost someone. Urara introduces her to the mystical experience of The Weaver Festival Phenomenon, which she hopes will cauterise their collective grief. |
Death Wish | Brian Garfield | 1,972 | Paul Benjamin is a CPA in New York and lifelong liberal. However, his staid life is overturned when his daughter, Carol, and spouse, Esther, are attacked by muggers. His wife does not survive the attack, and his traumatized daughter is left in a vegetative state. Forced to reevaluate his views, Benjamin becomes paranoid and eager for vengeance. After a trip to Arizona, a friend gives him a revolver as a gift. Benjamin shoots a mugger who accosts him. Benjamin continues to take justice into his own hands, drawing would-be muggers into traps by using himself as the bait. In one case, he rents a car, pulls it over to the side of the road, and writes an "Out of Gas" sign on the vehicle. He then hides, waiting for someone to steal the car. When some lawbreakers do so, he shoots them. It is only within the last fifty pages of the first novel that Benjamin slays his first victim. The second novel, Death Sentence, states that Benjamin murdered seventeen people over five weeks. |
Peter Camenzind | Hermann Hesse | 1,904 | The novel begins with the phrase, "In the beginning was the myth. God, in his search for self-expression, invested the souls of Hindus, Greeks, and Germans with poetic shapes and continues to invest each child's soul with poetry every day." The novel is purely poetical, and its protagonist in time aspires to become a poet who invests the lives of men with reality in its most beautiful of forms. Peter Camenzind easily reminds one of Hesse's other protagonists, i.e. Siddhartha, Goldmund, and Harry Haller. Like them, he suffers deeply and undergoes many intellectual, physical, and spiritual journeys. In the course of his many journeys, he will come to experience the diverse landscapes of Germany, Italy, France, and Switzerland, as well as the wide range of emotions that humans exhibit at different stages in their lives. In a later stage of his life, he will embody the ideal of St. Francis as he cares for a cripple. Peter Camenzind, as a youth, leaves his mountain village with a great ambition to experience the world and to become one of its denizens. Having experienced the loss of his mother at an early age, and with a desire to leave behind a callous father, he heads to university. As he progresses through his studies, he meets and falls in love with the painter, Erminia Aglietti and becomes a close friend to a young pianist named Richard. Greatly saddened because of the latter's death, he takes up wandering to soak up the diverse experiences of life. Ever faced with the vicissitudes of life, he continually takes up alcohol as a means to confront the harshness and inexplicable strangeness of life. He also meets and falls in love with Elizabeth, even though she will later marry another man. However, his journey through Italy changes him in many respects and enhances his ability to love life and see beauty within all things. It is only when he becomes friends with Boppi, an invalid, does he truly experience what it means to love other human beings. In time, he comes to see a wonderful reflection of humanity in its most noble of forms in Boppi, and the two forge an indelible friendship. After Boppi dies, Peter Camenzind returns to his village and takes care of his aging father, even as he plans out the completion of his life's great work. |
The High King | Lloyd Alexander | 1,968 | The story is set only days after the conclusion of Taran Wanderer. It is nearly winter, less than two years after events of The Castle of Llyr. Taran and his companion Gurgi return from wandering to Caer Dallben, in haste after getting news from Kaw the crow that Princess Eilonwy has returned from the Isle of Mona. Indeed they find her at home, along with her escort King Rhun of Mona and the former giant Glew who had been magically restored to human size by potion from Dallben. Taran knows himself now and he is determined to propose marriage to Eilonwy. Before he gets to it, the bard-king Fflewddur Fflam and his mount Llyan arrive with a gravely injured Gwydion, Prince of Don. Servants of Arawn had ambushed them and seized the magical black sword Dyrnwyn. Fortunately their purpose was to secure it and depart. How did Taran escape, Fflewddur asks? Evidently Arawn himself came from Annuvin to the verge of Caer Dallben in the guise of Taran, with no more than the powers of Taran, in order to snare them. Because Dyrnwyn may be pivotal as a threat to Arawn, Dallben consults the oracular pig Hen Wen to determine how it may be regained. During the reading, the ash rods used to communicate shatter and the two thirds of Hen Wen's answer are discouraging and vague. When Gwydion heals sufficiently, he sets out with Taran and others to meet with King Smoit. Gwydion insists that he alone should enter Annuvin to seek the sword, but Smoit's Cantrev Cadiffor is on the way. The small party divides for Rhun and Eilonwy to visit the ships of Mona en route. When Gwydion, Taran, and others reach Caer Cadarn, they are imprisoned by Magg, former Chief Steward of Mona and traitor. He and a small force have previously imprisoned King Smoit and imprisoned or deceived his men. When Eilonwy approaches with the other party, she detects something amiss and they cautiously send Fflewddur Fflam to the gate as a bard traveling alone. After entertaining soldiers for a night, he returns with the bad news. Gwystyl of the Fair Folk is also outside the stronghold, en route home after closing the waypost near Annuvin, personally bearing his final observations to King Eiddileg. Eilonwy takes him by surprise and he reluctantly reveals the voluminous Fair Folks stores concealed in his cloak. With his personal assistance, and stocked with magical smokes, fires, and concealments, all but King Rhun (with their mounts) break in and free the prisoners. The plan goes awry, however; King Smoit and his men are finally able to regain control only by Rhun's intervention, which costs his life. Learning from Gwystyl that the Huntsmen and Cauldron-Born of Annuvin are active outside that realm, Gwydion turns from the quest for Dyrnwyn to planning for battle, presumably first at Caer Dathyl. Gwystyl, Fflewddur, and Taran leave separately to support from the Fair Folk, the northern realms (Fflewddur's small kingdom is northeast), and the Free Commots where Taran wandered the last couple years (southeast). Meanwhile, unknown to Gwydion, the pet crow Kaw has been attacked by gwythaints while spying near Annuvin. Chased far east, he manages to reach Medwyn and that guardian of animals has raised the alarm, asking all the creatures of air and land to oppose the forces of Arawn. Taran, Coll, Eilonwy and Gurgi travel under the unfinished banner of the White Pig on a green field, designed and embroidered by Eilonwy. Taran musters the Commots, and sends them marching in groups to Caer Dathyl while the smiths and weavers rallied by Hevydd and Dwyvach work day and night to equip them. They people rally "to the banner of the White Pig because ... it is the banner of our friend Taran Wanderer".(ch 9) Soon after Taran and the last Commots reach Caer Dathyl, King Pryderi arrives from the western realms (northwest). In council he announces his new allegiance to Arawn, for the good of all, because "Arawn will do what the Sons of Don have failed to do: Make an end of endless wars among the cantrevs, and bring peace where there was none before."(ch 11) He is rejected utterly but permitted to return unharmed to his command of the greatest army. Battle begins next day. Although the Sons of Don and allies have the best of it, the Cauldron-Born arrive en masse before evening, bearing a great ram. The attack parts for their remorseless march to the gates, which they finally burst and then raze the fortress overnight. High King Math and most inside defenders are killed, and Gwydion is proclaimed High King in camp. The Cauldron-Born have never before left Annuvin in numbers. Gwydion determines that the best chance is to attack while it is guarded by mortal men alone. He will lead the Sons of Don to waiting ships on the north coast, and attack by sea, while Taran leads the Commots to delay the Cauldron-Born return march (their power wanes with time and distance from Annuvin). There is no time to wait for other allies to arrive. Taran and his army reinforce a broken wall and "man" it with branches; they are able to hold the tired Cauldron-Born warriors beyond arm's length by brute force, and turn the march from a straight and easy route into the rugged hills. Thanks to a company of Fair Folk, and to the wolves and bears, they destroy most of the Huntsmen who accompany and lead the undead. At last the Cauldron-Born break free of the hills and return to the lowland route, however. Regaining strength as they near Annuvin, it would be futile for the exhausted allies to meet them again head-on. Inevitably they will march the long, easy route to Arawn's stronghold. Taran and the remainder of his army finally reach Annuvin by the direct route, led by Doli into the mountains and by Achren almost over the peak of Mount Dragon. Taran sees that victory is nearly in Gwydion's hands, already in the courtyards of the stronghold. But the march of the Cauldron-Born looks to be just in time to smash the attackers, and a few of the undead break ranks to march up and meet him. At the last, after hurling stone upon the warriors, and tipping the great "dragon" rock off the very summit to roll down, he finds the sword Dyrnwyn uncovered there. He draws the blade, whose flame dismays even the only the undead warrior to reach him. With it he slays the one, and all of his brethren die as well, crying out for the first and only time. After the chaotic defeat of Arawn's forces, the companions gather before the Great Hall. Achren identifies Arawn in the form of a serpent near to striking Taran, and grabs him; he strikes her fatally, but cannot strike again before Taran cleaves him with Dyrnwyn. Then the sword begins to fade, losing its magic. The stronghold bursts in flame and falls in ruins. Eilonwy and Chief Bard Taliesin are able to read the old inscription on the scabbard: "Draw Dyrnwyn, only thou of noble worth, to rule with justice, to strike down evil. Who wields it in good cause shall slay even the Lord of Death." The allies travel to Caer Dallben by ship. Gwydion tells that in victory the Sons of Don, with all kinsmen and kinswomen, must return to the Summer Country. Indeed, all those who still have magic will depart. "All enchantments shall pass away", the Fair Folk have shut down surface wayposts and closed their realm. Dallben and Eilonwy with personal powers must go, and others who have served well have the option, Taran among them. He proposes to Eilonwy at last, and she accepts of course. They will embark again tomorrow. Overnight, Taran is uncomfortable about his decision. The witches Orddu, Orwen and Orgoch appear as beautiful young women and reveal that they too are departing, and leaving him with the unfinished tapestry of his life. He realizes there is much work to be done to rebuild Prydain, and he has made many promises, so he determines to remain behind. Eilonwy is able to give up her magical nature magically, in order to remain with him, and the two are married. Dallben reveals that Taran completes a path prophesied in the Book of Three whereby an orphan of "no station in life" would succeed the Sons of Don as High King. Eventually, Dallben traveled to seek such a one and try to hasten the day; he found a baby hidden in the trees beside a battlefield of great carnage, without any token of parentage. Taran receives many gifts including The Book of Three itself, although "it no longer foretells what is to come, only what has been". In it Dallben writes a conclusion, "And thus did an Assistant Pig-Keeper become High King of Prydain." In time, only the bards knew the truth of it. |
The Diary of a Young Girl | Anne Frank | 1,947 | During the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands Anne Frank began to keep a diary on June 14, 1942, two days after her 13th birthday, and twenty two days before going into hiding with her mother Edith Frank, father Otto Frank, sister Margot Frank and three other people, Hermann van Pels, Auguste van Pels, and Peter van Pels. The group went into hiding in the sealed-off upper rooms of the annex of her father's office building in Amsterdam. The sealed-off upper-rooms also contained a hidden door behind which the Franks would hide during the parts when Nazi soldiers were investigating the buildings for harbored Jews. Mrs. van Pels' dentist, Fritz Pfeffer, joined them four months later. In the published version, names were changed: the van Pels are known as the Van Daans and Fritz Pfeffer is known as Mr. Dussel. With the assistance of a group of Otto Frank's trusted colleagues, they remained hidden for two years and one month, until their betrayal in August 1944, which resulted in their deportation to Nazi concentration camps. Of the group of eight, only Otto Frank survived the war. Anne died in Bergen-Belsen from a typhus infection in early March, shortly (about two weeks) before liberation by British troops in April 1945. |
Gathering Blue | Lois Lowry | 2,000 | Kira is a girl with a twisted leg who lives in a more primitive society where people who can't work die. She has been kept alive by her mother, and, when her mother dies, is brought before the Council of Guardians. Kira's life is spared when she proves she can embroider well, and is assigned to the task of fixing up the robe worn by the singer whose only job is to sing the story of human civilization once a year. She meets Thomas, the boy whose duty is to carve the Singer's staff; and, when running out of thread, begins making a trip to the hut of Annabella, an old woman who teaches Kira dyeing. Annabella shows her the plants needed to make every color, except for blue. Kira slowly learns that her life is less than idyllic. She hears crying in her building, and she and Thomas discover another orphan girl whose ability is to sing and will eventually replace the current Singer. The orphan girl is scolded and punished if she doesn't sing; Kira befriends her but realize that she, Thomas, and the orphan girl do not have as much freedom as thought. At the Ceremony, she sees the Singer (whose robe she is fixing). She realizes that his feet are chained, and he is essentially a prisoner. The implication is that she and the others with Gifts are also prisoners. Kira is also friends with a boy named Matt. Matt tells Kira of a village he once came across while lost in the woods. This village has blue. When the day that the Singer sings his song comes, Matt is nowhere to be found. He eventually returns with a blind man from the village in a blue shirt. The man, it turns out, is the father whom Kira thought was dead. He now lives in a community made up of injured and disabled people who help one another. He has enemies on the council and is forced to return, while Kira decides to stay in the village to continue to mend the singer's robe and help improve the society she lives in. |
Messenger | Lois Lowry | 2,004 | Lowry introduced Matty in Messenger; he is an energetic and impatient individual who is undergoing an awkward transition into adulthood as the story begins. Matty lives with Seer, an "unseeing" man who the people of the Village rescued years before. Matty is desperate for his new name to be "Messenger," which he feels is what he is best as being himself. Many of the people in Village are like Seer: cast out from their old communities and sometimes seriously injured by a Jamison, Kira's mentor & protector from Gathering Blue.They have made themselves new homes in Village. Most of the Villagers are reasonably altruistic, and they are never lacking those to help a Villager overcome some disability. Matty is from a community wherein people only know what the community tells them, and where those who do not fit the norm are usually put to death. Outside the safe boundaries of Village is Forest, a foreboding realm which most of the Villagers fear. In spite of the lack of dangerous beasts, Forest itself is animated. It is capable of delivering "Warnings" in the form of injuries caused by such things as sharp twigs, stinging insects, or poisonous plants, all of which attack with deliberate intent. If the person warned enters the forest again, it will kill them. Matty, whom Forest seems to favor, has gone through Forest many times without incident. Consequently, he has become Village's messenger, carrying word to the other communities scattered throughout the region. At one point, Jonas (called "Leader" in this book) says that he received a barge full of books from the community, and that the community has changed. Very early in the book, discord appears in Village. People who trade at a gathering called Trade Mart change from compassionate and generous to angry and impatient. The temperament of the Villagers changes, and they decide to close their borders, no longer permitting the displaced and unwanted of other communities to enter. Seer, in the wake of this sudden change, decides to send Matty to travel through the Forest to retrieve his daughter, Kira, who lives in a town several days away. The journey soon becomes gravely perilous, as the Forest begins to attempt to entangle Kira and Matty. Leader's ability of remote viewing, which the book often refers to as "seeing beyond", allows him to sense the danger. He enters the forest to save them, only to be captured himself. Kira, who has the ability to weave prophecy-like patterns in thread and cloth, uses her gift to contact Leader, who tells her to have Matty use his gift to save them. This gift is a special ability which Matty possesses but hardly understands, which makes him mad, resulting in a fury; a power of healing, which causes wholeness from the inside out. Matty puts his hands to the ground and manages to restore the integrity of Forest and people alike, at the expense of his own life. Leader names Matty the Healer. Near the end is a quotation of poetry, derived from To An Athlete Dying Young: "Today, the road all runners come/Shoulder-high we bring you home/And set you at your threshold down/Townsman of a stiller town." This is spoken by the Village's schoolteacher, known as Mentor. On a side note, in the previous book, Gathering Blue, when Matty was a child known as Matt, the nursing of his dog Branch back to health could be a possible foreshadowing of Matty's healing powers. |
The Man Who Counted | null | null | First published in Brazil in 1949, O Homem que Calculava is a series of tales in the style of the Arabian Nights, but revolving around mathematical puzzles and curiosities. The book is ostensibly a translation by Brazilian scholar Breno de Alencar Bianco of an original manuscript by Malba Tahan, a thirteenth century Persian scholar of the Islamic Empire – both equally fictitious. The first two chapters tell how Malba Tahan was traveling from Samarra to Baghdad when he met Beremiz Samir, a young lad with amazing mathematical abilities. The traveler then invited Beremiz to come with him to Baghdad, where a man with his abilities will certainly find profitable employment. The rest of the book tells various incidents that befell the two men along the road and in Baghdad. In all those events, Beremiz Samir uses his abilities with calculation like a magic wand to amaze and entertain people, settle disputes, and find wise and just solutions to seemingly unsolvable problems. In the first incident along their trip (chapter III), Beremiz settles a heated inheritance dispute between three brothers. Their father had left them 35 camels, of which 1/2 (17.5 camels) should go to his eldest son, 1/3 (11.666... camels) to the middle one, and 1/9 (3.888... camels) to the youngest. To solve brother's dilemma, Beremiz convinces Malba to donate his only camel to the dead man's estate. Then, with 36 camels, Beremiz gives 18, 12, and 4 animals to the three heirs, making all of them profit with the new share. Of the remaining two camels, one is returned to Malba, and the other is claimed by Beremiz as his reward. The translator's notes observe that a variant of this problem, with 17 camels to be divided in the same proportions, is found in hundreds of recreational mathematics books, such as those of E. Fourrey (1949) and G. Boucheny (1939). However, the 17-camel version leaves only one camel at the end, with no net profit for the estate's executor. At the end of the book, Beremiz uses his abilities to win the hand of his student and secret love Telassim, the daughter of one of the Caliph's advisers. (The caliph mentioned is Al-Musta'sim, and the time period ends with the Abbasid dynasty's collapse.) In the last chapter we learn that Malba Tahan and Beremiz eventually moved to Constantinople, and there they lived long and pleasant lives. |
Boomeritis | Ken Wilber | null | The protagonist, "Ken Wilber", is a brilliant MIT student studying artificial intelligence. Ken believes that the future of evolution includes the departure of human consciousness from the physical realm, or "meatspace", and the transhuman merging of human intelligence with cyberspace. Ken attends a series of lectures at an institution called the Integral Center (an obvious stand-in for the real life Integral Institute) which guides him towards a more expansive understanding of evolution and existence. These lectures are interposed with explicit descriptions of Ken's sexual fantasies with another character, Chloe. |
Veronika Decides to Die | Paulo Coelho | 1,998 | Veronica is a beautiful young woman from Ljubljana, Slovenia who appears to have the perfect life, but nevertheless decides to commit suicide by ingesting too many sleeping pills. While she waits to die, she decides to read a magazine. After seeing an article in the magazine which wittily asks "Where is Slovenia?," she decides to write a letter to the press justifying her suicide, the idea being to make the press believe that she has killed herself because people don't even know where Slovenia is. Her plan fails and she wakes up in Villete, a mental hospital in Slovenia, where she is told she has a week to live. Her presence there affects all of the mental hospital's patients, especially Zedka, who has clinical depression; Mari, who suffers from panic attacks; and Eduard, who has schizophrenia, and with whom Veronika falls in love. During her internment in Villete she realises that she has nothing to lose and can therefore do what she wants, say what she wants and be who she wants without having to worry about what others think of her; as a mental patient, she is unlikely to be criticized. Because of this newfound freedom Veronika experiences all the things she never allowed herself to experience, including hatred and love. In the meantime, Villete's head psychiatrist, Dr. Igor, attempts a fascinating but provocative experiment: can you "shock" someone into wanting to live by convincing her that death is imminent? Like a doctor applying defibrillator paddles to a heart attack victim, Dr. Igor's "prognosis" jump-starts Veronika's new appreciation of the world around her. |
Attack Poodles and Other Media Mutants | James Wolcott | null | Wolcott takes as his subject matter popular right-wing pundits whom he dubs "attack poodles". These include such TV figures as Bill O'Reilly, Michael Savage, Chris Matthews, Dennis Miller, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Peggy Noonan, and Robert Novak. He asserts their simplistic sloganeering which panders to disaffected Americans is destroying political discourse. Attack Poodles and Other Media Mutants ISBN 1-4013-5212-X |
Number 31328 | null | null | The story starts in Aidini, and takes us through the first days of the Turkish occupation. The way to amele taburu is slowly but steadily painted in pale and crimson, in the red bloodstained steps of bare wounded feet walking on hot summer sand. The life of the captives, as seen through the eyes of one who lived through these horrific experiences numbs the spirit of the reader too. The few bright sparks of humanity in a wasteland of inhumanity are treasured, as people are treated as if worthless: struck to death with hammers, lethally wounded and left to die alone, raped and then killed. All hope and all light is lost, despite the occasional effort by the prisoners to help each other—sincere at first, then worn down and half-hearted, until at last utter indifference. |
The Songlines | Bruce Chatwin | 1,987 | In the book Chatwin develops his thesis about the primordial nature of Aboriginal song. The writing does not shy away from the actual condition of life for present day indigenous Australians, it does not present the songlines as a new-age fad but from an appreciation of the art and culture of the people for whom they are the keystone of the Real. While the book's first half chronicles the main character's travels through Outback Australia and his various encounters, the second half is dedicated to his musings on the nature of man as nomad and city builder. The basic idea that Chatwin posits is that language started as song, and the aboriginal Dreamtime sings the land into existence. A key concept of aboriginal culture is that the aboriginals and the land are one. By singing the land, the land itself exists; you see the tree, the rock, the path, the land. What are we if not defined by our environment? And in one of the harshest environments on Earth one of our oldest civilizations became literally as one with the country. This central concept then branches out from Aboriginal culture, as Chatwin combines evidence gained there with preconceived ideas on the early evolution of man, and argues that on the African Savannah we were a migratory species, moving solely on foot, hunted by a dominant brute predator in the form of a big cat: hence the spreading of "songlines" across the globe, eventually reaching Australia (Chatwin notes their trajectory generally moves from north-east to south-west) where they are now preserved in the world's oldest living culture. |
In Watermelon Sugar | Richard Brautigan | 1,968 | Through the narrator's first person account we hear the story of the people and the events of iDEATH. The central tension is created by Margaret, once a lover of the narrator, and inBOIL, a rebellious man who has left iDEATH to live near a forbidden area called the Forgotten Works. It is a huge trash heap where the remnants of a former civilization lie abandoned in great piles. Margaret, a collector of such 'forgotten things', is friendly with inBOIL and his followers, who explore the place and make whiskey. inBOIL's separation from the group may have been related to the annihilation of 'The Tigers', killed many years previously by the people. It is unknown to the reader whether 'The Tigers' were actual tigers, human beings or somehow anthropomorphic: while the tigers would kill and eat people (including the narrator's parents) they could also talk, sing, play musical instruments and were at least competent with arithmetic. Two tigers were killed on a bridge (known later as 'the abandoned bridge'). The last tiger was killed on a spot later developed into a trout farm. In the violent climax of the novel, inBOIL returns to the community along with a handful of followers, planning, he says, to show the residents what iDEATH really is. The residents know only that "something" is about to happen—for all they know, inBOIL could be plotting to kill them all. Margaret appears oblivious to the threats, and unconcerned about the safety of her own family and friends. Many suspect that Margaret knew and did not reveal details of inBOIL's real plan, thus "conspiring" with the evil men. She is semi-ostracized from iDEATH, and at the beginning of the novel the narrator reveals he had ended their relationship because of these events. |
The Kraken Wakes | John Wyndham | null | The novel describes escalating phases of what appears to be an invasion of Earth by never-seen aliens, as told through the eyes of Mike Watson, who works for the English Broadcasting Company with his wife and co-reporter Phyllis. A major role is also played by Professor Alastair Bocker – more clear-minded and far-sighted about the developing crisis than everybody else, but with the habit of telling brutally unvarnished and unwanted truths. Mike and Phyllis are witness to several major events of the invasion, which proceeds in a series of drawn-out phases; it in fact takes years before the bulk of humanity even realize that their world has been invaded. In the first phase, objects from outer space land in the oceans. Mike and Phyllis happen to see five of the "meteors" falling into the sea, from the ship where they are sailing on their honeymoon. Eventually the distribution of the objects' landing points – always at ocean deeps, never on land – implies intelligence. The aliens are speculated to come from a gas giant, and thus can only survive under conditions of extreme pressures in which humans would be instantly crushed. The deepest parts of the oceans are the only parts of Earth in any way useful to them, and they presumably have no need or use for the dry land or even the shallower parts of the seas. In theory, the two species could have co-existed indefinitely, hardly noticing each other's presence. Humanity nevertheless feels threatened by this new phenomenon – particularly since the newcomers show signs of intensive work to adapt the ocean deeps to their needs. A British bathysphere is sent down to investigate, and is destroyed by the aliens. The British government responds by exploding a nuclear device on the spot. As it turns out, the aliens have more means of getting at the humans than the other way around; a similar American attempt ends in disaster. Moreover, humanity is not united in the face of the mounting threat – the Cold War between West and East is well under way, with the two sides often suspiciously attributing the effects of the alien attacks to their human opponents, to the point the invasion threatens to trigger a nuclear exchange. Phase two of the war starts when ships all over the globe begin to be attacked by unknown weapons and are rapidly sunk, causing havoc to the world economy. Shortly after, the aliens also start 'harvesting' the land by sending up biological 'sea tanks' which capture humans from seaside settlements, for reasons that are never made clear; the Watsons witness one of these assaults on a Caribbean island. These attacks are eventually met with enough retaliation from the various human militaries that "...their percentage of losses mounted and their returns diminished". And so, in the final phase, the aliens begin melting the polar ice caps, causing sea levels to rise. London and other ports are inexorably flooded (the government relocates to Harrogate), causing widespread social and political collapse. The Watsons cover the ongoing story for the EBC until the radio (and organized social and political life in general) cease to exist whereupon they can only try to survive and escape a now-flooded London. At the end, scientists in Japan develop an underwater ultrasonic weapon that kills the aliens. However, the global population has been reduced to between a fifth and an eighth of its pre-invasion level, and the world's climate has been unalterably changed. As stated by the protagonist in the book itself, the book aims to demonstrate that an alien invasion of Earth could take a very different form from that in "The War of The Worlds"; publication of the book coincided with the release of 1953 film "The War of the Worlds", an adaptation of H.G. Wells' classic work which at the time got considerable attention in the general public and among SF fans in particular. |
Aristoi | Walter Jon Williams | 1,992 | Gabriel, a minor Aristos, runs a group of planets containing societies devoted to artistic pursuits, assisted by his several daimones, each of whom has his or her own personality and special area of interest. Attending oneirochronon parties and composing operas, having sex with both men and women (at one point, he has sex with two women at once -- one in physical reality, one in the oneirochronon) he seems to live a leisurely, decadent life. An elder Ariste, Cressida, warns Gabriel that something is up in a nearby solar system. There appear to be some extra planets in an area which astronomical surveys had said contained none. Cressida is murdered before she can explain more but Gabriel begins to suspect that Saito, the Aritos whose domain is closest to the mystery solar system, is using it for some undisclosed purpose. Gabriel and some of his advisers leave on a secret mission to the mystery solar system. When they arrive there they discover a horrifying truth: the planets contain life, human life. The most advanced of the planets contains a society similar in nature and technological development to Renaissance Europe. The people here have been left without the guidance and control of an Aristos and are mired in constant warfare and squalor, perishing of diseases which modern technology can easily cure. Someone, presumably Saito, has created human life here and consigned it to perpetual suffering for some unknown reason. Horrified by the suffering they see, Gabriel and some of his companions travel down to the planet to investigate. Posing as visitors from a distant country they identify a local nobleman who they believe to be Saito and arrange a confrontation. While they are waiting for their chance to assassinate Saito they see their spaceship, which had been orbiting the planet, destroyed. Their assassination attempt fails when they realize that the nobleman is actually an artificial lifeform. Gabriel and his companions are captured and imprisoned. It is then that Gabriel is confronted with the truth: the mastermind behind this horrifying experiment is not Saito, but Captain Yuan, the architect of the current galactic civilization who had long been presumed dead. Yuan explains his motives behind creating new life: the galactic society of the Logarchy has become staid and stultifying. Protected from any danger, the people have stopped improving and have become slaves of the Aristoi. He created this new solar system and the life within it in order to give a new start to humanity and create a society free from the restrictions of the Logarchy. Yuan, Saito, and Zhenling, an Ariste who Gabriel had considered an ally and even taken as a lover, then begin a brainwashing program on Gabriel, eventually breaking his will and convincing him to help them with minor duties on their project. However, their plan is foiled when a previously hidden sub personality of Gabriel, that he dubs The Voice, uses his computer privileges to escape. Gabriel manages to defeat Saito and escape along with his friends. He informs the rest of the Logarchy about what has happened and rallies them to a war footing. The Logarchy's forces swarm into the new solar system to provide humanitarian relief and begin to integrate the societies into the galactic society. As Yuan's secrets are revealed it is also discovered that he had tampered with the examination process which forms the backbone of the Logarchy, promoting people to Aristoi who he believed could help him and keeping others back. Captain Yuan himself has escaped to parts unknown and Gabriel makes it his life's mission to track him down and bring him to justice. As he does so he is warned by Zhenling, now imprisoned, that in doing so he will only fulfill Yuan's plan to shake up the galactic status quo. |
The Prometheus Deception | Robert Ludlum | 2,000 | The story begins with the protagonist, under the alias the Technician, who is in deep cover to stop the Hezbollah terrorist organization from overthrowing the government of Tunisia. The operation appears to be going well, until the terrorists discover that the weapons the Technician has supplied them are defective. Before the ensuing battle is over, though, Abu (the leader of the terrorist agency) manages to stab him in the abdomen. He is helicoptered out, and we next find him entering the headquarters of the Directorate. We meet his boss, Ted Waller, a lover of puzzles. Waller fires Bryson from the Directorate, saying he's lost his touch; Bryson is now told to live as a professor of Byzantine history under the alias of Jonas Barett. After some initial drunkenness and a search for oblivion because his wife, Elena, has left him, he agrees to take the job. He lives under this alias for 5 years and becomes a popular professor, until the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence at the CIA, Harry Dunne, confronts him with a shocking revelation. We learn that the Directorate is really a Russian intelligence operation created by GRU masterminds: essentially a penetration operation on American soil. He learns that his boss is really Gennady Rosovsky, who assumed the name of Ted Waller after the English poet Edmund Waller. Dunne says that Bryson's entire life, including his parents' death, was engineered by the Directorate to lead him to be a part of the agency. Every mission Bryson has undertaken was designed to hurt American interests, which horrifies him. Bryson is convinced to go after the Directorate and infiltrates a weapons tanker to find out what they're doing with weapons they're amassing. There he meets Layla, and after blowing up the tanker and amassing an arsenal, he continues to search for the Directorate; however, it seems that everywhere he goes there is a terrorist attack that follows. He pursues the trail of his former contacts with the Directorate. He meets with a former colleague, Jan Vansina, only to have Vansina killed before his eyes. At another point, when he is about to be shot by a former enemy, he is saved by Waller, who explains that Harry Dunne is really a part of Prometheus, an organization of business executives and powerful politicians around the world. The members of Prometheus are pushing the Treaty on Surveillance, which would allow for an international super-FBI, and their own Richard Lanchester (a former businessman turned politician) would be at the head. The implication is that this organization, because its members own information companies would then be able to monitor everything that went on in the world, and thereby control it. The Directorate's headquarters are destroyed, and he and his wife, Elena, united again, barely escape. He learns that money is being wired to members of the organization through a bank owned by Meredith Waterman, a respected bank. He goes to the bank headquarters and sneaks into their archives. There he learns of a business choice that forced the company to be sold to a certain Gregson Manning, the CEO of the world's largest company, Systematix, which owns health insurance companies, satellites, software, and thus many ways to get information on people. Manning, of course, is a member of Prometheus. Now, Bryson and Elena must infiltrate Manning's mansion to crash the meeting of Prometheus's leaders, days before they assume control. However, he finds Ted Waller at the mansion, escaped from the Directorate's destruction and a double agent. He is surrounded and about to be executed when a machine he's purchased, a virtual cathode oscillator, destroys the machinery in Manning's home and disables all the "smart guns" that are trained on him. Most of the guests in the mansion are trapped and killed, seemingly ending the Prometheus Group. Nick and Elena quietly move to a tropical location somewhat assured to be isolated and away from any monitoring devices. Their peace is interrupted when Waller taps into their satellite TV, and promises that they will meet again. |
Loamhedge | Brian Jacques | 2,003 | One day while Abruc the otter and his son Stugg are out foraging for food, they find the bodies of two badgers; an old one, dead, and a giant one who is barely clinging to life. The otters take the giant back to their colony, where he is revived and reveals himself to be called Lonna Bowstripe. He is told that his attacker was most likely the pirate Raga Bol, whose ship has been lost, and his crew of sea-rats, who are moving inland. Lonna vows to hunt down and kill the entire crew. Armed with his bow and arrows, he sets out to exact his revenge. Meanwhile at Redwall Abbey, there is a young hare maid named Martha Braebuck, who is totally incapable of walking, thus restricting her to a wheelchair. She is wheeled around by her hyperactive brother Hortwill Braebuck (Horty) and his friends, Springald and Fenna. While napping in front of the tapestry of Martin the Warrior, Martin and Sister Amyl appear to Martha in a dream, and she is told that the secret to make her able to walk can be found within the ancient walls of Loamhedge Abbey and that two individuals are coming that can help her. As it so happens, the two in question are Bragoon and Sarobando, two lifelong friends who ran away from the Abbey as Dibbuns. They survive by tricking small vermin bands and taking their food. This time, it's the gang of the weasel Burrad, whose numbers are at about 13. After Bragoon enters the camp (and Skrodd accidentally kills Burrad) they tell the gang that they must leave Mossflower Woods and never return. Skrodd has other plans, however, and convinces the gang to head to Redwall, where there is a rumor of a magical sword. One night, Skrodd gets killed by the rat Dargle, who gets decapitated during Skrodd's death throes. The bodies are discovered by a young fox named Little Redd (Later named Badredd), who convinces the gang he was the one who had killed Dargle. They continue on to Redwall, though no one really takes the fox seriously. Bragoon and Sarobando arrive at the Abbey during the Summer festival and are told Martha's sad story and where the cure can be found. They decide to set out to Loamhedge, but not before Horty's group asks if they can go too. When Abbot Carrul refuses, the trio create a distraction and escape the Abbey. Though they wind up being captured by Darrats, they are rescued by Bragoon and Saro, who are not too entirely pleased to see them. Since they are already fairly far from the Abbey and could risk recapture, however, they are allowed to join the quest. Meanwhile, Badredd's group has arrived at Redwall and hold it under siege by slipping in through the east wall gate. Realizing he could do with some more troops, Badredd sends Flinky and Crinktail out to recruit some new vermin. The two stoats unwittingly run into Raga Bol and his crew, who take over management of besieging the Abbey. Elsewhere, the group of questers scale the tall cliffs leading to Loamhedge and enter a cave to avoid the rain. There they find Lonna and exchange stories. Lonna encounters Martin the Warrior's spirit during the night, telling him the whereabouts of Raga Bol. Lonna sets out, and the gang from Redwall continue up the cliff face and keep walking to the ancient Abbey. At Redwall, Raga Bol continues to try to break into the Abbey. After an escapade of using a ladder to scale one of the windows, one sea rat manages to enter the Abbey and is about to kill Carrul when Martha suddenly lunges out of her chair and pushes him away, realizing she now has the ability to stand and all she needed was will power. Badredd's group managed to escape the Abbey during the battle, and Bol sends a rat named Blowfly after them. Instead of finding the escapees, Blowfly encounters Lonna, who asks him where the Abbey is and then kills him. When Lonna arrives at Redwall, he manages to kill many sea rats, and due to the efforts of the now mobile Martha, gets inside of the main building and is able to snipe out the crew from there. In a last-ditch attempt to kill the badger, Raga Bol tricks Lonna into coming out to the open where a group of spear chuckers wait to slay him. Things go wrong when Lonna seizes Bol and uses him as a living shield against the spears. Then he goes on a rampage and kills every last rat. In the meantime, the five travelers find a stream but get ambushed by reptiles. Fortunately, Sarobando sneaks out and gets Log-a-log Briggy to help them get out of the ambush. They soon get into another wasteland and get lost. When Horty finds a dormouse named Toobledum and his pet lizard Bubbub, Toobledum shows them the way to Loamhedge. The expedition to find Loamhedge has finally arrived at the dead Abbey, but all the things in Abbess Sylvaticus' grave have rotted away to nothing or turned into dust. Rather than return empty pawed, Bragoon and Saro tell the young ones to wait outside while they write their own cure, essentially saying that one just needs faith in oneself. On the way back, the group encounters the Abyss and are attacked by Kharanjul the Wearet. In an attempt to allow Horty, Fenna, and Springald to get to safety, Sarobando and Bragoon hold off the oncoming forces, eventually pushing the bridge over the edge of the abyss. Though they won the battle, the duo is badly injured, and they die shortly after. Ten seasons after they return to the Abbey, we find that Springald has become Abbey Recorder, Fenna has become Abbess, Horty has joined the Long Patrol at Salamandastron, adding the nom de guerre 'Longblade' to his name, Lonna has become ruler of Salamandastron, and Martha sings and dances on the walls every season in memory of the two who left to try to find her a cure. |
The Castle of Iron | Fletcher Pratt | 1,950 | In the wake of the events of The Mathematics of Magic, Harold Shea and his lady love Belphebe of Faerie have married and settled happily into a mundane earthly existence. But after Belphebe disappears at a picnic, Shea is questioned by the police on suspicion of foul play. The authorities also question his work colleagues at the Garaden Institute, Walter Bayard and Vaclav Polacek, and then decide to take in the three of them for further interrogation. At that point the whole group, including police officer Pete Brodsky, are spirited away to another world, that of the Xanadu which is the subject of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem Kubla Khan. After they have all languished there for a time, Shea and Polacek are pulled away from this world as well and into that represented by Ludovico Ariosto's epic, the Orlando Furioso. The person responsible for their plight turns out to be Reed Chalmers, aspiring magician and former head of the Garaden Institute, who had accompanied Shea to Faerie in his previous adventure. He had been attempting to retrieve Shea alone, but had erroneously pulled in Belphebe first, and then misplaced his three colleagues and the police officer before at last getting things (nearly) right. Aside, that is, from getting Polacek too and leaving Bayard and Brodsky stranded in Xanadu. Moreover, as Ariosto's epic was a source text for Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queen, Belphebe's mind has become confused, reverting in accord with the setting to that of her Furioso prototype, Belphagor. As a result, she now believes herself a native of the world into which they have been plunged, no longer recognizing Shea as her husband! Chalmer's goal was to seek Shea's assistance in transforming his own love, the lady Florimel, a human simulacrum magically made of snow, into a real person. It was also to that end that he himself had come to this world, where he is now the guest of the wizard Atlantès de Carena in the latter's marvelous iron castle in northern Spain. The world of the Furioso is based on Carolingian legend, and the Moorish Spain in which the extradimensional travelers find themselves is in the midst of a conflict with the Frankish empire of Charlemagne and his paladins. Somehow they must manage to negotiate their way through the delicate international politics, tiptoe around the treacherous Atlantès, achieve Chalmers' ambitions for Florimel, restore Belphebe's sanity — and survive! Beyond that there are still Bayard and Brodsky to rescue, though those are tasks for later tales... |
Repent, Harlequin! Said the Ticktockman | Harlan Ellison | 1,965 | The story opens with a passage from Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau. The story is a satirical look at a dystopian future in which time is strictly regulated and everyone must do everything according to an extremely precise time schedule. In this future, being late is not merely an inconvenience, but a crime. The crime carries a hefty penalty in that a proportionate amount of time is "revoked" from one's life. The ultimate consequence is to run out of time and be "turned off". This is done by the Master Timekeeper, or "Ticktockman", who utilizes a device called a "cardioplate" to stop a person's heart once his time has run out. The story focuses on a man named Everett C. Marm who, disguised as the anarchical Harlequin, engages in whimsical rebellion against the Ticktockman. Everett is in a relationship with a girl named pretty Alice, who is exasperated by the fact that he is never on time. The Harlequin disrupts the carefully kept schedule of his society with methods such as distracting factory workers from their tasks by showering them with thousands of multicolored jelly beans or simply using a bullhorn to publicly encourage people to ignore their schedules, forcing the Ticktockman to pull people off their normal jobs to hunt for him. Eventually, the Harlequin is captured. The Ticktockman tells him that pretty Alice has betrayed him, wanting to return to the punctual society everyone else lives in. The Harlequin sneers at the Ticktockman's command for him to repent. The Ticktockman decides not to stop the Harlequin's heart, and instead sends him to a place called Coventry, where he is converted in a manner similar to how Winston Smith is converted in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. The brainwashed Harlequin reappears in public and announces that he was wrong before, and that it is always good to be on time. At the end, one of the Ticktockman's subordinates tells the Ticktockman that he is three minutes behind schedule. The Ticktockman walks away to his office "going mrmee, mrmee, mrmee, mrmee". |
Esther: A Novel | null | null | The comic story deals with a young, freethinking socialite who falls desperately in love with an Episcopal minister. The result is a clash of intellects, a confrontation between faith and reason and a battle of the sexes. |
Leave it to Psmith | P. G. Wodehouse | 1,923 | Down at Blandings, Lord Emsworth is dismayed to hear from Baxter that he is expected to travel to London to collect the poet Ralston McTodd, invited to the castle by his sister Connie, a keen supporter of the Arts; another poet, Aileen Peavey is already installed at the castle. Joe Keeble tries to persuade his imperious wife to let him give money to his beloved stepdaughter Phyllis, but is bullied out of it, and when Emworth's feckless younger son Freddie suggests stealing Connie's necklace to free up some cash, Keeble is taken with the idea. Freddie, not keen on doing the job himself, sees Psmith's advert in the paper, and tags along to London with Lord Emsworth. Meanwhile in the metropolis, we learn that Mike, having married Phyllis on the assumption that his job as estate manager for Psmith's father would be secure, found on Mr Smith's death that the old man was bankrupt, and is working as a poorly-paid schoolmaster. Psmith worked for a time for an uncle in the fish business, but could stand the fish no longer and quit. Phyllis meets some old school friends, including Eve Halliday, an assertive young girl who pities the once-rich Phyllis, believing her too soft to cope with penury. Eve, we learn, is a friend of Freddie Threepwood, and on his encouragement has taken a post cataloguing the Blandings library, while another friend, Cynthia, has been abandoned by her husband, famous poet Ralston McTodd. Later, Psmith sees Eve sheltering from the rain opposite the Drones, and chivalrously runs out to give her the best umbrella from the club's umbrella rack. They later meet once more at an employment agency, where Psmith has come seeking work and Eve is visiting an old friend. Psmith meets up with Freddie Threepwood, who describes his scheme to steal Connie's necklace, but dashes off without revealing his name. Soon after, Psmith runs into Lord Emsworth at the Senior Conservative Club, where the Earl is dining with Ralston McTodd. The poet is annoyed by Emsworth's absent-mindedness, especially when the old man potters across the street to inspect a flower shop, and leaves in a rage. When Emsworth returns, he mistakes Psmith for his guest, and when Psmith sees Eve Halliday meeting Lord Emsworth, he decides to visit Blandings, posing as McTodd. Welcomed at the castle, especially by fellow poet Peavey, he is nevertheless suspected by the ever-vigilant Baxter, the real McTodd having telegrammed to cancel his visit. Eve arrives and Psmith begins his wooing with some success, despite her belief that he is McTodd and has jilted her friend. Freddie, worried that one of the maids is a detective, is advised by Psmith to kiss her, and judge by her response whether she is a real maid; Psmith and Eve run into him just as he is embracing the girl. One day, a stranger arrives at the house claiming to be McTodd, but Psmith turns him politely away. The man, Edward Cootes, runs into Aileen Peavey on his way back to the station, and we learn they are both crooks, estranged lovers both after the diamonds. Cootes returns to the castle, and forces Psmith to help him get in, which Psmith does, passing him off as his valet. He arranges the use of a small cottage, in case he needs to hide the jewels from Cootes. Cootes and Peavey make a plan to steal the necklace during a poetry-reading, while Eve, having heard from Freddie that Joe Keeble plans to give him money, questions Keeble about why he isn't helping out her friend; he enlists her as a helper in the diamond-stealing plot. As Psmith begins his reading of McTodd's poems, Cootes turns off the lights and Peavey grabs the necklace, flinging out of the window to where Eve is standing; she hides it in a flowerpot. Returning later to fetch it, she wakes the vigilant Baxter, but evades him, leaving him locked out and stashing her flowerpot on a windowsill. Baxter, locked out of the house in his lemon-coloured pyjamas, throws flowerpots through a window to awake Lord Emsworth, who assumes he is mad and calls in Psmith to help appease him. Next morning, Baxter is fired from his job, and Eve finds the flowerpot empty at Psmith's cottage. Enlisting Freddie's help, she searches the place, but finds nothing; Psmith enters and explains his motives, his friendship with Mike and Phyllis. Cootes and Peavey appear, armed, and threaten to escape with the necklace, but Psmith takes advantage of Freddie's leg falling through the ceiling to overpower Cootes and retrieve the jewels. Keeble gives Mike the funds he requires to buy his farm, and gives Freddie enough to get him into a bookmaking business. Psmith and Eve get engaged, and Psmith persuades Lord Emsworth to take him on as Baxter's replacement. |
Anne of Avonlea | Lucy Maud Montgomery | 1,909 | Anne is about to start her first term teaching at the Avonlea school, although she will still continue her studies at home with Gilbert, who is teaching at the nearby White Sands School. The book soon introduces Anne's new and problematic neighbor, Mr. Harrison, and his foul-mouthed parrot, as well as the twins, Davy and Dora. They are the children of Marilla's third cousin and she takes them in when their mother dies while their uncle is out of the country. Dora is a nice, well-behaved girl, somewhat boring in her perfect behaviour. Ironically Davy is an exact opposite, much more of a handful and constantly getting into many scrapes. They are initially meant to stay only a short time, but the twins' uncle postpones his return to collect the twins and then eventually dies. Both Anne and Marilla are relieved (Marilla inwardly of course) to know the twins will remain with her. Other characters introduced are some of Anne's new pupils, such as Paul Irving, an American boy living with his grandmother in Avonlea while his widower father works in the States. He delights Anne with his imagination and whimsical ways, which are reminiscent of Anne's in her childhood. Later in the book, Anne and her friends meet Miss Lavendar Lewis, a sweet but lonely lady in her 40s who had been engaged to Paul's father 25 years before, but parted from him after a disagreement. At the end of the book, Mr. Irving returns and he and Miss Lavendar marry. Anne discovers the delights and troubles of being a teacher, takes part in the raising of Davy and Dora, and organizes the A.V.I.S. (Avonlea Village Improvement Society) together with Gilbert, Diana, and Fred Wright, though their efforts to improve the town are not always successful. The Society takes up a subscription to repaint an old town hall, only to have the painter provide the wrong color of paint, turning the hall into a bright blue eyesore. Towards the end of the book, Mrs. Rachel Lynde's husband dies and Mrs. Lynde moves in with Marilla at Green Gables, allowing Anne to go to college at last. She and Gilbert make plans to attend Redmond College in the fall. This book sees Anne maturing slightly, even though she still cannot avoid getting into a number of her familiar scrapes, as only Anne can—some of which include selling her neighbor's cow (having mistaken it for her own), or getting stuck in a broken duck house roof while peeping into a pantry window. |
Anne of the Island | Lucy Maud Montgomery | 1,915 | Anne leaves Green Gables and her work as a teacher in Avonlea to pursue her original dream (which she gave up in Anne of Green Gables) of taking further education at Redmond College in Nova Scotia. Gilbert Blythe and Charlie Sloane enroll as well, as do Anne's friends from Queen's Academy, Priscilla Grant and Stella Maynard. During her first week of school, Anne befriends Philippa Gordon, a beautiful girl whose frivolous ways charm her. Philippa (Phil for short) also happens to be from Anne's birthplace of Bolingbroke, Nova Scotia. The girls spend their first year in boardinghouses and decide to set up house thereafter in a lovely cottage called Patty's Place, near campus. The girls enter their second year at Redmond happily ensconced at Patty's Place, while life continues in Avonlea. Diana Barry becomes engaged to Fred Wright and Davy and Dora continue to keep Marilla busy. Midway through their college years, Gilbert, who has always loved Anne, proposes to her but Anne rejects him; although she and Gilbert are very close, she holds sentimental fantasies about true love (all featuring a tall, dark, handsome, inscrutable hero) and does not recognize her true feelings for Gilbert. Gilbert leaves, his heart broken, and the two drift apart. Anne's childhood friend Ruby Gillis dies of consumption very soon after finding her own true love. Anne later welcomes the courtship of Roy Gardner, a darkly handsome Redmond student who showers her with attention and poetic gestures. However, when he proposes after two years, Anne abruptly realizes that Roy does not really belong in her life, and that she had only been in love with the idea of him as the embodiment of her romantic image of love. Anne is so ashamed in how she treated Roy that she feels her entire Redmond experience may have been spoiled. She returns to Green Gables, a "full-fledged B.A.", but finds herself a bit lonely. Diana gives birth to her first child, and Jane Andrews, an old school friend, marries a Winnipeg millionaire. Having received an offer to be the principal of the Summerside school in the fall, Anne is keeping herself occupied over the summer when she learns that Gilbert is gravely ill with typhoid fever. With shock, Anne finally realizes how deep her true feelings for Gilbert are, and endures a white night of fear that he will leave this world without knowing that she does care. In the morning, Anne gratefully learns that Gilbert will survive. Gilbert recovers over the summer, bolstered by a letter from Phil assuring him that there is really nothing between Anne and Roy. After several visits to Green Gables, Gilbert and Anne take a late summer walk in Hester Gray's garden, and finally become engaged. |
Anne's House of Dreams | Lucy Maud Montgomery | 1,917 | The book begins with Anne and Gilbert's wedding, which takes place in the Green Gables orchard. After the wedding, they move to their first home together, which Anne calls their "house of dreams." Gilbert finds them a small house on the seashore at Four Winds Point, an area near the village of Glen St. Mary, where he is to take over his uncle's medical practice. In Four Winds, Anne and Gilbert meet many interesting people, such as Captain Jim, a former sailor who is now the keeper of the lighthouse, and Miss Cornelia Bryant, an unmarried woman in her 40s who lives alone in an emerald-green house and deems the Blythes part of "the race that knows Joseph." Anne also meets her new neighbor, Leslie Moore, who lost her beloved brother and her father, and then was forced by her mother to marry the mean-spirited and unscrupulous Dick Moore at age 16. She felt free for a year or so after Dick disappeared on a sea voyage, but Captain Jim happened upon him in Cuba and brought him home, amnesiac, brain-damaged and generally helpless, and now dependent on Leslie like a "big baby." Leslie becomes friends with Anne, but is sometimes bitter towards her because she is so happy and free, when Leslie can never have what Anne does. Anne's former guardian Marilla visits her occasionally and still plays an important role in her life. Marilla is present when Anne gives birth to her first child, Joyce, who dies shortly after birth (as Montgomery's second son did). After the baby's death, Anne and Leslie become closer as Leslie feels that Anne now understands tragedy and pain—as Leslie puts it, her happiness, although still great, is no longer perfect, so there is less of a gulf between them. Later in the story, Leslie rents a room in her house to a writer named Owen Ford, who is the grandson of the former owners of Anne's House of Dreams, the Selywns. Owen, who is looking to write the Great Canadian Novel, finds the inspiration he was looking for in Captain Jim's shipboard diary, and transforms it into "The Life-Book of Captain Jim." While Owen is finishing the novel, he and Leslie independently realize they have feelings for each other, but both know they cannot do anything about them. Owen leaves the Island and Leslie is even more miserable being trapped in her marriage to Dick. Gilbert examines Dick Moore and suspects that if Dick underwent surgery on his skull, he might recover his faculties. Anne and Miss Cornelia are both opposed to the surgery, fearing that Leslie's life will become infinitely harder if Dick returns to himself, but Gilbert feels obligated to let Leslie know there is a chance for Dick. Leslie consents, and Dick undergoes the surgery in Montreal; when he awakens, he reveals that he is actually Dick's cousin George, who accompanied Dick to Cuba and was with him when Dick died of yellow fever twelve years before. George resembles Dick strongly because their fathers were brothers and their mothers were sisters, and both had the same peculiar eye coloring abnormality (heterochromia) by which Captain Jim recognized "Dick" in Cuba years before. Leslie, abruptly set free by this news, returns home, and considers taking a nursing course to get on with her life. Owen Ford returns to the Island to court Leslie after Miss Cornelia informs him of what has happened, and they become engaged. While this is going on, Anne gives birth to her second child, a healthy son. He is named James Matthew, for Anne's guardian Matthew Cuthbert and for Captain Jim. At the end of the book, Owen Ford's book is published, and Captain Jim dies with a smile on his face after reading his advance copy. Miss Cornelia, thought to be a confirmed spinster, announces that she has decided to marry Marshall Elliott, who may be a Grit but at least is a Presbyterian; she says she could have had him at any time but refused to marry him until he shaved his beard off, which he had refused to do for twenty years until the Grits came into power. Finally, Anne, Gilbert, Jem and their new housekeeper, Susan Baker, move to the old Morgan house in the Glen, later to be named Ingleside. Anne is greatly saddened to leave the House of Dreams, but knows that the little house is outgrown and Gilbert's work as a doctor requires him to live closer to town. This book introduces Susan Baker, the elderly spinster who is the Blythes' maid-of-all-work. |
Anne of Windy Poplars | Lucy Maud Montgomery | 1,936 | Anne of Windy Poplars takes place over the three years between Anne's graduation from Redmond College and her marriage to Gilbert Blythe. While Gilbert is in medical school, Anne takes a job as the principal of Summerside High School, where she also teaches. She lives in a large house called Windy Poplars with two elderly widows, Aunt Kate and Aunt Chatty, plus their housekeeper, Rebecca Dew, and their cat, Dusty Miller. During her time in Summerside, Anne must learn to manage many of Summerside's inhabitants, including the clannish and resentful Pringle family, her bitter colleague Katherine Brooke, and others of Summerside's more eccentric residents. Additionally, Anne befriends the young and lonely Elizabeth Grayson, a motherless member of the Pringle family who lives next door to Windy Poplars. She frequently visits Marilla at Green Gables. At the end of the novel, Anne departs Summerside, returning to Green Gables and Avonlea for her wedding to Gilbert. Upon her departure many of the town's residents express that they will greatly miss her as they have grown very fond of her or have been helped by her, including Katherine Brooke and Elizabeth Grayson. |
Anne of Ingleside | Lucy Maud Montgomery | 1,939 | Seven years after Anne's House of Dreams, Anne visits Diana Wright and her daughter, Anne Cordelia, in Avonlea following the funeral of Gilbert's father. When she returns home to the old Morgan house, now named "Ingleside", she is greeted by her five children: James Matthew ('Jem'), the eldest, now aged seven; Walter Cuthbert, who is about six and often thought to be a bit of a 'sissy' because of his love for poetry; twins Anne ('Nan') and Diana ('Di'), who are five and look nothing alike, Nan with brown hair and hazel eyes, and Di with red hair and green eyes; and finally Shirley, two years old and Susan Baker's favorite, as she took care of him as an infant while Anne was very sick following his birth. The book includes the dreadful, seemingly eternal visit of Gilbert's disagreeable, oversensitive aunt Mary Maria Blythe, whose visit was only supposed to last two weeks but stretches on for months and who only leaves when Anne unintentionally offends her by arranging a surprise birthday party, much to the relief of the family. During the novel, Anne and Gilbert's youngest child is born and is named Bertha Marilla Blythe. She is also called Roly-Poly, or, generally, 'Rilla'. The novel includes a series of adventures which spotlight one of Anne's children at a time as they engage in the misunderstandings and mishaps of youth. At the end of the book, Anne worries that Gilbert has grown distant and possibly doesn't love her anymore. She and Gilbert spend a disagreeable evening with the widowed and childless Christine Stuart, who was once Anne's rival (or so she thought) for Gilbert's love. Suddenly realizing how tired Gilbert looks, Anne begins to wonder if she has been taking Gilbert for granted. At the end she is proven wrong, as Gilbert's lack of attention was caused by worry over one of his patients. He surprises Anne with an anniversary gift and a promise of a trip to Europe for a medical congress. |
The Napoleon of Notting Hill | G. K. Chesterton | 1,904 | The dreary succession of randomly selected Kings of England is broken up when Auberon Quin, who cares for nothing but a good joke, is chosen. To amuse himself, he institutes elaborate costumes for the provosts of the districts of London. All are bored by the King's antics except for one earnest young man who takes the cry for regional pride seriously – Adam Wayne, the eponymous Napoleon of Notting Hill. While the novel is humorous (one instance has the King sitting on top of an omnibus and speaking to it as to a horse: "Forward, my beauty, my Arab," he said, patting the omnibus encouragingly, "fleetest of all thy bounding tribe"), it is also an adventure story. Chesterton is not afraid to let blood be drawn in his battles, fought with sword and halberd in the London streets between neighboring boroughs; Wayne thinks up some ingenious strategies, and Chesterton does not shrink from the death in combat of some of his characters. Finally, the novel is philosophical, contemplating the value and meaning of man's actions and the virtue of respect for one's enemies. Michael Collins, who led the fight for Irish independence from British Rule, is known to have admired the book. There has been speculation that the setting of the book prompted the date chosen for the setting of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. The novel is also quoted at the start of Neil Gaiman's novel Neverwhere. |
Chainfire | Terry Goodkind | 2,005 | Richard Rahl is the ruler of the D'Haran Empire, a collection of nations previously made up of D'Hara, the Midlands and Westland. Richard Rahl and the D'Haran Empire are currently locked in an epic struggle with the Imperial Order, an Empire from the Old World, led by Emperor Jagang. Chainfire continues the story of Richard in his attempt to teach the people that their lives are theirs alone, and that they can be free of the Imperial Order. Richard is gravely injured from an enemy arrow. He is brought to Nicci, a sorceress and former Sister of the Dark, who heals him using subtractive magic causing unforeseen events to spiral out of control. When he awakens, Richard discovers that his wife, Kahlan Amnell, the Mother Confessor, is missing. More than that, however, no one around him seems to remember her. Nicci and Cara both attribute Richard's memory of Kahlan to dreams and delusions brought about by his injury and quite possibly an unintended effect of the subtractive magic used in healing Richard. Fearing for Kahlan's life, Richard desperately tries to find some trace of her and at the same time convince the others that she exists. His search leads him to the witch woman, Shota, who reveals "that which you seek is long buried with the bones". In return for more information, Shota demands the Sword of Truth, which Richard relinquishes to her pet, Samuel, the previous bearer of the sword. Shota then utters the words "Chainfire" and "The Deep Nothing" and tells Richard to "beware the four-headed viper". Shota also warns Richard of a "blood beast" conjured by several wizards and Sisters of the Dark, under the orders of Jagang. The beast is meant to kill Richard and is as unstoppable as it is unpredictable. What's more, the beast is able to track Richard when he uses his gift because of the way Nicci healed his arrow wound. In the meantime, Ann and Nathan together have discovered many blank pages in books of ancient prophecy. They seem to remember that the pages should not be blank but can't remember what was originally written there. Zedd makes the same discovery independently. Concerned, but still determined to find his wife, Richard makes his way to the Wizard's Keep to find Zedd, who has no memory of Kahlan either. To try to prove her existence, Richard exhumes her grave and is shocked to find a corpse in the buried casket. He is briefly disheartened, but Nicci convinces him to persevere. Ann, Nathan, and Nicci make their way to the Keep as well and are reunited with Richard, Zedd, and Cara. As Richard continues to attempt to prove the existence of the woman he loves, the others become convinced he is mentally ill and plot to "heal" him, so that he will 'fulfill prophecy' and lead the D'Haran army against the forces of Emperor Jagang. At the same time, the reader learns that Kahlan has been kidnapped by the four remaining Sisters of the Dark who escaped the Dream Walker in Blood of the Fold. The Sisters have cast a spell using subtractive magic to erase people's memories of Kahlan and Kahlan's memories of herself. The Sisters then use Kahlan to steal the boxes of Orden from the Garden of Life in the People's Palace in D'Hara. Richard, Nicci, and Cara, make their way to the Sliph in order to escape the Keep and what the others would do. Richard learns that the Sliph knows of a place called the Deep Nothing. The Sliph takes them to some ruins called "Caska" in the Deep Nothing. Upon arriving they find themselves in the midst of a group of Imperial Order advanced scouts that have captured some of the people there. The reader is introduced to a girl named Jillian and a people called the "Dream Casters". While Nicci eliminates the Imperial Troops, Richard and Jillian look for answers in the catacombs. Together they find a hidden passage that leads to a protected library. In the library Jillian discovers a book called "Chainfire". They travel to the People's Palace and learn that the boxes are missing and that they've been put into play. Richard figures out that the Sisters have stolen his wife and the boxes. While there, Richard learns that an older woman has been captured and that there was something uniquely odd about her. As Nicci investigates she discovers that it is Sister Tovi, one of the Sisters of the Dark who gave an oath to Richard in order to be free of Jagang, the Dream Walker. Nicci uses deception to learn everything she can from Tovi, discovering that it was Samuel who stabbed Tovi and took the Box of Orden she was carrying. She also learns about the Chainfire spell, about how it was used to obliterate everyone's memory about Kahlan, and that the Boxes of Orden were created in opposition to it. Later Richard realizes that the Sword of Truth protected him from the Chainfire spell, which is why he was still able to remember Kahlan. Richard, Nicci and Cara return to the Wizard's Keep and, with the information gathered from Tovi and the book "Chainfire", they finally manage to convince Zedd, Nathan, and Ann of the truth. While no one but Richard remembers Kahlan, at least now they believe that she exists. |
Aghwee the Sky Monster | Kenzaburō Ōe | 1,964 | Aghwee opens with the anonymous narrator, a 28-year-old man, talking about the near-blindness in one of his eyes, the result of an attack by a group of children that year. Because of his blurred vision he sees "two worlds superimposed". The attack had prompted him to remember the events of the story, which took place ten years earlier, and the memory freed him from hatred of his assailants. The narrator had worked as a companion to a composer, D, then aged 28, who had (apparently) gone mad after the death of his infant son. D says that when he goes outside, he is visited by the spirit of his son, who swoops down out of the sky: "a fat baby in a white cotton nightgown, big as a kangaroo". D talks to Aghwee but refuses to interact with the people around him, saying that he is no longer living in the present time. The narrator is told by D's estranged wife that D had killed their son, starving him because he was born with a brain hernia (which later turned out to be a benign tumour). 'Aghwee' was the only word the child had spoken. The wife accuses D of fleeing reality. She gives the narrator a key which turns out to unlock a box of D's compositions, which D burns and buries. D takes the narrator to various places where D had previously enjoyed himself, as well as sending him to inform D's former girlfriend that he will no longer see her. Matters reach a crisis when a pack of dogs (of which Aghwee is said to be afraid) comes across D and the narrator while D is talking to Aghwee. However it is the narrator who panics until he feels a hand on his shoulder, "gentle as the essence of all gentleness" which he says he knows to be the D's but imagines to be Aghwee's. D then tells the narrator more about his experience of the world, saying that the sky contains all those whom a person has lost; he stopped living in the present to prevent the number of figures floating in his sky from increasing. The story reaches an end with the death of D on Christmas Eve. D begins talking to Aghwee while he and the narrator are out in the city. While waiting to cross a road, "D cried out and thrust both arms in front of him as if he were trying to rescue something". D is injured and is taken to hospital. As he lies dying, the narrator asks him if he had simply made up Aghwee as a cover for his suicide, and says that he himself was about to believe in the spirit. In answer D merely smiles; whether mocking or "friendly mischief" the narrator cannot tell. In a coda, the narrator returns to the recent incident when he was attacked by a group of children, who unaccountably became frightened and started to throw stones at him. He sensed "a being I knew and missed" — Aghwee — leaving him and returning to the sky. He no longer hated the children, and started to think of the figures who had filled his own sky over the intervening decade, associating the "gratuitous sacrifice" of his eye with perception of those figures. |
The Butter Battle Book | Dr. Seuss | 1,984 | The Butter Battle Book tells the story of a land where two hostile cultures, the Yooks and the Zooks, live on opposite sides of a long curving wall, fairly similar to the Berlin Wall. The Yooks wear blue clothes; the Zooks wear orange. The main dispute between the two cultures is that the Yooks eat their bread with the butter-side up, while the Zooks eat their bread with the butter-side down. The conflict between the two sides leads to an escalating arms race, each competing to make bigger and better weapons to outdo the other, which results in the threat of mutual assured destruction. The race begins when a Zook named Van Itch slingshots the Yooks' "Tough-Tufted Prickly Snick-Berry Switch", which could be used to give Zooks a twitch if they dared to come close to the wall, which was guarded by "the Zook-Watching Border Patrol". The Yooks then develop a machine with three slingshots interlinked, called a "Triple-Sling Jigger". This works once (Van Itch got scared and ran off), but the Zooks counterattack with their own creation: The "Jigger-Rock Snatchem", a machine with three nets to fling the rocks fired from the Triple-Sling Jigger back at the Yooks' side "just as fast as we catch 'em". The Yooks then discover that slingshots are old-fashioned, and create a gun called the "Kick-A-Poo Kid", loaded with "powerful Poo-A-Doo powder and ants' eggs and bees' legs and dried-fried clam chowder", and toted by a dog named Daniel, the country's "first gun-toting spaniel". The Zooks counterattack with an "Eight-Nozzled Elephant-Toted Boom Blitz", a machine that shoots "high-explosive sour cherry stone pits, and will put your dumb Kick-A-Poo Kid on the fritz!" The Yooks then devise a machine called the "Utterly Sputter", a large blue mecha with two very tall mechanical legs, a cabin which resembles that of a helicopter's, but with no rotors, and four faucets on the back, whose main purpose was to "sprinkle blue goo all over the Zooks!". But the Zooks counterattack with a Sputter identical to the Yooks'. Eventually, each side possesses a small but extremely destructive red bomb called the "Bitsy Big-Boy Boomeroo", the smallest weapon of all, and neither has any defense against it. The TV special (see below) demonstrates the development of the weapon in a mysterious, and somewhat frightening, mad scientist-style song (complete with living goo, floating rings, ghosts, snakes, and chemical flasks which imitate volcanoes). No resolution is reached by the book's end, with the generals of both sides on the wall poised to drop their bombs and waiting to see who will do it first. The question is left hanging for the reader to answer by his or her actions, much like the question "UNLESS" at the end of Dr. Seuss' book, The Lorax. The book thus departs from the commonly-accepted approach to children's writing, of positive themes and resolution of the plot's conflict by the end of the story. |
The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty | Kitty Kelley | 2,004 | The Family received attention due to its allegations that George W. Bush snorted cocaine with his brothers at Camp David during his father's presidency. One of Kelley's sources for the cocaine allegation was Neil Bush's ex-wife Sharon Bush, who has since denied telling Kelley the story. Kelley claims that Sharon Bush told her the story in front of a witness and has recanted due to pressure from the Bush family. The book also claims that in college Laura Bush was "a go-to girl for dime bags of marijuana", Barbara Bush objected to the fact that her son's girlfriend's stepfather was Jewish, and that at Harvard, George W. Bush objected to a classroom viewing of the film The Grapes of Wrath by asking "Why are you going to show us that Commie movie?", and saying "Look. People are poor because they are lazy." Glynn Wilson, a free-lance journalist from Alabama, sued Kelley for plagiarism claiming passages from the book have the exact wording as his on-line article. |
Nova | Samuel R. Delany | 1,968 | By the year 3172, political power in the galaxy is split between two factions: the older Earth-based Draco and the historically younger Pleiades Federation. Both have interests in the even newer Outer Colonies, where mines produce trace amounts of the prized power source Illyrion, the superheavy material essential to starship travel and terraforming planets. Caught in a feud between aristocratic and economically powerful families, a scarred and obsessed captain from the Pleiades, Lorq Von Ray, recruits a disparate crew of misfits to aid him in the race with his arch-enemy, Prince Red from Draco's Red Shift Ltd., to gain economic leadership by securing a vastly greater amount of Illyrion directly from the heart of a stellar nova. In doing so, Von Ray will shift the balance of power of the existing galactic order, which will bring about the downfall of the Red family as well as end Earth's dominance over interstellar politics. As the title indicates, the central metaphor for the novel is a nova: the destructive implosion/explosion of an entire sun, which, paradoxically, while it destroys most of a solar system, also creates new elements. In the book, at the eruption of a nova, not only do the laws of physics break down, but so do the laws of politics and psychology. This idea permeates the entire plot and storyline. The characters follow a quest plot line, in which they visit several worlds to gain information necessary to achieve their goal, all the while pursued by the Red family. Although the novel does not indulge the literary experimentation found in Delany's later books, it maintains a high level of innovation. Some chapters end or begin in mid-sentence. Also, the point of view regularly shifts between Lorq, Katin, and the Mouse. Each page in the book carries a header that gives the year and location of the scene on the page itself (e.g., "Draco, Earth, Paris, 3162"). This is useful because of the flashbacks in the long journey around the galaxy. |
Cloud Nine | Caryl Churchill | null | ; Act I Clive, a British colonial administrator, lives with his family, a governess and servant during turbulent times in Africa. The natives are rioting and Mrs Saunders, a widow, comes to them to seek safety. Her arrival is soon followed by Harry Bagley, an explorer. Clive makes passionate advances to Mrs Saunders, his wife Betty fancies Harry, who secretly has sex with the servant Joshua and Clive's son Edward. The governess Ellen, who reveals herself to be a lesbian, is forced into marriage with Harry after his sexuality is discovered and condemned by Clive. Act 1 ends with the wedding celebrations; the final scene is Clive giving a speech while Joshua is pointing a gun at him. ; Act II Although Act 2 is set in 1979, some of the characters of Act 1 are reappearing – for them only 25 years have passed. Betty has left Clive, her daughter Victoria is now married to an overbearing Martin, and Edward has an openly gay relationship with Gerry. Victoria, upset and distant from Martin, starts a lesbian relationship with Lin. When Gerry leaves Edward, Edward, who discovers he is in fact bisexual, moves in with his sister and Lin. The three of them have a drunken ceremony in which they call up the Goddess, and after that characters from Act 1 begin appearing in Act 2. Act 2 has a looser structure than Act 1, and Churchill played around with the ordering of the scenes. The final scene shows that Victoria has left Martin for a ménage à trois with Edward and Lin, and they are sharing custody of their son Tommy. Gerry and Edward are on good terms again, and Betty becomes friends with Gerry, who tells her about Edward's sexuality. |
The Amber Room | Steve Berry | 2,003 | The story is about judge Rachel Cutler and her husband Paul, a divorced American couple caught up in a treasure hunt for the long-missing Amber Room. A couple of competitive professional treasure hunters complicate matters. In their search through Germany to uncover the secrets behind its disappearance, they escape near-death in the tunnels running through the Harz Mountains, find themselves hanging off the edge of a tall church steeple, and discover a surprise in a hidden chamber of a Bohemian castle in the Czech Republic. |
The World at the End of Time | Frederik Pohl | 1,990 | World at the End of Time follows the story of a young Earth-born human, Viktor Sorricaine, on a colony expedition to a distant star system. The colonists are frozen for the long trip between stars. Unknown to both the humans of Earth and the colonists, the stars around them are home to immensely long-lived (effectively immortal) plasma creatures—with no knowledge of, or interest in, the activities of insignificant matter creatures. Wan-To, one of the oldest and most powerful plasma creatures, is engaged in a war. After creating modified copies of himself, or "children", for company, Wan-To finds himself in a deadly game of chess with them. The "board" is the entire galaxy and the weapons are the stars themselves. Each star may be home to an enemy "child"... and using a variety of exotic particles, Wan-To is able to cause a targeted star to flare and kill any enemy that may be living within it. Into the middle of this battlefield, the three colony ships (Ark, New Mayflower and Argosy) unwittingly head for their new home. Upon arriving, the colony begins to establish itself ... only to discover that their entire local group of stars appears to be undergoing a bizarre acceleration, and are dimming. After a disastrous disease outbreak and terraforming failures, the desperate colonists eventually decide to investigate the strange radiation emissions from a small world within their solar system. Upon arriving in orbit, their ship is badly damaged and Viktor is forced into the onboard freezer systems. They are eventually rescued and unfrozen four hundred of the colony's years later, to find the colony in an even more desperate situation. The star around which the colony's world orbits has dimmed considerably (due to the energy being siphoned off to accelerate it) and they are now travelling so fast that, due to relativistic effects, the universe around them has shrunk to a bright dot. The colony has become factionalized and heavily religious, with scientific investigation discouraged. Viktor is eventually frozen again for attempting to investigate why they have been accelerating. He wakes four thousand of the colony's years later, to find the far descendants of the colony have rebuilt their society into habitats closely orbiting their binary star system's secondary (a small red dwarf) and created a high-technology civilization dedicated to pleasure and comfort. He makes his way, eventually, to the former colony to find only a few fellow-colonists unfrozen and attempting to rebuild it. His unique status as someone who was born on "old Earth" brings publicity to their efforts and the rebuilding forges ahead. During the four thousand years of Viktor's frozen sleep, the star system has been slowed again. Unfortunately, after the vast amount of time that has passed, all that remains of the once young universe are dead stars and black holes ... and Wan-To desperately surviving on the energy provided by proton decay. Wan-To receives a tachyon transmission from his long-forgotten systems and makes preparations to move into these last remaining stars — believing that the small matter creatures inhabiting the system are irrelevant and can be destroyed should they become an irritation. |
Doktor Faustus | Thomas Mann | 1,947 | The origins of the narrator and the hero in the (fictitious) small town of Kaisersaschern on the (Thuringian) Saale, the name of Zeitblom's apothecary father (Wohlgemut, 'welltempered'), and the description of Adrian Leverkühn as an old-fashioned German type, with a cast of features 'from a time before the Thirty Years War', evoke the old post-medieval Germany: in their respective Catholic and Lutheran origins, and theological studies, they are heirs to the German Renaissance and the world of Dürer and Bach, but sympathetic to, and admired by, the 'keen-scented receptivity of Jewish circles.' They are awakened to musical knowledge by Wendell Kretzschmar, a German American lecturer and musicologist who visits Kaisersaschern. After schooling together, both boys study at Halle - Adrian studies theology; Zeitblom does not, but participates in discussions with the theological students - but Adrian becomes absorbed in musical harmony, counterpoint and polyphony as a key to metaphysics and mystic numbers, and follows Kretzschmar to Leipzig to study with him. Zeitblom describes 'with a religious shudder' Adrian's embrace with the woman ('Esmeralda') who gave him syphilis, how he worked her name in note-ciphers into his compositions, and how the medics who sought to heal him were all prevented from effecting a cure by mysterious circumstances. Zeitblom begins to perceive the demonic, as Adrian develops other friendships, first with the translator Rüdiger Schildknapp ('Shield-bearer') (a loyal friend), and then after his move to Munich with the handsome young violinist Rudi Schwerdtfeger ('Sword-polisher', i.e. swordsmith), Frau Rodde and her doomed daughters Clarissa and Ines, Dr. Kranich ('crane') the numismatist, Leo Zink and Baptist Spengler (two artists). Zeitblom insists, however, on the unique closeness of his own relationship to Adrian, who addresses only him as 'du' (rather than the more formal 'Sie'). Adrian also meets the Schweigestill ('silence-peace') family at Pfeiffering, in the country an hour from Munich, which later becomes his permanent home and retreat. He lives at Palestrina in Italy with Schildknapp (as in reality Thomas Mann did 15 years earlier, with his brother Heinrich) in 1912, and Zeitblom visits them there. And it is there that Adrian, working on music for Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost, has his long dialogue with a Mephistopheles figure who appears either objectively or out of his own afflicted soul. These are the central pages of the novel, corresponding also to its central part. Zeitblom transcribes Adrian's manuscript of the conversation, in which the demon claims Esmeralda as the instrument of his entrapment of Adrian's vainglory, ingenium and memoriam, and offers him twenty-four years of time gifted with genius (geniale Zeit), a time of incubation (hochtragende Zeit) from the date of his sexual embrace, if he will now renounce the warmth of love. This dialogue reveals the anatomy of Leverkühn's thought. Adrian then moves permanently to Pfeiffering, and in conversations with Zeitblom reveals a darker view of life than his. Figures of a demonic type appear, such as Dr. Chaim Breisacher, 'a racial and intellectual type of reckless development and fascinating ugliness,' to cast down the idols of the older generation. In 1915 Ines Rodde marries, but forms an adulterous love for Rudi Schwerdtfeger. Adrian begins to experience illnesses of retching, headaches and migraines, but is producing new and finer music, preparing the way for his great work Apocalypsis cum figuris. Schwerdtfeger woos himself into Adrian's solitude, asking for a violin concerto that would be like the offspring of their platonic union. By August 1919 Adrian has completed the sketch of Apocalypse. There is also a new circle of intellectual friends, including Sextus Kridwiß ('kreideweiß = chalk-white') the art-expert, Chaim Breisacher, Dr. Egon Unruhe ('Unrest') the palaeozoologist, Georg Vogler ('fowler') (literary historian), Dr. Holzschuher ('Clogs') (a Dürer scholar), and the saturnine poet Daniel zur Höhe ('to height'). In their 'torturingly clever' discussions they declare the need for the renunciation of bourgeois softness and a preparation for an age of pre-medieval harshness. Adrian writes to Zeitblom that collectivism is the true antithesis of Bourgeois culture: Zeitblom observes that aestheticism is the herald of barbarism. Apocalypse is performed in Frankfurt in 1926 under Otto Klemperer with Erbe (an allusion to Karl Erb, the famous Evangelist of Bach's St Matthew Passion) as the St John narrator. (As a music reviewer Thomas Mann had been witness to Erb's oratorio debuts in around 1916.) Zeitblom describes the work as filled with longing without hope, with hellish laughter transposed and transfigured even into the searing tones of spheres and angels. Adrian attempts to obtain a wife by employing Rudi (who gets his concerto) as the messenger of his love, but she prefers Rudi himself, and not Adrian. Soon afterwards Rudi is shot dead in a tram by Ines, because of jealousy. As Adrian begins to plan the second oratorio The Lamentation of Doctor Faustus, in 1928, his sister's child Nepomuk is sent to live with him. This beautiful boy, who calls himself 'Echo', is beloved by all. As the work of gigantic dimensions develops in Adrian's mind, the child falls ill and dies, and Adrian, despairing, believes that by gazing at him with love (contrary to his contract) he has killed him with poisonous and hellish influences. The score of the Lamentation is completed in 1930, Adrian summons his friends and guests, and instead of playing the music he relates the story of his infernal contract, and descends into the brain disease which lasts until his death ten years later. Zeitblom visits him occasionally, and survives to witness the collapse of Germany's 'dissolute triumphs' as he tells the story of his friend. |
The Stones Are Hatching | Geraldine McCaughrean | 1,999 | Phelim awakes one morning while his sister, Prudence, is away. He soon learns that he is the inheritor of a responsibility to stop the apocalyptic Stoor Worm from waking. In order to do this, he must (overcoming a strong reluctance) rally the three symbolic figures of Maiden, Fool, and Horse, elude the Stoor Worm's monstrous children, and reach the Worm at her resting place. At this he succeeds, encountering various dangers and losing his companions en route. At the climax, Phelim kills the Stoor Worm outright and returns home, thereafter making his sister ride on a horse and making it go to the farthest sea. This hypocrisy (contrasted with his name, which is translated as "Ever-Good"), strips him of his own symbolic significance. At the end, he seeks counsel of his father. |
Devil's Cub | Georgette Heyer | 1,932 | The son of the Duke and Duchess of Avon, the Marquis of Vidal is known as Devil's Cub not only for the excesses of his father but for his own wild habits. As he is paying court to a girl of the bourgeoisie, Sophia Challoner, he also participates in a rather impromptu duel, the outcome of which forces him to leave the country. He intends to bring Sophia with him as his mistress: but her strait-laced sister Mary has no intention of allowing her sister to be ruined, and takes her place, assuming that the Marquis will let her go once the mistake is discovered, leaving him with no chance to take Sophia afterwards. But she has not yet obtained the measure of the Marquis's personality, for in the grip of fury he takes Mary off with him instead, and only when they are in France and it is too late for either to turn back does he realise that by abducting a respectable girl he has compromised her and is obliged to offer her marriage. However, Mary refuses Vidal because she believes he is making the offer from guilt and as she has fallen in love with him she finds this intolerable. In her misery, she runs away, intending to seek her own fortune. While away, she meets Vidal's father, the Duke of Avon, by chance, and takes him into her confidence without realising that she is talking to Avon - who is an old crony of her grandfather's and has come to France to investigate the rumours surrounding his son and scotch any scandal. The two reach an excellent understanding, with Avon clearly coming to respect Mary. Vidal pursues, and ultimately realizes he loves her, persuading her to marry him - in spite of Avon's dry observation that she could do better. Heyer's An Infamous Army is a sequel to Devil's Cub. {| class="wikitable" |- !These Old Shades !Devil’s Cub |- |Justin Alastair, Duke of Avon |Justin Alastair, Duke of Avon |- |Léonie de Saint-Vire |Léonie (de Saint-Vire) Alastair, Duchess of Avon |- |Lady Fanny (Alastair) Marling |Lady Fanny (Alastair) Marling |- |Edward Marling |Mr. John Marling (son of Edward Marling, now deceased) |- |Lord Rupert Alastair |Lord Rupert Alastair |- |Harriet (Alastair) Field |Harriet (Alastair) Field |- |Mr. Hugh Davenant |Mr. Hugh Davenant |} |
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