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The Lost Symbol | Dan Brown | null | Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon is summoned to give a lecture at the United States Capitol, with the invitation apparently from his mentor, a 33rd degree Mason named Peter Solomon, who is the head of the Smithsonian Institution. Solomon has also asked him to bring a small, sealed package which he had entrusted to Langdon years earlier. When Langdon arrives at the Capitol, however, he learns that the invitation he received was not from Solomon, but from Solomon's kidnapper, Mal'akh, who has left Solomon's severed right hand in the middle of the Capitol Rotunda in a recreation of the Hand of Mysteries. Mal'akh then contacts Langdon, charging him with finding both the Mason's Pyramid, which Masons believe is hidden somewhere underground in Washington D.C., and the Lost Word, lest Solomon be executed. Langdon is then met by Trent Anderson, head of the Capitol police, and Inoue Sato, the head of the CIA's Office of Security. Examining Solomon's hand, they discover a clue leading them to a Solomon's Masonic altar in a room in the Capitol's sub-basement, where they find a small pyramid lacking a capstone, with an inscription carved into it. Sato then confronts Langdon with the security x-ray taken of his bag when he entered the Capitol, which reveals a smaller pyramid in the package Langdon brought in response to the request by the kidnapper posing as Solomon. Because the package had been sealed for years, Langdon was unaware of its contents, but Sato, dissatisfied with this, attempts to take Langdon into custody. Before she can arrest him, however, she and Anderson are assaulted by Warren Bellamy, the Architect of the Capitol and a Freemason, who then flees with Langdon during the melee. Mal'akh is a Freemason with tattoos covering almost his entire body. He infiltrated the organization in order to obtain an ancient source of power, which he believes Langdon can unlock for him in return for Peter Solomon's life. As Langdon deals with the events into which he has been thrust, Mal'akh destroys the Smithonsonian-sponsored laboratory of Dr. Katherine Solomon, Peter's younger sister, where she has conducted experiments in Noetic Science. Mal'akh is also being pursued by Sato in the interests of National Security. Mal'akh captures Langdon and seriously injures Katherine Solomon. He places Langdon in a tank of breathable oxygenated liquid, from where Langdon unlocks the code at the Pyramid's base for Mal'akh, who then flees with Peter Solomon to the Temple Room of the Scottish Rite's House of the Temple. Langdon and Katherine are eventually rescued by Sato and her staff who race to the House of the Temple where Mal'akh threatens to release a heavily edited video showing government officials performing secret Masonic rituals. Mal'akh, who turns out to be Peter's long-believed dead son, Zachary Solomon, forces the Word—the circumpunct—out of his father and tattoos it on his head on the last portion of unmarked skin on his body. Mal'akh then orders Peter to sacrifice him, as he believes that it is his destiny to become a demonic spirit and lead the forces of evil. Director Sato, however, arrives at the Temple in a helicopter, which smashes the Temple's overhead glass panel, the shards of which fatally impale Mal'akh. The CIA then thwart Mal'akh's plan to transmit the video to several leading media channels using an EMP blast, disabling a cell tower in the network path leading from Mal'akh's laptop computer. Peter informs Langdon that the circumpunct Zachary tattooed on his head is not the Word. Deciding to take Langdon to the true secret behind the Word, Peter leads him to the room atop the Washington Monument and tells him that the Word—a common Christian Bible, the "Word of God"—lies in the Monument's cornerstone, buried in the ground beneath the Monument's staircase. Langdon realizes that the symbols on the pyramid's base spelled out the words Laus Deo which translate to Praise God. These words are inscribed upon the small aluminum capstone atop the Monument, which is the true Masonic Pyramid. Peter tells Langdon that the Masons believe that the Bible is an esoteric allegory written by mankind, and that, like most religious texts around the globe, it contains veiled instructions for harnessing man's natural God-like qualities—similar to Katherine's Noetic research—and is not meant to be interpreted as the commands of an all-powerful deity. This interpretation has been lost amid centuries of scientific skepticism and fundamentalist zealotry. The Masons have (metaphorically) buried it, believing that, when the time is right, its rediscovery will usher in a new era of human enlightenment. |
Fall on Your Knees | null | null | At the start of the 20th century, James Piper sets fire to his dead mother’s piano and heads out across Cape Breton Island to find a new place to live. Working as a piano tuner, he meets and eventually elopes with 13-year-old Materia Mahmoud, much to the anger of her wealthy, traditional Lebanese parents. James, madly obsessed with Materia, impregnates her, and then becomes increasingly frustrated and confused by her resulting strange behavior. Materia gives birth to their first daughter, Kathleen, and James subsequently becomes disgusted with his once intriguing wife, finally realizing that he actually married "a child". Materia regrets marrying James, and does not take to the child, as she believes her daughter's relationship with James to be revolting. James, however, is swollen with pride over his beautiful daughter, and spends his time ignoring and neglecting Materia while spoiling and smothering Kathleen. Through the eyes of James, his life is perfect, aside from his wife. According to the town folk, however, something appears to be seriously wrong with the Piper family. Materia is taken in by the kind neighbor Mrs. Luvovitz, who teaches her to sew and cook. Materia misses her old life and her family who have since disowned her. She grows to hate James and their daughter Kathleen. Though his fixation on his eldest daughter is all encompassing, James eventually impregnates Materia three more times in quick succession. She gives birth to three girls, Mercedes, Frances and Lily, only to have newborn Lily die a crib death shortly after. She is from here on in the novel referred to as "Other Lily". The novel then explores the girls' relationship with their troubled father; their secretive, silent mother; and friendships that grow between them as they try to figure out their family's strange and mysterious history. As Kathleen grows older, she is perceived by her schoolmates as snobby, and they turn against her. Her father James is her only friend, and when he travels off to war, Kathleen is crushed. James, however, knows that he must leave Kathleen, as he has found himself increasingly attracted to her sexually. To him, enlisting is a way of beating "the devil." Kathleen befriends her younger sisters, and James later returns as a shadow of his former self. Still, he feels an attraction to his eldest daughter, and he sends her to New York City to train with a highly-regarded but challenging voice instructor and to fulfill her dream of becoming an opera singer at the Metropolitan Opera House. During her absence, James receives a letter from an "Anonymous Well-Wisher" suggesting that Kathleen may have gotten into trouble in New York. He immediately fetches her from New York, bringing her home where it becomes apparent that she is pregnant. Kathleen spends her pregnancy hidden in her family home, but eventually dies during childbirth, though her mother manages to save her twin children, a boy and a girl, by performing an emergency caesarian section. Influenced by her mother's increasing devotion to Catholicism, Kathleen's younger sister Frances believes the babies must be baptized, and so attempts to do so in the creek behind the house the night of their birth. James catches her, and believes she is trying to drown them. He drags her away and the male twin, named Ambrose by Frances, is accidentally left to drown in the creek. The female twin, Lily, contracts polio from the contaminated water in the creek, but survives the disease by what Mercedes attributes to a miracle. Mercedes, Frances and Lily are all raised to believe Materia is Lily's mother. When the accidental suicide of the grieving Materia shatters the world of the remaining Piper sisters, they come to depend on one another for survival. The development of the sisters — Kathleen, the promising diva; Mercedes, the caretaker; Frances, the mischievous one; and disabled Lily, the innocent one — forms the heart of the novel as they all bear the burden of their tragically flawed father. Frances, beaten, molested and disowned by her father, causes trouble in school, eventually getting herself expelled, despite Mercedes' best efforts to keep her in check. Frances finds solace in her dolls, matinee movies, her late mother's old hope chest, and her darling younger sister Lily. Frances eventually runs away in the middle of the night, ends up in a beaten down pub run by her Lebanese uncle, and becomes the pub's entertainment and pint-sized whore. She says she does it to save money for Lily, but Frances is unsure as to what exactly she is saving for. She discovers her long-lost grandfathers house, and then becomes obsessed with his African maid, Teresa. Frances stalks and seduces Teresa's brother, Leo, and becomes impregnated by him, after she has saved enough money for Lily and is ready to stop working. She dreams of becoming a mother to a black child. Slowly over the course of her life, Frances remembers in bits and pieces the truth about her father, mother, sisters and her drowned brother/nephew. Lily is crippled, one of her legs being smaller than the other, and she wears a leather brace. She loves Frances the most of everyone, and was raised to believe Materia and James were her parents, although Frances liked to tell her otherwise. Lily believes everything Frances tells her, and so believes Ambrose is her guardian angel, and often wished for him to protect Frances after she left the house in the middle of the night. Lily said Ambrose lived in the creek, and he came to her in her dreams. Lily led Mercedes to the spot where Frances seduced Leo Taylor, and Mercedes believed that Lily was a saint. Mercedes spends her time praying, taking care of the family and working hard at school. She eventually becomes a teacher. Kathleen's diary and old dress is eventually sent home by her caretaker in New York, and after Frances reads it, sends it with Lily to New York, to find Kathleen's lover. Through the pages of her diary as Lily reads, we learn of Kathleen's vocal lessons, her instructor she calls the Kaiser, and her illicit love affair with the female black piano accompanist, Rose Lacroix. The romance is a whirlwind, as both women fall madly in love with one another, going to Jazz bars with Rose dressed as a man. Kathleen thrives, and basks in her complete happiness. The world is their oyster, until James barges into Kathleen's apartment one day to find her in bed with the black woman. A furious attack on Rose leads to James' jealous rape of Kathleen, as his sexual desire for her finally overcomes him. This reveals Lily's true mother, and James brings Kathleen home to Cape Breton, where she then dies in childbirth, her dreams shattered and her short and gloriously promising life cut terribly short. James eventually confesses everything to Frances, after her child, Aloysius, is pronounced dead and she becomes depressed. James eventually dies in his reading chair, peacefully, and Frances finally reveals the family's darkest secrets to her sister Mercedes, who is firmly in denial. Frances dies as an elderly woman with the help of Mercedes, without ever knowing the actual fate of her child. The novel ends in New York, as Lily makes her way across North America to Rose's apartment, where the ghostly return of her lover's doppelganger child pushes her over the edge. The two form a friendship and live together for many years, eventually to be visited by a young black man called Anthony, bearing a gift from Mercedes Piper. He delivers a drawing of a family tree, made by Mercedes, finally revealing all the incest, illegitimate children, crib deaths and affairs that make up the Piper family. Anthony is revealed to be Frances' long-lost son Aloysius, and Lily sits him down to tell him all about his mother. http://www.randomhouse.ca/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780394281780 |
The Boy Who Kicked Pigs | Tom Baker | 1,999 | The novel begins by announcing that today will be the day that a young boy, Robert Caligari, dies. Robert is an extremely odd boy who cannot stop himself from kicking pigs. This begins as a private act of revenge against his sister, Nerys, who is always putting money in her own tin piggy bank. Robert is angry at Nerys constantly rattling the pig in front of him, and so takes great pleasure in kicking the pig across the room whenever he is alone. Robert's obsession with kicking pigs gets worse, and one day, he kicks his sister's piggy bank out of the window, causing chaos for his neighbours and a local police officer. The last straw for Robert's mother is when he kicks a rather large woman's bagged pork chops, which she had just bought at the local butcher's shop. After a local man finally gets revenge on Robert by throwing him over a church wall, Robert realises that he hates people. While Robert's neighbours soon come to the conclusion that he is a nice young boy, he is plotting revenge. After poisoning his sister's food, he decides to trick an old blind man into crossing a road of busy traffic. Unfortunately for the old man this proves fatal, yet nobody suspects Robert's involvement. Robert engineers another, far worse, road accident in the next step of his evil plan. However, in the process of doing so, he finds himself trapped in his secret hideaway, where he is about to face a truly terrible fate. |
The Nature of Truth | Sergio Troncoso | 2,003 | Helmut Sanchez is a young researcher in the employ of renowned Yale professor Werner Hopfgartner. By chance, Helmut discovers a letter written decades ago by his boss mocking guilt over the Holocaust. Appalled, Helmut digs into the scholar's life and travels to Austria and Italy to uncover evidence of Hopfgartner's hateful past. Meanwhile, Hopfgartner's colleague and rival, Regina Neumann, wants to reveal the truth about Hopfgartner's sexual liaisons with vulnerable students before the professor's imminent retirement. Neumann traps Sarah Goodman, an insecure graduate student trying to find her place at Yale, into initiating formal charges of sexual harassment against Hopfgartner. Soon Helmut's intellectual quest for the truth metamorphoses into a journey of justice and blood, one with unforeseen consequences. |
The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother | James McBride | null | Ruth had a very repressed childhood in Suffolk, Virginia. Her father, a failed rabbi who owned Shilsky's Grocery Store, made Ruth and her brother Sam work hard before and after school. They did their homework at the store when there were no customers at the counter. Ruth's father sexually abused her as a child. He did not allow her or her siblings to be friends with Gentiles or Blacks, but Ruth had a secret friend named Frances. They hung out at school and at her home secretly. Ruth also had a black boyfriend named Peter, something that was heavily taboo in a Jewish household at that time. Segregation was in action in the 1930s, '40s, and '50s, so they met secretly. Ruth became pregnant by Peter and she was extremely scared of what would become of her and Peter. She hid her pregnancy for as long as she could, but soon her mother discovered it and sent her to stay with her aunt in New York for the summer. Her Aunt Betsy helped Ruth get an abortion; Aunt Mary was mean but she gave Ruth a job in her leather factory where Ruth met a black man named Andrew Dennis McBride. Even though she didn't fall for him at first, she soon began to care about him more and more. They fell in love, married, and had eight children. Later on, Andrew fell dangerously ill and had to be hospitalized for his problems. Andrew McBride died of lung cancer before the birth of his eighth child with Ruth, James McBride. After the death of her husband, Ruth struggled to cope and deal with the responsibilities that come with having eight children. Later, Ruth remarried to another black man, Hunter Jordan, and had four more children. She never spoke of her Jewish upbringing or any of her family members. James McBride grew up in a family of 12 children with a black stepfather, a mother whose past was a mystery until he went out and discovered it for himself. At first, he was in fear of his mother, causing him to obey whatever she told him too. As he got older, he began to oppose what his mother said. When his father died, he too had problems dealing with his passing. He dabbled in drugs, mainly weed, and his grades and behavior plummeted. To straighten him out, his mother and step-father sent him away to live with a relative. While living there, James still led a delinquent lifestyle, doing drugs and losing jobs many times. However, he eventually returns his normal self and returns to his mother. Later in his life, James decided to look into his mother's past in order to have an easier emotional transition into his future. He had always been confused about his racial identity, which led to outrageous behavior and a lack of commitment. His supportive family put him in check, and he was able to find music and activities that reformed his life and gave it new purpose. Ruth died at her home in Ewing, New Jersey on January 9, 2010. |
Time's Eye | Stephen Baxter | 2,003 | In the year 2037 (in which the events of 2001: A Space Odyssey would take place by the 3001 Space Odyssey universe), the still-turbulent North West Frontier province of Pakistan near Afghanistan is being patrolled by UN peacekeepers. A helicopter, known as Little Bird, crewed by an American pilot, Chief Warrant Officer Casey Othic, a British observer, Lt. Bisesa Dutt, and back-up pilot Chief Warrant Officer Abdikadir Omar, an Afghan, is badly damaged by a villager using a R.P.G.. Forced to ditch, the crew are met by soldiers based at nearby Jamrud fortress, which houses a garrison of British troops from northern India, part of the British Empire. The soldiers believe the year is 1885. Casey is injured but Bisesa and Abdikadir are relatively uninjured and all three survivors are escorted to the fort to meet the commander, Captain Grove. Bisesa and Abdikadir explain to an initially unbelieving Grove what happened to them. Both parties eventually realise and accept the fact that they are from different periods. Both parties lost all communications before the crash and they hypothesise that it coincided with the “time-slip”. Also at the fort are American reporter Josh White and a British writer known as Ruddy – the young and still-unknown Rudyard Kipling. The British soldiers are outnumbered by sepoys and Gurkhas. Many strange metal orbs, known as the Eyes, are seen floating in the sky and they defy all attempts to examine them, even using advanced equipment scavenged from Little Bird. Other ‘visitors’ from different time periods appear in the vicinity; two hominids, known as ‘Seeker’, a mother, and her infant daughter ‘Grasper’. They are somewhere in the genetic chain between humans and apes (never clearly stated, but probably Australopithecus). They are captured and imprisoned by the soldiers. Simultaneously, Musa and Kolya, two Russian cosmonauts, and Sable, a North American astronaut, are returning to Earth from the International Space Station. They have also lost contact with ground control, but they manage to establish contact with Abdikadir, who’s using equipment from Little Bird. The cosmonauts orbit the Earth and take photographs. Abdikadir suggests that the Earth now comprises a conglomerate of different time periods from two million years ago, up to 2037, but have no clue as to why or who/what caused it. The cosmonauts decide to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere unaided and land near some camp fires spotted in central Asia, in the hope that the humans there will help them. Upon exiting the craft, Musa is decapitated by a Mongolian warrior, while Sable and Kolya are loaded onto a cart heading east. They have arrived in Central Asia when the Mongols were at the height of their power. The Cosmonauts are eventually taken to meet Genghis Khan, with whom they are able to communicate in the Mongolian language. The Khan keeps them alive as he believes they have been sent from heaven. Yeh-lu – an astrologer and adviser to The Khan - and Kolya work together to plan what they should do with the Mongol army. They decide that the Khan should lead his army into China to rebuild the trading posts and towns that were lost in the Discontinuity/time slip. Sable disagrees and convinces the Khan to take the army to Babylon as this is the only place on Earth (other than Abdikadir’s radio) that is broadcasting a radio signal of any sort. Sable believes this is where the power of this new world – which they name Mir (Russian for "world") - lies. Meanwhile, in Northern India, Bisesa encounters the army of Alexander the Great. Using a factor who speaks some Greek as an interpreter, the British forces and the Macedonians form an alliance and look toward Babylon. Alexander intends to establish a new capital there. Like Sable, Bisesa wants to examine the source of the radio signal. Alexander’s army arrives at Babylon before the Khan and has time to explore it. They discover that the western side of the city has been destroyed by an unknown disaster while the eastern side is filled with temples and ziggurats. An orb at least three times larger than those previously seen is discovered in the Temple of Marduk and is found to be the source of the radio signals. Casey receives a radio transmission from Kolya warning him that the Mongolians are heading to Babylon. Casey immediately informs Alexander who prepares his army for the battle. Sable catches Kolya's treachery, and The Khan punishes him by pouring molten silver into his eyes and ears and burying him alive beneath the throne. In battle, the Mongols are held at bay by Alexander’s forces, which have been supplied with firearms by the British forces and taught ‘modern’ military tactics. Sable manages to reach the Temple of Marduk; Ruddy attempts to stop her and is shot dead. Bisesa then confronts Sable and manages to turn the gun on her. The tide of the battle shifts toward the Mongols, but Kolya, who is barely alive, manages to kill the Khan, whilst committing suicide. In confusion, the Mongols retreat. Alexander has prevailed, and Babylon is now his to shape as he sees fit. The Macedonian, British, and modern humans spend the next five years rebuilding the city, while Bisesa devotes her time to studying the Marduk orb. Casey and Abdikadir are worried for her and lead her on an expedition exploring the Mediterranean Sea. Upon returning to Babylon, Bisesa reveals that she has established some manner of communication with the Orb and that it has agreed to take her home to her own time. Josh requests that she take him along and she agrees. The orb takes them to a large nuclear blast crater. Another orb arrives and takes her back to her apartment where her daughter Myra is waiting for her. The orb intended to leave Josh in the crater but, at Bisesa's request, it returned him to the Marduk orb. The penultimate chapter of the novel implies that the entities that created the orbs and the Discontinuity are similar or perhaps identical to those entities mentioned in Clarke’s earlier book 2001: A Space Odyssey, but does not explain why this happened. |
The Enormous Crocodile | Roald Dahl | 1,978 | One day an enormous crocodile goes tramping through the forest telling all the animals he's going to eat children. The animals tell him that it's a horrible thing to do but he tries to use his tricks to eat the tasty children nonetheless. However, every time he tries, the animals of the forest save the children. Later on, Trunky the elephant kills the crocodile by swinging him around in the air by his tail and letting him go until he flies into the sky and crashes headlong into the Sun. It is in the style of a picture book in contrast to Dahl's other books, illustrated by Quentin Blake. It was first published in 1978. A TV series based on the book is expected to come out sometime in 2012. |
De Magnete | William Gilbert | 1,600 | De Magnete consists of six books. # Historical survey of magnetism and theory of Earth's magnetism. # Distinction between electricity and magnetism. Argument against perpetual motion. # The terrella experiments. # Declination (the variation of magnetic north with location). # Magnetic dip and Design of the magnetic inclinometer. # Magnetic theory of stellar and terrestrial motion. Precession of the equinox. |
What Is History? | Edward Hallett Carr | 1,961 | Chapter one, "The Historian and his Facts", explores how the historian makes use of historical facts. Carr notes that in the 19th century, western historians held to an empirical, positivist worldview that revolved around a "cult of facts", viewing historical facts as information that simply had to be assembled to produce an objective picture of the past that was entirely accurate and independent of any human opinion. Carr argues that this view is inherently flawed, because historians selectively choose which "facts of the past" get to become "historical facts", or information that the historians have decided is important. As an example, he notes that millions of humans have crossed the Rubicon river in Northeastern Italy, but that historians have only chosen to treat the crossing of the Rubicon by Julius Caesar in 49 BCE as an important "historical fact". Carr contends that historians arbitrarily determine which of the "facts of the past" to turn into "historical facts" according to their own biases and agendas. Carr proceeds to document the rise of non-empirical historians in the 20th century, who like himself argued that it was impossible to write an objective history, because all historical facts were themselves subjective. Although sharing their general view, he criticises the approach adopted by one of these non-empiricists, R. G. Collingwood, for insinuating that any one interpretation of history was as good as any other. He compares the situation facing the historian to the situation of Odysseus facing Scylla and Charybdis, remarking that they can fall into the "untenable theory of history as an objective compilation of facts" or they can fall into "the equally untenable theory of history as the subjective product of the mind of the historian". Instead, Carr argues that history should follow a middle-path, constituting a relationship "of equality, of give-and-take" between the historian and their evidence. He remarks that the historian continuously moulds his facts to suit their interpretation and their interpretation to suit their facts, and takes part in a dialogue between past and present. Summing up his argument, Carr puts forward his own answer to the question of "what is history?", remarking that "it is a continuous process of interaction between the historian and his facts, an unending dialogue between the past and the present." In his second chapter, Carr focuses on the influence that society plays on forming the approach of the historian and the interpretation of historical facts. He begins by highlighting the manner in which each individual is molded by society from birth, meaning that everyone is a "social phenomenon". He proclaims that this "very obvious truth" has been obscured by the "cult of individualism" – the idea that the individual was entirely separate from society – that emerged in western thought with the rise of classical liberalism. He accepts that this "cult of individualism" is an inevitable by-product of "advancing civilisation" but nevertheless considers it illogical. Carr highlights that, as individuals, historians are heavily influenced by the society that surrounds them, meaning that they too are "social phenomenon". In turn, he notes, this societal influence subsequently influences their interpretation of the past. As an example, he highlights the work of George Grote (1794–1871), an English historian and Enlightenment-era thinker whose depiction of ancient Athenian democracy in his History of Greece reflected "the aspirations of the rising and politically progressive British middle class" of which he was a part. In the same way, Carr argued that no individual is truly free of the social environment in which they live, but contended that within those limitations, there was room, albeit very narrow room for people to make decisions that have an impact on history. Carr made a division between those who, like Vladimir Lenin and Oliver Cromwell, helped to shape the social forces which carried them to historical greatness and those who, like Otto von Bismarck and Napoleon, rode on the back of social forces over which they had little or no control. Though Carr was willing to grant individuals a role in history, he argued that those who focus exclusively on individuals in a Great man theory of history were doing a profound disservice to the past. As an example, Carr complained of those historians who explained the Russian Revolution solely as the result of the "stupidity" of Emperor Nicholas II (which Carr regarded as a factor, but only of lesser importance) rather than the work of great social forces. In the third chapter, "History, Science and Morality", Carr looks at the disputed claims that history constitutes a science. He then highlights that there are five objections to considering history a science, and proceeds to discuss each of these. First, he looks at the idea that while science looks at general theories, history |
À rebours | Joris-Karl Huysmans | 1,884 | Jean Des Esseintes is the last member of a powerful and once proud noble family. He has lived an extremely decadent life in Paris, which has left him disgusted with human society. Without telling anyone, he retreats to a house in the countryside. He fills the house with his eclectic art collection (which notably consists of reprints of paintings of Gustave Moreau). Drawing from the theme of Gustave Flaubert's Bouvard and Pecuchet, Des Esseintes decides to spend the rest of his life in intellectual and aesthetic contemplation. Throughout his intellectual experiments, he recalls various debauched events and love affairs of his past in Paris. He conducts a survey of French and Latin literature, rejecting the works approved by the mainstream critics of his day. Amongst French authors, he shows nothing but contempt for the Romantics but adores the poetry of Baudelaire and that of the nascent Symbolist movement of Paul Verlaine, Tristan Corbière and Stéphane Mallarmé, as well as the decadent fiction of the unorthodox Catholic writers Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam and Barbey d'Aurevilly. He rejects the academically respectable Latin authors of the "Golden Age" such as Virgil and Cicero, preferring later "Silver Age" writers such as Petronius and Apuleius as well as works of early Christian literature, whose style was usually dismissed as the "barbarous" product of the Dark Ages. Schopenhauer, he exclaims, has seen the truth, and he clearly expressed it in his philosophy. He studies Moreau's paintings, he tries his hand at inventing perfumes, and he creates a garden of poisonous flowers. In one of the book's most surrealistic episodes, he has gemstones set in the shell of a tortoise. The extra weight on the creature's back causes its death. In another episode, he decides to visit London after reading the novels of Dickens. He dines at an English restaurant in Paris while waiting for his train and is delighted by the resemblance of the people to his notions derived from literature. He then cancels his trip and returns home, convinced that only disillusion would await him if he were to follow though with his plans. Eventually, his late nights and idiosyncratic diet take their toll on his health, requiring him to return to Paris or to forfeit his life. In the last lines of the book, he compares his return to human society to that of a nonbeliever trying to embrace religion. |
Soldier, Ask Not | Gordon R. Dickson | 1,967 | Tam Olyn is an ambitious, vain, angry young man. Orphaned at a young age, and raised by a nihilist uncle, he cares little for others, with the possible exception of his younger sister, Eileen. Following his graduation from school, he is ready to launch his career as a journalist among the stars. In a prelude to the main events of the novel, he and Eileen visit the Final Encyclopedia, a centuries-long project to try to collect and catalog all knowledge. While standing at the center of the index room, Tam is identified as a one-in-a-billion person who can actually hear the voices of humanity while there. The dying director of the Encyclopedia wants him to stay on and succeed him, but an Exotic, Padma from the planet Mara, reads him as having no identity with others, no empathy, no soul. He cannot help the Encyclopedia. His sister has become engaged to Jamethon Black, a young mercenary from the Friendly world of Harmony. Despite the fact that Black seems a very decent young man, Tam callously manipulates his sister into breaking the engagement. Shortly, he leaves Earth, beginning his profession as a newsman. In the following five years, he advances in his profession, while his sister emigrates to Cassida, and marries a young engineer there. While covering a war on New Earth, he finds his sister's husband, who has been drafted, and attempts to keep him out of harm's way by using him as an assistant. The plan backfires. His brother-in-law, along with several other prisoners, is slaughtered by a fanatic Friendly soldier, in violation of the laws of war. Despite the fanatic's execution for his war crime, Tam chooses to blame the entire Friendly culture, and sets out to destroy them. Unfortunately, Tam has the ability to analyze people and situations, and manipulate them expertly. Padma observes his actions, and tries to put a brake on his behavior, but he will not be stopped. By manipulating events, he creates a situation for the Friendlies that may result in their destruction as a viable culture. In the culmination of events, he arrives to cover a war on the planet of St. Marie, a small agrarian world. (At this point, the novella's narrative commences). On one side are the Dorsai mercenary forces hired by the government, led by the identical twin brothers, Ian and Kensie Graeme. The twins, who appear in a number of other stories, are opposites in every way. Kensie is warm, friendly, loved by all, and a great leader of men. Ian is cold as ice, analytical, and a great tactician. He is respected and feared. On the other side are a group of Friendlies who had been misled into supporting an abortive local revolution. The Friendlies are led by Jamethon Black, whose engagement Tam had broken years earlier. The Friendlies are hopelessly outgunned and outnumbered. Tam has manipulated the situation so that not only will the Friendlies lose, but their ability to hire out their soldiers will be crippled, possibly leading to the end of their viability as a culture. In the end, he is thwarted only by the faith of Black, and the honor and courage of the Graeme brothers, despite the incredible cost to them. The best qualities of the splinter cultures defeat the worst qualities of Tam Olyn. As Padma explains to him, had he succeeded, not only would a necessary component of the human spirit have been lost, but the entire balance of power among the worlds would have been horribly upset. Eventually, Padma manages to break through his shell, allowing Tam to grow into more of a human being, and take his place at the Final Encyclopedia. A key event in the war, barely mentioned in this book, is the death of Kensie Graeme, and the manner in which his brother's honor prevents the bloodbath which could have resulted at the hands of Kensie's angry troops. These events occur after Tam has left the planet. The story is told in great detail in the short story, Brothers. |
Oh, the Places You'll Go! | Dr. Seuss | 1,990 | The story begins with the narrator, relating the decision of the unnamed protagonist (who represents the reader) to leave town. The protagonist travels through several geometrical and polychromatic landscapes and places, eventually encountering a place simply called "The Waiting Place", which is ominously addressed as being a place where everyone is always waiting for something to happen. It is implied that time does not pass in the Waiting Place. As the protagonist continues to explore, spurred on by the thoughts of places he will visit and things he will discover, the book cheerfully concludes with an open end. |
Gridlock | Ben Elton | 1,991 | The novel depicts a near-future London in which traffic congestion has reached almost critical levels, such that accidents in a few key places could bring the entire city's traffic network to a halt. The government is aware of the problem and plans a major new road-building program to relieve the pressure. The alternative, heavy investment in public mass transport systems such as railways, is ignored because it clashes with the government's ideology. The author argues that this is a highly misguided policy since, in his view, more roads have historically tended to simply generate more traffic and so create an even bigger problem in the long run. The climax of the book sees shadowy, possibly government-backed forces deliberately instigate the necessary simultaneous accidents which do indeed bring the whole of London to a standstill for several days. The resulting chaos is used as an excuse to press ahead with the road-building scheme. |
The Spanish Tragedy | Thomas Kyd | 1,592 | Before the play begins, the Viceroy of Portugal has rebelled against Spanish rule. A battle has taken place in which the Portuguese were defeated and their leader, the Viceroy's son Balthazar, captured; but the Spanish officer Andrea has been killed by none other than the captured Balthazar. His ghost and the spirit of Revenge (present onstage throughout the entirety of the play) serve as chorus and, at the beginning of each act, Andrea bemoans the series of injustices that take place before being reassured by Revenge that those deserving will get their comeuppance. There is a subplot concerning the enmity of two Portuguese noblemen, one of whom attempts to convince the Viceroy that his rival has murdered the missing Balthazar. The King's nephew Lorenzo and Andrea's best friend Horatio dispute over who captured Balthazar, and though it is made clear early on that it is in fact Horatio that defeated him while Lorenzo essentially cheats his way into taking partial credit, the King leaves Balthazar in Lorenzo's charge and splits the spoils of the victory between the two. Horatio comforts Lorenzo's sister, Bel-imperia, who was in love with Andrea against her family's wishes; despite her former feelings for Andrea, Bel-imperia soon falls for Horatio. Her courtship with Horatio is motivated partially by her desire for revenge. Bel-imperia intends to torment an amorous Balthazar, the killer of her former lover. As Balthazar is in love with Bel-imperia, the royal family concludes that their marriage would be an excellent way to repair the peace with Portugal. Horatio's father, the Marshall Hieronimo, stages an entertainment for the Portuguese ambassador; Lorenzo, suspecting that Bel-Imperia has found a new lover, bribes her servant Pedringano and discovers that Horatio is the man. He persuades Balthazar to help him murder Horatio during an assignation with Bel-Imperia; Hieronimo and his wife Isabella find the body of their son hanged and stabbed, and Isabella is driven mad. Revisions made to the original play supplement the scene with Hieronimo briefly losing his wits as well. Lorenzo locks Bel-Imperia away, but she succeeds in sending Hieronimo a letter, written in her own blood, informing him that Lorenzo and Balthazar were Horatio's murderers. His questions and attempts to see Bel-Imperia convince Lorenzo that he knows something; afraid that Balthazar's servant Serberine has betrayed the plot, Lorenzo convinces Pedringano to murder him, then arranges for Pedringano's arrest in the hopes of silencing him too. Hieronimo, appointed judge, sentences Pedringano to death; Pedringano expects Lorenzo to procure his pardon, and Lorenzo, having written a fake letter of pardon, lets him believe this right up until the hangman drops Pedringano to his death. Lorenzo manages to prevent Hieronimo from seeking justice by convincing the King that Horatio is alive and well. Furthermore, Lorenzo does not allow Hieronimo to see the King, claiming that he is too busy. This, combined with his wife's suicide, which happens just prior to Hieronimo's appeal to the King, pushes Hieronimo past his limit. He rants incoherently and digs at the ground with his dagger. Lorenzo goes on to tell his uncle, the King, that Hieronimo's odd behaviour is due to his inability to deal with his son Horatio's new found wealth (Balthazar's ransom from the Portuguese Viceroy), and he has gone mad with jealousy. Regaining his senses, Hieronimo, along with Bel-Imperia, feigns reconciliation with the murderers. The two plan to put on a play together, Soliman and Perseda. Under cover of the play they stab Lorenzo and Balthazar to death in front of the King, Viceroy, and Duke of Castile (Lorenzo and Bel-Imperia's father); Bel-Imperia kills herself, and Hieronimo tells his audience of his motive behind the murders, but refuses to reveal Bel-Imperia's complicity in the plot. He then bites out his own tongue to prevent himself from talking under torture, after which he kills the Duke and then himself. Andrea and Revenge are satisfied, delivering suitable eternal punishments to the guilty parties. |
Crying Out Love, In the Center of the World | null | null | In a small town in 1980s southern Japan, Sakutaro "Saku" Matsumoto and Aki Hirose, classmates all through junior high, become high school students and then fall in love. They share audio diaries, go on excursions together, and enjoy summer vacation. However, Aki finds herself suffering from Leukemia and begins to weaken, rendering her unable to see Saku or go outside. Saku is desperate to take her to Uluru (Ayers Rock) in Australia (the "Center of the World"), a place she had wished to visit. Saku buys tickets, but Aki dies before boarding the plane. Seventeen years later, an older, sombre Saku trudges through everyday existence. The last tape of Aki's audio diary is suddenly unearthed, leading Saku back to his hometown in the south, and back to his memories of their last days together. |
The Murder at the Vicarage | Agatha Christie | null | In St. Mary Mead, no one is more despised than Colonel Protheroe. Even the local vicar has said that killing him would be doing a service to the townsfolk. So when Protheroe is found murdered in the same vicar's study, and two different people confess to the crime, it is time for the elderly spinster Jane Marple to exercise her detective abilities. The vicar and his wife, Leonard and Griselda Clement respectively, who made their first appearance in this novel, continue to show up in Miss Marple stories: notably, in The Body in the Library (1942) and 4.50 from Paddington (1957) |
Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass | Bruno Schulz | 1,937 | "Father's Last Escape," the concluding story of the novel, Schulz makes an explicit reference to Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis (Schulz helped his one-time fiancee translate Kafka's The Trial into Polish, a translation for which Schulz provided an introduction). The old man's business has been liquidated and all his functions and authorities taken over by wife or relatives. Even the pretty, young Polish maid Adela has gone and been replaced by Genya, "anemic, pale, and boneless,…and so absent-minded that she sometimes made a white sauce from old letters and invoices." Father's response is to turn himself first into wallpaper, then a piece of clothing, and finally into a big crablike insect who — unlike Kafka's passive victim — runs around the house, searching endlessly for something. His wife can catch the creature in her handkerchief sometimes, but cannot hold him. One day, however, she must have managed because Father appears at lunch, as the main course, after which he escapes the table, never to be seen again. |
A Legend of Montrose | Walter Scott | 1,819 | The story takes place during the Earl of Montrose's 1644-5 Highland campaign on behalf of King Charles I against the Covenanters who had sided with the English Parliament in the English Civil War. The main plot concerns a love triangle between Allan M'Aulay, his friend the Earl of Menteith, and Annot Lyle. Annot is a young woman who has been brought up by the M'Aulays since being captured as a girl during a blood feud against the MacEagh clan (also known as the Children of the Mist). M'Aulay and Menteith are both members of Montrose's army. Annot eventually marries Menteith after it is discovered that she has aristocratic blood, and was kidnapped by the MacEaghs as a baby. This leads to the jealous M'Aulay stabbing Menteith and then fleeing Montrose's army. Menteith survives whilst M'Aulay disappears and is rumoured to have been killed by the MacEaghs. Much of the novel is taken up with a subplot involving an expedition into enemy territory by Dugald Dalgetty, an experienced mercenary fighting for Montrose. Dalgetty does not fight out of political or religious conviction, but purely for the love of carnage. However, he is very professional, and remains loyal to an employer to the end of his contract. He gained his experience fighting for various armies during the Thirty Years' War, then still raging in Germany. Note: He did not fight all thirty years. Dalgetty is regarded as one of Scott's finest comic characters, however he dominates so much of the story that the main plot is not really developed in detail. |
The Reader | Bernhard Schlink | 1,995 | *Michael Berg, a German who is first portrayed as a 15-year-old boy and is revisited at later parts of his life: when he is a researcher in legal history, divorced with one daughter, Julia. Like many of his generation, he struggles to come to terms with his country's recent history. *Hanna Schmitz, illiterate and former SS guard at Auschwitz. She is 36 and working as a tram conductor in Neustadt when she first meets 15-year-old Michael. She takes a dominant position in their relationship. *Sophie, a friend of Michael's when he is in school, and who he probably has a crush on. She is almost the first person whom he tells about Hanna. When he begins his friendship with her, is when he begins to "betray" Hanna by denying her relationship with him and by cutting short his time with Hanna to be with Sophie and his other friends. *Michael's father, a philosophy professor who specializes in Kant and Hegel. During the Nazi era he lost his job for giving a lecture on Spinoza and had to support himself and his family by writing hiking guidebooks. He is very formal and requires his children to make appointments to see him. He is emotionally stiff and does not easily express his emotions to Michael or his three siblings, which exacerbates the difficulties Hanna creates for Michael. By the time Michael is narrating the story, his father is dead. *Michael's mother, seen briefly. Michael has fond memories of her pampering him as a child, which his relationship with Hanna reawakens. A psychoanalyst he sees, tells him he should consider his mother's effect on him more, since she barely figures in his retelling of his life. *The daughter of Jewish woman who wrote the book about the death march from Auschwitz. She lives in New York City when Michael visits her near the end of the story, still suffering from the loss of her own family. The story is told in three parts by the main character, Michael Berg. Each part takes place in a different time period in the past. Part I begins in a West German city in 1958. After 15-year-old Michael becomes ill on his way home, 36-year-old tram conductor Hanna Schmitz notices him, cleans him up, and sees him safely home. He spends the next three months absent from school battling hepatitis. He visits Hanna to thank her for her help and realizes he is attracted to her. Embarrassed after she catches him watching her getting dressed, he runs away, but he returns days later. After she asks him to retrieve coal from her cellar, he is covered in coal dust; she watches him bathe and seduces him. He returns eagerly to her apartment on a regular basis, and they begin a heated affair. They develop a ritual of bathing and having sex, before which she frequently has him read aloud to her, especially classical literature, such as The Odyssey and Chekhov's The Lady with the Dog. Both remain somewhat distant from each other emotionally, despite their physical closeness. Hanna is at times physically and verbally abusive to Michael. Months into the relationship, she suddenly leaves without a trace. The distance between them had been growing as Michael had been spending more time with his school friends; he feels guilty and believes it was something he did that caused her departure. The memory of her taints all his other relationships with women. Seven years later, while attending law school, Michael is part of a group of students observing a war crimes trial. A group of middle-aged women who had served as SS guards at a satellite of Auschwitz in occupied Poland are being tried for allowing 300 Jewish women under their ostensible "protection" to die in a fire locked in a church that had been bombed during the evacuation of the camp. The incident was chronicled in a book written by one of the few survivors, who emigrated to the United States after the war; she is the main prosecution witness at the trial. Michael is stunned to see that Hanna is one of the defendants, sending him on a roller coaster of complex emotions. He feels guilty for having loved a remorseless criminal and at the same time is mystified at Hanna's willingness to accept full responsibility for supervising the other guards despite evidence proving otherwise. She is accused of writing the account of the fire. At first she denies this, but then in panic admits it in order to not have to give a sample of her handwriting. Michael, horrified, realizes that Hanna has a secret she refuses to reveal at any cost—she is illiterate. This realization explains many of Hanna's actions: her refusal of the promotion that would have removed her from the responsibility of supervising these women, and also the panic she carried her entire life over being discovered. During the trial, it transpires that she took in the weak, sickly women and had them read to her before they were sent to the gas chambers. Michael decides she wanted to make their last days bearable; or did she send them to their death so they would not reveal her secret? She is convicted and sentenced to life in prison. He chooses not to reveal her secret. Michael is trying to come to terms with his feelings for Hanna, and begins taping readings of books and sending them to her without any correspondence while she is in prison. Years have passed, Michael is divorced and has a daughter from his brief marriage. Hanna begins to teach herself to read, and then write in a childlike way, by borrowing the books from the prison library and following the tapes along in the text. She writes to Michael, but he cannot bring himself to reply. After 18 years, Hanna is about to be released, so he agrees (after hesitation) to find her a place to stay and employment, visiting her in prison. On the day of her release in 1988, she commits suicide and Michael is heartbroken. Michael learns from the warden that she had been reading books by many prominent Holocaust survivors, such as Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi, Tadeusz Borowski, and histories of the camps. The warden, in her anger towards Michael for communicating with Hanna only by audio tapes, expresses Hanna's disappointment. Hanna left him an assignment: give all her money to the survivor of the church fire. While in the U.S., Michael travels to New York to visit the Jewish woman who was a witness at the trial, and who wrote the book about the winter death march from Auschwitz. She can see his terrible conflict of emotions and he finally tells of his youthful relationship with Hanna. The unspoken damage she left to the people around her hangs in the air. He reveals his short, cold marriage, and his distant relationship with his daughter. The woman understands, but nonetheless refuses to take the savings Hanna had asked Michael to convey to her, saying, "Using it for something to do with the Holocaust would really seem like an absolution to me, and that is something I neither wish nor care to grant." She asks that he donate it as he sees fit; he chooses a Jewish charity for combating illiteracy, in Hanna's name. Having had a caddy stolen from her when she was a child in the camp, the woman does take the old tea caddy in which Hanna had kept her money and mementos. Returning to Germany, Michael visits Hanna's grave for the first and only time. |
Marching Through Georgia | S. M. Stirling | 1,988 | The story starts with Centurion Eric von Shrakenberg in a cargo airplane with his airborne unit and the embedded American correspondent William Dreiser, on their way to their drop point, where they will jump and parasail into Nazi-controlled Georgia. The Nazis have been much more successful than in our history, since the Soviets had to divert resources to defend their southern border against the Domination of the Draka. As a result, the Nazis managed to overrun European Russia. The Soviet Union has been pushed back and only controls territories east of the Ural Mountains. However, the Germans are seriously overstretched, and vulnerable to a strong attack. During the travel to their drop zone, Eric thinks back on his past and his relationship with his father, and his most recent visit home to see his family. This was the first visit in several years, his exile was due to his arranging the escape of his serf daughter to America. Eric's bravery in the earlier Draka conquest of Italy led to his former "mistake" being forgiven. Eric's "Century" ends up being seriously under-supplied because the gliders with the artillery went into a canyon. The engineers are frantically building a rubble ramp, but the heavy weapons won't be available for the battle. The story details how Eric's single infantry company takes and holds a small village strategically located on the crucial Ossetian Military Highway over the Caucasus Mountains. The balance of the First Airborne Legion is the plug which is holding four German divisions from escaping the trap they are in on the south side of the mountains. Eric's unit is tasked with holding the highway and village against repeated attacks by Felix Hoth's Waffen-SS armored regiment, which is fighting to clear the highway so the German divisions can escape. Eric's company manages to hold out long enough for the Draka to crush the four divisions, cross the mountains, and relieve his unit. Holding this highway and village is the critical act of the invasion of Russia. This lets the Draka's essentially undamaged and superior armored and mechanized units to penetrate into the plains of Southern Russia, where they can bring to battle and destroy the overstretched and exhausted German forces. It also leads to Eric being awarded the Domination's highest medal of valor, the aurora, "for saving 10,000 Citizen lives," and which makes him immune to Security Directorate reprisals for his "treasonous utterances" or for his earlier "indiscretion." The actions of Century A is the pivotal event at the beginning of the invasion of Russia that allows the Domination to eventually win the Eurasian War. |
Outbreak | Robin Cook | 1,987 | Dr. Marissa Blumenthal of the CDC investigates a series of deadly ebola outbreaks. The ebola virus, considered a level 4 pathogen, then plays havoc with the lives of innocent people. The ultimate villain is the ever-helpful doctor friend of Dr. Blumenthal. In the end Dr. Blumenthal is nearly killed by a goon but an FBI agent kills him and she is saved. The person she suspected was innocent and simply had been so caught up in protecting the CDC that he refused to listen and figured out the truth almost too late. Later it is explained to her that due to her investigation the people responsible for the outbreaks were caught and were going to jail for a long time including her former friend and that what they did was being compared to the Nazis. She has become an international epidemiological hero for her actions but she has decided to possibly go back into pediatrics after a vacation she's about to take at the end of the story. * Cook, Robin. (1987) Outbreak. ISBN 0-425-10687-X nl:Epidemie (boek) |
Sad Cypress | Agatha Christie | null | The novel is written in three parts: in the first place an account, largely from the perspective of the subsequent defendant, Elinor Carlisle, of the death of her aunt, Laura Welman, and the subsequent death of the victim, Mary Gerrard; secondly an account of Poirot's investigation; and, thirdly, a sequence in court, again mainly from Elinor's dazed perspective. In the first part, distant cousins Elinor Carlisle and Roddy Welman are happily engaged to be married when they receive an anonymous letter claiming that someone is "sucking up" to their wealthy aunt, Laura Welman, from whom Elinor and Roddy expect to inherit a sizeable fortune. Elinor immediately suspects Mary Gerrard, the lodgekeeper's daughter, to whom their aunt has taken a considerable liking. They go down to visit their aunt: partly to see her and partly to protect their interests. Mrs. Welman is helpless after a stroke and speaks of a desire to die, most notably to Peter Lord, her physician. After a second stroke, she asks Elinor to ask the family solicitor to prepare a will under which it is clear that Mary is to be a beneficiary. Roddy has fallen in love with Mary, provoking Elinor's jealousy. Mrs. Welman dies intestate during the night and her estate goes to Elinor outright as her only surviving blood relative. Subsequently, Elinor releases Roddy from the engagement and makes moves to settle money on him (which he refuses) and three thousand pounds on Mary (which Mary accepts). At an impromptu tea party thrown by Elinor for Mary and Nurse Hopkins, Mary dies of poison that had supposedly been put into a fish-paste sandwich. Elinor (who has been behaving suspiciously) is put on trial. Worse, when the body of her aunt is exhumed it is discovered that both women died of morphine poisoning. Elinor had easy access to morphine from a bottle that apparently went missing from Nurse Hopkins’s bag. In the second part of the novel, Poirot is persuaded to investigate the case by Peter Lord, who is in love with Elinor and wants her to be acquitted at all costs. Poirot's investigation focuses on a small number of elements. Was the poison in the sandwiches, which everyone ate, or something else, such as the tea that was prepared by Nurse Hopkins and drunk by only Mary and herself? What is the secret of Mary Gerrard's birth, which everyone seems so keen to conceal? Is there any significance in the scratch of a thorn on Nurse Hopkins's wrist? Is Peter Lord right to draw Poirot's attention to evidence that someone watching through the window might have poisoned the sandwich, thinking that it would be eaten by Elinor? In the third part of the novel, the case appears to go badly for Elinor, until her Defence unveils three theories that might exonerate her. The first (that Mary committed suicide) is difficult for anyone to really believe, and the second (Peter Lord's theory of the killer outside the window) is unconvincing. But the third theory is Poirot's. A torn pharmaceutical label that the Prosecution supposed to have held morphine hydrochloride, the poison, had in fact held apomorphine hydrochloride, an emetic. This was revealed because on an ampoule, the M in Morphine would be capital; Poirot finds a lowercase M – thus it isn't morphine. The capitalized prefix "Apo" had been carefully torn off. Nurse Hopkins had injected herself with this emetic, apomorphine, in order to vomit the poison that she had ingested in the tea, which explains her quick departure from the table as soon as the tea was consumed that fateful day. Her claim to have scratched herself on a thorn is disproved when it is revealed that the rose tree in question was a thornless variety: Zephyrine drouhin. If the means were simple, the motive is complex. Mary Gerrard is not the daughter of Eliza and Bob Gerrard. Instead—as Poirot has discovered from Nurse Hopkins in the course of the investigation—she is the illegitimate daughter of Laura Welman and Sir Lewis Rycroft, which made her the heiress to Mrs. Welman's estate since she was actually a closer relative than Elinor. When Nurse Hopkins encouraged Mary to write a will, Mary was prompted to name as beneficiary the woman that she supposed to be her aunt, Mary Riley (Eliza Gerrard's sister), in New Zealand. Mary Riley's married name is Mary Draper. Mary Draper is none other than Nurse Hopkins as two witnesses of the defence (Amelia Mary Sedley and Edward John Marshall, both from New Zealand), confirm in court. Poirot ends the novel by rebuking Peter Lord for his clumsy efforts to implicate the hypothetical killer outside the window. He has planted evidence and led Poirot to it in a desperate bid to free Elinor. Lord's momentary embarrassment is presumably alleviated by Poirot's assurance that it is to him, and not to her former love Roddy, that Elinor is now likely to become married. |
Animal Dreams | Barbara Kingsolver | null | Animal Dreams opens with a chapter narrated in the third person from the point of view of Doc Homer. This establishes a double narrative voice, which switches between dreams and memories of the past and events of the present. Doc Homer remembers his daughters, Codi and Hallie, when they were young. Their mother is dead. In the second chapter, narrated by Codi in first person, the plot line begins. Hallie leaves Tucson, Arizona, where she was living with Codi and Carlo, for Nicaragua. She plans to assist the newly established communist regime with their crop cultivation. Shortly thereafter, Codi also leaves Tucson, returning to her small rural hometown, Grace, to care for her ailing father and to teach high school biology. The return to Grace is fraught with difficulty for Codi, as she has always felt herself an outsider in the town and has never had a very close relationship with her father. Her return home raises the specter of several mysteries surrounding Codi and her family's past: her failure to hold a medical license despite her attendance at medical school, the deaths of her mother and of her child, and the relationship of her family to the rest of the community. In Grace, Codi stays in her friend Emelina Domingos's guest house. As the two women talk, Codi's high school relationship with Loyd Peregrina is revealed. Loyd, a friend of Emelina's husband J.T., still lives and works in town. Re-visiting Grace, Codi is again struck by her feeling of being an outsider. Codi and Hallie's mother died shortly after Hallie's birth. At the age of fifteen, Codi became pregnant with and then miscarried Loyd's child. She never told anyone. Her father, the town doctor, was aware of the situation, but Codi still does not know this. Codi and Loyd meet again and begin a new relationship. Loyd, a Native American who grew up on the nearby Reservation, is ready to establish a serious and committed relationship, but Codi is not ready to imagine herself as staying in one place or loving only one person. Loyd accepts her ambivalence. They continue to see each other, and he teaches her about Native American Cultures. |
The Truth About Forever | Sarah Dessen | 2,004 | Macy is still recovering from the sudden loss of her father. Since he died during one of their habitual morning runs, Macy gives up running and keeps all of her feelings to herself. This results in her being unable to comfort her mother. Her boyfriend, Jason, is currently away at Brain Camp. When Macy attempts to communicate with him about her unhappiness with her coworkers at the library. At the end of one of their e-mails she tells him that she loves him, he replies and thinks it would be for the best if they took a break until he returns in August. Upset and hurt, Macy goes for a ride and sees a van for Wish Catering, which catered her mother's party. She applies for a job, which she gets. Macy enjoys this new job and her new coworkers. There she meets the artistic Wes, who she later discovers lost his mother in a car accident and attended reform school for breaking and entering. During this time Macy's older sister begins to renovate their father's beach house despite reluctance from the other family members (mainly from her mother). Her mother refuses to talk to Macy about the sudden death of her husband, Macy's father; therefore she proceeds to put all of her time into her work. Macy attends a party with some of her coworkers, where she confesses about her father's death and her relationship issues with Jason to Wes. There, she bonds with coworker Kristy, who advises her to enjoy her life because forever keeps changing. Later Wes and Macy end up stranded together after their catering van runs out of gas, where Macy opens up to Wes about all of the issues in her life during a game of "Truth". They continue to play the game later during work, where Macy discovers that he is also in an "on break" relationship with a girl named Becky. As Macy and Wes grow closer together, Macy's mother advises against the job and any possible relationship with Wes. Macy later ends up deciding to confess to Wes, but sees him with Becky and ends up heart-broken again. Her mother has Macy helping her with preparations for a party, but eventually has to have Wish Catering assist her. It is during this time that Macy succeeds in being able to comfort her mother and discovers that Wes has broken up with Becky. Wes and Macy become a couple, with her resuming her running habit with him. Wes later joins her and her family at the beach house that has now been renovated. |
Complicity | Iain Banks | 1,993 | Colley is a "Gonzo journalist" with an amphetamine habit, living in Edinburgh. He also smokes cigarettes and cannabis, drinks copious amounts of alcohol, plays computer games, and has adventurous sex with a married woman, Yvonne. He regrets his addictions and misdemeanours and tries half-heartedly to give them up occasionally. He reflects on his awful experience of witnessing the aftermath of the massacre at the 'Highway of Death' in the Gulf War, and covers the deployment of HMS Vanguard, Britain's first Trident nuclear missile submarine. He thinks he has a scoop when he receives anonymous phone calls about a series of mysterious deaths. Suddenly he has mysterious deaths of his own to worry about, when an editorial he wrote years before comes back to haunt him. In it, he suggested that certain named capitalist and right-wing public figures would be better hate-figures than the conventional ones of foreign leaders or domestic criminals. It seems someone is killing off the people on his list, one by one. The description of the murders (which are ingeniously sadistic) is done in a fairly detailed manner. Under suspicion by the police, Colley finds himself involved doubly in the bizarre murders when the killer is revealed. At the end of the book, Colley is diagnosed with lung cancer (a downbeat ending omitted in the film adaptation). |
The Secret of the Old Mill | Franklin W. Dixon | 1,927 | The Hardy boys learn a case of counterfeit money is somehow intertwined with a national security case their dad is working on. Frank and Joe help prevent 14-year-old cyclist Ken Blake from getting killed in an accident. As they help the boy up they see he is delivering an envelope to Victor Peters, a name that means something to the Hardys later on in the book. The Hardys learn that their friend Chet Morton has been tricked when asked to make change for what turned out to be a counterfeit twenty dollar bill, something that the police later confirm is becoming more common in their town of Bayport. Later, Joe is awakened by a clattering sound and sees a mysterious figure bicycling away from the Hardys' home. While investigating the disturbance a note is found that reads, "Drop case or else danger for you and your family." The Hardy boys are not sure if this threat refers to the counterfeiting case that Frank and Joe are investigating or another case their detective dad, Fenton Hardy, is trying to solve. The Hardys go with Chet, who wants to apply for a job at Elekton Controls, a missile-development company, but are told by Mr. Markel, one of Elekton's security guards, that there are no openings. Before leaving, they notice a bike that looks similar to the one ridden by Ken Blake and that is likely to have been used by the person who left the threatening note. Mr. Docker, an Elekton maintenance man, tells them that Ken does odd jobs for the company, but that he is not there at that time, even though Joe is certain he saw Ken looking out an adjacent old watermill's window at them. The Hardys, their girlfriends, Iola Morton and Callie Shaw and Chet go nearby to have a picnic but an arrow is shot at them with an attached note reading, "Danger. Hardys beware." The Hardy brothers receive a gift of a motorboat they call The Sleuth, and show it to their friend, Tony Prito. Tony says the construction supply yard he is working at for the summer has become the latest to receive counterfeit money used to pay for lumber by a boy matching the description of Ken Blake. The Hardys take The Sleuth to the mill to investigate and find the mill wheel starting and stopping. Soon, they are attacked and left without gas in their new boat. They recover and get back to investigating by finding Ken who says he thinks someone has used his bike the same night that Joe saw someone bicycling from the Hardy's home. Markel and Docker pull Ken away and then a suspicious vehicle leaves Elekton. Later, the same suspicious vehicle gets away before an explosion at Elekton. Frank and Joe are terrified that their dad is inside the burning building. He was in the building but survived the explosion revealing that he was there to stop the attack after realizing there is a pattern to similar type attacks going on around similar companies in the United States. Eager to learn more from Ken, the Hardys soon find that Ken has been released from Elekton. The Hardys find him at a boarding house and he explains that the bricks and lumber bought with the counterfeit money were being used for a project at the mill. Frank and Joe return to the old mill and realize that the wheel mill is set up to act as a signaling device for the people living inside; an electric-eye stops the flow of electricity to the wheel. It acts as a warning to those inside that someone is approaching the mill. Going inside the mill at a time when they know no one else is there, they discover a secret room hidden by the lumber bought with counterfeit money. In the secret room, they find the tools used to make the fake money, but before they can get away the villains return to the mill. Frank and Joe escape through a tunnel but are captured by Docker and Markel. Victor Peters arrives and these three villains reveal that Docker shot the arrow at the girlfriends and Markel used the bike to deliver the note to the Hardys' home. Docker and Markel also explain that, without the knowledge of Victor Peters, they allowed another villain, Paul Blum, into Elekton to attack the place, which is the case that Fenton Hardy was investigating. Blum reveals that he is working for other countries who wish to stop United States missile development. Frank and Joe take advantage of an opportunity and overtake the villains. The book ends with the police arresting all the villains and the expectation of the Hardys' next case when "they were called upon to solve the mystery of The Missing Chums." |
The Frosted Death | null | null | The Sangaman-Veshnir drug company has discovered a fast-growing mold that grows on meat, covering the victim with a powdered sugar-like coating: "The Frosted Death". Growing into the skin pores and lungs, it causes death by suffocation, and cannot be killed by conventional means; a speck on the skin causes death in a short time. Kindly-seeming, thoroughly evil Veshnir murders to keep the mold secret: he has a deal with Germany to mass produce it as a weapon of war. A submarine of Nazis has infiltrated to support this effort. At his secret estate in Maine, Veshnir has set up a production facility, using dying men enslaved by blowing some mold into their brains. Benson quickly contains outbreaks of the mold, and uses detective work to identify the source. Mac works feverishly, develops an antidote. Mac and Josh are captured. Josh secretly infects Veshnir with the mold. Benson poses as one of the Nazi agents and uses the antidote to save Josh and Mac. Veshnir's production facility is destroyed. The Nazis will return to Germany and likely death. |
The Secret Panel | Franklin W. Dixon | 1,946 | Innocently responding to a motorist's request that they shut off a light at his home, the Hardy Boys discover a deep mystery: the man used the name of a man, John Mead, that Chief Collig claims died five years earlier in a car accident. Adding to the mystery, the Mead mansion's doors have neither knobs nor visible keyholes. Only after speaking to a locksmith do they learn that the locks were concealed. Meanwhile, their father Fenton assigns them to investigate a lead in the kidnapping of a doctor that may lead down the trail to a local boy who fell in with a local thief, a master criminal, who's a relation to the boy. The Hardy boys are to locate a traffic signal that hums like someone singing faintly, and drive ten minutes from it in each direction, then investigate the area for a "secret panel". Fenton's mystery ends up intertwining with the Mead mansion and the master criminal, who's been carrying out a series of break-ins and thefts without triggering the alarm systems. It turns out that the deceased Mr. Mead was an electronics genius who developed a device that could open any lock and defeat alarm systems, but asked that, upon his death, it be turned over to the FBI. The master criminal had befriended Mr. Mead, found out about the device, and stolen it. |
Josephine Mutzenbacher | null | 1,906 | The plot device employed in Josephine Mutzenbacher is that of first-person narrative, structured in the format of a memoir. The story is told from the point of view of an accomplished aging 50-year-old Viennese courtesan who is looking back upon the sexual escapades she enjoyed during her unbridled youth in Vienna. Contrary to the what the title indicates, almost the entirety of the book takes place when Josephine is between the ages of 5–12 years old, before she actually becomes a licensed prostitute in the brothels of Vienna. The book begins when she is five years old and ends when she is twelve years old and about to enter professional service in a brothel. Although the book makes use of many "euphemisms" for human anatomy and sexual behavior that seem quaint today, its content is entirely pornographic. The actual progression of events amounts to little more than a graphic, unapologetic description of the reckless sexuality exhibited by the heroine, all before reaching her 13th year. The style bears more than a passing resemblance to the Marquis de Sade's The 120 Days of Sodom in its unabashed "laundry list" cataloging of all manner of taboo sexual antics from incest, rape and homosexuality to child prostitution, group sex and fellatio. |
The Phantom Freighter | Franklin W. Dixon | 1,947 | The Hardy brothers embark on a freighter trip under mysterious circumstances and find themselves involved with a smuggling ring. The Hardy Boys discover that the Phantom Freighter is really a smuggling ship used to smuggle counterfeit documents, illegal drugs, cow hides, and electric motors. Enigmatic stranger Thaddeus McClintock arrives in Bayport and engages Frank and Joe Hardy to arrange for a relaxing trip for him (with the Boys to accompany him) with the mysterious promise of “I’ll pay all expenses and when the trip is over you’ll be paid. Money, if you like. Or something else.” Meanwhile, Aunt Gertrude has arrived and announced that she is going to be living in the Hardy household long term. The shipping company incorrectly delivers one of her cartons, delivering instead a box apparently of raw wool addressed to a Mr. Johnson to the Hardy’s address. After expressing her anger at the shipping company as the carton contains valuable family papers, Aunt Gertrude sends the boys to the address marked on the box to swap the packages. Arriving at the remote farm, the boys find nobody home but the barn ablaze. Frank breaks into the barn to rescue a carton believed to be Aunt Gertrude’s, only to find out it contained discarded newspapers. The owner of the barn who arrives and is shocked to find that someone had been staying at his house and having packages delivered while he was out of town. After getting a description of the man who signed for the package from the delivery driver, the boys spot a man matching that description at a clothing store and follow him to the docks where he disappears. Later, after reviewing several other modes of travel with Mr. McClintock, the boys suggest a cruise on an ocean going freighter, to which Mr. McClintock is receptive. The boys then try repeatedly to book passage on freighters scheduled through Bayport, but are rebuffed at every turn. The travel agency they attempted to work through, owned by Mr. Klack, seems more interested in keeping them off ships than arranging their passage. Even when the boys are successful at obtaining tickets through an out-of-town travel agency, an unknown individual posing to act on their behalf picks up their tickets, again preventing them from setting sail. At the suggestion of loyal Hardy friend Chet Morton (who is trying his hand at fly-tying), the boys and Mr. McClintock employ local fishing captain Harkness to take them on a fishing expedition. Captain Harkness agrees to take the trip, provided they avoid Barmet Shoals as he recently spotted a phantom freighter there that left him spooked and shaken. After landing a monstrous tuna to the delight of Mr. McClintock and heading back to Bayport, their boat runs out of gas to the disbelief of Captain Harkness. As night falls, the party on the boat is horrified to see a freighter cutting through the sea toward them, only to go silent and dark. Though the boys try hard to locate the ship, it is neither heard or sighted again and has disappeared by first light. Rescue comes from a coastal patrol aircraft and ship the next day. Meanwhile, numerous other break-ins are discovered in and around Bayport during which nothing was stolen from unoccupied houses, but packages are delivered and signed for by people unknown to the owners. Fenton Hardy reveals that he is working on a case of forged historical documents which have been appearing in the rare document trade. Aunt Gertrude takes a trip to Bridgewater, evasively answering questions about where and why she is going. The boys follow her to Bridgewater and find her meeting with an elderly woman the boys previously identified as one of the people involved in the package delivery scheme. The boys summon the local police who arrest the woman (who is selling some of the contents of Aunt Gertrude’s carton back to her) and search her motel room, finding more stolen property. The boys recruit their friend Biff Hooper to help them book passage, which turns to their advantage as an out-of-town travel agent arranges their cruise aboard the ‘’Father Neptune’’ Meeting Captain Gramwell of the ‘’Father Neptune’’, the boys learn that one crewmember recently left the ship ill and a new hand had been hired. Suspicious, the boys investigate and find the crewman had in fact been kidnapped and the new hand was sent to interrupt the trip. Captain Gramwell reacts quickly and has the new crewman, recognized by the boys as part of the smuggling ring, arrested and questioned to find his missing crewman, who is recovered. Mr. McClintock, the boys, Biff, and Chet board the ‘’Father Neptune’’ in Southport. At sea, the cargo aboard the ‘’Father Neptune’’ suddenly shifts, leaving the ship listing badly and in danger of sinking. The crew and passengers rush to redistribute the cargo, eventually restoring the ship upright. The boys tell Captain Gramwell about the smuggling ring and phantom ship. Captain Gramwell has the ship’s radio operator contact all the ships in the area and discovers that the ‘’Lion Tamer’’ spotted just such a ship nearby. Spotting the ship at nightfall, the ‘’Father Neptune’’ pursues the mystery ship, identified as the ‘’Black Gull’’, but is unable to overtake it, much to the frustration of Captain Gramwell as the ‘’Father Neptune’’ is declared to be the fastest ship in those waters and the mystery ship is obviously older and slower. That night, the mystery ship is again sighted, dark and apparently adrift. Along with the ‘’Father Nepture’’’s radio operator Sparks, the boys row over to the ship while the ‘’Father Neptune’’ keeps a spotlight on the mystery ship to hide the rowboat. This scene is depicted on the cover of the book. Upon boarding the mystery ship, the party finds the ship seemingly abandoned, but are suddenly jumped by the ship’s crew and captured. Held captive with Sparks aboard the ‘’Black Gull’’ by the chief smuggler Crowfoot, the boys pretend to cast in with the smuggler. Crowfeet tells the boys about the ship’s secret repeller belts around the hull which hold off any motorized vessel or aircraft, allowing the ‘’Black Gull’’ (under many different names) to escape from much faster ships and explaining how the boys adrift in the fishing boat were able to get so close with the fishing boat’s engine shut down due to fuel exhaustion. After the ‘’Black Gull’’’s radio operator falls ill, Crowfeet presses a seemingly reluctant Sparks into service to send messages. The boys then take turns sending coded messages via innocent-sounding nursery rhymes to their father, including the line “sailing, sailing, over the bounding main, for many a sailing ship can go faster…”. Soon a sleek racing sloop under full sail (immune to the effects of the repeller which only affects motor vessels) approaches and quickly overtakes the slow freighter. Coast Guard officers board and rescue the boys, Sparks, and the captured scientists who had been kidnapped and forced to work for the smuggler. Among them is a chemist who had developed the techniques used to artificially age paper to supply forged documents for sale in the antique / rare document market. The elderly “smuggler” Mitchell turns out to be Mr. McClintock’s former business partner and is happily reunited with Mr. McClintock aboard the ‘’Father Neptune’’. With Mitchell rescued, the entire design for the repeller belt is recovered and Mr. McClintock and Mitchell agree to turn the design over to the US Government. The boys, Chet, Biff, and Mr. McClintock then continue their cruise to the Caribbean. The reader is left with a note that the Hardy Boys next mystery will be The Secret of Skull Mountain. |
The Secret of Skull Mountain | Franklin W. Dixon | 1,948 | Every night water strangely disappears from the new Tarnack Reservoir near Skull Mountain. Frank and Joe join forces with a team of skilled engineers to solve the baffling mystery. The book takes place on Skull Mountain, a mountain where many skulls have been seen, near Bayport, U.S.A. This city around Skull Mountain loses water each night because of the new reservoir. There is always something mysterious happening on the mountain, which has an underground channel. The story begins when Joe wants to go swimming, however, Frank points out that there is no water. When they discover that the water is missing, they team up with Chet Morton, Dick Ames and Bob Carpenter in order to solve the mystery. While exploring Skull Mountain, where the reservoir is located, the boys are attacked several times. They finally find Timothy Kimball Jr. (sweeper) breaking into Mr. & Mrs. Kleng’s store in order to steal the safe which holds his pay ($5000). Timothy is arrested and questioned about the reservoir. This leads the Hardy Boys to catch the villain, Mr. Kleng, and solve the crime. At the end, the Hardy Boys can go swim because there is enough water in the pool. |
The Sign of the Crooked Arrow | Franklin W. Dixon | 1,949 | The Hardy brothers interrupt their investigations of jewelry store holdups to answer a plea from their cousin on a New Mexico cattle ranch. They discover how Arrow cigarettes can knock people out using a gas that comes out from a vent in the ground in New Mexico, originally discovered by American Indians. |
The Secret of the Lost Tunnel | Franklin W. Dixon | 1,950 | The Hardy Boys travel with Brigadier General Jack Smith to an historic Civil War battlefield in the Deep South. Rocky Run Battlefield (near the town of Centerville in an unnamed state) is the center of a legend involving a Confederate general who was disgraced due to his alleged involvement with the theft of gold from a bank. Smith seeks to vindicate the long-dead officer. |
The Wailing Siren Mystery | Franklin W. Dixon | 1,951 | Their SOS ignored by a strange yacht in a storm, the Hardy Boys find a wallet, apparently picked up by a helicopter, containing two thousand dollars alongside their speedboat and are launched into a mystery involving diverse clues. This includes finding out who kidnapped Jack Wayne and took his plane, and where the wailing siren is coming from. |
The Secret of Wildcat Swamp | Franklin W. Dixon | 1,952 | An paleontology expedition in the West turns into a desperate attempt to capture freight train robbers and an escaped convict. |
The Crisscross Shadow | Franklin W. Dixon | 1,953 | The Hardy boys find the missing deed to an Indian's land, prevent a phony salesman from carrying through a reckless scheme, and help their father solve a top-secret sabotage case. |
The Yellow Feather Mystery | Franklin W. Dixon | 1,954 | In trying to trace a missing will, detectives Frank and Joe Hardy trap a dangerous criminal who is willing to risk all--including murder--for money. |
The Hooded Hawk Mystery | Franklin W. Dixon | 1,954 | The Hardy Boys solve a kidnapping and break up a gang smuggling illegal aliens from India who are also holding an Indian prince captive. An official of the Indian government saw to it that a trained peregrine falcon was delivered to the boys to use in their investigation. Throughout their mission the falcon intercepts many messages between the smugglers as the criminals use pigeons to fly messages from place to place. Finally, the boys rescue the Indian prince and catch the human smugglers along with creating a strong bind between India and the Hardys. |
The Clue in the Embers | Franklin W. Dixon | 1,956 | In solving the mystery of two medallions missing from an inherited curio collection, the Hardys wind up in a desolate area of Guatemala at the mercy of dangerous thugs. |
The Secret of Pirate's Hill | Franklin W. Dixon | 1,957 | Hired by a mysterious businessman to locate an old Spanish cannon, the Hardy brothers and friends grow more and more suspicious as they encounter stolen cars and a mysterious man on a motorcycle. They eventually uncover the cannon and thousands in gold bullion after perilous underwater adventures. |
The Mystery at Devil's Paw | Franklin W. Dixon | 1,959 | Frank and Joe Hardy receive a telegram from their friend Tony saying that he is in danger in Alaska and needs their help. He also suggests bringing the brother's friend, Chet Morton. At the airport they find a person following them and spying on them and they are attacked. Later the police discover that the attacker was a wanted spy: Romo Stransky. Arriving in Alaska, they meet Ted Sewell, Tony’s helper, and he leads the boys to Tony’s camp. During the trip, Ted tells the boys about how his father disappeared and he wants them to help him find him. At camp, Tony tells the boys that they have been attacked several times by a gang. During a search of the island, they find a knapsack, a map and a piece of jade. They later learn of a gang member going to The Devil’s Paw — a place in British Columbia. At The Devils Paw they learn of an ancient Indian burial site where people would steal gold and jewelry. The brothers remembered the piece of jade they found in the knapsack and it might have been stolen from the burial site. They locate the ancient burial site and also find Ted Sewell’s father. They find the camp of the gang and learn that the mysterious gang was searching for a lost rocket. They are captured, but escape with the help of their friend Chet. A radio call to special agents leads to the arrest of the gang. |
The Mystery of the Chinese Junk | Franklin W. Dixon | 1,959 | The Hardys purchase a Chinese junk named the Hai Hau to ferry passengers to Rocky Isle and make some extra money. Four mysterious men also are interested in the boat because of treasure hidden inside the Hai Hau. |
Mystery of the Desert Giant | Franklin W. Dixon | 1,960 | The Hardy Boys and Chet Morton search on the California desert for missing industrialist, Willard Grafton, and break up a gang of criminals intent on defrauding the US government. Much of this book takes place in Blythe, California and it cites real, current locales, such as Hobson Way and the giant intaglios north of Blythe on U.S. Highway 95. http://www.blytheareachamberofcommerce.com/intag.htm In the end, the boys discover that Grafton's fellow explorer had a part in the gang of criminal's racket. With this, Grafton is rescued, and the thugs who apparently were smuggling illegal cheques across the country are caught. |
The Clue of the Screeching Owl | Franklin W. Dixon | 1,962 | When dogs and men suddenly disappear, and strange screams fill the night, fantastic stories of vengeful ghosts are almost believable. It is these strange happenings which bring Frank and Joe Hardy to the Pocono Mountains to help their father's friend, a retired police captain, solve the mystery of Black Hollow. But when the Hardy Boys and Chet Morton arrive at Captain Thomas Maguire's cabin on the edge of the hollow, he has disappeared. In the woods the boys find only a few slim clues: a flashlight bearing the initials T.M., a few scraps of bright plaid cloth, and two empty shotgun shells which had been fired recently. Frank and Joe are determined to find the captain, despite Chet's misgivings after a night of weird and terrifying screams. Neighbors of the missing man insist that the bloodcurdling cries are those of a legendary witch who stalks Black Hollow seeking vengeance. Strangely, it is a small puppy that helps the boys disclose a most unusual and surprising set of circumstances, involving a mute boy, an elusive hermit, and a fearless puma trainer. |
The Viking Symbol Mystery | Franklin W. Dixon | 1,963 | The Hardy Boys and Chet Morton travel to Canada's Northwest Territories to recover a stolen Viking artifact (a runestone). They also smash a group of thieves robbing recreational lodges around the Great Slave Lake. They visit Saskatoon, Saskatchewan; Edmonton, Alberta; Fort Smith, Northwest Territories; and Hay River, Northwest Territories. |
The Mystery of the Aztec Warrior | Franklin W. Dixon | 1,964 | The handwritten will of a deceased world-traveller is strange and mysterious. Its instructions are to deliver "the valuable object to the rightful owner, a descendant of an Aztec warrior." What is the valuable object and where is it? What is the name of the owner and where is he? Frank and Joe Hardy have only one clue to work with: the name of a complete stranger who can help find the answers, Roberto Hermosa. Despite the harassments, the threats, and the attacks made upon them by an unknown, sinister gang, Frank and Joe unravel clue after clue in their adventure-packed search for the living descendant of the mighty Aztec nation which once ruled Mexico. The hunt leads to a marketplace in Mexico City, to the Pyramids at Teotihuacan, to the tombs of Oaxaca-where Chet Morton, the Hardy's buddy, is nearly buried alive by foul play. It takes as much high courage as clever deduction for the young detectives to defeat their ruthless foes and to decipher the fascinating secrets of the strange and mysterious will. |
The Haunted Fort | Franklin W. Dixon | 1,965 | The story starts with the boys' friend Chet Morton who is going off to attend a summer art school in New England. He calls on the Hardy Boys to solve the mystery of the theft of two valuable oil paintings in the area of Millwood. The Hardy Boys accept the proposal and go along with Chet to the Millwood school. In the school, they meet a millionaire - Mr. Davenport. A fort, known as Senandaga, is believed to be haunted and the Hardy Boys think that the Haunted fort may have something to do with the theft of the paintings. The Hardy Boys and Chet are told that Mr. Davenport's ancestor, known as the prisoner-painter was held prisoner in Senandaga and he made 17 paintings of the outside view of Senandaga. Out of seventeen, 3 have been stolen. It is believed that a treasure, which contains a chain of solid gold is hidden in the fort, the clue to find them is in the paintings of the prisoner-painter. The Hardy Boys investigate the case. Many times, their car, boat and jeeps are sabotaged, usually in with the intent to kill them. But, the Hardy Boys escape every time. As the story progresses, all the paintings are stolen by someone who wants the clue to find the chain, except one, which is kept with Mr. Davenport. Soon the Hardy Boys & Chet find the clue in that one painting and search the fort. During which, they see a ghost walking on water. The Hardy Boys have a number of suspects - example: a strange English hermit who lives alone on an island, a critic named Chauncy Gilman who hates Mr. Davenport, a student of the school named Ronnie Rush & a French Sculpting teacher named Rene Folette. While searching, they and Mr. Davenport are caught and are held captive in a dungeon. In the end, they find the gold chain, fight the villains, and solve the mystery. |
The Mystery of the Spiral Bridge | Franklin W. Dixon | 1,966 | The Hardy Boys track down the saboteurs who kidnapped their father, and have to keep them from blowing up a bridge near Boontown, Kentucky. The bridge is being built by Tony Pritos fathers construction company. Mr Hardy is ill most of the story. The Villains are mostly ex-crooks who wants that area of the bridge for themselves. |
The Secret Agent on Flight 101 | Harriet Adams | 1,967 | Joe and Frank Hardy go to a magic show with their dad. After the show is done, their dad asks Hexton how the vanishing act was performed. Hexton offers to do the trick on Fenton Hardy. When their dad disappears, he does not reappear. Hexton says their dad is simply playing a joke on them; Joe and Frank do not believe this. They suspect he was kidnapped. To be sure, Joe and Frank study some of their dad's records; they find Hexton was the leader of an international gang. The first place they look is in a light house that they suspected he might be in. They go inside and see a guard; the guard tries to escape but cannot. He says their dad was here but is not anymore. Though not sure, the boys suspect that their dad was purposely moved to a more secretive place. The boys check in Hexton's castle but get caught. They find that the hinges of the place they were locked in were bad; Joe and Frank take turns to pry them off. Finally, the boys escape. The boys overhear the gang talking about stealing some jewels. They now have a second job to do. As the boys were leaving, the criminals try to recapture them. It ends up that the police have come just in time to save the boys. Although the boys are fine, the criminals escape. Hexton steals the jewels and takes a ride on Flight 101. Joe and Frank also take a ride on flight on Flight 101, but see nothing suspicious. When everyone was exiting the plane, the boys think they see Hexton. As they try to capture him, another person helps in the capturing of Hexton. It ends up that the person was Fenton Hardy. All along Joe and Frank's dad was spying on Flight 101. |
The Arctic Patrol Mystery | Franklin W. Dixon | 1,969 | At the beginning the Hardy boys fly to Iceland to look for a man that an insurance company that is giving him a reward. Then at a party someone attempted to kidnap Frank. A clue is a glove by a sulfur pit in Iceland. It might mean the American astronauts that came to Iceland to study the volcanoes. They take a flight on a private plane to Akureyri. The pilot is an enemy and forces a landing on a glacier. After they land on the glacier they handcuff their enemy. They are fooled by a phony police helicopter that rescues the enemy. They tried to use the radio but the pilot hid the radio crystal. They found it and made contact with the radio tower at Reykjavik. Shortly another helicopter came to pick up the Hardys. They went to Akureyri and visited a phony Rex Hallbjornsson. Shortly after they see Chet wandering in front of the hotel. He looked funny. Then they realized he was drugged! They thought some one might be upstairs looking at their stuff! They rushed upstairs. It was the pilot and his phony rescuer .Joe tried to get the pilot and the wig came off. It was the phony Rex Hallbjornsson! They got away! Chet and Tony looked went to investigate a man named Hallbjornsson that might know rex while frank and Joe went with a coast guard officer to look for Hallbjornsson in the sea. After a devastating storm they saw a small raft, maybe with a motor. They thought it might be the criminals. Over the course of a day or two, they put on disguises and acted as phony crewman for Rex Mar (the real Hallbjornson—he changed his name). When they came on deck, Musselaman was there and was fooled by the disguises until Joe slipped up by speaking English in Iceland. The boys defeat the criminals in hand-to-hand combat and have them arrested. |
The Bombay Boomerang | Franklin W. Dixon | 1,970 | The Hardy Boys head to sea to solve the theft of mercury shipments and a government missile and to foil a terrorist plan to create havoc in the United States. They discover that the gang is hiding in a hotel in Baltimore, where their father, Fenton Hardy, is staying under the name L. Marks. An attempt is made on their father's life when his cover is blown, but the Hardy Boys save him in time. Using devices such as ear bugs, they spy on the gang. With the help of an Admiral at the Pentagon, the boys uncover the gang's nefarious plot. The gang wants to blast a cave containing nerve gas with a Super S missile that can't be redirected. This will cause the nerve gas to spread in the USA, which in turn will help overthrow the US government. The Hardys learn that an Indian freighter, Nanda Kailash, is going to dock at Baltimore. They explore the ship as all the clues point towards India. There, an attempt is made on Joe's life. The Hardys also capture the Mercury gang. They find a new friend, Akshay, who takes them to a ship called the Bombay Batarang, where they uncover some clues to the mystery. In the end, with trickery the Hardys capture the rest of the gang. Later they are abducted, but they fight off the criminals and capture the mastermind in the end.. |
Danger on Vampire Trail | Franklin W. Dixon | 1,971 | The Hardy boys and two friends take a camping trip to the Rocky Mountains in an attempt to locate a gang of credit card counterfeiters. |
The Masked Monkey | Franklin W. Dixon | 1,972 | The Hardy brothers' search for the missing son of a wealthy industrialist leads them to Brazil and great danger. |
The Shattered Helmet | Franklin W. Dixon | 1,973 | Danger is the name of the game when the Hardys agree to help their pen pal from Greece, Evangelos Pandropolos, search for a priceless, ancient Greek helmet. Years ago, Evan's uncle had loaned it to a Hollywood movie company for use in a silent motion picture, The Persian Glory, for a role in the movie, but the helmet was lost after the movie was done. At Hunt College, where Evan, Frank, Joe and Chet Morton are taking a summer course in film-making, the boys are harassed by Leon Saffel whose harassments get more and more vicious. All the while a gang is trying to force Mr. Hardy to give up his investigations of a national crime syndicate and also trying to find the helmet, which after speaking to Evan's billionaire uncle, may have belonged to King Agamemnon making the helmet even more valuable. The clues that the Hardys unearth keep them on the move-from their college campus to California and finally to Greece. In a sizzling climax, the Hardys, Evan and Chet match wits with their powerful enemies on the island of Corfu. |
The Clue of the Hissing Serpent | Franklin W. Dixon | 1,974 | The Hardy brothers and Chet head to Hong Kong to investigate a missing chess trophy, a serpent pattern on a vase and hot-air balloon, and end up smashing an international crime ring. |
The Mysterious Caravan | Franklin W. Dixon | 1,975 | On a winter vacation in Jamaica, the Hardy Boys begin a dangerous adventure when an ancient bronze death mask is discovered near their beach house (where Frank comically loses and finds his underwear) The case takes them from Jamaica to their hometown of Bayport to Casablanca to Marrakesh. They meet William along the way, a kind African who is willing to help them uncover secrets of the mask, which they find out is Jamaican property. William scares off the enemies of the Hardy Boys in Swahili, telling them he is an even more powerful Juju man then theirs and eventually Mr. Hardy comes after Frank and Joe thought they were dead. Back at the Celliers', they celebrate and Christine, the gorgeous, black-haired teen lets the Hardys call home to their worrying mother and Aunt Gertrude. William even receives a wild dog as a present for saving the Hardys from the predicament. |
The Witchmaster's Key | Franklin W. Dixon | 1,976 | The Hardy boys' investigation of a museum and grave robbery in Griffinmoore, East Anglia arouses the anger of a coven of black witches. |
The Jungle Pyramid | Franklin W. Dixon | 1,977 | The search for gold robbed from a mint takes the Hardy Boys to Mexico City and to the Yucatán Peninsula where they uncover a second mystery in the New York Museum. |
The Firebird Rocket | Franklin W. Dixon | 1,978 | The Hardy Boys help their detective father, Fenton Hardy, search for a famous rocket scientist whose disappearance endangers the launching of the Firebird Rocket. They are threatened multiple times, but still do not give up with their lives at risk. Frank and Joe Hardy aid their father and others. However, they soon learn that they are working for a criminal. |
The Sting of the Scorpion | Franklin W. Dixon | 1,979 | During their father's investigation of the ruthless Scorpio gang of terrorists, the Hardy Boys witness an explosion and an elephant falling from an airship named Safari Queen of Quinn Airport which was carrying animals of the newly opened Wild World Zoo. Strange events are happening at Wild World, so the Hardy Boys search for the truth. They fall into a trap and almost escape injury. They capture the gang in an all-out fight.The leader of the gang is Eustace Jarman. |
Princess Daisy | Judith Krantz | 1,980 | The novel tells the story of Princess Marguerite "Daisy" Valensky. She is the daughter of Prince Alexander "Stash" Valensky, a wealthy Russian-born polo player and former playboy, and his wife Francesca Vernon, a beautiful and talented American actress. Stash and Francesca, madly in love, are thrilled by her pregnancy and the news that she is carrying twins. However, a problem during delivery denies one of the twin girls, named Danielle, enough oxygen, and she is born brain-damaged, while Daisy is healthy. Francesca suffers from acute post-partum depression and enters a fugue state for several weeks. Stash, who has a fear and disgust of illness and abnormality after a childhood spent watching his mother slowly waste away from tuberculosis, is unable to accept or love Danielle. When Francesca recovers from her depression, he lies to her, telling her that the second-born twin died soon after birth. She discovers the truth and flees with both infants to California, where she is helped by her former agent and his wife. For several years, she lives a secluded life in Carmel and grants Stash short visits with Daisy. Francesca dies in a car accident, and Daisy and Dani are reunited with their father, who immediately places Dani in an expensive but remote home for retarded children, much to Daisy's distress. When Daisy turns 16, her father dies in a plane accident, after which her older half-brother, Ram, who has become obsessed with her, seduces and then brutally rapes her. To get her away from Ram, her father's mistress, Anabel (a mother figure to the girl), sends her to the University of California at Santa Cruz, where she forms what will be a lifelong friendship with Kiki Kavanaugh, an auto industry heiress from Grosse Pointe, Michigan. Because of Daisy's total estrangement from Ram, who is a trustee of her inheritance, she neglects to read his letters regarding her stock portfolio at a crucial moment and thus loses everything her father left her. As a result, she is forced to drop out of college and go to work. She paints portraits of rich, horse-mad peoples' children on ponies in order to pay Dani's bills and also works in a demanding job at a production company that makes television commercials. When Anabel becomes ill and needs money for treatment, Daisy must make a decision to abandon her private life. Up to this point, Daisy has lived out of the public eye, refusing to trade on her title for financial gain, but she ultimately accepts an opportunity to do so. In the process, Daisy must learn to trust a man who loves her, to come to terms with her sister's disability, and to make peace with the life she's been given. |
The Book of Illusions | Paul Auster | 2,002 | Set in the late 1980s, the story is written from the perspective of David Zimmer, a university professor who, after losing his wife and children in a plane crash, falls into a routine of depression and isolation. After seeing one of the silent comedies of Hector Mann, an actor missing since the 1920s, he decides to occupy himself by watching all of Mann's films and writing a book about them. The publishing of the book, however, triggers another series of events that draw Zimmer even deeper into the actor's past. The middle of the story is largely dedicated to telling the life story of Hector Mann, involving his self-imposed exile from his past life and career, which serves as a form of penance for his role in the death of a woman who loved him. In his last days, his wife sends a letter to Zimmer, requesting him to come to their New Mexico home to bear witness to Mann's final legacy of films. The events that ensue form the overarching story of Zimmer's rehabilitation from his reclusive state, and his coming to terms with the manner in which his family was killed. |
Cart and Cwidder | Diana Wynne Jones | 1,975 | Osfameron Tanamoril (Moril) Clennenson is a travelling musician, who travels with his father, Clennen, his mother, Lenina, and his elder siblings, Dagner and Brid, through Dalemark, a country torn by civil war between the South and the North. They travel around, playing music, taking passengers and messages, and spreading news throughout the country. When Clennen (the father and main performer) is murdered by the Earl of South Dales, who suspects him of being a spy for the North, Lenina (who is high-born and gave up the chance of being a Lady when she married Clennen) takes her three children and their passenger Kialan, the fugitive son of a Northern earl, back to her home town of Markind in South Dalemark. Within the same day as her husband's death, Lenina is married to her former fiancé the Lord of Markind, guided by the belief that this is the only way to counter the bad luck caused by Clennen's murder. Dagner, Brid, and Moril encounter their father's murderer among the wedding guests in Markind and together with Kialan they flee the town and try to reach the North, while continuing to perform for a living. However, without Clennen and Lenina, they find this difficult to do. The oldest son, Dagner, tries to continue their father's work as a Northern spy, but is arrested for treason against the Earl of South Dales. Brid, Moril, and Kialan are forced to flee, believing that Dagner will be hanged. Before he died, Clennen left his youngest son Moril a magical cwidder (a common musical instrument in Dalemark similar to a lute with some properties of an acoustic guitar). It is rumored to have been owned by Moril's ancestor and namesake Osfameron, who was both a minstrel and a famous magician, featuring in many of the legends of Dalemark. Throughout their travels from the South to the North, Moril discovers that he has the power to use the magic of his newly inherited instrument. As they travel, they become embroiled in the civil war. As the Southerners are about to attack the North, Moril uses his magical cwidder to make the mountains 'walk' and close Flennpass, the only mountain pass between the North and the South, just as his ancestor, the famed Osfameron, did in so many of the songs Moril's father had sung nearly every day. The walking mountains crush the attacking Southern army, killing the evil Earl of South Dales, Clennen's murderer, and saving the North. However, after the battle, Moril is wracked with guilt, as he caused the deaths of hundreds of men, and mainly because he was angry that his beloved horse, Olob, had been shot. In the end, when all safely reach Hannart, the earldom of Kialan's father, they are joined by Dagner who has been released from jail after the death of the Earl of South Dales and traveled to North Dalemark with another traveling Singer, Hestefan. Moril decides that he should travel with Hestefan and learn how to be a proper Singer. Hestefan accepts, and they leave to continue travelling through Dalemark. |
Champions of the Force | Kevin J. Anderson | null | Kyp Durron continued his rampage to destroy the Galactic Empire with the Sun Crusher to avenge his brother (whom he inadvertently kills when he destroys Carida). Luke, who was in a suspended animation state after the fight between himself and Exar Kun, made every attempt he can to save his body from the evil spirit of Exar Kun. After reaching out to the Jedi twins, he warns them about the danger. In the end, all the apprentices unite and Exar Kun is destroyed. After the death of Exar Kun, Kyp comes to the light side again. Luke forgives Kyp but many throughout the galaxy, especially the Empire, shall hate him forever. Kyp takes the Sun Crusher into the Maw to destroy it. After Wedge Antilles and his group of fighters reach the Maw Installation, the last of Admiral Daala's ships, the Gorgon, limps back to Imperial installation in the Maw near Kessel. After destroyong the Installation and blowing an ionic asteroid, Admiral Daala successfully fakes her death and escapes. Meanwhile, Bevel Lemelisk and his group of scientists escape on the prototype Death Star. Before they could go far, Kyp crashes his ship, the Sun Crusher into the prototype and hauls both ships into a black hole. Kyp escapes by getting into a pod. Now Kyp has redeemed himself to the Jedi Order, himself, and Luke. |
Pied Piper | Nevil Shute | null | The story concerns an elderly Englishman, John Sidney Howard, who goes on a fishing holiday in France after the Second World War breaks out, but before the fall of France. Entrusted with the care of two British children, and overtaken by events, he attempts to return to England and safety. His journey is hampered by the unexpected speed of the Nazi invasion of France, and by the fact that he continually finds himself entrusted with the custody of more and more young children. Eventually, he is stranded in Nazi occupied France and he is fully aware that, as an Englishman, he is an enemy to the occupying forces. While attempting to get passage on a fishing boat, he and his charges are discovered by the Germans. However, in a final plot twist, the German commandant allows them to escape on the condition that they take his niece with them and send her to relatives in the USA. His niece is apparently orphaned and had a Jewish mother. The tale is told by an acquaintance he meets in a London club. |
The Comedians | Graham Greene | 1,966 | The reader is introduced to the main characters on board the Medea, a Dutch ship serving Port-au-Prince and the Dominican Republic. The narrator is Mr. Brown, returning from an unsuccessful trip to the United States to sell his hotel, located in Port-au-Prince. Also present are Mr. Smith, (the Presidential Candidate), who ran on the vegetarian ticket in the American election of 1948; he and Mrs. Smith are on an optimistic journey to build a vegetarian center in Haiti. "Major" Jones is a likeable person of dubious history; he is full of stories about exploits that are not quite believable. Upon arriving in Haiti, Brown returns to his hotel to find that the secretary of social welfare, who it seems was on the run from the government, has committed suicide in his pool. Brown has to dispose of the body to avoid being implicated. Meanwhile, Jones is arrested as soon as he sets foot on Haitian soil. When Brown is made aware of this, he convinces Mr. Smith to use his 'political weight' to help Jones get out of prison. With only the help of a pen and some paper, Jones is able to forge his way into the Haitian government. When the body of Secretary Philipot is found, his family tries to hold a funeral, but the government's soldiers, the Tontons Macoute, ambush the procession and steal the body. The ex-secretary's nephew decides to join the rebel forces, and to do this he must first participate in a voodoo initiation ceremony. Brown reunites with his lover, Pineda, but finds that her child and husband still stand between them. And Mr. and Mrs. Smith continue to look into establishing a vegetarian centre in Haiti, before they finally realize that this country is in no way suited to such an enterprise. The Smiths pack up their bags and leave for the neighboring Dominican Republic. Just as quickly as he infiltrated the government, Jones is soon an enemy of the state, and Brown has an adventure trying to smuggle Jones out of the country. Brown first attempts to sneak Jones onto the Medea, and when that fails Jones is given sanctuary in Pineda's embassy. But Brown doesn't like it when Jones becomes too close to the Lady Pineda, so he convinces Jones to join the rebels in the north. Many sacrifices are made towards this end, as Jones has been proclaiming himself a great military hero and the rebels really believe that he will liberate their country. However, it seems that this was all a bluff on Jones' part and he is soon killed in action. The rebellion fails. Brown, unable to return to his hotel in Haiti, finds a new job in Santo Domingo as a mortician. |
The Citadel | A. J. Cronin | 1,937 | In October 1921, Andrew Manson, an idealistic, newly qualified doctor, arrives from Scotland to work as assistant to Doctor Page in the small Welsh mining town of 'Drineffy'. He quickly realises that Page is an invalid and that he has to do all the work for a meagre wage. Shocked by the unsanitary conditions he finds, he works to improve matters and receives the support of Dr Philip Denny, a cynical semi-alcoholic. Resigning, he obtains a post as assistant in a miners' medical aid scheme in 'Aberalaw', a neighbouring coal mining town in the South Wales coalfield. On the strength of this job, he marries Christine Barlow, a junior school teacher. Christine helps her husband with his silicosis research. Eager to improve the lives of his patients, mainly coal miners, Manson dedicates many hours to research in his chosen field of lung disease. He studies for, and is granted, the MRCP, and when his research is published, an MD. The research gains him a post with the 'Mines Fatigue Board' in London, but he resigns after six months to set up a private practice. Seduced by the thought of easy money from wealthy clients rather than the principles he started out with, Manson becomes involved with pampered private patients and fashionable surgeons and drifts away from his wife. A patient dies because of a surgeon's ineptitude, and the incident causes Manson to abandon his practice and return to his former ways. He and his wife repair their damaged relationship, but Christine is killed in a traffic accident. It is Denny, now teetotal, who whisks him off to the Welsh countryside to recover. Since Manson had accused the incompetent surgeon of murder, he is vindictively reported to the General Medical Council for having worked with an American tuberculosis specialist who does not have a medical degree, even though the patient had been successfully treated at his nature cure clinic. Despite his lawyer's gloomy prognosis, Manson forcefully justifies his actions during the hearing and is not struck off the medical register. He joins Denny and bacteriologist Dr Hope in opening an integrated, multi-specialty practice, then uncommon, in a country town. |
Fantastic Mr. Fox | Roald Dahl | 1,970 | The story revolves around an anthropomorphic, tricky, clever fox named Mr. Fox who lives underground beside a tree with his wife and four children. In order to feed his family, he makes nightly visits to farms owned by three wicked, cruel, dimwitted farmers named Boggis, Bunce, and Bean and snatches the livestock or food available on each man's respective farm. Tired of being outsmarted by Mr. Fox, the farmers devise a plan to attempt to shoot him by sneaking up on him a certain distance from his hole, blasting shots at their enemy, only to shoot off his tail. In order to successfully kill the fox, the farmers dig up his burrow using caterpillar tractors, although fortunately the family manages to escape by burrowing further beneath the earth to safety. The trio of farmers are ridiculed for their persistence, so they decide to gather by Mr. Fox's hole with tents and pointed guns in order to shoot him when he emerges. Cornered by his rivals, Mr. Fox and his family (along with all of the other families of underground creatures) are left to starve. Suddenly, Mr. Fox devises a plot one day to acquire food. He and his children tunnel through the dirt and wind up burrowing to Boggis's hen-house, just as he had planned. Mr. Fox kills several chickens and sends some of his young to carry the food back home to Mrs. Fox for her to prepare a meal. Along the way to their next destination, Mr. Fox runs into his friend Badger and permits him to accompany him on his mission, and the group proceeds to tunnel to Bunce's farm and then to Bean's cider cellar (where they are nearly discovered by a hired woman named Mabel when she enters the room to collect a few jars of apple cider for Bean). They carry their findings back home, where a great celebratory smorgasbord is being served to the starving underground animals and their families. At the table, Mr. Fox invites everyone to live in a secret underground neighbourhood with him and his family, where he will hunt for them daily and no longer need to worry about predators. Everyone joyfully cheers for this idea, whereas Boggis, Bunce, and Bean are left waiting for the fox to emerge from his hole. |
Twelve | Jasper Kent | null | Twelve is the story of 17 year old White Mike, the privileged son of a restaurant tycoon. His mother succumbed to breast cancer several years before the novel began. White Mike is a drug dealer who has taken his senior year in high school off to sell marijuana to his wealthy peers. When he is not selling drugs he is reminiscing of his childhood and philosophizing about a world he feels he is not a part of. The novel takes place over a five day period in December 1999, beginning on the night of the 27th and ending on New Year's Eve. It is told in a 3rd person narrative and follows not just White Mike but many other characters, but despite this White Mike is the central figure in the book. ;Part 1 -- December 27 The novel begins with White Mike thinking about his deceased mother and musing about the state of New York in the Winter. He then visits the rec center, where Hunter, a friend of his has gotten into a fight with a black basketball player named Nana. The fight ends with both covered in copious amounts of each other's blood. White Mike and Hunter head to a nearby Goody's, where they discuss College. White Mike then leaves to make a sale. Hunter then leaves and goes home, thinking about the fight with Nana while listening to James Taylor on his discman. At home he makes sporadic conversation with his father, who is quite wealthy and a borderline alcoholic. Hunter then leaves the apartment and goes for a walk. The narrative then shifts to Nana, who is going home to his apartment in the Harlem housing projects. Before he can get into his building he witnesses a drug deal between two shady characters, a pale white boy and a heavy black man. The deal then erupts into violence when the heavy man shoots the pale boy with a gun wrapped in a hand towel. Nana tries to escape but is killed as well by the heavy man, who pockets the pale boy's revolver before fleeing the scene. We then shift to Sara Ludlow, the "hottest girl in school" and her girlfriends as they head to a party. They discuss school and their friends. White Mike is at the party. He sells some pot to Chris, the boy throwing the party, but declines Chris's invitation to come in. After wondering how smart Sara Ludlow is, he leaves, musing about how rich everyone is. We then meet Chris, the boy throwing the party, a 17 year old boy desperate to lose his virginity. There is an overview of the party and we then meet Jessica, a school mate of Sara and Chris who heads to the bathroom to do some cocaine. Instead of cocaine she does a drug given to her by a boy. The drug is called Twelve. She takes some and is overwhelmed by the high that follows. She compares it to the first time she read The Gettysburg Address before passing out. The narrative shifts to Claude, Chris's brother, and Tobias, a male model, taking a trip through China Town. They smoke some pot together and then buy bladed weapons at a shop. Claude takes home his weapons and arranges them in his closet, all in perfect order like some private shrine. ;Part 2 -- December 28 The corpses of Nana and the pale boy are found. After talking with some boys who witnessed the fight at the rec center, two detectives place Hunter under arrest because of the blood still on his clothes. Jessica wakes up and heads to the skating rink with some girlfriends. Once there, she accidentally injures a boy named Andrew by cutting his forehead with her skate. Andrew is taken to the hospital and the girls leave the rink. Jessica calls Chris and asks for White Mike's phone number, telling him that she wants more of the drug she had the party, Twelve. At the hospital, Andrew undergoes surgery and is placed in a room for an overnight stay. He is placed in the same room as Sean, the high school football star who happens to be Sara Ludlow's boyfriend. Sean was involved in a car accident. Sara arrives to visit him and strikes up a conversation with Andrew. Andrew loans her his Dave Matthews Band CD, thinking it will make a good excuse to see her again. Sara then goes to see Chris. She asks him to host another, bigger party on New Year's Eve, since his parents are out of town. Chris is apprehensive, but Sara tempts him with sexual favors so he gives in. White Mike meets Jessica with Lionel, a mysterious drug dealer who supplies Mike with Marijuana. Lionel sells the Twelve to Jessica, who asks for Lionel's beeper number in case she wants more; Lionel gives her the number. White Mike and Lionel then converse about Charlie, White Mike's cousin who got him into drug dealing and is away at College. It is revealed here that Lionel killed Charlie and Nana. He tells White Mike he has not seen Charlie, and departs. Tobias heads to a shoot at the modelling agency. There he meets Molly, a fellow model who he is interested in. He takes Molly to Chris and Claude's where he is keeping his flesh-eating piranhas. After showing her the fish, he invites her to the New Year's Eve party and she agrees. Hunter is placed under arrest for the murders of Nana and Charlie since the blood on his clothes is verified as Nana's. He finds he does not have an alibi. Chris and Claude go to a cocktail party hosted by their aunt. Chris converses with a wannabe-author friend of his aunt's about The Beatles and Eminem. After the party Claude returns to China Town with Tobias and illegally buys an Uzi submachine gun from one of the shops. ;Part 3 -- December 29 Chris is having a boxing lesson when Sara shows up, requesting money for some Twelve which she will give to Jessica. Chris reluctantly gives her the money. Molly visits White Mike, who is a good friend of hers even though she is unaware of his "profession". She tells him about Tobias and the party. White Mike gently tries to dissuade her from going. Andrew is bored so he goes for a walk and ends up in Carl Schurz park where he meets and eccentric old man named Sven. He plays a game of chess with Sven, who beats him. Andrew feels he is being insulted by Sven and tries to leave, but Sven insists on taking him to a nearby pub for a drink. He does. At the bar, Andrew and Sven drink Scotch and Sodas and discuss school and Sven's old life as a merchant sailor. Feeling weirded out, Andrew leaves. White Mike is walking home and sees Captain, a homeless bodybuilding black man, injuring himself by hitting a brick wall and calls an ambulance. ;Part 4 -- December 30 That morning, Andrew calls Sara under the guise of getting his CD back. She invites him to Chris's party and asks him to bring weed. Andrew does not smoke pot but decides to score some anyway. We are then introduced to Timmy and Mark Rothko, two fat wanna-be black boys who get their kicks stealing CDs, smoking weed and speaking in an exaggerated hip-hop vernacular. They contact White Mike with the intent of buying some weed. White Mike has a phone conversation with an old friend of his and Hunter's, Warren, and then decides to take a train ride down to Coney Island. The perspective shifts to Sean, who has to go to the hospital for a check-up on his broken arm. He takes a taxi and is annoyed by the driver. White Mike goes to Coney Island and observes people. Back on the train he gets the call from Timmy and Mark Rothko. Jessica wakes up and watches the talk shows. She enjoys watching the "dregs of hummanity" on television and holds a fake talk show with her stuffed animals in which she comments on a fictional school massacre. Here we are given the impression that Jessica may not be all there. Timmy and Mark Rothko stop to buy cigarette usings a fake I.D. It fails and they threaten the store clerk, who in turn pulls an empty revolver on them. They leave all too quickly. Jessica has lunch with her mother, who advises she visits a psychiatrist. She reluctantly agrees and wonders what she will tell her psychiatrist. White Mike sells some weed to Timmy and Mark Rothko, who both irritate and amuse him with their lifestyle. In jail, Hunter finally contacts his father through Andrew's father. Hunter tells his father he is frightened. Hunter's father remembers an incident that happened when he was in school, when a boy died at a drunken fireside party. White Mike meets Andrew at the amphitheatre and sells him weed. White Mike is curious as to why Andrew is buying it. Andrew tells him it is for a girl. ;Part 5 -- New Year's Eve Andrew wakes up and decides to get a haircut. He does, then at home decides he looks bad. He decides to go to the party and resolves to get himself drunk. Chris goes out and buys toiletries and condoms, thinking that tonight will be the night that he loses his virginity. He goes home and throws out his collection of pornography. Timmy and Mark Rothko call White Mike for more weed. They follow him to his house, much to his annoyance. He gives them their weed and they talk about birds. Mark Rothko and Timmy then go to the supermarket and smash a container of Marshmallow fluff. White Mike receives a call from his dad telling him Charlie is dead. White Mike breaks down and wonders who could have done it. Jessica prepares for the party and to score more Twelve. At the party, Jessica gives her cell phone to a girl who beeps White Mike for weed. White Mike rushes over. Andrew and Molly meet in the kitchen and grow closer, deciding to head out for pizza when Lionel arrives. Lionel and Jessica go upstairs and she realises she does not have enough for a bag. She offers to have sex with Lionel in exchange. White Mike arrives at the party and in a fit of rage trashes the house stereo. He punches Chris when Chris attempts to kick him out. He bursts in on Lionel and Jessica, who are having sex. Lionel pulls Charlie's revolver, which he took from the murder scene, on White Mike. White Mike realises Lionel killed Charlie and attacks him, only to be shot. The gunshot causes Claude to snap, and he leaves his room armed with his submachine gun and sword. He goes on a rampage, killing many of the partygoers including Mark Rothko, Timmy, Andrew and Molly. After charging through the house, he steps outside and opens fire on the police, who fatally shoot him on the spot. An afterword by White Mike explains that he underwent surgery for his wound and survived. It also states that Hunter was cleared of all charges after the bullets from Lionel's gun were examined. He also explains that he is now studying in Paris and that he likes it better than New York. After the title page is the inscription, "Dedicated to my father." The next page reads, "Can we please all stand and have a moment of silence for those students who died? And can we now have a moment of silence for those students who killed them?" |
Streets of Laredo | Larry McMurtry | 1,993 | Between the events of the two books, quite a bit has happened. Lorena, lover of Gus McCrae, has left Clara and married Pea Eye Parker, of the former Hat Creek Outfit. They have several children, and own a farm in the Texas panhandle. Pea Eye is thoroughly devoted to Lorena, and Lorena has learned to reciprocate and become almost equally as attached to Pea Eye. Lorena teaches in a nearby schoolhouse. The cattle ranch (set up by the Hat Creek outfit in Montana) has collapsed. Newt is dead, thrown by the Hell Bitch. Call has finally admitted to himself that Newt was his son. July Johnson is dead, and Clara lives alone. Call has gone back to being a Ranger and a gun-for-hire. Trains have greatly expanded the reach of civilization and have pushed back the frontier. The American West is no longer rough and tumble and Captain Woodrow F. Call has become a relic, albeit a greatly respected one. 19-year old Joey Garza and his deadly German rifle (capable of killing a man at a distance of half a mile) are not about to let law and order close the book on the Wild West just yet. The book opens with former Ranger Captain Woodrow F. Call (now a bounty hunter) and Ned Brookshire, the "salaried man" of the title. Brookshire has been sent to Texas from New York by his boss, railroad tycoon Colonel Terry to contract Call's services in apprehending a bandit. The bandit in question is a young Mexican named Joey Garza, who has cost Terry significant business and money through his deadly train robberies. Brookshire is surprised that the old man he encounters has such a reputation, though he notes that Call does have a rather dangerous and respect-demanding aura about him. Brookshire himself does not strike a particularly imposing figure, and soon proves not to be cut out for train or horse travel, inexperienced in the ways of the west or violence, and very homesick for his bossy but loving wife, Katie. Call, on the other hand, is the very picture of experience. Though he is old and seems almost to have trouble lifting his foot into the stirrups, his reputation speaks for him. He has spent forty years on the border and the frontier, many of those with his more talkative but equally respected late partner, Gus McCrae. Protecting settlers in innumerable skirmishes with hostile Indians, rustlers, and dangerous gangs has earned him a great deal of respect and a reputation that generally strikes fear into the hearts of criminals. Family is a focal point of McMurtry's book, with the emphasis on two very different families. One is that of Pea Eye Parker, Call's corporal, a fellow former-ranger who assists Call in his bounty-hunter duties. Pea Eye is now married to Lorena Wood, the whore heroine of Lonesome Dove and now a school teacher and mother of five. Pea Eye is increasingly pressured by his wife and children to stop following the captain in pursuit of bandits, but his loyalty and devotion to Call usually prevails. Though he initially refuses to accompany Call and Brookshire in the hunt for Joey Garza, his guilt wins out and he soon sets out after Call, accompanied by the celebrated Kickapoo tracker, Famous Shoes. The second family that dominates the plot of Streets of Laredo is the family of Joey Garza. Joey's mother, Maria, is the midwife of a small Mexican village on the Rio Grande. She has had a string of brief, failed marriages and has three children, of which Joey is the oldest. Of the other two, her daughter, Teresa, is blind from birth, while her other, Rafael, is very slow. One of Maria's husbands sold Joey to the Apache Indians as a slave when he was a small boy; by the time he came back to Maria and her family, he was a bitter, angry, silent boy who was obsessed with killing and stealing (unknown to Maria, Joey killed her third husband, the only one who was kind to her or her children). Joey possesses a fine German rifle with a telescopic sight, which enables him to shoot his victims from a half-mile away. At the on-set of the novel, Joey is hiding out in Crow Town, an outlaw village deep in the borderland desert. One of the other notorious denizens of Crow Town is the legendary Texas gunfighter, John Wesley Hardin. Maria travels by horse to Crow Town to warn Joey that Call is on his trail. Joey disappears, stealing his mother's horse, and rides to Langtry, Texas, where he shoots and hangs Judge Roy Bean, the "Law West of the Pecos." As Call and Brookshire search for Joey Garza, they discover that he is not the only outlaw preying on the railroad. A string of strange murders soon leads Call in the pursuit of a ghost from the past - Mox Mox (or, as the Apache call him, "The Snake You Do Not See"). A former flunky of Blue Duck, of Lonesome Dove fame, Mox Mox is known for burning his captives alive. Mox Mox was thought to have been killed years before, but had just been in hiding at sea, and has now returned at the head of a murderous gang. The news is especially traumatic for Lorie, who herself had nearly been burnt by the villain while she was a captive of Blue Duck. Fearing for the lives of her children, Lorie sends them to Nebraska, to the protection of her friend Clara Allen. She then sets off to find Pea Eye to warn him. Pea Eye and the Kickapoo Famous Shoes, unaware of the threat of Mox Mox, continue south to find Captain Call. They are thrown into the Presidio jail when the sheriff accuses Famous Shoes of being a horse thief (he came across Famous Shoes eating a dead horse several years ago and decided that it was stolen) and decides to hang him. Captain Call hears of their plight and frees them from jail (near-killing the sheriff in the process in a furious beating) and continues in pursuit of Mox Mox. He ambushes the gang just as they are about to burn two children alive, killing outright all but two - Quick Jimmy, a renegade Cherokee, who escapes unscathed, and Mox Mox himself, who limps off to die. After rescuing Pea Eye and Famous Shoes from a corrupt bordertown sheriff, Call and his gang close in on Joey Garza. Ned Brookshire is killed in a scuffle; the anticipated confrontation between Call and Joey leaves Call seriously wounded; Lorie must amputate a leg to save him. The Mexican bandit is instead shot and mortally wounded by Pea Eye. Garza then drags himself back to his native village and attempts to kill his younger siblings, Teresa and Rafael, for whom he has long reserved his greatest hatred. Maria, mother of the three children, attempts to stop Joey; he stabs her. A local villager then shoots Joey dead. Maria dies from her wounds, and at her request, Pea Eye and Lorie adopt Maria's two surviving children, return with them to their farm. Call, crippled and no longer able to pursue bandits, goes to live with them. He becomes increasingly attached to Teresa, Maria's blind daughter, demonstrating for the first time an attachment to anyone besides Gus McCrae. |
Dead Man's Walk | Larry McMurtry | 1,995 | In this first prequel to Lonesome Dove the reader finds McCrae and Call as young additions to the Texas Rangers. The two young Rangers are introduced quickly and brutally to the rangering life on their first expedition, in which they are stalked by the Comanche war chief Buffalo Hump. After a narrow escape, the rangers return to civilization, only to quickly join an expedition to capture and annex Santa Fe, part of New Mexico (the part east of the Rio Grande) for Texas. The expedition, led by pirate and soldier of fortune, Caleb Cobb, is ultimately a failure; of the 200 initial adventurers, only about 40 survive, falling to starvation, bears, and Indians (in one memorable chapter, the Comanche ignite the grasses surrounding the ranger camp, forcing rangers to jump over the edge of a canyon to escape the flames), only to be swiftly arrested by the Mexican authorities. Those survivors are forced to march the Jornada del Muerto ("Dead Man's Walk") to El Paso, and many, Mexican and Texan alike, die along the journey. The Texas contingent is reduced to ten persons when the captives panic after they observe cavalry drilling and are slaughtered in a blood lust as they flee. At their destination, the ten are forced to gamble for their lives by drawing a bean from a jar - a white bean signals life, a black bean death. Call and McCrae are among the five survivors. The last Rangers then return to Texas, escorting an Englishwoman and her son, who have also been held captive by the Mexicans. During the course of this book, three other familiar and important characters are introduced. At a general store, Augustus McCrae meets Clara Forsythe, later to marry Robert Allen and become Clara Allen, Augustus's old flame in the original novel. In the same town, Call meets a prostitute named Maggie, later to become the mother of his illegitimate son, Newt. On their journey, they are tracked by Buffalo Hump, future father of Blue Duck, whom they will hunt during their later days as Texas Rangers and during the Montana expedition chronicled in Lonesome Dove. |
A Ring of Endless Light | Madeleine L'Engle | 1,980 | Sixteen year old Vicky Austin and her family are spending the summer on Seven Bay Island with her maternal grandfather, who is dying of leukemia. At the beginning of the story, Vicky attends a funeral for Commander Rodney, a family friend. Also present are the commander's wife, his sons Leo and Jacky who own a launch boat business, and Adam Eddington, an intern at the Island's research base and friend of Vicky's brother, John. After the funeral Vicky encounters Zachary Gray, her boyfriend from the previous summer whom her family does not particularly like. She soon learns that Zachary indirectly caused Commander Rodney's death; the commander had his heart attack while saving Zachary from a suicide attempt. This revelation and others set Vicky on a train of thought that continues throughout the book; the mysterious and (to Vicky) frightening topic of death. Death and the threat of it seem to loom everywhere, from news reports to the death of a baby dolphin, from the recent demise of Zach's mother in an automobile accident to Grandfather Eaton's slow deterioration. During the course of the story, Vicky finds herself in a tangle of three romances; one with the solid, unexciting Leo, one with dark and dangerous Zachary, and one with the gentle but emotionally damaged Adam, whom she is helping with a project on dolphin and human communication (ESP) with three dolphins: Basil, Norberta, and Njord. Vicky discovers a remarkable rapport with the dolphins, an unspoken communication that teeters on telepathy. Her ability extends to communicating with Adam as well, but he pulls away, unwilling to allow that level of intimacy after a devastating betrayal the previous summer. Meanwhile, Vicky must help out at home, facing her grandfather's increasing confusion as he identifies Vicky with his dead wife. He has also been hemorrhaging, and Vicky often goes with Leo to pick up blood. There at the hospital, she meets a girl named Binnie who is sick with a type of leukemia and has seizures. Binnie's father is radically religious and is constantly disposing of the medication that control the seizures. One night, her grandfather starts to hemorrhage and is sent to the hospital. Vicky is on a date with Zachary, and does not know about her grandfather's medical crisis until they come to the dock and see that Leo is not there to pick them up. Zachary rushes Vicky to the hospital, and eventually abandons her there. As she waits in the emergency room, she is spotted by Binnie's mother, who leaves her unconscious daughter with Vicky while she goes to find a nurse. Binnie has a convulsion and dies in Vicky's arms. This latest trauma sends Vicky into a wave of darkness, an almost catatonic state in which she is only vaguely aware of reality. Vicky's parents and Leo, who are already upset because Vicky's grandfather has been bleeding internally, try unsuccessfully to comfort and communicate with her. Then she feels hands on hers - Adam's. He tells her that she "called" him (meaning with ESP) and he came. The next day, Vicky in still in a wave of darkness. Her grandfather tells her that it is hard to keep focused on the good and positive in life but she must bear the light or she will be consumed by darkness. He also removes the emotional burden he placed on her earlier, when he asked her to tell him when it was time to die. Vicky is unable to listen, too caught up in her own misery. Finally Adam takes her into the ocean, where Vicky's dolphin friends break through her mental darkness, until she is able to play with them and face the light again. |
Elephants Can Remember | Agatha Christie | null | The bodies of General Alistair Ravenscroft and his wife were found near their manor house in Overcliffe. Both had bullet wounds, and a revolver with only their fingerprints left between them. In the original investigation no one was able to prove whether the case was a double suicide or murder/suicide and, if the latter, who killed whom. Left behind are the couple's two children, including daughter Celia. Ten years later, Mrs. Ariadne Oliver, a school friend of the late Margaret Ravenscroft and godmother to her daughter, is approached at a literary luncheon by Mrs. Burton-Cox, to whose son Celia Ravenscroft is engaged. Mrs. Burton-Cox asks Mrs. Oliver what she appears to believe is a very important question: which of Celia's parents was the murderer, and which was murdered? Initially put off by the woman's attitude, after consulting with Celia herself, Mrs. Oliver agrees to try to resolve the issue. She invites her friend Hercule Poirot to solve the disquieting puzzle. Together they conduct interviews with several elderly witnesses whom they term “elephants”, based on the assumption that, like the proverbial elephants, they may have long memories . Each "elephant" remembers (or mis-remembers) a very different set of circumstances, but Poirot notes some facts that may have particular significance: Margaret Ravenscroft owned four wigs at the time of her death, and a few days before her death, she was seriously bitten by the otherwise-devoted family dog. Poirot decides that the investigation must delve deeper into the past in order to unearth the truth. He and Mrs. Oliver discover that Dolly (Dorothea) and Molly (Margaret) Preston-Grey were identical twin sisters, both of whom died within the space of a few weeks. While Molly generally led an unremarkable life, Dolly had previously been connected with two violent incidents and had spent protracted periods of her life in psychiatric nursing homes. Dolly had married a major called Jarrow and, shortly after his death in India, she was strongly suspected of drowning her infant son, something that she had tried to blame on the little boy’s Indian Ayah. A second murder was apparently committed in Malaya while Dolly was staying with the Ravenscrofts; it was an attack on the child of a neighbour. While staying again with the Ravenscrofts, this time at Overcliffe, Dolly apparently sleep-walked off a cliff and died on the evening of September 15, 1960. Molly and her husband died less than a month later, on October 3. Poirot is contacted by Desmond Burton-Cox, Celia Ravenscroft's fiancé, who gives him the names of two governesses who had served the Ravenscroft family, who he thinks may be able to explain what happened. Turning an investigative light on the Burton-Cox family, Poirot’s agent, Mr. Goby, discovers that Desmond (who knows that he is adopted, but has no details about the adoption or his origins) is the illegitimate son of a now-deceased actress, Kathleen Fenn, with whom Mrs. Burton-Cox’s husband had conducted an affair. Kathleen Fenn had left Desmond a considerable personal fortune, which would, under the terms of his will, be left to his adoptive mother were he to die. Mrs. Burton-Cox’s attempt to prevent Desmond getting married to Celia Ravenscroft is thus an unlovely attempt to obtain the use of his money (there is no suggestion that she plans to kill him and inherit the money). Poirot suspects the truth, but can substantiate it only after contacting Zélie Meauhourat, the governess employed by the Ravenscrofts at the time of their death. She returns with him from Lausanne to England, where she explains the truth to Desmond and Celia. Dolly had fatally injured Molly as part of a psychotic episode, but such was Molly’s love for her sister that she made her husband promise to protect Dolly from the police. Accordingly, Zélie and Alistair made it appear that Dolly’s was the corpse found at the foot of the cliff. Dolly took her sister’s place, playing the role of Molly to the servants. Only the Ravenscrofts’ dog knew the difference, and this is why it bit its "mistress". Ultimately, Alistair committed suicide after killing Dolly in order to prevent her from injuring anyone else. Desmond and Celia recognise the sadness of the true events, but now knowing the facts are able to face a future together. |
The Heart of Midlothian | Walter Scott | 1,818 | The title of the book refers to the Old Tolbooth Prison in Edinburgh, Scotland, at the time in the heart of the Scottish county of Midlothian. The historical backdrop was the event known as the Porteous Riots. In 1736, a riot broke out in Edinburgh over the execution of two smugglers. The Captain of the City Guards, Captain John Porteous, ordered the soldiers to fire into the crowd, killing several people. Porteous was later killed by a lynch mob who stormed the Old Tolbooth. The second, and main element of the novel was based on a story Scott claimed to have received in an unsigned letter. It was about a certain Helen Walker who had travelled all the way to London by foot, in order to receive a royal pardon for her sister, who was unjustly charged with infanticide. Scott put Jeanie Deans in the place of Walker, a young woman from a family of highly devout Presbyterians. Jeanie goes to London, partly by foot, hoping to achieve an audience with the Queen through the influence of the Duke of Argyll. Jeanie Deans' role in the novel is described in more detail in Jeanie Deans (fictional character). Jeanie Deans is the first woman among Scott's protagonists, and also the first to come from the lower classes. While the heroine is idealized for her religious devotion and her moral rectitude, Scott nevertheless ridicules the moral certitude represented by the branch of Presbyterianism known as Cameronians, represented in the novel by Jeanie’s father David. Also central to the novel is the early-18th century Jacobitism, a theme found in so many of Scott’s novels. Scott’s sympathies can be seen in the ideal figure of the Duke of Argyll, a moderate on these issues. The Heart of Midlothian has been adapted for the screen once, in 1914, and for television once, in 1966. Two operas have also been based upon the novel - La Prigione di Edimburgo (Imprisoned in Edinburgh) by the Italian composer Federico Ricci (1809–1877) and Jeanie Deans by the Scottish classical composer, Hamish MacCunn (1868–1916). |
The Birthday Boys | Beryl Bainbridge | null | Five first-person narratives give different perspectives on the voyage: Petty Officer Taff Evans; the ship's scholar, medic, and biologist Dr. Edward Wilson; Robert Falcon Scott; Lieutenant Henry Bowers; and Captain Lawrence Oates each give their account of the hardships, the problems, and finally the failure of their endeavour: Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen beats them to the South Pole by a month. |
The Fifth Sacred Thing | Starhawk | 1,993 | The novel describes a world set in the year 2048 after a catastrophe which has fractured the United States into several nations. The protagonists live in San Francisco and have evolved in the direction of Ecotopia, reverting to a sustainable economy, using wind power, local agriculture, and the like. San Francisco is presented as a mostly pagan city where the streets have been torn up for gardens and streams, no one starves or is homeless, and the city's defense council consists primarily of nine elderly women who "listen and dream". The novel describes "a utopia where women are leading societies but are doing so with the consent of men." To the south, though, an overtly-theocratic Christian fundamentalist nation has evolved and plans to wage war against the San Franciscans. The novel explores the events before and during the ensuing struggle between the two nations, pitting utopia and dystopia against each other. The basic premise resembles that of Pat Murphy's earlier novel The City, Not Long After. The story is primarily told from the points of view of 98-year-old Maya, her nominal granddaughter Madrone, and her grandson Bird. Through these and other characters, the story explores many elements from ecofeminism and ecotopian fiction. |
The Gate to Women's Country | Sheri S. Tepper | null | The Gate to Women's Country is set in the future, 300 years after a nuclear war destroyed most of human civilization. The book focuses on a matriarchal nation known as Women's Country, and particularly the city of Marthatown. Stavia, the novel's heroine, is the younger daughter of Morgot, an important member of the Marthatown Council. The book opens with Stavia as an adult, heading to meet her fifteen-year-old son, Dawid. He has spent the last ten years living outside the city walls with the warriors, as all boys do, and is now old enough to decide whether he wishes to remain a warrior or accept a life of study and service among the women as a servitor. Dawid formally renounces his mother and chooses to become a full-fledged warrior. Afterwards, Stavia remembers when her younger brother was sent to live with the warriors. Much of the rest of the novel is told in flashback, following Stavia's life from childhood to adulthood. In the story's present, Stavia prepares for her role as Iphigenia in Marthatown's annual performance of Iphigenia at Ilium, a reworking of the Greek tragedy The Trojan Women that weaves through the novel as a leitmotif. While still a child, Stavia met Chernon, the son of one of her mother's friends. Although Chernon lives in the garrison with the other boys and men, he and Stavia form a friendship. They meet at the twice-annual Carnival, the only event in Women's Country where warriors and women can mix freely. Stavia eventually agrees to smuggle books to Chernon for him to read, even though this is forbidden for boys in the garrison. In fact, Chernon has been ordered by his commander, Michael, to learn more about the secrets of the women who rule Women's Country. After confessing to breaking the ordinances, Stavia is sent away from Marthatown for several years to train as a doctor. On her return Chernon pursues their relationship again. When Stavia is selected for an exploration mission to the south, Chernon leaves the garrison (on Michael's orders) and meets her there. While away from Women's Country, Stavia and Chernon are captured by a band of "Holylanders", members of a struggling community to the south of Women's Country. They practice polygamy and seem to be descendants of rural fundamentalist Christian splinter groups. The Holylanders are brutally misogynistic and treat women as slaves to their husbands. Stavia's experiences among the Holylanders gives her a deeper appreciation for her homeland. Upon her return to Women's Country she finally learns the secrets of the Women's Country Council and the choices they have made to preserve their way of life. The secret of Women's Country is that there are no births of warrior children, all children are fathered artificially by servitors. The goal of Women's Country is to breed out the gene that causes men to choose the warrior life. |
The Price of Salt | Patricia Highsmith | 1,951 | The novel's two main characters are Therese Belivet, a lonely young woman, and Carol Aird, an elegant stranger Therese encounters one day at her temporary job in a New York department store. Therese is just starting out her adult life in Manhattan and looking for her chance to break through into her dream job as a theater set designer. Therese was semi-abandoned as a small girl by her widowed mother, who sent Therese to an Episcopalian boarding school. She is dating a young man, Richard, whom she does not love and does not want to have sex with. On a long and monotonous day working in the toy department of the department store, Therese is struck by an elegant and beautiful woman in her early thirties, whom she serves. The woman, Carol, gives her address to Therese in order to have her purchases delivered. On an impulse, Therese sends Carol a Christmas card to her home address. Carol, who is going through a difficult separation and divorce and is herself quite lonely, unexpectedly responds, and the two begin to spend time together. Therese develops a strong attachment to Carol, but she is unsure how to understand her feelings. Therese's boyfriend accuses Therese of having a "schoolgirl crush" but Therese knows it is more than that: she is in love with Carol. Carol's husband, Harge, is suspicious of Carol's relationship with Therese, whom he meets briefly when Therese stays over at Carol's house. Carol had previously admitted to Harge that she had a short-lived homosexual relationship with her best friend, Abby. Harge is furious, and he takes the couple's daughter to live with him, pending the final divorce proceedings. To escape from the tension in New York, Carol and Therese take a road trip West, over the course of which it becomes clear that the feelings the women have for each other are romantic and sexual. They become physically as well as emotionally intimate and declare their love for each other. The women are unaware that Carol's husband has hired a private investigator to follow them and collect any evidence that would incriminate Carol as homosexual in the upcoming custody hearings. The investigator bugs the room in which Carol and Therese first have sex. Carol stops him on the road and demands that he hand over any evidence against her. The investigator sells Carol some tapes, at a high price, but then tells her that he has already sent several tapes and other evidence to Harge in New York. Carol knows that she will lose custody and most visitation rights to her daughter if she continues her relationship with Therese. Carol leaves Therese out West and heads back to New York to fight for her daughter. She tells Therese that she cannot continue their relationship. Therese is heartbroken, but her strength of character allows her to try to rebuild her life in New York. In New York, the evidence for Carol's homosexuality is so strong that her case for custody would stand no chance in court, and she capitulates to Harge in the end, submitting to an agreement which gives him full custody of their child and leaves Carol with rare supervised visits. However, the book's ending is unusually optimistic compared to those of lesbian pulp novels, as it suggests that Carol and Therese may stay together and be happy after all. |
The Walls Came Tumbling Down | Robert Anton Wilson | 1,997 | The introduction of the book includes Wilson's thoughts abouts many things, including UFOs, the Magna Carta, the IRA and Nelson Mandela. It also includes Wilson's explanation of how he wrote the screenplay after a film deal had collapsed and he was trying to get another deal together. The book deals with the sometimes frightening experiences that happen to those who stumble into an expanded consciousness without any intent to go there and without any preparation or Operating Manual to tell them how to navigate when the walls tumble and the doors of perception fly open, leaving the brain suddenly free of the limits of "mind". |
My Father's Glory | Marcel Pagnol | 1,957 | Young Marcel was born in the country but raised in Marseille. His father, Joseph, is a hard-working strongly atheist public school teacher in Marseille. Marcel's Aunt Rose marries the round, jovial, and very theistic and Roman Catholic Uncle Jules. Joseph and Uncle Jules come into conflict over religion. Over summer break, Joseph and Jules decide to take their families to a house in the country. Jules decides to educate Joseph in hunting techniques. Marcel wants to come hunting with them, but the two adults don't like the idea; they lie to him that he can come, but leave the house while he is still just waking up. Marcel, aware of their deceit, gets up and follows them stealthily. He observes Jules making a fool out of Joseph over his hunting prowess. This enrages Marcel. But while he is following them he gets lost in the wilderness. Hearing the hunters later, he follows the sounds to the top of a high cliff. His presence there scares out the legendary birds, the Rock Partridges. Joseph shoots two down with his side-by-side loading musket. Jules does not believe that Joseph has made the kill. Marcel retrieves the birds and holds them by the legs in his outspread arms on the cliff for the sight of the hunters in the valley below. He "lifts his father's glory to the sky", hence the name "My Father's Glory." Back in the village, the residents are amazed at Joseph's skill. Marcel is very proud of him, but realizes his father's vanity when Joseph poses for a photograph with the birds. Earlier, Joseph had mocked a colleague who posed with fish, saying that such poses lacked dignity. |
Sunstorm | Stephen Baxter | 2,005 | Sunstorm opens with the last chapter of Time's Eye as its initial chapter, and Bisesa Dutt is in London, reunited with her daughter. It is June 9, 2037, the day after her helicopter was shot down in the North Western Frontier Province of Pakistan. The five years that she spent on Mir, an alternate Earth, are now only memories (though the fact that her body has aged five years since June 8, 2037, will eventually serve as some confirmation of her story). In the meantime, a major solar event occurs on June 9, disrupting virtually all of the Earth's electronic hardware. Dramatic as it is, this phenomenon is only a minor precursor of a far more massive solar eruption about five years off. Scientific models of the projected 2042 event make clear that the Earth will be sterilized completely by the upcoming solar burst. The effects will be so powerful as to even endanger astronauts on Mars. Rather than sit by and allow the sun to just destroy all of earth's life, political leaders (most notably the President of the Eurasian Union, Miriam Grec), and scientific leaders (led by Siobhan McGorran, the Astronomer Royal) decide to embark upon an ambitious plan to literally shield Earth from the worst effects of the storm. The plot is further complicated when information from Bisesa's odyssey makes it clear that what is happening to the sun is not simply a random happening in nature, but is rather the result of events set in motion by an alien intelligence, known as the Firstborn, since they were the first alien race to reach sentience, and thus the most advanced civilization in existence in the universe. They are determined to stop mankind from infiltrating the stars, since they believe mankind to be a disorderly and wasteful life form, increasing entropy with its energy usage and eventual wars, thus hastening the Universe's eventual heat death. |
The New Inquisition | Robert Anton Wilson | 1,986 | The New Inquisition is the author's term for what he refers to as a tendency within mainstream science to forbid certain forms of theories from being classed as "science." He cites the cases of Wilhelm Reich, Rupert Sheldrake, and the Mars effect controversy, among others, in support of a central claim that a materialist bias within the scientific community has led to some speculations and theories he claimed were unjustly thought of as unscientific. "The Citadel" is the author's term for the military-industrial complex that he claims funds mainstream science and is the source of its bias. The book lists a large list of paranormal reports, (from the Fortean times among others) with Wilsons tour of the history of modern physics. He is particularly interested in Bell's theorem, and Alain Aspect's experimental proof of Bell's theorem. Wilson opines that the implications of Aspect's proof include that magic is possible, and that "the sum total of all minds is one". He claims the facts that he thinks that it is not a coincidence that the darwinian model of evolution best suits the "reality tunnel" of the Citadel, and that biologists such as Sheldrake who have alternative theories of evolution, are drummed out of mainstream science. On the topic, he states, Among the concepts covered is the idea of "absolute laws of physics" - he ends up saying that every "law" that has been investigated seemed to be subject to anomalous results from time to time, and that there may be some other parallel universe with absolute laws of physics that are always obeyed, but Wilson has not seen any sign of it round in this one. Wilson draws on a large number of accounts of recorded events said to be "paranormal" but dismissed by materialist science as mass hallucination, e.g. the visions in Fátima, Portugal, and various UFO sightings. He comments that when it comes to 70,000 people having a mass hallucination, it's difficult to see how the explanation is any less occult than the events the explanation purports to explain. "You try it", he writes "See if by any means you can induce a mass hallucination [...] try, saying, hey, take a look at that light over there brighter than the sun." The book lists a lot of phenomena that the author claims do not fit neatly into a materialist account of the world, and secondly, the book introduces various interpretations of quantum physics that may or may not provide a ground for explanation. The book concludes with the idea which he claims Schrödinger supported, that the sum total of all minds is one, and that individual brains are best understood as local receivers, of an overall transmission which is always everywhere. The author repeatedly says "I am not asking you to believe any of this stuff, I'm just asking you to dispassionately observe your own reaction to these accounts". |
Le Silence de la mer | null | null | In the book, Vercors tells of how an old man and his niece show resistance against the German occupiers by not speaking to the officer, who is occupying their house. The German officer is a former composer, dreaming of brotherhood between French and German nations, deluded by the Nazi propaganda of that period. He is disillusioned when he realises the real goal of the German army is not to build but to ruin and to exploit. He then chooses to leave France to fight on the Eastern Front, cryptically declaring he is "off to Hell." |
The Blood Ring | null | null | Egyptian artifacts intended for the Braintree Museum in Washington, D.C. are stolen. Mysterious figures from ancient Egypt are sighted at night, people are murdered, a mummy speaks and walks, people have terrible headaches and seem to be taken over by their pre-incarnations as ancient Egyptians. The "Blood Ring" is set with a pink cornelian stone that is made blood red and filled with power if it is dipped in human blood every 48 hours. Nellie Gray is prominent on the list of intended sacrifices, and Smitty, rescuing her at one point, Samson-like, pulls down a reproduction Egyptian temple in the museum. Josh guards the Egyptian exhibit at night after a guard is killed and another quits; realistically nervous, he displays none of the typical feet-shuffling eye-rolling mannerisms often found in the pulps of this time. Benson's scientific sleuthing reveals that Egyptian symbolism, drugs, hypnosis, and technology were used by the villain as part of a blackmail scheme. Typically, Benson turns the villain and his gang against one another, and tricks them into dying in their own death trap. |
Elmer and the Dragon | Ruth Stiles Gannett | 1,977 | Elmer and Boris the dragon are stranded on a remote island inhabited only by canaries. One of them, Flute, was Elmer's pet until he escaped to Canary Island. Elmer helps Flute and the king and queen canaries to dig up a chest that the island's former human settlers left. Inside are various household items, a watch, a harmonica, and six bags of gold. The dragon flies Elmer back to his house before returning to Blueland, his own home. |
Phantom | Terry Goodkind | 2,006 | This book continues Richard's quest to find his wife, Kahlan, and release her from the Chainfire spell. Kahlan still travels with the Sisters of the Dark Ulicia, Cecilia, and Armina as they hurry to catch up with the fourth Sister, Tovi. Unbeknownst to them Tovi is dead, stabbed by Samuel in the previous book and allowed to die after being questioned by Nicci. They stop at the White Horse Inn, and the Sisters are shocked when the innkeeper can see Kahlan and correctly title her. Because of the Chainfire enacted on Kahlan, no one should be able to know she exists. She was erased from the memories of all who knew her and anyone who sees her instantly forgets. The Sisters kill the man and his family, and continue on, traveling toward Caska where they believe Tovi has gone. Back at the Wizard's Keep, Richard senses powerful magic and goes to investigate. He discovers Zedd, Ann, and Nathan in a room where Nicci is caught up in the grips of a powerful spell called a verification web. The web is meant to examine the Chainfire spell and see if there is any way to undo it. Richard realizes that there is something wrong with the spell and tries to convince the others who don't really believe him, but Richard is able to disable the spell. Before Nicci can tell anyone that the spell was indeed corrupted, the deadly beast that Jagang had created to hunt Richard appears in the room. In order to drive it off, Nicci places herself back into the spell form to draw upon the power between life and death. By refusing to actually supply the magic to the spell, the power of life and the power of the underworld come together and strike the beast, driving it away for the time being. When Nicci awakens for the second time, Richard has saved her from the spell. Richard realizes that the corruption to the spell was caused by the presence of the three chimes being in the world, and the chimes not only corrupted the verification web, but they have corrupted all magic. Even the Chainfire spell was affected by the chimes (Reechani, Sentrosi, Vasi), and now he (Richard) believes that the Chimes are infecting anything with magic, not just Kahlan. Shota arrives at the Keep, bringing Jebra in an attempt to make Richard believe that he is wasting his time trying to find Kahlan when there is a whole world that needs to be saved from the Imperial Order. To that end, Shota instructs Jebra to testify to the horrific terrors that had befallen the people of Ebissinia. Shota reveals that Samuel was under the control of another witch woman, Six. Richard says that he understands the situations but Shota is still unconvinced and touches Richard with her power, allowing his mind to see a vision that places Richard in the position of the slaughtered men of Ebissinia, who are condemned to death while listening to the vulgar promises of what the soldiers will do to their wives. In this dream-like reality, Richard sees Kahlan begging for his life and they profess their love for each other. As Nicci and Shota have a minor confrontation, Richard realizes that Shota is right. Despite how important Kahlan's life is to him it's only one life, while the whole of the New World is threatened by the Order. Pleased, Shota gives Richard a prediction she has had from the flow of time. Long ago, the First Wizard Barracus went to the Temple of the Winds to ensure that someone with the Subtractive side of the gift would be born again. After Barracus came back from the temple he threw himself out his window, but not before he left a special book for Richard. Before Shota leaves, she gives him one last cryptic message: Richard's mother was not the only one to die in the fire that claimed her life. After such events, Richard comes to understand that he was right all along when earlier he stated that it is impossible to fight the hordes of Imperial Order forces head on in one great final battle. Richard, Nicci and Cara travel in the Sliph to the main army in D'Hara and explains to the Commanders what he has come to understand and his position. Richard issues a command that the army be broken up into smaller units, stating that if the Old World wants war then they shall have it. The tactic being that while the Imperial Order is here in the New World, they shall become the Phantom D'Haran Legion, bringing death and destruction to the Old World. The death and destruction will be an endless reminder of what will happen to those who support the Order. He orders the troops to kill anyone who opposes them, burn crops, and bring him the ears of anyone who preaches the beliefs of the Order. His troops destroy entire garrisons of troops, impaling their heads on stakes, skin bureaucrats of the empire alive and impale them on stakes, and follow the strategy of slash-and-burn warfare to starve the men, women and children of the empire. The three Sisters of the Dark and Kahlan follow Sister Tovi's trail to Caska, where they are surprised to find not Tovi (who has been dead since the end of the previous book), but Jagang waiting for them. Jagang once again proves that he is a master strategist by revealing that he had never left the Sisters of the Dark's minds and that by tricking them into thinking their fake bond with Richard Rahl was working, he had learnt much from their quest. He also captures Kahlan, him being able to see her because he was linked to the Dark Sister when they performed the Chainfire spell on Kahlan, and was therefore unaffected by it. Meanwhile, while traveling back to the Wizard's Keep through the Sliph, Richard is attacked by Jagang's beast and magic conjured by the previously thought to be dead Princess Violet (now Queen Violet at Six's instruction), causing him to become separated from his power. The Sliph instigates "emergency measures" instilled in her thousands of years ago by First Wizard Barracus and shunts Richard to an emergency escape portal somewhere in the wilds close to the land of the Night Wisps. Richard must pass a test Barracus left for him before the Sliph will tell him why he needs to see the Night Wisps. After a brief visit to the land of the Night Wisps to recover a secret book left by the War Wizard Barracus (who left the outfit and ruby pendant), Secrets of a War Wizard's Power. Richard is captured by Six and taken to Tamarang. There, he hides Secrets of a War Wizard's Power in the room that he was tortured in during Wizard's First Rule, deciding that regardless of what happens to him, he cannot let anyone find the book that Barracus hid for 3000 years for him. While being taken to Violet, Richard attempts an escape killing dozens of Imperial Order soldiers. The commanding officer is impressed with his skill and takes Richard away as a captive to become a player of Ja'La dh Jin (Game of Life) on his division's team. The division of the Imperial Order rejoins the main forces, now laying siege on the People's Palace. Richard catches a glimpse of Kahlan as he is taken into the camp and revives her will to fight on and remember her past. Back at the Wizard's Keep, while discussing Richard's desire to save Kahlan, Zedd states that even though Richard is trying hard, Kahlan is as good as dead. The Chainfire spell put in place over her destroys memories, not just overlap them or bury them; Kahlan will never remember any of them, even Richard, ever again. Nicci has a revelation about the all important Prophecies that Richard must lead them in the final battle and puts one of the Boxes of Orden in play in Richard's name, so that not only the Sisters of the Dark have superiority in that matter. The book ends with a few major cliffhangers: Richard is a captive in the Imperial Order's main camp, without his sword or his gift; Kahlan is a captive of Jagang with a Rada'han; the Boxes of Orden are in play by Sister Ulicia; there is a problem with Chainfire and with magic; that the Imperial Order is slowly making their way into the central stronghold of the D'Haran forces: the People's Palace, but also the D'Haran forces appear able to cut off the Imperial Order supply lines just as winter starts. |
The Arm of the Starfish | Madeleine L'Engle | 1,965 | The plot centers on a young marine biology student named Adam Eddington, who travels to the remote island Gaea off the coast of Portugal for a summer job working for a famous scientist, Calvin O'Keefe. Even before he leaves JFK airport, Adam is approached by Carolyn ("Kali") Cutter, the beautiful, well-traveled daughter of a rich American industrialist living in Europe. She warns Adam against yet another passenger, Canon Tallis. Tallis is accompanying Calvin O'Keefe's eldest daughter, 12-year-old Polly O'Keefe, to Geneva, but bad weather and mysterious dangers derail those plans. Instead, Adam finds himself shepherding Poly on a short flight from Madrid to Lisbon. When Poly uses the restroom during the flight, she seems to disappear from the airplane completely, and the flight crew denies she was ever on board. Kali's father, Typhon Cutter, later enables Adam to rescue Poly from her kidnappers, deepening Adam's confusion about whom to trust. As the plot unfolds, it becomes clear that at least two different factions have equally strong but differently motivated interests in Dr. O'Keefe's research on organ regeneration. Adam faces a number of ethical dilemmas as he is forced to choose between these factions. Eventually Adam realizes that the O'Keefes are the ones who care about "the fall of the sparrow," as their friend Joshua Archer puts it, a Biblical allusion to caring about others, even the seemingly weak and unimportant. Adam wants nothing further to do with Kali and her ruthless father, but the O'Keefes ask him to make a date with Kali anyway, so that Adam can act as a double agent, passing along fake research papers to the Cutters and smuggling the real ones out to trusted people in Lisbon. Adam reluctantly agrees. This plan is complicated, however, by Kali's unexpected claim that she has learned of her father's perfidy, and wants Adam to protect her and keep her confidences. Adam's attempt to do so makes it nearly impossible to pass on the real papers, hampered as he is by Kali's presence and spies from both sides. Eventually Joshua comes to Adam's rescue, but is shot dead; and Adam learns that Kali was acting on her father's behalf all along. The Cutters are not arrested. Later, Adam goes back to the Cutters' hotel to retrieve his passport from Kali. Playfully, she makes him chase her into the ocean, where she is attacked by a shark. Adam uses a special knife Poly gave him to fight off the shark and get Kali to shore. O'Keefe uses his experimental knowledge about limb regeneration to help Kali. |
Redgauntlet | Walter Scott | 1,824 | Darsie had been Alan Fairford's favourite schoolfellow, and, to please his son, Mr Fairford had consented that Darsie, who received an ample allowance on the understanding that he was to make no inquiries respecting his family until he completed his twenty-fifth year, should live with them. Alan was studying for the law, but his companion had started for his first country ramble, and the story commences with a long correspondence between them. As he returned from fishing in the Solway Firth, with Benjie as his instructor, Darsie was overtaken by the tide, and carried by Mr Herries, dressed as a fisherman, on horseback to a cottage, where his niece Lilias said grace at supper-time; and next morning he was placed under the guidance of Joshua Geddes. The Quaker, who was part owner of some fishing nets in the river, invited him to spend a few days at his house; and while there he heard from Alan that a young lady had called to warn him that his friend was in considerable danger, and to urge that he should at once return to Edinburgh. A letter, however, from old Mr Fairford determined him not to do so; and having made acquaintance with the blind fiddler, who told him a tale of the Redgauntlet family, Darsie went with him to a fishers' merry-making, where he danced with Lilias, who reproached him for leading an idle life, and begged him to leave the neighbourhood. Mr Fairford had arranged that Peter Peebles, an eccentric plaintiff, should be his son's first client, and Alan was pleading the cause before the Lords Ordinary when his father, by mistake, handed him a letter from Mr Crosbie, announcing that Darsie had mysteriously disappeared. Alan instantly rushed out of court, and started in search of his friend, who had accompanied the Quaker to await an attack on his fishing station, and been made prisoner by the rioters, of whom Mr Herries was the leader. After being nearly drowned, and recovering from a fever, he awoke in a strange room, to which he was confined for several days, when he was visited by his captor, and conducted by him to an interview with Squire Foxley, who, acting as a magistrate, declined to interfere with Mr Herries' guardianship. As the squire was leaving, however, Mr Peebles arrived to apply for a warrant against Alan for throwing up his brief, and startled Mr Herries by recognising him as a Redgauntlet and an unpardoned Jacobite. Darsie obtained a partial explanation from him, and was told to prepare for a journey disguised as a woman. Meanwhile, Alan had applied to the provost, and, having obtained from his wife's relation, Mr Maxwell, a letter to Herries, he started for Annan, where, under the guidance of Trumbull, he took ship for Cumberland. On landing at Crakenthorp's inn, he was transported by Nanty Ewart, and a gang of smugglers, to Fair-ladies' House, where he was nursed through a fever, and introduced to a mysterious Father Buonaventure. After being closely questioned and detained for a few days, he was allowed to return with a guide to the inn. Darsie was also travelling thither with Herries and his followers, when he discovered that Lilias, who accompanied them, was his sister, and learnt from her his own real name and rank. He was also urged by his uncle to join a rising in favour of the Pretender; and, having hesitated to do so, was detained in custody when they reached their destination, where Alan, as well as other visitors and several of the neighbouring gentry, had already arrived. He was then introduced to a conference of Charles Edward Stuart's adherents, and afterwards to the prince himself, who refused to agree to their conditions, and decided to abandon the contemplated attempt in his favour. Ewart was, accordingly, ordered to have his brig in readiness, when Nixon suggested that he should turn traitor, upon which they fought and killed each other. Sir Arthur now learned that Fairford and Geddes were in the house; but, before he was allowed to see them, they had been shown into the room where Lilias was waiting, when Alan became aware that his fair visitor at Edinburgh was his friend's sister, and heard from her lips all the particulars of her brother's history. Their conversation was interrupted by the entrance of Benjie, in whose pocket a paper was found indicating that Nixon had communicated with the Government; and, during the confusion which ensued, the Hanoverian General Campbell arrived, unarmed and unaccompanied, and after explaining that the Jacobites had been betrayed weeks before, announced that he was sufficiently supported with cavalry and infantry. The Rebellion was over before it could begin. His instructions, however, from King George were to allow all concerned in the plot to disperse, and he intimated that as many as wished might embark in the vessel which was in waiting. The Pretender was, accordingly, led by the Laird of Redgauntlet to the beach, and Lilias offered to accompany her uncle in his voluntary exile. This, however, he would not permit, and, after an exchange of courtesies with the general, the prince departed amidst the tears and sobs of the last supporters of his cause, and henceforward the term Jacobite ceased to be a party name. Lilias, of course, married Alan, and Herries, who had asked his nephew's pardon for attempting to make a rebel of him, threw away his sword, and became the prior of a monastery. |
The Dragons of Blueland | null | null | Boris the dragon contacts Elmer shortly after the events in Elmer and the Dragon to ask Elmer's help: several men have found his family of dragons and are proposing to sell them to zoos and circuses. Elmer runs away from home again and helps Boris's family to scare off the men permanently. |
Mao: The Unknown Story | Jung Chang | 2,005 | Chang and Halliday do not accept the idealistic explanations for Mao's rise to power or common claims for his rule. They argue that from his earliest years he was motivated by a lust for power and that Mao had many political opponents arrested and murdered, including some of his personal friends. During the 1920s and 1930s, they argue, Mao could not have gained control of the party without Stalin's patronage, nor were Mao's decisions during the Long March as heroic and ingenious as Edgar Snow's Red Star Over China claimed and thereby entered the mythology of the revolution. Chiang Kai-shek deliberately did not pursue and capture the Red Army. Areas under Communist control during the Second United Front and Chinese Civil War, such as the Jiangxi and Yan'an soviets, were ruled through terror and financed by opium. Mao, they say, sacrificed thousands of troops simply in order to get rid of party rivals, such as Chang Kuo-tao, nor did he take the initiative in fighting the Japanese invaders. Despite being born into a peasant family, when Mao came to power in 1949 he had little concern for the welfare of the Chinese peasantry. Mao's determination to use agricultual surplus to subsidize industry and intimidation of dissent led to murderous famines resulting from the Great Leap Forward, exacerbated by allowing the export of grain to continue even when it became clear that China did not have sufficient grain to feed its population. Chang and Halliday argue that the Long March was not the heroic endeavour portrayed by the Chinese Communist Party and that Mao's role in leading it was exaggerated. Officially portrayed as an inspiring commander, the authors write that he was nearly left behind by the March and only commanded a fairly small force. He was apparently disliked by almost all of the people on the March and his tactics and strategy were flawed. They also write that Chiang Kai-shek allowed the Communists to proceed without significant hindrance as his son was being held hostage in Moscow and that he feared he would be killed if the Communists were crushed. Mao is also portrayed, along with the Communist elite, as a privileged person who was usually carried around in litters and protected from the suffering of his subordinates, rather than sharing their hardship. Despite the high level of casualties amongst ordinary soldiers, supposedly no high-ranking leaders died on the journey, regardless of how ill or badly wounded they were. The book says that, contrary to revolutionary mythology, there was no battle at Luding Bridge and that tales of a "heroic" crossing against the odds was merely propaganda. Chang found a witness, Li Xiu-zhen, who told her that she saw no fighting and that the bridge was not on fire. In addition, she said that despite claims by the Communists that the fighting was fierce, all of the vanguard survived the battle. Chang also cited Nationalist (Kuomintang) battleplans and communiques that indicated the force guarding the bridge had been withdrawn before the Communists arrived. A number of historical works, even outside of China, do depict such a battle, though not of such heroic proportions. Harrison E. Salisbury's The Long March: The Untold Story and Charlotte Salisbury's Long March Diary mention a battle at Luding Bridge, but they relied on second-hand information. However, there is disagreement in other sources over the incident. Chinese journalist Sun Shuyun agreed that the official accounts were exaggerated. She interviewed a local blacksmith who had witnessed the event and said that "when [the troops opposing the Red Army] saw the soldiers coming, they panicked and fled — their officers had long abandoned them. There wasn't really much of a battle." Archives in Chengdu further supported this claim. In October 2005, The Age newspaper reported that it had been unable to find Chang's local witness. In addition, The Sydney Morning Herald found an 85-year old eyewitness, Li Guixiu, aged 15 at the time of the crossing, whose account disputed Chang's claims. According to Li, there was a battle: "The fighting started in the evening. There were many killed on the Red Army side. The KMT set fire to the bridge-house on the other side, to try to melt the chains, and one of the chains was cut. After it was taken, the Red Army took seven days and seven nights to cross." In a speech given at Stanford University, former US National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski mentioned a conversation that he once had with Deng Xiaoping. He recalled that Deng smiled and said, “Well, that’s the way it’s presented in our propaganda. We needed that to express the fighting spirit of our forces. In fact, it was a very easy military operation." One of the allegations in the book against Mao was that he not just tolerated the production of opium in regions that the Communists controlled during the Chinese Civil War but also participated in the trade of it, in order to provide funding for his soldiers. According to Russian sources that the authors state they found, at the time the trade generated around $60 million a year for the Communists. This was stopped only due to overproduction driving down the price and Communist officials other than Mao deciding that the practice was immoral. Mao is alleged to have exposed men under his command to unnecessary suffering just to eliminate his opponents. Zhang Guotao, a rival in the Politburo, was sent with his army in 1936 on a hopeless mission into the Gobi desert. When it inevitably failed Mao ordered that the survivors be executed. Chang and Haliday suggest that Mao used other underhanded means in eliminating opponents. Apart from general purges like the Hundred Flowers Campaign and other operations like the Cultural Revolution, he had Wang Ming (another Politburo rival) poisoned twice, who had to seek treatment in Russia. Chang and Halliday write that in comparison to official history provided by the Chinese authorities that Communist forces waged a tough guerrilla war against the Imperial Japanese Army, in truth they rarely fought the Japanese. Mao was more interested in saving his forces for fighting against the Chinese Nationalists. On the few occasions that the Communists did fight the Japanese, Mao was very angry. Notable members of the KMT were claimed to have been secretly working for the Chinese Communists. One such "sleeper" was Hu Zongnan, a senior National Revolutionary Army general. Hu's son objected to this description and his threat of legal action led Jung Chang's publishers in Taiwan to abandon the release of the book there. Rather than reluctantly entering the conflict as the Chinese government suggests, Mao is alleged to have deliberately entered the Korean War, having promised Chinese troops to Kim Il Sung (then leader of North Korea) before the conflict started. Halliday had previously conducted research into this conflict, publishing his book Korea: The Unknown War. The book opens with the sentence "Mao Tse-tung, who for decades held absolute power over the lives of one-quarter of the world's population, was responsible for well over 70 million deaths in peacetime, more than any other twentieth century leader." Chang and Halliday claim that he was willing for half of China to die to achieve military-nuclear superpowerdom. Estimates of the numbers of deaths during this period vary, though Chang and Halliday's estimate is one of the highest. Sinologist Stuart Schram, in a review of the book, noted that "the exact figure... has been estimated by well-informed writers at between 40 and 70 million". China scholars agree that the famine during the Great Leap Forward caused tens of millions of deaths. Chang and Halliday argue that this period accounts for roughly half of the 70 million total. An official estimate by Hu Yaobang in 1980 put the death toll at 20 million, whereas Philip Short in his 2000 book Mao: A Life found 20 to 30 million to be the most credible number. Chang and Halliday's figure is 37.67 million, which historian Stuart Schram indicated that he believes "may well be the most accurate." Yang Jisheng, a Communist party member and former reporter for Xinhua, puts the number of famine deaths at 36 million. In his 2010 book Mao's Great Famine, Hong Kong based historian Frank Dikötter, who has had access to newly opened local archives, places the death toll for the Great Leap Forward at 45 million, and describes it as "one of the most deadly mass killings of human history." Professor R. J. Rummel published updated figures on worldwide democide in 2005, stating that he believed Chang and Halliday's estimates to be mostly correct and that he had revised his figures for China under Mao accordingly. |
Joe Cinque's Consolation | Helen Garner | null | Joe Cinque's Consolation begins with Garner being informed of Singh's second 1999 trial and its circumstances, when it was already in progress. She becomes interested and begins attending hearings in Canberra. She relates her impressions of the trial, including her negative reactions to Singh and her mystification at Rao's and others' lack of shock at and complicity in Singh's plans. As the trial progresses she becomes acquainted with Cinque's mother Maria and feels that the court system is not doing sufficient justice to the victim or his family. After the trial Garner interviews Singh's family and attempts to interview Singh and Rao, but both refuse or are uncontactable. She becomes interested in victim's rights, interviews the presiding judge and repeatedly visits and becomes a friend of Cinque's family, and eventually concludes that the purpose of the book is to be Joe Cinque's consolation, as the trial proceedings could not be. |
To Dance with the White Dog | Terry Kay | null | Sam Peek happily resides in Hart County, Georgia as a pecan farmer and local celebrity featured in many gardening/horticultural magazines. He and his wife Cora are both in their 80's, and have just celebrated their 57th wedding anniversary. Cora dies of a heart attack. Sam and his family are deeply grieved over this, and his daughters begin to obsess over his safety and his life. Not long after Cora's death, a mysterious white dog that only Sam can see appears near the house. He thinks it is just a stray, but daughter Kate and his other children don't see it and think he's going crazy. Even Sam's favorite son James can't see the dog. Nobody believes Sam except Kate's son Bobby. After a series of events, the family begins to see the white dog. The day before Sam's death, the dog disappears, and it is thought the dog was Cora in another form. |
The Time Wanderers | Boris Strugatsky | 1,987 | The principal characters are Maxim Kammerer and Toyvo Glumov, both working for an organization which investigates "Unexplained Events" ("UE"s). Their investigation of a series of events leads them to believe that they are witnesses to a new action by the Wanderers. After much investigation, the UEs are discovered to be the work of a secret society called the Ludens. The Ludens are born human, but possess latent mental powers far beyond those of normal humans. They view themselves as a distinct race, and claim to have "different interests" from humanity at large, in some instances claiming to be above traditional human morality. The Ludens routinely conduct experiments on humans and alter their minds in order to further their own means. Kammerer and Glumov's investigation unmasks the Ludens, and they are made public in what would later be called "The Great Revelation." At the end of the novel, the Ludens discover that Glumov himself has the capacity to become a Luden, and Glumov must decide whether or not to join their race. Glumov at first states that to join the Ludens would be a betrayal of his family, friends, and civilization. The book ends on a sinister note, with Glumov becoming a member of the Luden group, the implication being that he was coerced. Indeed, the story is told as Maxim's memoir, his sole intent in writing it being to clear up the story of Glumov: another source (in the fictional setting) had implied that Glumov was in the Luden group all along. |
The Redundancy of Courage | Timothy Mo | 1,991 | Like East Timor, Danu is a Portuguese colony, invaded and occupied by its giant neighbour, which is not named, but is based on Indonesia. The people of the occupying country are referred to throughout the book as the malai, similar to 'malae' the word for foreigner in Tetum, East Timor's national language. Danu is annexed by the malai and declared their 'fifty-eighth province', over which their green and white flag is raised. (Indonesia declared East Timor its 'twenty-seventh province', and its flag is red and white. In any case, by part three of the novel Mo's description of the malai flag has changed to red and white too (chapter 25)) |
Empire | Antonio Negri | 2,000 | In general, the book theorizes an ongoing transition from a "modern" phenomenon of imperialism, centered around individual nation-states, to an emergent postmodern construct created among ruling powers which the authors call Empire (the capital letter is distinguishing), with different forms of warfare: ...according to Hardt and Negri's Empire, the rise of Empire is the end of national conflict, the "enemy" now, whoever he is, can no longer be ideological or national. The enemy now must be understood as a kind of criminal, as someone who represents a threat not to a political system or a nation but to the law. This is the enemy as a terrorist....In the "new order that envelops the entire space of... civilization", where conflict between nations has been made irrelevant, the "enemy" is simultaneously "banalized" (reduced to an object of routine police repression) and absolutized (as the Enemy, an absolute threat to the ethical order"). Empire elaborates a variety of ideas surrounding constitutions, global war, and class. Hence, the Empire is constituted by a monarchy (the United States and the G8, and international organizations such as NATO, the International Monetary Fund or the World Trade Organization), an oligarchy (the multinational corporations and other nation-states) and a democracy (the various non-government organizations and the United Nations). Part of the book's analysis deals with "imagin[ing] resistance", but "the point of Empire is that it, too, is "total" and that resistance to it can only take the form of negation - "the will to be against". The Empire is total, but economic inequality persists, and as all identities are wiped out and replaced with a universal one, the identity of the poor persists. |
When Grover Moved to Sesame Street | Jocelyn Stevenson | null | Grover's mommy tells Grover that she has a new job, much to Grover's delight. The news remains upbeat to Grover when he learns he'll have to move to "a place called Sesame Street." He, his mother, and best friend Minnie pack for the move. However, in bed that night, Grover is creeped out by his empty room, and starts to have regrets about the move. Grover experiences more shock on realizing that Minnie won't be moving with him and his mother, to which Grover's mommy consoles him with "after we are settled in our new home, Minnie may come to visit us." Grover has obvious apprehensions about the move, even when unpacking in his new room. He finds it smells "funny", and sounds "empty". Outside, on the steps of the apartment, he hollers "Hello, everybodee! Grover Monster is here. Where are my new friends?" Big Bird asks what the problem is, to which Grover replies, "I am crying because I do not have any new friends." Big Bird, a resident of the neighbourhood much longer than Grover, starts to cry with Grover, because he too has no "new friends". Of course, this is all a course of misunderstanding in the semantics of speech, as Grover means he has no friends at all, and Big Bird means that while he has friends, none are "new". The two meet and greet each other, and quickly become friends. Grover then meets Cookie Monster, Betty Lou, Bert, and Ernie. They all take him on a grand tour of the neighbourhood, stopping at Hooper's Store, managed by David, and the Fix-it Shop, operated by Maria and Luis. They also stop at Oscar's can, where a rather pippy Oscar the Grouch shakes hands with Grover, and at Big Bird's nest. On returning to the neighbourhood soda shop, Grover invites everyone to come see his new room, then exclaiming "I think I am going to like it here on Sesame Street." On the last page, as Grover makes this statement to his friends, Minnie and her mother are coming around the bend of the street. In books following this, Grover and Grover's mommy are back in the suburbs, likely somewhere in New Jersey. |
Fear on Wheels | Franklin W. Dixon | 1,991 | Hot rod TV show producer Grant Tucker has hired the Hardy boys following several mysterious accidents; an unknown extortionist has been demanding a quarter of a million bucks in cash. Several dangerous accidents happen, with monster trucks without drivers going on rampage, tires coming off, and hot rods going up in flames. In the end, Joe and star rider Jessica Derey have a hair's breadth escape, narrowly escaping being crushed by a monster pickup on a live TV show. They also catch the extortionist, a former star who was involved in a major accident, got scared of driving, and managed to work up a lot of resentment, which was why he decided to damage the show by crippling it financially. |
Iola Leroy | null | null | Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted (1892), is the story of Iola Leroy, a beautiful young mixed-race woman of majority white ancestry in the antebellum years. Born free in Mississippi, she and her brother Harry are the children of a wealthy white planter and his mixed-race wife, a former slave whom he freed and married before the American Civil War. (Note: Such interracial marriage was then illegal, although planters wealthy enough sometimes flouted the law). Her father sends Iola to the North to be educated. After his death, Iola is kidnapped, told that she has black blood, and sold into slavery in the Deep South. In a plot that follows the conventions of the late nineteenth century tragic mulatto genre, Iola struggles to elude the intentions of her various owners to use her sexually. After she is freed by the Union Army during the war, she seeks to find her scattered family members. Embracing her African heritage, she works to improve the social and economic condition of blacks in the United States. Iola is supported in her struggle by people who relate to various aspects of her complicated life: a devoted former Leroy family slave, Tom Anderson, rescued Iola from a lecherous master. Her brother Harry Leroy joins her in refusing to "pass" as white, although that would make life easier for them. (Note: Both Leroys have a majority of white ancestry.) She meets a newfound uncle, Robert Johnson, who introduces her to her dark-skinned maternal grandmother Harriet, of mostly African descent. After the war, Leroy continues to identify as black. She declines to pass for white when her New England suitor, Dr. Gresham, makes it a condition of his proposal of marriage. He wants her to promise never to reveal her African ancestry. Leroy marries Dr. Frank Latimer, a man of mixed ancestry who also identifies with the black community. They return to North Carolina to fight for "racial uplift." After a series of coincidences, Iola Leroy Latimer reunites with her surviving Leroy family members after the war. |
The Black Cloud | null | 1,957 | In 1964, astrophysicists on Earth become aware of an immense cloud of gas that is heading for the solar system. The cloud, if interposed between the Sun and the Earth, could wipe out most of the life on Earth by blocking solar radiation and ending photosynthesis. A cadre of astronomers and other scientists is drawn together in Nortonstowe, England, to study the cloud and report to the British government about the consequences of its presence. The cloud decelerates as it approaches the Sun (contrary to physical laws) and comes to rest around the Sun, causing disastrous climatic changes on Earth and immense mortality and suffering for the human race. This section of the novel presages the nuclear winter scenario popularised in the 1980s. As the behaviour of the cloud proves to be impossible to predict scientifically, the team at Nortonstowe eventually come to the conclusion that it might be a life-form with a degree of intelligence. In an act of desperation, the scientists try to communicate with the cloud, and to their surprise succeed in doing so. The cloud is revealed to be a superorganism, many times more intelligent than humans, which in return is surprised to find intelligent life-forms on a solid planet. When the astronomers ask the cloud how its lifeform originated, it replies that they have always existed. One of the characters suggests this is incompatible with the Big Bang theory. Thus it may be that Hoyle was hinting at his own Steady State theory of the existence of the Universe, which most cosmologists consider disproved by the discovery of cosmic background radiation. The cloud then learns that another intelligent cloud has stopped communicating and may have mysteriously vanished, not so far away in space in the cloud's terms, so it decides to move on, relieving Earth's suffering. Two of the scientists die in an attempt to learn some of the cloud's vast store of knowledge through visual signals, in order to gain further insights about the Universe. |
The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea | Yukio Mishima | 1,963 | The novel chronicles the story of Ryuji, a sailor with vague notions of a special honor awaiting him at sea. He meets a woman called Fusako with whom he falls deeply in love, and he ultimately decides to marry her. Fusako's 13-year-old son, Noboru, is in a band of savage boys who believe in "objectivity", rejecting the adult world as illusory, hypocritical and sentimental. As Ryuji begins to draw close to Fusako, a woman of the shore, he is eventually torn away from the dreams he's pursued his entire life. Fusako's son, Noboru, who shares an especially close bond with his mother through a voyeuristic ritual, hates the idea of losing his mother to a man who has let his hope and freedom die. This anger and fear of loneliness translates into terrible, savage acts performed by Noboru and the gang of which he is a part. |
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