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Running on Empty | Franklin W. Dixon | 1,990 | Thieves hot wire and steal Chet Morton's prize Corvette. But when he tries to catch those responsible, he gets kidnapped himself. In response the brothers Frank and Joe go in chase of Chet's kidnappers. The two brothers attempt to join the gangs to get leads on Chet and uncover a chopshop ring. With the Camaros, Caddys and Corvettes, the Hardys are putting themselves on the line. |
Dark Desire | Christine Feehan | null | The book begins with Jacques Dubrinsky, younger brother to Mikhail, being tortured and buried alive by members of the same fanatical group that attacked Raven and killed his sister some 25 years earlier in Dark Prince. As time goes on he loses much of his memory (perhaps even his sanity), the only thing he has a clear memory of is of the faces of his human tormentors, the vampire who betrayed him to the society, and of the woman who will save him. Shea O’Halloran is a brilliant American surgeon and researcher trying to find the cure for a rare blood disorder. Her pursuit of a cure is personal; she also suffers from the disease, and she fears that one day it will kill her. She occasionally has to have blood transfusions in order to survive. It is only after her mother Maggie commits suicide that she learns that she has inherited this disorder from her father. In her diary, her mother writes of having an affair with a man named Rand. She writes that he takes her blood when they make love. Unfortunately he’s a married man whose wife recently gave birth to a son and disappears before Maggie can tell him of her pregnancy. She believes that his wife Noelle discovered his infidelity and murdered him. The loss of Shea's father devastates Maggie, and she retreats from the world, even her own child. Shea suffers a stark and painful childhood. Maggie commits suicide when Shea turns 18. This disorder is not her only difference. No human medicine works on her; she can hear and feel the thoughts of others. When she touches a patient, she instantly knows what is wrong with him/her. Because of this, she’s tracked by the same vampire hunting society that has imprisoned Jacques, believing she too is a vampire. They even show her pictures of seven others that they have caught and murdered. No matter where she goes, they always track her down. One day Shea is racked by horrendous pain and visions of a man being tortured. For years she dreams of this man. After the society finds her again, she goes to the Carpathian Mountains to do further research on her disorder. She feels that since there are many legends of vampires in the region that this may be the epicenter of the disease. When she goes for a walk, she’s compelled to go to a spot deep in the forest. She finds a cellar where a man has been tortured and buried alive with a stake driven through his body. Suddenly he awakens and attacks her, twice feeding on her blood. She has a compulsion to help him, despite his violent assault. She takes him to her home and treats his wounds. After he takes her blood for the third time, she becomes violently ill. The next day, when she asks who he is, Jacques is stunned. He always knew she was his lifemate then recites the ritual words, binding them for all time. He tells her that she doesn’t have a disease, but that they are a different race of people who need blood to survive. Shea refuses to believe this at first. Then she realizes that she doesn’t have normal human bodily functions. She soon realizes that this is the truth and that her father was a being just like Jacques. After a few days, Shea has to leave Jacques to get more blood from the blood bank. She is spotted by another Carpathian, Byron, who realizes by her smell that she’s been in contact with Jacques. He immediately informs Mikhail. When they arrive, they see Shea apparently torturing Jacques; Mikhail attacks her thinking she is deranged. This triggers Jacques’ protective instincts and he tries to kill them. Mikhail calls Gregori, their race’s most powerful healer, who convinces Jacques to allow them to heal him. The next evening, Shea and Jacques tell her life story. Shea was (before being converted by Jacques) half-human, half-Carpathian, something that was considered impossible. They also think that her birth confirms that a psychic human woman who is a lifemate to a Carpathian is capable of giving birth to female children. This is vitally important because their people are on the verge of extinction; no female has been born in more than 500 years. They inform her that her father is not dead, and it was Noelle who was murdered. They also tell her that her half-brother was also killed by the society. Jacques also relates what happened to him, how a vampire delivered him to the human killers. Before they can discover who the vampire might be, Byron is taken. Raven is able to connect with him and determine that he is in a dark and dank room. Shea realizes that he is being housed in the same place the humans buried Jacques seven years earlier. While the men go to the cellar to rescue him, women stay behind. Shea is almost immediately uneasy, but Raven senses no threat. Suddenly, the humans attack the women, shooting the pregnant Raven. Luckily Shea and Gregori are able to save Raven and her child. The attack is puzzling because no one but Shea felt any threat. There is only one explanation for this; her father Rand is the vampire. This means that it was Rand who delivered his own son and Jacques to the men to be tortured. Gregori is selected to hunt Rand, but Rand attacks Jacques, who is forced to destroy him. |
Spider-Man: Down These Mean Streets | null | null | The story centers around a mysterious drug known as Triple X that has been giving its users superpowers as well as rendering them mentally and physically unstable. Spider-Man is forced to team with the police to not only protect people from the enhanced users but find the origin of the drug itself. They soon learn that one of Spider-Man's most prominent enemies might be behind the drug but for a grander scheme. |
The Naughtiest Girl is a Monitor | Enid Blyton | 1,945 | It is the story of Elizabeth Allen, who is made a monitor and then risks her position by accusing Julian, a fellow student, of being a thief who tricks her and making her lose her place as a monitor, by playing tricks on her such as making irritating water drops fall on her head, making her books fall thrice, making the teacher to send her out and putting sneezing powder in her book which enters her nose on opening the book and tickles her nostrils, causing her to sneeze. Elizabeth also quarrels with another fellow student, Arabella Buckley, who is vain and selfish and disobeyed the school rules about pocket money. She also makes a midnight feast for her birthday. Elizabeth then sees Julian taking biscuits from the old games locker and thinks he is stealing. She is made to resign her position as a school monitor but ultimately gets it back when she saves a small child from drowning. The real thief- Martin- is discovered at last and admits to having deliberately framed Julian. But unfortunately, in the process he had got Elizabeth into trouble.But at last there was a happy ending. |
Gallows View | Peter Robinson | 1,987 | A Peeping Tom is frightening the women of Eastvale; two glue-sniffing young thugs are breaking into homes and robbing people; an old woman may or may not have been murdered. Investigating these cases is Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks, a perceptive, curious and compassionate policeman recently moved to the Yorkshire Dales from London to escape the stress of city life. In addition to all this, Banks has to deal with the local feminists and his attraction to a young psychologist, Jenny Fuller. As the tension mounts, both Jenny and Banks’s wife, Sandra, are drawn deeper into the events. The cases weave together as the story reaches a tense and surprising climax. |
The Lamp From the Warlock's Tomb | null | null | Anthony Monday and Myra Eells live in Minnesota, where odd things begin to occur after the purchase of an antique oil lamp. Late one night at his high school, Anthony burns the lamp as part of his science project and, later, when leaving the school, sees a strange-looking cobweb-covered apparition. Anthony flees in terror but trips over the dead body of the school's watchman. Later, while walking home from the library, Anthony sees the withered corpse of the watchman in an antique shop. Ms. Eells confides in her brother Emerson, an expert in the occult, about the strange lamp and the even stranger sights and sounds seemingly ignited by the lamp. Emerson soon discovers the oil lamp is one of three items (à la bell, book, and candle) that are keeping a sinister spirit at bay. |
Water for Elephants | Sara Gruen | null | The story is told as a series of memories by Jacob Jankowski, a ninety (or is it ninety-three) year-old man who lives in a nursing home. Jacob is told what to eat and what to do. As the memories begin, Jacob Jankowski is a twenty-three year old Polish American preparing for his final exams as a Cornell University veterinary student when he receives the devastating news that his parents were killed in a car accident. Jacob’s father was a veterinarian and Jacob had planned to join his practice. When Jacob learns that his father was deeply in debt because he had been treating animals in exchange for just beans and eggs and had mortgaged the family home to provide Jacob an Ivy League education, he has a breakdown and leaves school just short of graduation. In the dark of night, he jumps on a train only to learn it is a circus train belonging to the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth. When the owner of the circus, Uncle Al, learns of his training as a vet, he is hired to care for the circus animals. This consequently leads Jacob to share quarters with a dwarf named Walter (who is known as Kinko to the circus) and his dog Queenie. A few weeks later Jacob is summoned to take a look at Camel, an old man who, after drinking Jamaican ginger extract for many years, can't move his arms or legs. Fearing Camel will be "red-lighted" (referring to the practice of throwing circus workers off a moving train as either punishment or as severance from the circus to avoid paying wages), Jacob hides him in his room. The head trainer, August, is a brutal man who abuses the animals in his care (such as the new elephant Rosie) and the people around him. Alternately, he can be utterly charming. Jacob develops a guarded relationship with August and his wife, Marlena, with whom Jacob falls in love. August is suspicious of their relationship and beats Marlena and Jacob. Marlena subsequently leaves August and stays at a hotel while she's not performing. Uncle Al then informs Jacob that August is a paranoid schizophrenic and then utters a threat: reunite August and Marlena as a happily married couple or Walter and Camel get red-lighted. A few days later after discovering that August has tried to see Marlena, Jacob visits her in her hotel room. Soon after he comforts her however, the couple sleeps together and the two soon declare their love for each other. Marlena soon returns to the circus to perform (and also to have secret meetings with Jacob), but refuses to have August near her, which makes Uncle Al furious. She also discovers that she is pregnant. One night Jacob climbs up and jumps each car, while the train is moving, to August's room, carrying a knife between his teeth intending to kill August. However, Jacob backs out (leaving the knife on August's pillow) and returns to his car, only to find no one there but Queenie. He then realizes that Walter and Camel were red-lighted and Jacob himself was also supposed to have been. As the story climaxes, several circus workers who were red-lighted (thrown) off of the train come back and release the animals, causing a stampede during the performance. In the ensuing panic, Rosie the elephant takes a stake and drives it into August's head. His body is then trampled in the stampede. Jacob was the only one who saw what truly happened to August. As a result of this incident, which occurred during a circus performance, the circus is shut down. Soon after, Uncle Al's body is found with a makeshift garrote around his neck. Marlena and Jacob leave, taking with them several circus animals (Rosie, Queenie and Marlena's horses), and begin their life together. Back in the nursing home ninety-three year old Jacob is waiting for his son to take him to the circus. It is revealed that Jacob and Marlena married and had 5 children spending the first seven years at the Ringling Bros. circus before Jacob got a job as a vet for a Chicago zoo. Marlena is revealed to have died a few years before Jacob was put into a nursing home. After finding out no one is coming for him, elderly Jacob makes his way to the circus next to a nursing home on his own. He soon meets the manager Charlie and after the show begs to be allowed to stay with the circus selling tickets. Charlie agrees and Jacob believes he has finally come home. |
Chart Throb | Ben Elton | 2,006 | The story revolves around the occurrences during the latest series of the hit 'reality' star search programme, Chart Throb. The show was the brainchild of Calvin Simms, who assumed a Simon Cowell style role as the mean, English judge. He is accompanied by the extravagant but bitchy former rockstar-turned-transsexual reality TV star, Beryl Blenheim, and the ageing pop manager Rodney Root. Calvin's wife wants to divorce him, but as part of a bet she agrees that if he can rig the results of the new series of Chart Throb, she will leave him without taking any of his cash. Beryl Blenheim is trying to manage the scripted reality show she helms, The Blenheims, whilst coping with her drug-addled wife, Serenity, and the flagging pop career of one of her daughters, Priscilla. Meanwhile, Rodney is facing the challenge of judging his old flame, the beautiful Iona, whilst trying to revive some public interest in his life and work. All of these stories clash and reach a climax at the final of the TV series. At the end of the book, it is said that by the year 2050 everybody will be either a pop star or star of their own reality TV programme. Chart Throb was the 11th novel by Ben Elton, and was released both in hardback and paperback. |
Built for Trouble | Ralph Salaway | null | Shapely starlet Nola Norton finds a gimmick to get the attention of a major Hollywood studio. At a beautiful Southern California beach she pretends to be drowning and lures lifeguard Eddie Baker into deep water. In circumstances that completely disorient Eddie, Nola uses a concealed underwater breathing device, constructed for her by Eddie's supervisor, to hold Eddie underwater until he passes out. She then contrives to rescue him, which gains her the press she's been seeking, but effectively costs Eddie his career. When Eddie learns that his rescuer has landed a $150,000 studio contract on the strength of the publicity he unwittingly helped her gain, he determines to claim a share of the money for himself. He uncovers the connection between Nola and his supervisor, Hank Sawyer, now dead under mysterious circumstances. He determines that Nola and her sleazy theatrical agent, Joe Lamb, murdered Hank not only because of his complicity in the lucrative publicity stunt, but also because of what he knew about Nola's past as a teen-age prostitute in San Diego—the kiss of death for an aspiring Hollywood star. Armed with this information— and enough material evidence to hang Nola in both the criminal justice system and the court of public opinion—Hank offers Nola a "business proposition" which falls little short of blackmail. Varied games of cat-and-mouse ensue, in which Nola unsuccessfully uses her charms to neutralize Eddie's assault on her income. Meanwhile, Joe Lamb convinces his vivacious, red-headed associate Carol Taylor to become involved in tracking Eddie to his desert hiding place. There Eddie and Carol become more than just friends. When Joe accompanies Carol to her next rendezvous with Eddie, he pulls a gun and takes steps to put Eddie out of the way, as he and Nola did with Hank Sawyer. Surprised and horrified, Carol steps in on Eddie's behalf and accidentally shoots and kills Joe. Eddie takes extraordinary risks to dispose of Joe's body in a way that will not implicate himself or the distraught Carol. While this seems to put the police off the scent, back in Los Angeles Nola puts the pieces together and threatens to expose Eddie as Joe's murderer. With the stakes this high, a showdown is inevitable. Eddie tracks Nola and her movie-star beau to a yacht off the shores of Catalina Island, where once more murder hangs in the night air. Eddie finds Nola a formidable adversary to the end, as the novel comes to its explosive conclusion. |
La Tumba | null | null | Situated in Mexico City in the 1960s, its main character, Gabriel Guía, is a teenager holding a somewhat cynical and disenchanted view of life and himself. He has the usual adventures of a Mexican rebellious teen in the 1960s, told in slang and a direct tone. He knows French, loves the good music (clearly references from Wagner's Lohengrin but also Stravinsky, jazz and rock and roll) writes tales and poetry, and makes many references and citations of authors like Arthur Rimbaud and Chekhov, some of his more intellectual friends sharing his interest. |
Molly Moon, Micky Minus and the Mind Machine | Georgia Byng | 2,007 | The heroine, Molly Moon, is on a mission to bring her long-lost twin brother, Micky, home. In order to do this, she travels back in time to the day of her birth with her best friend Rocky, and her small black pug Petula. When they realize the kidnapper is a time traveler, they follow him far into the future, to Mont Blancia (present day Mount Blanc). However, Molly then discovers that Micky has been made to think he is useless by Princess Fang, an evil 6-year-old genius, so he can hypnotize people of the village for her, into doing her orders. Once Molly is about to try to save Micky, she gets caught by Princess Fang. The evil princess, using her high-tech mind machine, takes away all of Molly's knowledge of hypnotism, leaving her helpless. However, in spite of losing her powers, Molly gains a new power; mind reading. Using her new skill, Molly is able to gather information from Princess Fang. However, Molly's best friend, Rocky, gets hypnotized, in the beginning, by Micky. Rocky then starts helping Princess Fang, so Molly promised herself to rescue him. Nurse Meekles (a worker) helps her escape with Micky by taking Micky's hypnotic powers into the mind machine too. They escape into a zoo, where Molly attempts to persuade Micky that Princess Fang is just using him. She mentions the fact that they've been pretending he was sick and needed their help, and the fact that he's named "Minus". After much persuasion, Molly gets Mickey on her side, and Micky tells her about the horrible plan the Princess Fang had concocted. In the end, Molly uses her mind reading powers to ask the mind machine if she can get her hypnotizing skills back. The mind machine gives back her, and Micky's, knowledge. She then hypnotizes all of Princess Fang's guards and asks to get her crystals back. Once she has her crystals, she stops time and gets in position to hypnotize people. Finally, all of the people, including Princess Fang, are hypnotized and Molly gets the situation under control. Molly also gets the true rulers of Mont Blancia back on the throne. After that she takes King Klaucus and his brother who were injected with a genetic fluid by princess Fang and are made mutants to Mont Blanc five hundred years ago when it was still covered in snow. There Klaucus' brother, Wildgust, tries to kill Klaucus to try to take over the throne. Molly freezes time, and the group leaves Wildgust in the past. In the end Molly, Micky, Rocky, Petula, and Silver and Mercury (two mind-reading birds given to Molly and Rocky as presents) leave to Molly's home at Briersville five hundred years in the past. |
De Perfil | null | null | The novel opens with the phrase "Behind the rock is the world I live in" and the reader finds him smoking cigarettes in his home's garden, hiding from his parents behind a big rock. (In Mexico it is common but not compulsory to live with one's parents until marriage, even if one has the means to support oneself). The son of a psychiatrist and a housewife, he has a younger brother he can't stand because he is acting like his psychiatrist father all the time. Also, he assume that his parents could divorce and have doubts about his birth (X jokes that he's adopted). His friend Ricardo is timid and naive, having bold ideas he never dares put to practice, and when he does, he usually makes a joke of himself. Ricardo is very attached to X, the closest thing to a name the main character gets in the novel (given by Ricardo in one of his "confidential" plans in his diary), but X thinks Ricardo is too childish. No one can think that Ricardo has a crush on X, but it's a fact that he has an absence in the father figure pattern, substituting in X even if he tortures him all the time. X meets many kinds of people: a fledging music group about to make their first record (Los suásticos) and their homosexual manager, a young and rich female singer (Queta) with which he have an affair, his flamboyant and cynical neighbor(Octavio)who don't have any aspirations but only to be a rockstar (the fact is that he doesn't belong to any band), his intellectual cousin (Esteban) who fights X for his conventional lifestyle and more characters, most with some artistic or intellectual aspiration, including student leaders, highly politicized (a future vision of events that will happen in the next five years in Mexico). |
Mind Transfer | Janet Asimov | null | The novel journeys through the birth, life, death, and second life of a man whose family pioneers human-to-android mind transfer. It also explores the ethical and moral issues of transferring consciousness into an android at the moment of death, and examines the idea of prematurely activating an android which has not yet accepted a human brain scan. |
Ciudades Desiertas | null | null | Ciudades Desiertas is the story of Susana, a female Mexican writer fleeing her home to attend an international workshop in the USA, leaving her husband Eligio behind and completely unaware of her whereabouts. A hot-tempered intellectual with a somewhat cynical and misanthropic sense of humor, he works his way to catch up with his wife, arguing to have only done so to find out why exactly Susana left. The book's title seems likely derived from the couple's separate observations in regards to the apparent lack of movement around Arcadia, where the workshop takes place. They almost immediately suffer a cultural shock upon their arrival, although they are already well acquainted with the typical American lifestyle. The American residents, with a small town mentality, are depicted as largely more ignorant of the visitors' culture and society; whereas the latter, especially Latin Americans, show a contemptuous reluctancy to try and fit in, perhaps Susana being the most remarkable exception. Throughout their journey, both try to pinpoint their relationship's setbacks, as well as their own flaws. The two attempt to show a sense of individuality and emotional disattachment from their spouse, each according to their respective point of view. While Eligio tries to make sense out of things, halfway acknowledging the extent of his feelings for his wife, still paradoxically giving in to outbursts of rage on occasions; Susana strains to convey an ideal of utter independence, as she feels the routine of her marriage holds her back. Motivated at first to prove her own self-worth, which she does find, she eventually experiences the certainty of her love for Eligio, in spite of all her efforts to stay away from him. |
Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America | null | null | Bloom describes the arrival of the Hasidim in Postville. In 1987, Aaron Rubashkin, a Lubavitcher Hasidic butcher from Brooklyn, purchased an unused meat-rendering plant and turned it into a state-of-the-art facility for producing Glatt kosher meat. A group of a few hundred Hasidim joined him to help manage and operate the facility, which grew to employ 900. The town's population of around 1,300 had a mixed relationship with the Hasidim. Throughout the book, Bloom describes the power struggles between the two groups, culminating in a ballot referendum held by the town calling for annexation of the land where the plant was located, which permitted the town to gain the ability to tax and regulate the plant. According to the jacket, the book tries to the answer whether "the Iowans [were] prejudiced, or were the Lubavitchers simply unbearable?" Bloom chooses sides in the culture clash. In the book, Bloom voices his opinions on the vote (he supports annexation) and his condemnation of the Hasidic community (whose behavior towards the local native Iowans he frequently describes as "despicable", and whose beliefs he characterizes as "racist"). At one point in the book, Bloom compares Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the Rebbe (religious leader) of the sect who died in 1994, to Louis Farrakhan, asserting that their messages of separatism are nearly identical. In the Afterword of the updated edition of the book, Bloom describes the receiving in the aftermath of the book's publication frequent accusations of airing the Jews' "dirty laundry", and betraying his brethren. |
Shadows on the Rock | Willa Cather | 1,931 | Book I: The Apothecary The story opens in 1697 in Quebec. Euclide Auclair stands on Cap Diamant overlooking the river, watching as the last ship of the season returns to France. He comes down to dinner with his daughter, Cécile. After dinner, Cécile feeds Blinker, a partially disabled hired man who does some of the heavy chores. Euclide Auclair came to the Quebec colony eight years prior, in the service of Count de Frontenac, as physician and apothecary. His wife has died after an illness, and the duties of housekeeping have devolved upon his daughter Cécile. The following day, Cécile and Euclide attend to Reverend Mother Juschereau, who has sprained her ankle. Her father replenishes the hospital supplies while Mother Juschereau tells Cécile a story. Book II: Cécile and Jacques On market day, in late October, Euclide goes to buy vegetables to store in his root cellar. A description is given of citizens growing lettuce and root vegetables in cold frames in their cellars during the long winter. He goes to the church to say a prayer and notices Jacques, the son of a dissolute woman, also saying his prayers. Cécile goes to Governor Frontenac to ask for a pair of shoes for Jacques. He praises her for her charity and industry, and asks if she would like anything for herself. She asks to look at his bowl of glass fruit, and he reminisces about his experiences in Turkey, where the glass was made. Euclide sends Cécile with medicine to the convent. Cécile runs into Jacques and sitting in the chapel, she tells him a story. They light a candle. As they leave, they meet Bishop Laval. We learn, in a flashback, that Bishop Laval saved Jacques from freezing in a snowstorm, though Jacques does not entirely remember this. Cécile takes Jacques to the cobbler to be measured for shoes. She reviews the collection of wooden feet that the cobbler has made to represent the measure of the feet of his wealthy customers. On Christmas Eve day, Cécile opens a gift that has been sent by her Aunt Clotilde in France – a crèche (nativity scene). Cécile and Jacques assemble the figures in a stable of pine branches. Jacques contributes a figure of a beaver to the scene. Book III: The Long Winter The young Bishop Saint-Vallier calls at Auclair's shop for sugared fruit. We learn that Bishop Saint-Vallier has undone the system of education and parish management instituted over twenty years by Bishop Laval. Euclide does not like the young bishop because of his extravagant way of life, his snubbing of the older bishop, and because he believes Saint-Vallier makes poor decisions. Euclide derides him a “less like a churchman than a courtier”. We learn that Blinker was a torturer in the king's service in France, and that he did not wish this trade – it was forced upon him. He had come to Quebec to get away from this employment, but is haunted by the deaths of his victims. Book IV: Pierre Charron In June, a fur-trader named Pierre Charron calls on Euclide. He tells many stories to Euclide and Cécile, and accompanies Cécile on a visit to friends on the Île d'Orléans. Book V: The ships from France With many of their fellow townsfolk, Cécile and Jacques go down to the harbor to watch as five ships arrive from France. There is a general celebration. Cécile receives packages from her two French aunts containing clothing and jewelry. Cécile is scheduled to return to France when the ships leave at the end of summer, but is having reservations. She tells her father that she is concerned about who will look after her friend Jacques. Her father takes no notice, and she is quite upset. She goes to the church to pray, and runs into Bishop Laval, to whom she relates her troubles. Book VI: The Dying Count The Count learns that, despite his expectations, he is not being recalled to France. He tells Euclide that he is released from his service and may return to France, but Euclide chooses to remain. The Count tells Euclide that he is dying, and directs him to take the bowl of glass fruit to Cécile as a gift. Some time later, the Count passes away. The two bishops resolve their differences. Cécile does not go to France. Epilogue The epilogue takes place fifteen years later, in 1713. Bishop Saint-Vallier returns to New France after thirteen years of absence, including several years of captivity in England, which has left him humbled and changed. Cécile has married Pierre Charron, and they are raising four boys. |
Nimitz Class | Patrick Robinson | null | The plot revolves around a nuclear torpedo attack on the fictitious Nimitz class aircraft carrier Thomas Jefferson. Two separate storylines follow. The first concerns the search for the attacking submarine, a cold war era Kilo. The second concerns how the villain both planned and performed the attack while evading the US military. The hunt for the Kilo results in the sinking of the Ayatollah of Iran's submarines, an underwater transit through the Bosporus, and an underwater battle near the Falklands. Commander Ben Adnam is a slick commander who eludes capture. He skillfully evades Bill Baldrige and the U.S. navy. it:Classe Nimitz (romanzo) |
H.M.S. Unseen | null | null | As hinted at the end of Nimitz Class, Ben Adnam is alive and well. Having returned to Iraq, he is awarded a medal, but also suffers a betrayal. He flees Iraq and offers his services to Iran. He devises a plan to cripple Transatlantic air travel. The plan first requires capturing HMS Unseen—the last of the "quietest subs in the world"—the Upholder Class. He combines this with a defunct missile system, and creates a weapon capable of knocking any aircraft out of the sky without detection. The plan works perfectly and several aircraft, including "Air Force Three" carrying the Vice President, are destroyed. However, Ben is abandoned by the Iranians and so left to fend for himself. He comes up with a scheme to meet the man who has hunted him for so long, Admiral Morgan, in order to offer his services to the US. During their confrontation, Adnam informs Morgan that Iraq was behind the terrorist attacks and suggests that the destruction of some dams in the country is sufficient retribution. The US destroy these dams and Baghdad ends up beneath four feet of water. In the Epilogue, Ben Adnam, having been given a permanent job and a US passport, decides to come clean and inform Morgan that it was actually under the flag of Iran that he had destroyed the airlines. A furious Morgan terminates Adnam's employment but gives him the option of taking his own life, rather than have a SWAT team do it for him. With nowhere left to run, Adnam positions himself in the traditional east-facing position of Muslim prayer before shooting himself in the head. Ben Adnam is somewhat unique among techno thriller villains in that he is neither captured nor are any of his attacks thwarted by the "good guys"; even his death is at his own hands. This has led to claims that the books are actually a satire of the genre which often feature perfect heroes and despicable but one dimensional villains. |
A Thousand Splendid Suns | Khaled Hosseini | 2,007 | The novel is split into four parts. The first part focuses exclusively on Mariam, the second and fourth parts focus on Laila, and the third part switches focus between Mariam and Laila with each chapter. Mariam lives in a kolba on the outskirts of Herat with her mother. Jalil, her father, is a wealthy man who lives in town with three wives and nine children. Because Mariam is his illegitimate daughter, she cannot live with them, but Jalil visits her every Thursday. On her fifteenth birthday, Mariam wants her father to take her to see Pinocchio at his movie theater. When he does not show up, she hikes into town and goes to his house. He refuses to see her, and she ends up sleeping on the porch. In the morning, Mariam returns home to find that her mother has committed suicide out of fear that her daughter has deserted her. Mariam is then taken to live in her father's house. Jalil arranges for her to be married to Rasheed, a shoemaker from Kabul who is thirty years her senior. In Kabul, Mariam becomes pregnant seven successive times, but is never able to carry a child to term, and Rasheed gradually becomes more abusive. A girl named Laila and a boy named Tariq, who are close friends and aware of social boundaries, live in the same neighborhood. War comes to Afghanistan, and Kabul is bombarded by rocket attacks. Tariq's family decides to leave the city, and the emotional farewell between Laila and Tariq ends with them making love. Laila's family also decides to leave Kabul, but as they are packing a rocket destroys the house, kills her parents, and severely injures Laila. Laila is taken in by Rasheed and Mariam. After recovering from her injuries, Laila discovers that she is pregnant with Tariq's child. After being told that Tariq is dead, she agrees to marry Rasheed, who is eager to have a young and attractive second wife, and hopes to have a child with her. When Laila gives birth to a daughter, Aziza, Rasheed is displeased and suspicious, and he soon becomes abusive toward Laila. Mariam and Laila eventually become confidantes and best friends. They plan to run away from Rasheed and leave Kabul, but they are caught at the bus station. Rasheed beats them and deprives them of water for several days, almost killing Aziza. A few years later, Laila gives birth to Zalmai, Rasheed's son. The Taliban has risen to power, and there is a drought, and living conditions in Kabul become poor. Rasheed's workshop burns down, and he is forced to take jobs for which he is ill-suited. Rasheed sends Aziza to an orphanage. Then one day, Tariq appears outside the house. He and Laila are reunited, and their passions flare anew. When Rasheed returns home from work, Zalmai tells his father about the visitor. Rasheed starts to savagely beat Laila. He nearly strangles her, but Mariam intervenes and kills Rasheed with a shovel. Afterwards, Mariam confesses to killing Rasheed, in order to draw attention away from Laila and Tariq, and is executed, while Laila and Tariq leave for Pakistan with Aziza and Zalmai. After the fall of the Taliban, Laila and Tariq return to Afghanistan. They stop in the village where Mariam was raised, and discover a package that Mariam's father left behind for her: a videotape of Pinocchio, a small pile of money and a letter. Laila reads the letter and discovers that Jalil regretted sending Mariam away. Laila and Tariq return to Kabul and fix up the orphanage, where Laila starts working as a teacher. Laila is pregnant with her third child, and if it is a girl, it is suggested she will be named Mariam. |
Dans le ciel | Octave Mirbeau | null | Inspired by the art of the Impressionists – using Claude Monet and, mainly, Vincent Van Gogh as models for its central characters –, Dans le ciel conveys the author’s growing conviction that the only worthwhile art communicated its striving for the incommunicable and that the finished work could express no more than the frustration of its goals. A series of interlocking narratives, the novel begins by relating the creative failures of the self-styled novelist Georges, who produces nothing but an unfinished autobiography, then chronicles the poignant struggles of the painter Lucien, whose inability to complete his masterpiece culminates with his suicide when he severs his own hand. It is with the discovery of the terrible fate of the self-mutilating artist that Mirbeau’s truncated narrative is itself left in suspension. |
Mahashweta | null | null | Mahashweta is a very famous Marathi novel written by Dr. Sumati Kshetramade and deals with the issue of leukoderma. It was also adapted into a Television soap with Aishwarya Narkar playing the protagonist. Later Mrs. Sudha Murthy also wrote a novel by the same name and theme. Mrs. Murthy says she came to know about the Marathi novel only after finishing writing her Kannada novel. In Mrs. Murthy's novel the female protagonist Anupama ; who has met her match a handsome Dr. Anand, just like the story of Cinderella and gets a life dream come true. This all is shattered when she discovers that she has leukoderma which is still treated in India as a curse. The name Mahashweta is taken from the female protagonist Mahashweta in Banabhatta's play Kadambari This book has affected life of many people. One of such personal experience is mentioned by Sudha Murthy at the end of book where she is invited to an unknown marriage of a girl with leukoderma which was almost broken and then the bridegroom changed his opinion after reading her book Mahashweta.This book has been translated in many languages like English, Marathi, Hindi, Gujrati, and Oriya. |
Daemon | Daniel Suarez | 2,006 | Soon after the death of Matthew A. Sobol from brain cancer, a computer daemon is activated. Its first mission: to kill anyone and anything that stands in its way. Detective Peter Sebeck is called in to investigate the death of two programmers who worked for a computer game manufacturer, CyberStorm Entertainment. During his investigation, Peter meets and befriends Jon Ross who is a technology consultant. Unfortunately, their traditional investigation methods are useless against Sobol's Daemon program. The Daemon anticipates every move, seemingly one step ahead of anyone who tries to interfere with its operation. The program takes over thousands of companies and provides financial and computing resources for creating AutoM8s (computer controlled driverless cars, used as transport and occasionally as weapons), Razorbacks (sword-wielding robotic riderless motorcycles, specifically designed as weapons) and other devices. The sequel picks up shortly after the end of Daemon. Sobol's distributed AI has already infiltrated the computer systems of companies and many governments. While the Daemon is a technological creation, much of the work is carried out by human beings - eagerly doing their part to change the world according to the vision of Matthew Sobol. Connected by the "Darknet", these human followers create their own ranking system and economy. Meanwhile, the American political and economic system is collapsing, with the price of fuel and the unemployment rates both skyrocketing, and steady reports of violent drug gangs crossing the border from Mexico. In battling the Daemon, the government is forced into a difficult alliance with private corporations, giving rise to many private armies, some of whom are actually responsible for the attacks. The government is unaware that some corporate interests actually want the Daemon to survive - at least to use it selectively as a weapon against their rivals. Detective Sebeck, meanwhile, is sent on a "quest" by the avatar of the late Matthew Sobol, one in which he will have to determine the role of freedom to the human race. |
John Dough and the Cherub | L. Frank Baum | null | The story begins in the bakery of Jules and Leontine Grogrande, French immigrants to the United States. Their mysterious local customer, Ali Dubh, comes to the bakery one day with an urgent request. He is being pursued by three of his countrymen, because he possesses the Great Elixir — "the Essence of Vitality, the Water of Life." A mere drop of this liquid can endow a person with pronounced health, strength, and longevity. Ali Dubh pleads with Madame Grogrande to hide the golden vial of the Elixir for him; she is reluctant, but relents when the Arab also provides her with a silver vial that contains a cure for her rheumatism. In addition to being rheumatic, however, Leontine is also colorblind; she confuses the gold and silver bottles. She pours the Great Elixir into a bowl of water and bathes her sore limbs in it. Instantly the pain is gone, and she feels "as light and airy as a fairy...It occurred to her that she would like to dance; to run and shout, to caper about as she used to do as a girl." Since she is a sensible older woman, she goes to bed instead. Her husband Jules comes into the bakery at 3:00 AM; it is the Fourth of July, and he decides to bake a large gingerbread man to display in his store window. He mixes his dough — and uses the water in the bowl at hand. He forms a gingerbread figure the size of a "fourteen-year-old boy," but in the shape and appearance of a "typical French gentleman." Jules gives the figure glass eyes, white candies for teeth, and lozenges for his suitcoat buttons. He bakes the gingerbread man in his oven — and is astonished to find that the figure comes to life when done. The full dose of the Great Elixir has endowed John Dough the gingerbread man not only with life, but with intelligence and multilingual speech. Jules flees in panic; John Dough equips himself with the baker's top hat and a candy-cane cane, and sets out to see the world. Ali Dubh is outraged when he learns what has happened; but he also sees a solution for his problem. He simply needs to eat the gingerbread man to gain the benefits of the Elixir. With that realization, the Arab sets out in pursuit of John Dough. On the evening of the Fourth, John Dough accidentally hitches a ride on a large rocket launched during the festivities. The rocket carries him all the way to the Isle of Phreex; John falls from the sky onto a Fresh-Air Fiend, who was, naturally, sleeping outdoors. On Phreex, John encounters a cavalcade of odd beings; most importantly, he meets the cryptic figure of Chick the Cherub, "the first and only Original Incubator Baby." Though only six years old (or eight, depending on who is counting), Chick is a slang-talker, and psychopathically brave and even-tempered, an androgyne Button-Bright. Chick becomes John's friend, companion, and protector in a strange new world. The inhabitants of Phreex — "the Freaks of Phreex," as they are called — are a wildly diverse lot. Among the more memorable are: an animated Wooden Indian; a girl executioner who never gets to kill anybody and weeps over the fact; and a two-legged talking horse that bullies its rider. The Isle is also the home of crank inventors. One of them, the least cranky of the lot, has created a workable flying machine. Once Ali Dubh shows up on Phreex (he purchased a magic spell from a witch to track his quarry), John and Chick depart in the flying machine for parts unknown. Their first stop is a small island that contains the Palace of Romance. There, the heroes fall into a Sheherazade predicament: they need to keep telling stories to avoid being killed. They soon make their escape in the flying machine, which crashes onto another island of strange creatures. They meet Pittypat, a talking white rabbit, and Para Bruin, a big and bouncing rubber bear. The mifkets, who also inhabit the island, are malicious gnome-like beings who cause the protagonists major problems, even eating the fingers from John's left hand. Things look dire when Ali Dubh arrives and conspires with the mifkets. John sacrifices the rest of his hand to save the life of a pretty young girl trapped on the island, who is wasting away; his Elixir-rich gingerbread flesh saves her life. Pittypat the rabbit introduces the heroes to the King of the Fairy Beavers, who accepts them into his subterranean domain and resolves their difficulties with his magic. The girl is restored to her parents; John and Chick, joined by Para Bruin, are borne into the sky by friendly flamingoes. After a brief and unpleasant stop on Pirate Island, the flamingoes carry the three adventurers to their final destination. (Ali Dubh is left stranded on the mifket island; his witch-bought spell was good for two uses only.) The twin countries of Hiland and Loland occupy opposite halves of an island, separated by a high wall and a large and richly-furnished castle. The people of Hiland are tall and thin, and live in tall thin houses; those of Loland are short and stout, with dwellings to match. The king who ruled the two lands has died, and both peoples await the arrival of a prophesied, non-human replacement. John Dough fits the bill, and becomes the new King of Hiland and Loland. A local baker repairs the damage John has endured in his travels. Para Bruin becomes Chief Counselor, while Chick promotes himself (or herself) to Head Booleywag — "the one that rules the ruler." Together, the three manage very well for many years to come—but the annals of Hiland and Loland never state whether Chick, the Head Booleywag, is male or female. |
The Spook's Battle | Joseph Delaney | 2,007 | Mam has returned to her own land, Greece, to try to silence the evil rising there. In a special room in the family farmhouse, she has left behind trunks and boxes only to be opened by her youngest son Tom. Meanwhile, in Pendle, the covens are rising and the three most powerful witch clans are rumoured to be uniting in order to conjure an unimaginable evil. Together, they will be capable of raising the dark made flesh - the Devil himself. Tom and the Spook will need to set off for Pendle quickly to avert the unthinkable but first Tom must journey home. Could it be that the boxes will reveal more about his mother's past? And will these powerful secrets place Tom's family in ever greater danger? But when Tom and Alice travel home they find a great horror, Tom's family had been kidnapped, and the kidnapper also took the trunks. |
The Night Buffalo | Guillermo Arriaga | 1,999 | After Gregorio commits suicide, his friend Manuel finds himself unraveling his late friend’s world, and what led him to suicide. Gregorio’s tortuous relationship with his girlfriend is now inherited by Manuel; he becomes involved with his late friend’s girlfriend. Gregorio has missed appointments, left strange messages, and has been harassed by a vengeful policeman. |
The Street of Crocodiles | Bruno Schulz | null | The collection tells the story of a merchant family from a small Galician town which resembles the writer's home town, Drohobycz, in many respects. The story abounds in mythical elements, introduced by means of the visionary and dreamlike literary depiction (e.g. frequently occurring motif of labyrinth), characteristic of the writer. It is thus mythologized reality, processed by the imagination, artistically distorted and enriched by all possible references and allusions to other literary works, to great myths, to other, more exotic domains of reality. One of the most significant characters in the work is the Father, who is not only the head of the family, a merchant running a textile shop in the marketplace, but also a mad experimenter endowed with superhuman abilities, a demiurge living between life and death, between the world of the real and the imaginary. Despite the literary fascination with the character of the Father displayed by Schulz, it is Józef who he renders the protagonist, as well as the narrator of the work. In the character of this young boy, eagerly discovering the world that surrounds him, many of Schulz's own traits are clearly visible. |
So Totally Emily Ebers | Lisa Yee | 2,007 | Moving is not a pleasant experience- especially moving to the other side of the country with a moody mother who insists on stopping at every museum along the way. The road from Allendale, New Jersey, to Rancho Rosetta, California, is not a smooth one for fun-loving Emily Ebers. The only reason she had to move was because her parents divorced, and it was all because of Alice, her boring journalist mother. It was she who wanted to divorce, to tear the family apart, and to sell the house that Emily loved. Alice definitely cares about Emily. Emily only chose to live with Alice because if she lived with her father, she would get in his way- and the way of his band, Talky Boys, which is touring the East Coast. Just when her summer looked like it couldn't get any worse, Emily is signed up for volleyball by Alice. During these torture sessions, Emily must learn to hit the ball over the net, live with the awful Coach Gowin, and endure and reflect insults from popular girl, Julie and her "back-up singers." However, in a twist of fate, she meets Millicent Min, a home-schooled Chinese girl who was forced to play volleyball because there wasn't a gym at home. Surprisingly, Millie and Emily become friends instantly, and Millie even goes to Emily's for a sleepover. But here's where the problem arises- is it possible for Alice to dematerialize so that her ugly hippie clothing and boring talk about journalism doesn't embarrass Emily? Luckily, Millie fakes interest in Alice and is safely whisked off to Emily's room before Alice can drone on about her newest articles. After this sleepover, everything gets even better for Emily. First, she meets the other Mins- Mr. and Mrs. Min and Grandma Maddie- who are actually normal humans, unlike Alice. Then, she meets the boy of her dreams- Stanford Wong, who is athletic, smart, and handsome. He's the only seventh grader on the A-team for basketball, Millie's tutor, and someone that would "never do anything to hurt anyone." Emily's life is now back to normal, and even volleyball isn't so excruciating as it first was now that she has Millie. However, everything she didn't give a second thought about now comes back to her- why Millie used large words and carried a briefcase, why she was so uncomfortable talking about school, and why another girl on the volleyball team calls her a "genius". During the morning of a sleepover at Millie's, Emily uncovers everything she needs to know to fit the pieces of the puzzle together- trophies, plaques, certificates, diplomas, and newspaper articles labeled 'Millicent Min'. She realizes that Millicent isn't stupid, homeschooled, or tutored by Stanford Wong. She is a genius, whereas Stanford Wong is failing language arts. "Best friends don't lie to each other," she thinks. How could they have lied to her the entire time? Disgusted with her "friends," Emily decides to start anew and find real buddies who won't lie to her. First, she decides to become closer to Wendy, the other nice girl in volleyball. Through Wendy, she learns about Julie and her back up singers- how they could either "make or break" Emily when she started school. Though she isn't the type to join the popular clique, Wendy encourages her to start school with a good reputation. Plus, being popular can't harm her, can it? Thus, the two of them attend Julie's pedicure party (popular girls only) where Emily is encouraged to look at herself in a different way- that is, comparing themselves to ultra-thin models. Emily starts dieting (though she isn't fat) and plucking her eyebrows (though they aren't ugly). In this quest to find out who she really is, Emily is pressured to buy six identical purses, $112 each, for each of the six popular girls (Julie and her Triple A backup singers Alyssa, Ariel, and Ariana, plus Emily and Wendy) with her dad's credit card. That day, Emily not only spent $672 (plus tax), but also one of her final tokens of tolerance for the so-called popular clique. Though Wendy is a nice girl, no one beats Millie's "deadpan sense of humor" and the way she always had something to talk about. The timing was always perfect for Millie and Emily. Luckily, it still is. In an awkward telephone conversation, the two former best friends decide to meet at the mall. Though it takes some time for Millie to figure out that she had not "sorely misjudged the dynamics" of their relationship, but rather misjudged Emily's ability to look beyond IQ, she does figure out that Emily was and will always be her friend despite the intellectual barrier that had caused Millie to be friendless in the first place. With Millie back, Emily is able to face the fact that her dad is no father of the year. When he finally calls for the second time the entire summer, it's about the credit card, to "confirm the purchase of six [expensive] purses" and to tell Emily to stop using the credit card. Emily is heartbroken; she had believed that her father had been extremely busy with his band and that he still loved her very much. Fortunately, when the truth hits her, Millie is right next to her, handing her tissues. But that's not all that Millie does- she even asks for the makeover that Emily's always wanted to do to cheer Millie up. Emily also finds out that Alice had turned down a prestigious assignment to Paris, just to be with her for the summer! After realizing her serious error, Emily apologizes to her mother, saying, "I'm so sorry,...about this summer and life and everything. I've been so mean to you." Finally, after an entire summer, Emily is able to engage in an intimate relationship with her mother who she doesn't call "Alice" anymore, but "mom"- short, sweet, and daughterly. After Millie's perfect definition of "true friend" in that noble act, Emily is able to break her bonds with Julie and the Triple A's. "I may have been slow, but I finally figured out what a true friend is, and Julie never was one," she declares. When Julie attempts to persuade Emily that what she has been doing for Emily is all for Emily's own good (e.g. the dieting), even meek Wendy sticks up for Emily. With one more true friend, Julie can't break her in school. That's another problem solved and just one more to go. Although Stanford called almost everyday, he never said anything or left a message. He never apologized, and Emily thinks it's because he never liked her. However, several days before summer vacation ends, the two make it up to each other. In an ice cream shop, Emily kisses Stanford on the cheek and they become boyfriend and girlfriend. And finally, with a sweet letter to her father, Emily completes her diary. She is finally "home", as wise old Maddie says. |
A Song for Summer | Eva Ibbotson | 1,997 | Set in early 1940s Austria, the novel centers around a young English woman called Ellen Carr. Raised in a family of prominent suffragettes, Ellen, to the surprise of all friends and family, grows up with a great love of all things domestic. Inspired by Henny, the servant/partner of her grandfather, she enjoys cooking, cleaning and the various other chores that her mother and aunts have abandoned in their academic and feminist pursuits. While Ellen attends University to please her family, she leaves school before her final exams when Henny contracts cancer in order to be at her side. After Henny's death, Ellen travels to Henny's homeland of Austria to become housemother at Hallendorf School, a progressive school for children stocked with characters of all sorts. Ellen soon finds that everything is not as it should be - the school is based on the Arts and is an institution for wealthy children; however, the parents of many of these children have used the school simply as a place out of sight and mind, in which to dump children that they see as nuisances. Ellen takes on the role of mother to these children, giving them the love and encouragement that they deserve. In the beautiful Austrian countryside Ellen discovers an eccentric world occupied by wild children and even wilder teachers, experimental dancers and a tortoise on wheels. And then there is the particularly intriguing, enigmatic, and very handsome Marek: part-time gardener, fencing teacher, and the most romantic, compelling, swoon-worthy hero figure since Mr Darcy. Ellen is instantly attracted to the mysterious gardener, but Hitler’s Reich is already threatening their peaceful world. But when she discovers that Marek is actually a famous musician working with various Reistances to smuggle Jews to safety, Ellen begins to realize the depth of her feelings for him—and the danger their newfound love faces in the shadow of war. |
Conspiracy Game | null | null | Jack Norton, one of a group of Navy SEALs that were psychically and physically enhanced by Dr. Peter Whitney, called Ghostwalkers, is on a mission to the Democratic Republic of the Congo to rescue his twin brother, Ken from rebel forces. Ken had led a team sent to save an American senator whose plane had gone down. Unfortunately, Ken himself was then captured and tortured before he was retrieved. When he rescued his brother, Jack too was captured; however he was able to escape. Briony Jenkins takes a walk in the jungle, despite the danger of encountering rebel forces. She is a member of a circus family, called the Flying Five. But she has always been different; she cannot be around people without feeling constant pain. She is also stronger and faster than either of her four brothers. Jack encounters Briony while hiding in the jungle, and is immediately aware that she is a Ghostwalker like hemself. He is also stunned by his powerful attraction to her. Briony in turn is amazed that even with his numerous injuries, she cannot feel his pain nor hear his thoughts; it's the first time that has ever happened. She is also surprised to learn that Jack knows her older brother Jedediah, having served with him when Jeb was a SEAL. Briony is able to get Jack to her hotel and treat his wounds. The next day, Jeb arrives and is at first stunned then alarmed to see Jack with his sister. Jack has always had a formidable reputation, and he’s surprised that his sister seems comfortable in his presence. Jeb agrees to help Jack, and suggest he hides in the arena where they have been permitted to practice. Throughout the next few days as Jack waits to be picked up by his people, the attraction and intimacy between him and Briony grows. When it is time to leave, Jack coolly informs her that he doesn’t want to continue their relationship. Almost three months later, Briony discovers that she’s pregnant. Before she can get over that shock, her doctor tries to drug her and kidnap her. She and her brother escape and go on the run. Twice more enhanced soldiers find her and try to “return her to the lab”. Then a man calling himself Kaden Montague appears and shows her a file of her life. The story told to her adoptive family is a lie; she is not the daughter of a man whose wife died in childbirth. She is one of several orphaned girls who have been psychically and physically enhanced by a man named Peter Whitney. She was given to her family because he wanted to see if she was tough enough to survive the constant bombardment of human emotion without an anchor (a psychic who can filter strong emotion). Not only was that, but the overwhelming attraction between Jack and Briony is no accident. Whitney designed pheromones that would insure strong physical compatibility. All he needed to do was get them both at the same place at the time and nature would take care of the rest. All of this was done so that Briony and Jack would be the parents of the second generation of Whitney’s supersoldiers. Briony knows that she can’t remain with her family; as her pregnancy advances, she’ll be less able to defend herself. So she turns to the one person who might be able to protect her and her unborn child, Jack Norton. When Briony and Jeb appear on Jack and his twin brother’s remote cabin, he is stunned by her revelation that she’s pregnant. He’s even more surprised by the information that not only is Whitney still alive, but he’s also plotting to kidnap Briony. Somewhat to even Briony’s surprise, he agrees to protect her and the baby. It’s not all good news however; the attraction manufactured by Whitney is as intense as ever, if anything, it’s even stronger than before. As they spend time together, Briony realizes that Jack is not the “badass” he purports to be, but a man shattered by an abusive and painful childhood. His own father killed his mother and tried to kill him and his brother because of his intense jealousy. Jack has always feared that he too would by like that if he were ever to fall in love. Just as Jack and Briony reach this new understanding, the house comes under attack. Whitney’s men have found her again. Briony realizes that the only way they could be tailing her is with a tracking devise. She finds and removes it. She also makes another revelation; she remembers that she has a sister, a twin sister. A fact that Luther, one of the men sent to reacquire her conforms. Luckily Jack and Ken are able to fight off the soldiers until they can be rescued by their comrades. Both Jack and Ken pledge to help find Briony find her sister, Mari. |
Without Seeing the Dawn | Stevan Javellana | null | Without Seeing the Dawn was set in a small farming village called Manhayang in Santa Barbara, Iloilo. The residents of the barangay were living their simple life when the violence of war reached their place and brought death and suffering. Ricardo "Carding" Suerte, the young son of Juan Suerte wanted to marry Lucia (nicknamed "Lucing"), the daughter of the teniente del barrio. Although Ricardo's father wished to send him to school first, the blessing to marry was given and the traditional asking the hand custom known as the pamamanhikan was done. Ricardo built a house for him and his wife on the land that was entrusted to Ricardo's father by Don Diego (a landlord) despite the advice of the elderly that building one's house in May will bring misfortune. Soon after, misfortune struck: their first child was stillborn, Lucia had an affair with Luis, the son of Don Diego, and the land the Suerte's had been tilling was given to another tenant. The couple went to Iloilo City where Ricardo met fellow stevedore and union member Nestong and Rosing, a prostitute. Lucia left Ricardo because of Rosing. Ricardo followed Lucia who was then in Badlan after receiving news that Lucia was pregnant and that the representante (representative) entrusted them with a land to till. They named their son Crisostomo. Misfortune came again because their landlord sold the land they were tilling, and a flood destroyed their harvest and killed their carabao. They went to Mindanao to find a land to own. However, Ricardo was drafted for military service. Upon his return, Lucia was pregnant but his father and their son died. At first he was not told the truth, the real reason why his father and son died was because they were killed by Japanese soldiers, not by illness. His wife was also raped by the Japanese occupiers. He was angered after knowing the truth and became an enemy executioner. Because of Ricardo's behavior, Lucia sent him away. When the Japanese invaders ordered the people to go to a designated barrio to be identified as non-guerrillas, the Manhayang villagers evacuated the area, except for Lucia who wanted to wait for Ricardo who would be leading the "suicide attack" at the enemies' garrison. When they met, Ricardo asked for Lucia's forgiveness but said farewell after giving Lucia some money. Lucia refused and stayed even if she had to welcome back Ricardo as a corpse. |
Lee and the Consul Mutants | null | null | It is not every day that a part of your body explodes. But ten-year-old Lee's appendix does just that, landing him in hospital. After his operation, Lee discovers that being in hospital has its bright side. But his world turns dark again when he uncovers a fiendish plot by the white-coated Consul Mutants to take over the world. Other kids might quake in their boots at this news, but not Lee. He is determined to save the planet and formulates a cunning plan to stop the alien invasion. Lee and the Consul Mutants is the story of a fearless boy battling against intergalactic odds for the sake of mankind. Lee’s only weapon is his intelligence . . . which is a pity. |
Lee Goes For Gold | null | null | Meeting his father's multizillionaire boss inspires ten-year-old Lee to come up with a brilliant get-rich-quick scheme of his own. But not everyone is keen for Lee to succeed. Local shopkeeper Panface certainly is not, and it seems that he has sneaky spies out there, trying to ruin Lee's plans Will Lee overcome those out to stop him making his fortune? Or will he spend the whole time daydreaming about how many houses he will own and how many butlers he will have? Lee will need to rely on his common sense and financial genius if he is to succeed . . . so it could be a struggle. |
Lee's Holiday Showdown | null | null | Nothing is ever straightforward when Lee is around. Not even a summer holiday in Spain. It ought to be a case of lazing by the pool, but Lee is soon spying on dodgy men in shiny suits and sunglasses, battling with a family that seems determined to ruin everyone's holiday and haranguing horrendous holiday reps. With so much going on, how will Lee ever get a tan? |
In the Sargasso Sea | null | null | The protagonist, Roger Stetworth, unwillingly joins a slave ship called the "Golden Hind" captained by Luke Chilton. (When Chilton demanded that Roger "sign aboard" he refused and was clubbed on the head and thrown overboard.) He is rescued by the "Hurst Castle" and doctored by a painfully stereotyped Irishman. The "Hurst Castle" is abandoned but does not founder in a gale and the crew accidentally leave Stetworth marooned aboard. The ship drifts into the center of the Sargasso Sea where Stetworth finds himself in a ships' graveyard in which survivors of previous shipwrecks still inhabit the forgotten ships. Stetworth must rely on his own ingenuity to get free from the choking sargasso weeds. |
God's Spy | Juan Gómez-Jurado | 2,007 | From the book cover: In the days following the Pope's death, a cardinal is found brutally murdered in a chapel in Rome, his eyes gouged and his hands cut off. Called in for the grisly case, police inspector Paola Dicanti learns that another cardinal was recently found dead; he had also been tortured. Desperate to find the killer before another victim dies, Paola's investigation is soon joined by Father Anthony Fowler — an American priest and former Army intelligence officer examining sexual abuse in the Church, who knows far more about the killer than Paola could possibly imagine. |
Muddle Earth | Paul Stewart | 2,003 | Joe, a boy from ordinary Earth, has been summoned to Muddle Earth -a world full of monsters and mayhem and more- by the wizard Randalf. He is then exhorted as a 'warrior-hero'. In other words, he must fight evil on behalf of Randalf, who has in turn been contracted by the ruler of Muddle Earth, the Horned Baron. The Horned Baron, however, has problems that even Randalf cannot attend to: his wife Ingrid is a very demanding woman. This is a trait that the evil villain Doctor Cuddles pays heed to, and uses to his advantage in all three sections of the novel. |
The House of the Sleeping Beauties | Yasunari Kawabata | 1,961 | The titular house is an establishment where old men pay to sleep besides young girls that had been narcotized and happen to be naked, the sleeping beauties. The old men are expected to take sleeping pills and share the bed for a whole night with a girl without attempting anything of "bad taste" like "putting a finger inside their mouths". Eguchi is presented with a different girl each time he visits the house because of the short notice of his visits. He discovers that all girls are virgins which somehow compels him to comply with the house rules. Each girl is different and the descriptions of his actions are mixed with the dreams that he has sleeping besides the girls. |
Niagara Falls, or Does it? | Henry Winkler | 2,003 | Hank starts a new year at his school and meets his new teacher who has her students write an essay about their summer vacations. Hank has a hard time with homework and with staying on task which makes writing an essay a difficult assignment. Meanwhile, his grandpa, Papa Pete, asks Hank and his friends Ashley Wong and Frankie Townsend to put on a magic show at his bowling league game. However, his teacher made a statement to Hank saying she can't wait to see his creative report, so he has to do his report and perform for Papa Pete. Hank decides to make a model of Niagara Falls, where he spent his vacation, rather than write about it but when he presents the project in class he accidentally floods the classroom. Hank is given two weeks of punishment at school and at home. His punishment includes not being able to participate in the magic show for Papa Pete's bowling league. Finally, after a lot of convincing, his parents allow him to do the magic show. It was a relief to all the people at the bowling lanes because class bully and overall idiot Nick McKelty was performing in Magik 3's (Hank, Frankie, and Ashley's magic group) place. The magic show happens, and McKelty gets laughed at and thrown off stage. In the end, things go well for Hank, as he also meets the new music teacher, Mr. Rock, during detention, and they instantly like each other. Mr. Rock helps Hank with his essay and talks to his parents about his learning disabilities, which no one knew Hank had.He lives in New York City. |
Dragon Moon | Carole Wilkinson | 2,007 | When the story starts out Liu Che,(Ping's former friend and the emperor of China),has his troops attacking the Duke of Yan's palace where Ping has been living for a year, because he believes that they kidnapped his former imperial dragon Kai. Meanwhile, Ping decides to wake Kai up from his winter hibernation for his safety, and finds that he has not only matured greatly in size, but knowledge as well. Ping leaves the palace with Kai to search for the Dragon Haven to further insure his safety. On the way, they find the emperor, Liu Che, wounded with a shard of Kai's dragon stone in his hand. He repents his crimes and decides to abandon his quest for immortality. At the morning, Ping refuses his offer of love and continues on her journey. On the way, she meets Jun, and together they find an old man, "Lao Long Zi", one of Danzi's former dragon keepers, at Tinkling Village. He brings them most of the way to Long Gao Yuan before dying. After getting there, however, Ping discovers only a heap of dragon bones from a massacre by dragon hunters. Ping and Kai are discouraged, and Kai refuses to leave. One day, a yellow dragon swoops down from the sky and carries Kai away. Ping stumbles towards the mountain in a half-dead state, until she too is picked up by the dragon(not too gently) and brought to the real, current dragon haven. There, she learns that many years ago, Hei Lei's dragon keeper had abandoned him for a woman, and that his girlfriend, in her old age, had then betrayed the location of the dragon haven to a band of dragon hunters for three pieces of gold. They had killed many of the dragons in hibernation. Only Hei Lei, the black dragon, was awake, and attacked the hunters just in time. Still, they managed to get away with many dead dragons in their greedy hands, with only a handful escaping. Ping is distraught as she watches Kai pick up many of the wild dragons' habits and feels him slowly drawing away from her. During a moon gathering, Kai and Hei Lei end up in a fight, and Kai, who wins, is revealed to be a "dragon of five colors"(green, yellow, black, white, and red). A "dragon of five colors" will automatically assume the position of leader(and no one can challenge him, as the dragons formerly had none). Ping eventually wins the trust and friendship of all the dragons, but realizes that she must end the dragons' reliance on humans and leaves. The book ends with Ping beginning a new life with Jun, as she saw in one of her visions of her future. |
The Spell | Ed Kelleher | 1,998 | Robin is doing research in the United States. He goes into a bar where he meets Sylvan, and calls Jane; she tells him she is pregnant with his baby. The novel flashes forward to 1995 where the main protagonist, Alex, is visiting an ex-boyfriend Justin and his partner. He drives to their house in the country. Robin's son, Danny, is also there. After a flashback to Simon's (Robin's lover prior to Justin) AIDS related death, the plot goes back to Justin and Robin's cottage where the men are drinking and play with their young attractive neighbor Terry. Whilst driving Alex to see the local picturesque cliffs, Robin scares everyone by accelerating quickly and only stopping right before the cliff's edge. Later, Danny and Alex meet-up in Soho where they walk into Aubrey and Hector. It is clear that Danny knows many attractive gay men and slept with most of them. The two men go on to have dinner in a nice restaurant, followed by dancing at a club, where Alex is given his first pill of ecstasy by Danny. His desire quickly blurs as he is unsure if it is the drug or his attraction to Danny that allows him to kiss the younger man. Justin is bored alone in his house. He calls Terry for casual sex. Later, Danny and his older friend George are driving to a party - Danny confesses to being bored with Alex. Alex and Hugh talk about Danny's lack of cultural knowledge and Alex's drug use. Later, Danny is organizing a party and Alex wonders if he didn't perhaps waste his youth by not going to raves. Robin and George pick up their friends at the station. Danny's birthday party looks like a gay nightclub, as it is filled with attractive gay men doing drugs. Robin has a sexual encounter with Lars. Danny gets a new job as a nocturnal security guard, to Alex's annoyance. He takes cocaine from a man he meets in the toilet and is caught with it. He then goes clubbing after he is fired. Later he returns home and Alex comes over; he tells him he wants to quit his job. Robin suggests Danny and Alex stay in Robin and Justin's cottage whilst they are separated. There, they make love in Robin and Justin's bed and take to going for walks. Alex explains how Justin's father died when they were away on holiday together, how this was the end of their relationship. Later, they take ecstasy. Robin tells Tony he has had to let parts of his house for financial security. Later, he walks round the house looking back towards the past, and Terry pops in - they make love. Justin is house-hunting with the aid of an attractive estate agent, Charles. Later in his hotel he has sex with Carlo, an escort. After seeing another house, he goes into a bar in Soho. Eventually he returns home and Robin is there; they play Scrabble together. Danny then goes to Dorset to see his father and his lover. They are hanging by the beach. Later at a party, whilst playing cricket, Danny says he is going to visit his mother in San Diego, to Alex's surprise. He then proceeds to break up with him. A little later, Alex, Nick, and Danny are off to visit a castle. Alex craves the pleasures that Danny has introduced him to. He attempts to call a drug dealer to no avail but later walks into Lars on the street, who says he can get him anything he wants. The novel ends with Alex and his new, more stable boyfriend Nick standing at the cliff's edge, admiring the beauty of stopping before going over. |
No Thoroughfare | Charles Dickens | null | Two boys from the Foundling Hospital are given the same name (Walter Wilding), with disastrous consequences in adulthood. After the death of one – now a proprietor of a wine merchant’s company - the executors, to right the wrong, are commissioned to find a missing heir. Their quest takes them from wine cellars in the City of London to the sunshine of the Mediterranean—across the Alps in winter. Danger and treachery would prevail were it not for the courage of the heroine, Marguerite, and a faithful company servant. |
An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals | David Hume | null | Hume's approach in the second Enquiry is largely an empirical one. Instead of beginning his moral inquiry with questions of how morality ought to operate, he purports to investigate primarily how we actually do make moral judgments. As Hume puts it: As this is a question of fact, not of abstract science, we can only expect success, by following the experimental method, and deducing general maxims from a comparison of particular instances. (EPM, §1, ¶10) Furthermore, Hume purports to provide a naturalistic account of morality, at least to the extent that it is something that is common among the human species. He writes: The final sentence, it is probable, which pronounces characters and actions amiable or odious, praise-worthy or blameable... depends on some internal sense or feeling, which nature has made universal in the whole species. (EPM, §1, ¶8) But, whether in the end Hume purports to provide a normative ethical theory, rather than a merely descriptive theory of moral psychology, is a contentious issue among Hume scholars. Hume defends his sympathy-based moral sentimentalism by claiming that, contrary to moral rationalism, we can never make moral judgments based on reason alone. Reason deals with facts and draws conclusions from them, but, all else being equal, it could not lead us to choose one option over the other; only our sentiments can do this, according to Hume. Hume writes that: ...morality is determined by sentiment. It defines virtue to be whatever mental action or quality gives to a spectator the pleasing sentiment of approbation; and vice the contrary. (EPM, Appendix 1, ¶10) Hume puts forward sentimentalism as a foundation for ethics primarily as a meta-ethical theory about the epistemology of morality. Hume's sentimentalism is akin to the moral epistemology of intuitionism (although, of course, different in many respects). According to such a theory, one's epistemological access to moral truths is not primarily via an evidentially mediated faculty, such as reason. Rather, one's epistemological access is more direct. According to Hume, we know moral truths via our sentiments--our feelings of approval and disapproval. Hume's arguments against founding morality on reason are often now included in the category of moral anti-realist arguments. As Humean-inspired philosopher John Mackie suggests, for there to exist moral facts about the world, recognizable by reason and intrinsically motivating, they would have to be very queer facts. However, there is considerable debate among scholars as to Hume's status as a realist versus anti-realist. According to Hume, our sympathy-based sentiments can motivate us towards the pursuit of non-selfish ends, like the utility of others. For Hume, and for fellow sympathy-theorist Adam Smith, the term "sympathy" is meant to capture much more than concern for the suffering of others. Sympathy, for Hume, is a principle for the communication and sharing of sentiments, both positive and negative. In this sense, it is akin to what contemporary psychologists and philosophers call empathy. In developing this sympathy-based moral sentimentalism, Hume surpasses the divinely-implanted moral sense theory of his predecessor, Francis Hutcheson, by elaborating a naturalistic, moral psychological basis for the moral sense, in terms of the operation of sympathy. After providing various examples, Hume comes to the conclusion that most, though not all, of the behaviors we approve of increase public utility. Does this then mean that we make moral judgments on self-interest alone? Unlike his fellow empiricist Thomas Hobbes, Hume argues that this is not in fact the case, rejecting psychological egoism--the view that all intentional actions are ultimately self-interested. In addition to considerations of self-interest, Hume maintains that we can be moved by our sympathy for others, which can provide a person with thoroughly non-selfish concerns and motivations, indeed, what contemporary theorists would call, altruistic concern. The first-order moral theory that emerges from the second Enquiry is a form of virtue ethics. According to Hume, the kinds of things that our moral sentiments apply to--the things of which we approve and disapprove--are not particular actions or events. Rather, we ultimately judge the character of a person--whether they are a virtuous or vicious person. Hume ultimately defends a theory according to which the fundamental feature of virtues is "...the possession of mental qualities, 'useful' or 'agreeable' to the 'person himself' or to 'others'" (EPM, §10, ¶1). As a result, certain character traits commonly deemed virtues by the major religions of the time are deemed vices on Hume's theory. Hume calls these so-called "virtues", such as self-denial and humility, monkish virtues. Rather vehemently, he writes: Celibacy, fasting, penance, mortification, self-denial, humility, silence, solitude, and the whole train of monkish virtues; for what reason are they everywhere rejected by men of sense, but because they serve to no manner of purpose; neither advance a man's fortune in the world, nor render him a more valuable member of society; neither qualify him for the entertainment of company, nor increase his power of self-enjoyment? We observe, on the contrary, that they cross all these desirable ends; stupify the understanding and harden the heart, obscure the fancy and sour the temper. We justly, therefore, transfer them to the opposite column, and place them in the catalogue of vices.... (EPM, §9, ¶3) Clearly, Hume thought that there were grave misunderstandings at the time as to what counts as virtue versus vice. For example, Hume attempts to defend, contrary to many religious teachings, that a certain amount of luxury, even pride, is virtuous. |
The Armies of Memory | John Barnes | 2,006 | Several attempts are made on Giraut's life as he works on his new Ix cycle of music. He is sent back to Wilson, his home planet and culture of Occitan, to complete the new music along with his Office of Special Projects team as protection. Paxa retires from the OSP and leaves Giraut after finding out she cannot be successfully backed up on a psypyx, which would make her death permanent. Giraut begins to fall in love with a fellow musician Azalais who introduces him to Ebles, a contact for rogue colonies outside of Council space which call themselves the Union. Soon after, Azalais is killed and Giraut is severely injured in another assassination attempt. After Giraut is healed he is contacted again by Union. Margaret sends him, along with Raimbaut and Laprada, to the rogue Union colony of Noucatharia to get to the bottom of several coincidences, including the whereabouts of a possible psypyx of Shan, and to find out who keeps trying to kill him. Once there Giraut begins to fall in love with Rielis, a talented musician and singer, as he tries to uncover what Union wants from him and the Council. It is revealed to Giraut and his team that everyone on Noucatharia is either an aintellect in human form or a chimera human/aintellect, both of which are forbidden horrors in Council space. They are also told there are multiple aintellect conspiracies unknown to the OSP, and that Noucatharia was the site of the first invasion by an unknown Alien army, in which humans were beheaded and aintellects/robots fought as best they could. After another amateurish assassination attempt he is kidnapped, separated from his team, and implanted with Shan's psypyx. As Rielis questions Shan, Giraut and Rielis rapidly come to know what happened on Addams to cause it to lose contact with Earth. An aggressive alien aintellect-run invasion overwhelmed their defenses and killed everyone not in hiding—their goal being to destructively holograph brains, deconstruct aintellects and send back those memories and experiences to their home planet to be consumed as entertainment for their dependent organic creators who had isolated themselves in virtual reality. Only by advanced planning by Shan's father and help from his personal aintellect was a very young Shan able to escape via springer to Earth. The OSP invades Noucatharia with help from Raimbaut just as Giraut/Shan and Rielis are beginning to agree on the cooperation that is needed between the Council and the Union to face the alien threat. Giraut/Shan are held prisoner by Margaret until the OSP can sort out friend from foe, but Paxa comes through a springer to free Giraut. He quickly recognizes that Paxa is joined to Azalais as a chimera in exchange for being able to be psypyxed in the future, and to help the progressive and dynamic Union face an alien threat. Giraut/Shan and Paxa/Azalais mount a rescue mission and free the aintellect humans and chimeras from OSP control and get Raimbaut to join them. Raimbaut and Giraut/Shan then choose to stay behind in an attempt to rescue or destroy a Rielis psypyx from an OSP building before it can be tortured for its knowledge and secrets. They destroy the psypyx and Margaret captures them before they can make it to a springer. Raimbaut is quickly cleared of charges and Shan is eventually implanted in Margaret's brain—but Giraut is found guilty of assisting the aintellect conspiracies in escaping from Noucatharia. His trial is a rallying cry for human supremacists, but over time and as the facts come out they are increasingly marginalized by society who see Giraut as a martyr. The only thing left is for him to be executed to permit his public beheading to serve as a unifying story for future generations, as contact is made with the aintellect-run Union colonies. |
Svanurinn | null | null | The story is about a nine-year-old girl sent to a country farm in Iceland to serve her probation for shoplifting (which is a characteristic Icelandic sentence). In the novel, the girl finds a kind of freedom by submitting to the inevitable restraints and suffering of remote rural life. |
The Dame's the Game | Ralph Salaway | null | Shelly Tanner's husband Joe is a wealthy industrialist conducting military-sponsored research on Cold War armaments and intelligence gear. To relax, Joe has taken to shooting craps in a high-stakes floating game situated in various Los Angeles locations. He consistently loses serious sums of money, but out of obsession with the idea that his luck has to change, he returns to the game night after night. His beautiful, sexually frustrated wife, Shelly sees through the crooked game, but can't convince Joe to stop throwing his money away. In desperation she drives to Las Vegas to enlist the aid of casino detective Barney Conroy. At first, Barney wants nothing to do with free-lance work. He prefers the predictable security of his casino job. But when he is roughed up in the casino parking lot by thugs obviously tied to the Tanner affair, his injured pride compels him to find Shelly and promise his assistance. Shelly brings Barney and Joe together in Los Angeles and they all visit the craps game. Barney quietly confirms that the game is rigged. He thinks he recognizes the stickman as a dishonest but cowardly neighbor from his boyhood home in Kansas City, but doesn't know if he himself has been recognized. After discussing the crooked nature of the game with a still-unreceptive Joe, Barney and Shelly form an amorous association. Shelly decides to leave Joe. As she and Barney spend a blissful first night together in a nearby motel, Joe returns to the craps game and uses the information Barney uncovered to confront the gang running it. Their response is to overpower him, take him to his own home and kill him using Shelly's gun. The gang's operatives have followed Barney and Shelly to the motel, know what they're up to, and anonymously tip the police that the pair are Joe's murderers. Barney and Shelly are arrested and both spend some time in jail, but because no evidence directly implicates him, Barney is released. He uses his freedom to discover the real motives and the subrosa political affiliations of the gang members and, with the help of Shelly's high-priced Hollywood lawyer, successfully leads the FBI into a night-time, seaside gun battle where the gang is defeated. |
Hawke | null | null | A coup d'état involving rogue military leaders in Cuba leads to Alexander Hawke to investigate and stop the threat of a nuclear submarine. |
Pennterra | Judith Moffett | 1,987 | Quaker colonists founded a colony on a planet they dubbed Pennterra. They soon discovered the planet was already inhabited, by a species they dub the "hrossa". They put forward a number of conditions to the colonists, saying that they must not leave the valley they landed in, must not use machinery, and should keep their population about the same as the time they landed, approximately 600. The Quakers agree with these restrictions, and set up a camp called Swarthmore, in the valley they call the Delaware. The hrossa, being capable of transferring their emotions onto others, often tapped into the Quakers as they held meeting for worship. This leaves a number of them much more tolerant of the hrossa conditions. Several, including George Quinlan and his son Danny, become more closely acquainted with the hrossa. At times they visit a nearby village called Lake-Between-Falls and develop a friendship with one of its elders, KliUrrh. However, as the story begins a second colony ship arrives from Earth. These colonists, called the Sixers, are more skeptical of the hrossa request, and enter talks with the Quakers. For the most part, the Sixers are adamant about colonizing the planet with machinery, putting their own survival above the hrossa. However, two members of the crew, Maggie and Byron, along with Quakers Katy and George visit Lake-Between-Falls hoping for permission for a coastal town of their own. However, KliUrrh denies the request, saying that they must follow the same conditions given to the Quaker colonists. He explains that their god TuwukhKawan will never allow this, and they would be destroyed if they violate the request. Many of the Quakers take this as representing a legitimate threat, but the Sixers do not see it as serious and believe the Quakers have simply been compromised by their contact with the hrossa. With permission from the hrossa, a team of Quakers come to Lake-Between-Falls to learn more about the hrossa and the planet in general, in order to get an idea of the threat to the Sixers. The team consists of George, Swarthmore's de facto leader; his son, Danny, who is capable with the hross language; Katy, a psychologist; Alice, an exobiologist; and Bob, an amateur anthropologist. Initially, they make little progress, as the sexuality of the hross is transmitted to the team, making it difficult to do any work. This is especially problematic for Danny, who at age 12 has begun puberty. In separate encounters, Alice has sex with George, and Katy with Bob. It soon becomes apparent that free-for-all sex might be necessary to keep them at work, but George initially resists due to his son's presence. Another day, Katy allows Danny to dry hump her, to George's unease. However, he gives in and soon the five have regular intercourse with one another, including, after some time, Danny with his father. This makes it easier for the team to work. Among their discoveries, they find out that the hermaphroditic hrossa typically give birth to only one child in a lifetime, and few die early. The occasional second birth makes up for those that do, and the population thus tends to remain stable. Going on a hunt with the hrossa, they learn that they hunt by transmitting a message of "hunger", which brings animals sacrificially to them. The hrossa have sexual intercourse with the animals, and then beat them with a club. The Quakers also tell many stories to the hrossa, hoping to trigger a response and learn more about the planet's natives. Finally, at Thanksgiving, the team leaves back to Swarthmore, and explain their findings to the town. The team goes back for another month, but have little more success. Returning to camp, Danny has difficulty readjusting. Missing the hrossa form of sexuality, he finds himself having sex with sheep, and on a couple of occasions, the sympathetic Katy. Danny, being the only person his age in the town besides a kid named Jack, finds life back home insufferable. When Jack is offered to stay for some time in the new Sixer village, Danny is adamant about going there as well. There Danny stays with Maggie, and goes to school in a town that allows him many more peers. He has trouble adjusting at first. He finds himself enjoying the skills behind basketball, but put off by the competition. Initially, his best friend in the colony is Maggie, who finds he acts much more mature than his age. Eventually, however, he meets a kid named Joel, who is highly interested in the hross. The two grow close, to the point he is comfortable discussing his sexual quirks. Joel describes him as a "human hross", which puts off Danny at first. However, he soon realizes the term fits his sexuality, but relabels himself a "Quaker hross". One morning Danny leaves for a walk and notices footprints. Following them, he eventually comes to find Caddie, a classmate of his, alone and naked. She seems scared, which Danny does not understand, and when he turns to let her change, she knocks him out with a rock. Danny later learns that her father was abusing her, and reports him to a psychiatrist. Soon afterwards, she is adopted by another family in the settlement, and appears to show improvement. Meanwhile, problems start to impact Sixertown. Many of the pregnant women who arrived on the planet had miscarriages or sudden abortions. A hross came to visit Danny, and told him he must leave the town soon, as the "destruction" was coming soon to Sixertown. The captain of the town allowed anyone who felt the threat was credible could relocate to Swarthmore. However, only Danny, Joel, Jack, Caddie and Byron took the threat seriously, and were joined by Maggie in the trip to the Quaker town. However, the lander crashed and the five became stranded. They soon found water near the crash site, but their food reserves were limited, and it soon became clear that hoping for help to come to the lander might not be their best option. Maggie stayed with the lander to take care of Joel, as the others head out hoping to make it back on foot, or be found otherwise by someone. After some point, food reserves became scarce, and Caddie grew weak. Danny found that some animals would approach him, which he could have sex with and kill as the hrossa did. Byron decided that he should remain to take care of Caddie, and that Jack and Danny should continue on as before. Exhausted, they became famished at times only to have more animals offering themselves for sacrifice. After some time, they found their way back to the Delaware River, some 50 miles from camp, and were discovered. While Caddie died, the other five survived back to camp. In the meantime, the problem at the Sixer camp became more serious, with none of their food sources able to reproduce. Eventually they gave in to the original hross conditions, and moved into the southern portion of the Delaware River. However, the population there was left permanently infertile due to their exposure to the compound that caused all their problems. It is also realized that those going through physical development on the planet could more easily integrate the planet's ecosystem than those who did not. This leaves the future situation of the human settlement unclear, as it suggests that those born on Pennterra could survive outside a human colony. |
Lair of the Lion | Christine Feehan | null | Isabella Vernaducci is a young aristocratic woman desperate to save her imprisoned brother. He has been falsely accused of treason and is slated to be executed within the month. She feels she has one chance to save him, the powerful Don DeMarco. The Don is respected and feared throughout the land. Many say he is gifted with strange powers, that all, even the beasts obey him. So she makes the arduous journey to his isolated palazzo. Once she is granted an audience with the Don and explains her plight, he agrees to help her on one condition: she must become his wife. Stunned but relieved she agrees and the plans are set into motion. For all her joy at saving her brother, there are powerful undercurrents of unease. It is said that there is a curse on the DeMarcos, that all marriages are doomed to fail, end in betrayal and murder. |
Demons of Chitrakut | Ashok Banker | 2,004 | The story picks off where it left in Siege of Mithila. Rama and Lakshmana have collectively annihilated Ravana's massive invasion force with the most powerful divine weapon in history, the Brahmastra. The entire army, reduced to dust, is washed away with the waters of the holy Ganga, replaced by a beautiful flowering forest, with no trace of the invasion left for human history. Rama and Sita are married, as are Lakshmana and Urmila. Their brothers, Bharat and Shatrughna, are married to Sita's cousins Mandavi and Shrutakirti respectively. Following the ceremony, Vishwamitra takes his leave of the two boys and leaves Rama with an important piece of advice: to follow his dharma at all costs, as it will help him prepare for the trials ahead that he has foreseen. While the wedding party of Ayodhya travels home with the princes and their new brides, they are interrupted by Parashurama, the warrior known as Rama of the Axe, who, upon hearing the destruction of Shiva's bow by Rama, has erupted in a rage from his meditation to slaughter him. However, upon realizing that Rama is the one responsible, he becomes skeptical, and believes Rama is lying to him about having destroyed Ravana's army. He gives Rama the Bow of Vishnu, the exact brother to the Bow of Shiva which Rama split in two and challenges him to single combat. Rama single-handedly defeats Parashurama and, upon his request, destroys the fruit of all of Parashurama's penances with a single celestial arrow. Parashurama comes to a conclusion about Rama which remains largely unrevealed, and he gifts Rama with the Bow, claiming that it "always belonged to him". The wedding party arrives back in Ayodhya amidst great pomp and celebration, aided by a light show orchestrated by Vashishta. Manthara, who had previously been put under house arrest, kills the guard confining her and escapes with the help of Ravana's mayavic power. It is revealed here that Ravana is alive, although incapacitated, and can still bestow his followers with evil powers. During the grand welcome back to Ayodhya, a woman identified as Kaikeyi attempts to run into the paths of the elephants, crying out to Rama in order to warn him about something. She is taken away by royal guards, but not before Kausalya sees her. They are subsequently very surprised when Kaikeyi turns up, fully groomed, to greet the new bride upon her arrival, despite the fact that they saw her bloodied and dirty upon the streets only seconds earlier. Sumitra accuses Kaikeyi of employing witchcraft, to which Kaikeyi angrily replies that she is innocent of any crime, and stalks off to her chambers. Dasaratha once again begins to fall ill. The princes celebrate their suhaag raats (nuptials) upon returning home, after performing the necessary rituals. Dasharatha announces that Rama's coronation as Crown Prince will occur the following morning. Dasaratha, feeling ill once more, lies in his bed and tells Kaikeyi that he is ashamed of the wrong things he has done or indirectly caused, and is more than proud of his eldest son. Manthara then enters and tells Dasaratha that Kaikeyi has taken a vow to fast unto death in the palace kosaghar. Dasaratha, upset by this news, agrees to go to the kosaghar to see what she needs. Meanwhile, Kausalya, Sumitra and a number of handmaidens discover that the woman seen upon the streets with Kaikeyi's voice was in fact one of Manthara's handmaidens, who has been witness to the fact that Manthara is a devil-worshipper and has performed human sacrifices to the Dark Lord, Ravana. Kaikeyi projected her consciousness through the girl's body when it was forced out of her own body at one point. In the presence of Vashishta and Kausalya, she reveals that an act of great evil is soon to occur but it is not of her doing, and asks Kausalya to "save Rama". Kausalya and Vashishta confront Kaikeyi in the kosaghar, where Dasaratha lies motionless in a coma-like state. They discover to their horror that Kaikeyi is in fact Dasaratha's first wife, and that they married at a small shrine off the battle plains of the Asura Wars following Dasaratha being near-mortally wounded. Along with their marriage, Dasaratha promised Kaikeyi two boons which she was allowed to call back later on, and using that to her advantage, she has called for Rama to go south into exile for fourteen years and for Bharata to be crowned King. Due to the events which transpired in the kosaghar while granting the boons, Dasaratha is now dying and there is no way to save him this time. Vashishta then reveals that Manthara, the "green witch" as she is now called, has used sorcery to possess and drug Kaikeyi. Manthara reveals her true colors and threatens to kill Dasaratha, but Vashishta reveals to her that the Dark Lord's promises to her are entirely false, and that she was shaped while in her mother's womb into the deformed crone that she is. Manthara refuses to believe this revelation and flees. Rama, after receiving instructions to leave Ayodhya and its borders by the following dusk, returns to his chambers only to find Sita tearfully pleading to let her go with him. He relents, and while attempting to leave with her, is stopped by a crowd at the gates of Ayodhya led by General Dheeraj Kumar. He tells Rama that Kaikeyi was being manipulated and that he should not honor the boons, but Rama refuses, saying that regardless of the circumstances, he is dharma-bound to honor his father. Realizing that Rama will not change his decision, Lakshmana makes the decision to come with him. In the palace, Kausalya confronts Kaikeyi, who has assumed regentship of Kosala. She utters a mantra to release Kaikeyi of her curse, and she realizes with horror what she has done. Manthara appears again and threatens to kill Kausalya. She injures her but before she can deliver a killing blow, she is distracted by Bharata, who has returned. With the help of Vashishta, he overheard the entire conversation and decides to execute Manthara. Kausalya asks him to show mercy, and she flees, having lost her powers. Dasaratha, in his final moments, is visited by Kaikeyi. However, before she is able to explain her actions, Dasaratha divorces her by royal decree. In his final moments, Kausalya states that she will return Rama home, and he passes away quietly. Following the Battle of Mithila, Ravana's brother Vibhishana had rescued him and the only survivor of the battle - Jatayu with the aid of the Pushpak Vimana, the royal divine chariot and taken him back to Lanka. The entire city was in shambles, with the few remaining rakshasas catapulted to leaders overnight, belligerently rebellious. Jatayu believes that Ravana is now dead, but Vibhishana knows better... Ravana is briefly revived when Vibhishana is forced to call him and deal with the squabbling chiefs, who all appear to believe that he is dead. He is able to speak to Vibhishana but is unable to do anything because of the energy prison he is trapped in. Vibhishana promises to release him if he swears to forgo any further invasion of the mortal world. Reluctantly, Ravana agrees, but begins to lose his power once again. Vibhishana decides to use the energy of the Narak-portal to destroy the cage around Ravana, but the act closes up the portal for good. Meanwhile, Jatayu, somewhat elated that Ravana is dead, begins to think about performing penance for his misdeeds. He sees a black flag declaring Ravana's death, and follows it, intrigued. He wanders by accident into Kumbhakarna's chambers, and.... |
The Hosts of Rebecca | Alexander Cordell | null | The plot concerns the Rebecca Riots in the 19th century. The action is seen through the eyes of young Jethro Mortymer.It is based on the true events of the Rebecca Riots in which the people of West Wales protested against the toll gate charges of the business men and land owners of the time. The Rebecca name refers to the leader of the campaign, which was a man dressing in women's attire to protect his identity. On reading the book you understand the reasons for such protests and its manner. The book is a worthy sequel to The Rape of the Fair Country. |
Twelve Years a Slave | Solomon Noethup | null | The book tells how Solomon Northrup, a free carpenter and fiddler, was deceived by two men who originally offered him work as a musician in New York state and Washington, DC; then drugged him, and kidnapped and sold him into slavery while in the nation's capital. Two men presenting themselves as circus promoters offered Northup work as a fiddler, first in New York City and then in Washington, DC. They offered a generous amount of money to work for their circus in the capital and offered to pay for his transportation and a hotel. After they arrived and watched some of President Harrison's funeral procession, Northup was drugged at the hotel room. He was bound and moved to a slave pen owned by James Burch, a slave trader. It was located in the Yellow House, one of several slave markets on the National Mall. This and Robey’s Tavern were located in the area between the present-day buildings housing the Department of Education and the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, within view of the Capitol. Burch coerced Northup into accepting a new name and past as having been born a slave in Georgia. Burch told Northup that if he were to tell his true story to another person, he would be killed. When he asserted his status as a free man, Burch beat him violently; Northup finally stopped protesting. Northup was transported with other slaves to New Orleans, Louisiana by ship, where he and others contracted smallpox and some slaves died. He asked a sympathetic sailor to get a message to his family, which the man did, but they did not know how to find him in Louisiana. Northup was sold by Burch's partner in New Orleans to a planter on a bayou of the Red River, and had several different owners during his 12 years as a slave in Louisiana. In some places his carpentry and other skills earned him good treatment. The contrast with his previous life made the deprivations and sufferings of slavery worse: the meager slave diet, a cabin with a dirt floor, poor clothing; restrictions on his freedom, and numerous beatings and physical punishment. At one time, he was leased to a man named Tibbets, who lost his temper and attacked him with an axe. Northup fought back and ran back to his old master, who finally took him in. Northup eventually regained his freedom. He met Samuel Bass, a white carpenter from Canada, who was hired by Northup’s owner. Northup learned that Bass did not share the racial prejudice of white men in America, and ultimately confided his story to him, with a letter describing where he was located. Bass delivered the letters to Northup’s wife, who called on Henry Northup, an attorney who was a family friend and son of the man who had held and freed Northup's father. Henry Northup contacted New York state officials and the governor appointed him as an agent, under current state law, to go to Louisiana to free Solomon Northup. Bass and Northup took a great risk in starting this process; when forced to free Northup, his master said he would have killed the man who took his account to the north. |
Behind Enemy Lines | John Vornholt | null | The book begins with Ro Laren, former Enterprise crew member turned Maquis officer taking command of a ship in the hopes of heading to Federation lines to safety. But they soon run into trouble when they are attacked by Jem'Hadar attack craft. Another Starfleet ship, the Aurora comes to assist, but it is no use. Both ships send distress calls, and one ship comes to their aid: the Enterprise. As this is happening, in a distant galaxy, another former Enterprise crewman witnesses the destruction of a Cardassian mining craft as he is herded onto a Dominion space station. The space station not only houses prisoners of war, but also serves as a base of operations as the Dominion attempts to construct an artificial wormhole. Sam Lavelle finds Taurik, yet another former crewman also being herded into the station up to the male prisoners compound. Upon entering, Sam is berated for agreeing to be the Liaison Officer of their pod, but he is "rescued" by the call of the Vorta in command of the station, and upon entering a ball, is confronted by a Founder, with the message that he is to be given command of a ship. On his crew are Taurik, and the mastermind of the whole wormhole operation, Enrak Grof, a Trill who values his work over alliances. The Enterprise enters the battle, and rescues the Bajoran transport, but unfortunately the Aurora is destroyed in the battle. Captain Jean-Luc Picard learns of the wormhole's construction, and prepares to take Laren, Chief Engineer Geordi LaForge, and a small crew in an attempt to destroy it. The crew disembarks, and after some run ins with Cardassians, Jem'Hadar, Ferengi and Romulans, they reach the wormhole, and using a tractor beam, they attempt to send thousands of small asteroids careening into it, but decide to instead destroy the mining craft and apparently halt any chance of completing the wormhole. They prepare to fire, but learn that the craft is actually full of Federation prisoners. They save the prisoners and destroy the craft. But returning home, they learn from Grof that their ship wasn't the only one sent to mine the metal, meaning that the wormhole still could be completed. |
Philaster | Francis Beaumont | null | The play is set in a fictionalized version of the Kingdom of Sicily, ruled by an otherwise-unnamed king. This king's father and predecessor, the ruler of Southern Italy (the Kingdom of Naples), had conquered the island of Sicily and displaced the native royal house; but the heir of that house, and rightful king of Sicily, is Philaster, who lives as a nobleman in the royal court. The king fears him, but cannot kill him, because of the passionate loyalty of the people. The king has a plan, however: with no son of his own, he will marry his daughter Arethusa to a Spanish prince named Pharamond, and make the Spaniard his heir. Arethusa, however, is in love with Philaster, and disdains the Spaniard. Philaster reciprocates the princess's affections, and sends his page Bellario to serve her and to be their intermediary. Arethusa is able to frustrate her father's plan by exposing Pharamond's affair with Megra, a loose gentlewoman of the court; but the Spaniard seeks revenge, by spreading reports that Arethusa is having an affair with Bellario. The passionate Philaster is deceived by the slander, and accepts it as true. During a hunt, Philaster confronts Arethusa; the overwrought protagonist stabs the princess (the incident that gives the play its subtitle). Philaster is interrupted by a passing countryman; they fight, and both men are wounded. Philaster crawls off, and Arethusa is discovered by nobles of the court. Arethusa's and Philaster's wounds are not fatal; both recover. Philaster is found, arrested, and sentenced to death. The king places Philaster in Arethusa's custody; she quickly marries him, which causes the king to decree her death as well. The executions are frustrated when the rebellious citizens capture Pharamond and hold him hostage. The falsehood of Pharamond's accusation against Arethusa is exposed when Bellario is revealed to be a disguised female (she is Eufrasia, a courtier's daughter, infatuated with Philaster). Pharamond retreats to Spain. Since the rightful ruler of Sicily is now the king's son and no alternative presents itself, Philaster is restored to his crown. In creating the play, Beaumont and Fletcher were influenced by the works of Sir Philip Sidney, especially the Arcadia. The play bears relationships with a range of contemporaneous works, including The Faithful Shepherdess and Cymbeline. |
Flint the King | Mary Kirchoff | 1,990 | Flint The King is set in the five years before Dragons of Autumn Twilight where the Heroes of the Lance split up and look for signs of gods returning and a new evil stirring in the world. Flint Fireforge returns to his sleepy boyhood village in the foothills near Solace to discover that everything has changed. The village is now prosperous and producing weapons for an unknown buyer. When Flint starts poking around he is discovered and pushed into the "Beast Pit" and expected to die. He is rescued by a group of Gully Dwarves who make him their king. Flint struggles to bring the gully dwarves together and form a fighting force so that he can escape and use them to foil the enemies' plans. |
The Day of the Djinn Warrior | Philip Kerr | 2,007 | Djinn twins, John and Philippa Gaunt, are off on another trip around the world in book four of the bestselling Children of the Lamp series. It's a race against time as the twins attempt to save their mother, Layla Gaunt from her destiny of being Blue Djinn of Babylon, save their father, Edward Gaunt, from an aging curse brought from a binding their mother Layla put on their father to make sure the twins were home with him, and museums worldwide from unexplained robberies and bizarre hauntings. As John and Philippa and their friends travel across the globe on their rescue mission, they notice that something very strange is happening: An evil force has woken the terracotta warriors created by an ancient Chinese emperor, and a spell has been cast possessing the soldiers with wicked spirits. Now, the very fate of the world hangs in the balance. It's up to the twins to solve the mysterious robberies, stop the terracotta warriors, rescue their parents, and save the world before it's too late. |
Tanis, the Shadow Years | Barbara Siegel | 1,990 | Tanis, the Shadow Years is set in the five years before Dragons of Autumn Twilight where the Heroes of the Lance split up and look for signs of gods returning and a new evil stirring in the world. Tanis leaves Solace with Clotnik after the promise that the dwarven juggler can lead him to his long-lost human father. On the way they are trapped in a grass fire but manage to save themselves and a mage, Kispha. Kispha is injured and dying and offers to help Tanis find his father in the mage's own memory as long as he saves Brandella and bring her back. |
Schrödinger's Kitten | George Alec Effinger | null | The story follows a Middle-Eastern woman, Jehan Fatima Ashûfi, through various realities, ranging from one in which she is raped when still a girl, subsequently abandoned by her family and dies alone, to one in which she is sentenced to death for killing her would-be rapist and being unable to pay the "blood price" to his family, and another in which she becomes a physicist and companion to well-known German scientists ranging from Heisenberg to Schrödinger, and subsequently prevents the Nazis from developing nuclear weapons during World War II by simply forwarding "unintelligible scientific papers" to key politicians looking into the idea. She is, unusually, aware of the existence of these realities, which she perceives as "visions" and assumes might come to her from Allah. Throughout different points in the story, the adult Jehan of some realities struggles to reconcile her religious upbringing and "visions" with her scientific profession; in the end, however, an aged Jehan finds satisfaction in the explanation of Hugh Everett's theory regarding the possibility of alternate realities, which fits with her personal experiences. |
100,000,000 Guinea Pigs | Arthur Kallet | null | The book's key proposition is that a great deal of products sold to the public - particularly pharmaceuticals and food products - are released with little regard or knowledge of how these products adversely impact the consumer. Corporations, often knowingly, release products which either do not do what they purport to, or have dangerous side effects or defects. Furthermore, many officials and government departments, namely the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, have fallen victim to regulatory capture. The book goes on to state that the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 is not effective in arresting these trends, and real reform or consumer protection is obstructed by the powerful connections that offending corporations have with the government. "If the poison is such that it acts slowly and insidiously, perhaps over a long period of years (and several such will be considered in later chapters), then we poor consumers must be test animals all our lives; and when, in the end, the experiment kills us a year or ten years sooner than otherwise we would have died, no conclusions can be drawn and a hundred million others are available for further tests". The authors develop ideas such as synergy effects, and the precautionary and substitution principles. They claim that many toxic substances, even in low concentrations, can act together to cause much more harmful effects than each substance would individually. Prolonged exposure to low amounts of toxic substances, even at very mild concentrations, can potentially have serious negative health impacts that consumers are not made aware of. These impacts are felt by all consumers because harmful substances are being ingested by consumers due to the use of dangerous pesticides, herbicides and other chemicals in food production. Preservatives are particularly criticized, and the increase in canned or packaged foods in cited as evidence of an increasing risk of such synergy effects due to the high amount of chemical byproducts these products include. The book argues that many products would not be sold if properly labeled, and this has been a key failing of the Food and Drug Administration. Extensive reform and overhaul in government regulation and inspection of the food and drug industry is needed in order to adequately protect consumers from corporations and manufacturers who do not place the health of the consumer before profit. Examples cited include beauty products, which in the first quarter of the 20th century were found to contain arsenic, lead and even radium - the health effects of which were not understood or known to consumers at the time. The true label for a pineapple pie, they argue, would be closer to this: "corn starch-filled, glucose-sweetened pie with made with sub-standard canned pineapple, artificial (citric acid) lemon flavor and artificial coal tar color". The book takes particular aim at the pharmaceutical market in the United States during the period, citing extensive lists of drugs which are often the subject of very strong and widespread campaigns of media promotion as 'wonder-drugs', yet which do not have any effect on the conditions they purport to cure, and often carry with them serious side effects that are not revealed to consumers. The authors claim that advertising for these drugs is deliberately misleading and use a variety of dishonest techniques from false testimonials to fake experts. The authors also questioned the value of statements made by scientists who vouched for the safety of products, citing the example of a dean of the College of Pharmacy of Columbia University who had vouched for the safety of a drug that later proved fatal to many. In the final analysis, the authors encourage consumers to be more active and questioning in their purchasing habits. Consumers should be vigilant in finding out more information about products and ingredients, and boycotting products with dangerous ingredients and their producers. They also call for stronger laws, tougher penalties for offending companies, and a much more concerted effort from authorities to implement consumer protection laws. The book concludes with the statement that "Above all, let your voice be heard loudly and often, in protest against indifference, ignorance, and avarice responsible for the uncontrolled adulteration and misrepresentation of foods, drugs, and cosmetics". |
I Got a "D" in Salami | Henry Winkler | 2,003 | Hank gets his first report card from 4th grade. He goes to his mom's deli to show her. While this is going on, his mom is making a special salami to give to a leader of a supermarket chain. Hank decides to get rid of his report card before his parents see it. He gives it to Robert to destroy. Robert puts it in a batch of salami. Once his mom is done making many batches of the salami, she picks the one with the report card in it. Hank and his friends try to put a stop to the delivery but they don't stop the deliveryman in time. While this is going on Hank figures out he has learning problems. In the end Hank begins eating his sandwich while visiting the Press for the large Supermarket chain and gets a business deal for his mom's deli. pt:I Got a "D" in Salami |
Lucy | Jamaica Kincaid | 1,990 | Eager to leave the West Indies, Lucy longs to leave her past behind. She does not feel nostalgic for her childhood and her homeland, where she felt oppressed by toxic British and family influences. This becomes evident when Lucy describes an event that happened in her former school. While attending Queen Victoria Girl's school, she was forced to memorize a poem about daffodils. (This poem "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" was written by William Wordsworth roughly two centuries ago.) The poem recalls the beauty of daffodils that the speaker has seen years ago. Lucy cannot appreciate this beauty, because daffodils do not grow on her island. After reciting the poem, Lucy is applauded and she explains that at this moment she feels fake. She feels like people see her as English on the outside but on the inside she hates the English. The daffodils represent Lucy's alienation from both her education, and from her new home. Lucy also claims that she is trying to escape her mother. The relationship between Lucy and her mother is a central theme. Lucy thought that she has to leave behind her relationship with her mother in order to become an adult. Many things in the United States remind Lucy of her mother. At one point in her relationship with Mariah, Lucy sees Mariah (her boss) and her mother as the same, because they both try to control Lucy. (At other times, Lucy feels like Mariah's friend.) Lucy also sees a resemblance when she sees Lewis cheating on Mariah. Lucy's own father cheated on her mother. Lucy though begins to love Mariah towards the end of the novel. As the novel draws near the end, one is able to discover how Lucy really feels about her mother. The novel also encompasses Lucy actions in her new home. Lucy makes new friends. She meets a guy named Hugh with whom she has sex. In the park with the children one day, she meets a girl named Peggy. Mariah, the mother of the children, does not like Peggy because she smokes and curses but realizes that Lucy needs friends. Lucy also meets a guy named Paul with whom she becomes close. This novel explores Lucy's complicated sexuality, especially illustrated in Lucy's homoerotic relationship with Peggy. The novel ends with Lucy wishing she "could love someone so much that she would die from it." Lucy's dream of escaping her past leaves her feeling alone. ;Lucy: the narrator and protagonist ;Annie Potter: Lucy's mother ;Mariah: the wife whom Lucy works for as an au pair ;Lewis: the husband whom Lucy works for as an au pair ;Tanner: the boy with whom Lucy has her first sexual encounter ;Miriam: the youngest daughter of Lewis and Mariah, with whom Lucy develops a special bond ;Dinah: Mariah's best friend and the woman with whom Lewis has an affair ;Peggy: Lucy's best friend, whom she meets while in the United States ;Hugh: Lucy's first boyfriend in America; he is also the brother of Dinah ;Paul: Lucy's lover, who feels more for her than she does for him |
All About Love: New Visions | Bell Hooks | 2,001 | In the first chapter she proposes that if we came to an agreement on the definition of love and acknowledge it as a verb rather than a noun we would all be happier. In the second chapter she proposes that children be treated with respect and justice so that they may learn to love. In the third chapter she proposes that complete honesty is necessary for a healthy relationship. She believes males learn to lie as a means of obtaining power, while females do the same but also lie to pretend powerlessness. In the fourth chapter she proposes that self-acceptance and self-love are necessary to have a happy relationship. In the fifth chapter she proposes that a relationship with God is necessary to provide love to others. In the sixth chapter she proposes that in order to love we must let go of obsessions with power and domination as a culture. In the seventh chapter she proposes that we must place love above materialism. In the eighth chapter she proposes that a sense of community and belonging is essential to feel loved and desire to give love. In the ninth chapter she proposes that both partners have to be giving. |
Dinosaur Summer | Greg Bear | null | Peter Belzoni and his father Anthony Belzoni join an expedition to return the dinosaurs belonging to the last dinosaur circus to the plateau. To reach the plateau, the expedition must deal with the vagaries of politics. One dinosaur dies en route, but the remainder are released on the plateau. However, the expedition members are trapped on the plateau and must face, and escape from, dinosaurs both real and fictional. |
Sofia Petrovna | Lydia Chukovskaya | null | Sofia Petrovna, a typist in the Soviet Union in 1937 is proud of the achievements of her son Nikolai (Kolya). Kolya, an engineering student and strong Communist, is at the beginning of a promising career, with his picture featured on the cover of Pravda. Before long, however, the Great Purge begins and Sofia's coworkers begin vanishing, amid accusations of treachery. Soon, Kolya's best friend Alik reports that Kolya has been arrested. Sofia and her friend and fellow typist Natasha try to find out more but are drowned in a sea of bureaucrats and long lines. More people vanish, and Sofia spends ever more time in lines at government buildings. Natasha makes a typographical error that is mistaken for a criticism of the Red Army and she is fired. When Sofia defends her, she is criticized and soon forced out as well. Alik is questioned, and when he does not renounce Kolya, he, too, is arrested and vanishes. Natasha and Sofia both lose their will to live. Natasha commits suicide via poison, and Sofia immerses herself in a fantasy of Kolya's return. When she finally gets a letter from Kolya, in which he reaffirms his innocence and tells more of his own story, Sofia tries to fight for his freedom again, but realizes that, in this bizarre, chaotic place, she will likely only place more suspicion on herself and Kolya. Out of desperation, she burns the letter. |
King Coal | Upton Sinclair, Jr. | null | Hal Warner, a rich young fellow determined to find the truth for himself about conditions in the mines, runs away from home and adopts the alias "Joe Smith." After being turned away by one coal mine for fear of Hal being a union organizer, he gets a job in another coal mine operated by the General Fuel Company, or GFC. In the mines he befriends many of the workers, and realizes their misery and exploitation at the hands of the bosses. He befriends Mary Burke, who is a passionate a fighter for the workers' rights. Her father is a mine worker who spends his days drinking and leaving her to take care of her siblings. She and Hal grow close, which tears at Hal's loyalty to his fiancée back home. After dedicating himself to the workers' cause, he tells them that he will appeal to the bosses to become a check weigh man who measures the amount of coal, but the GFC, wanting to cheat the workers out of their pay, appoints a company check weigh man. Hal is eventually put into the jail by the marshal, who is teased by Hal over conditions of the mines and accused by Hal of being corrupted and unfair to the workers. After an explosion in the mines, Hal seeks out Peter Harrigan, an old friend whose father owns the General Fuel Company. The workers organize a strike and union to demand their rights from the bosses, but the rescue effort goes longer than expected. The bosses are more intent on the tools and equipment than the miners. "Damn the man! save the Mules!" says a boss. Hal appeals to the United Mine Workers to back the strike, but they refuse, telling him that the strike is primitive and unexpected and that to support it when its just started to participate in action would waste the union's resources. Hal is told to wait a few more years for the other unions to strike, and only with a massive course of action could the unions win. Hal is left to tell the workers the grievous news but the workers nevertheless cheer out his name (some calling out Joe Smith and others Hal) for standing up for them. After a confrontation with his brother Edward, Hal resolves to return home and dedicate his life to the workers' cause. Hal leaves and concludes that he is in love with Mary Burke. |
Grave Peril | Jim Butcher | 2,001 | Set a year after the events of Fool Moon, the story begins with Harry Dresden hunting a ghost with Michael Carpenter, a Knight of the Cross and wielder of the holy sword called Amoracchius. They drive the spirit into the Nevernever before destroying her, and Harry discovers the ghost was under a spell of torment that caused the ghost to go on a rampage. At that moment, the faerie Leanansidhe and her Hellhounds encircle them. She greets Dresden as her godson and reminds him of a long-ago pact he made to serve her. Dresden lies his way out of the situation and returns to the real world, only to be arrested by the Chicago police. Michael's pregnant wife Charity bails Michael out of jail, and Susan appears to bail out Dresden. Back at his apartment, a pair of vampires deliver an invitation to a party celebrating the promotion of Madame Bianca, the head of the Red Court vampires in Chicago. Dresden is required to attend as the representative of the White Council of Wizards; to turn down the invitation could provoke war. Susan, not understanding the danger, can hardly wait to go to a vampire party, but Dresden insists that she not attend. The next morning, Michael and Dresden visit Father Forthill at St. Mary of the Angels Church. Lydia had hidden there, but panicked and fled when attacked by another spirit. Dresden consults a local ectomancer, Mortimer Lindquist, who explains that the barrier between the real world and the spirit realm is getting thinner, which makes it easier for things to cross over, and which also makes new ghosts much more powerful. . Later, Murphy calls Dresden for a personal favor, to try to help one of Murphy's fellow officers, who is trapped in the same icy torment spell that had affected the ghost in the hospital. Finally having time to track down Lydia, he finds her and is attacked by vampires who abduct with Lydia. Affected by the narcotic vampire venom, Harry falls asleep and dreams that he is attacked by the demon which he battled during a previous case involving the aforementioned sorcerer, Leonid Kravos. He is wakened by his assistant, a spirit of knowledge called Bob, who helps him to discover that he really was attacked and that this Nightmare-demon drained a significant portion of his magical power. Dresden realizes that the Nightmare's targets are those who foiled Kravos' schemes, and that sleep makes the victims susceptible in spite of other protective measures. He rushes to help Murphy, the next likely target, but the Nightmare has gotten there before him, disguised as Dresden himself, and Dresden is only able to chase him away and try to minimize the damage. Now only he and Michael are left from the group who had defeated Kravos, and it seems the demon knows that the best way to hurt Michael is to threaten his family. Still disguised as Dresden, the Nightmare kidnaps Charity. Dresden tracks the Nightmare a cemetery and attacks, when Leanansidhe appears as Dresden is beaten down. In exchange for a pledge of service, his godmother points out the water streams around the cemetery, and Dresden tackles the Nightmare into one, causing it to melt into ectoplasm. Dresden picks up Amoracchius, intending to use it against his faerie godmother, but the sword wrenches out of his hands and lands at the faerie's feet. Since Dresden defiled the holy blade by attempting to use it in an act of treachery, Leanansidhe is able to pick it up and steal it. Dresden calls on assistance from a friend in Chicago PD to get Kravos's journal from the evidence lockers in order to learn the name of the demon. Since Dresden cannot determine which of his enemies is controlling the Nightmare, he casts a spell that binds the Nightmare to focus its attention only on him. When Dresden bound the Nightmare to him, he felt the presence of the sorcerer that was controlling it. He and Michael go to Bianca's party reasoning that it's unlikely to be a coincidence, and that they may be able to identify the person there. At the entrance, they meet Thomas Raith, the representative of the White Court vampires, and his human date Justine. Thomas facilitates Dresden's introduction to the vampires, who poison him with narcotic vampire venom. Michael keeps Dresden on his feet so they can find the sorcerer. Then, Susan arrives with a forged invitation; due to this breach of hospitality, the vampires are free to kill her. To make matters worse, Leanansidhe is present and her proximity further weakens Dresden due to his broken promise to her. Susan bargains with her to cure Dresden in return for a year of Susan's memory, but not specifying what form that would take. The faerie seals the bargain and leaves Susan with no memory at all of Dresden - the year taken was not contiguous, but rather consisted of every moment Susan had spent in Harry's presence. As Harry and Michael attempt to get Susan out of the party, they encounter an old foe of Michael's, Mavra of the Black Court vampires. Dresden senses that she is the sorcerer manipulating the Nightmare. Leanansidhe reappears to gift Amoracchius to Madame Bianca. As part of the evening's entertainment, Mavra intends to unmake the sword with the blood of an innocent person, Lydia. It's an obvious trap; Dresden and Michael will have to violate the rules of hospitality and the Unseelie Accords -- potentially triggering war between wizards and vampires -- in order to save Lydia and the sword. As the Red Court vampires surround them, Thomas explains that he and Justine are also marked for death and offers to help Harry in return for protection. Bianca captures Justine and holds her ransom with the price of Thomas betraying Dresden. Thomas agrees and pushes Susan into the mob of vampires. Bianca double-crosses him and keeps Justine, ordering Thomas' death. He flees while Susan is dragged away screaming. Burning with rage, Dresden incinerates everything in the immediate vicinity and collapses, exhausted. Michael carries Lydia and Dresden out of the inferno. Dresden regains consciousness a day later. He's slightly burned but Lydia is safe and asleep. Michael has been guarding them in spite of his own wounds and the poor health of his wife and newborn child. Thomas arrives to propose that they work together to rescue Susan and Justine. As an offer of good faith, Thomas returns Amoracchius. Lydia awakens, possessed by the Nightmare, and attacks them. Thomas subdues her using his vampiric powers and Dresden exorcises the spirit. His attempts to control it using the demon's name fail, and he realizes the culprit is not the demon at all; it's actually the ghost of Leonid Kravos himself, using the demon's shape to distract Harry. Mavra used the torment spell to stir up the spirits, which in turn weakened the barrier between the real world and the Nevernever, thus allowing Kravos to become a more powerful ghost when he committed ritual suicide in his jail cell. Mavra had also been teaching Bianca sorcery, making her a more powerful adversary. The group decide to journey through the Nevernever to sneak into Bianca's house, but en route, Leanansidhe attacks and captures Dresden. He strikes yet another bargain with her, extracting a promise that she will not bother him for a year and a day. Bound by it, she releases him. However, as Michael and Thomas made no such bargain, she attacks them instead. They urge Dresden to go ahead without them and rescue Susan and Justine while they hold off the faerie and her Hellhounds. Dresden returns to the real world inside Bianca's house, which turns out to be a trap. Dresden is captured by Bianca and locked in a room with Justine and Susan. Susan has been partially turned into a vampire, a process that will be completed if she kills a human through vampiric feeding. Dresden manages to restore her memory with magic, and he reinforces Susan's self-control and defuses her thirst by finally admitting his love for her. Together, they seduce Kravos to kill Harry. But due to the weakened barrier, Harry's ghost forms and together they defeat Kravos. Dresden consumes the Nightmare, taking back his and Kravos' power as well. They try to escape, but are stopped by Bianca, who offers a compromise: Dresden gets Justine, his magical items, and safe passage; in exchange, Bianca gets Susan. If Dresden refuses and tries to rescue Susan, there will be war between the vampires of the Red Court and the White Council. Dresden fights back with a powerful spell that exploits the thinned barrier with the Nevernever to rouse the spirits of all the vampires' victims against them. The wrath of the empowered spirits destroys the mansion and the vampires, while Dresden, Susan, and the others escape. After the battle, Susan disappears; her apartment is up for rent and she's not at her job. Dresden tracks her down to a secluded cottage and proposes marriage, but Susan refuses, leaving him a love note as she flees the country. The final note of the book is the White Council will be visiting Chicago as a war has broken out between vampires and the Council. |
The Magic of Krynn | Margaret Weis | null | The book is a compilation of 10 short stories from various authors taking place in the fictional world of Krynn: #"Riverwind and the Crystal Staff" by Michael Williams. The tale is a narrative poem that describes the search for the Blue Crystal Staff by Riverwind. #"The Blood Sea Monster" by Barbara Siegel and Scott Siegel. This is a tale written in first person perspective by an elf named Duder, who lives in a small fishing village off the coast of the Blood Sea of Istar. While running from a baker after stealing some bread, Duder meets an old human fisherman, Six-Finger Fiske, who recruits the elf to catch the legendary Blood Sea Monster. #"A Stone's Throw Away" by Roger E. Moore. This tale is about the adventure of the kender, Tasslehoff Burrfoot, using a teleporting ring that he had found during a murder committed in Solace. The story takes place in a citadel of an evil human magus. #"Dreams of Darkness, Dreams of Light" by Warren B. Smith. #"Love and Ale" by Nick O'Donohoe. #"Wayward Children" by Richard A. Knaak. This tale involves a group of Draconian soldiers who stumble into a mysterious village inhabited by older elves. #"The Test of the Twins" by Margaret Weis. This is the tale of Raistlin Majere taking the infamous "Test" at Tower of High Sorcery in Waywreth. #"Harvests" by Nancy Varian Berberick. This is the tale of a young Tanis Half-Elven and Flint Fireforge, who befriend a young girl named Riana in a forest. They decide to aid her in her quest to find her lover and brother who have been kidnapped by phantoms. #"Finding the Faith" by Mary Kirchoff. #"The Legacy" by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman. This is the tale of Palin Majere, the mage son of Caramon, who takes the Test in the Tower of High Sorcery while the conclave believe that the mage's uncle, Raistlin, is still alive and is trying to steal Palin's body to return to the world. This tale is also retold in the novel, "The Second Generation." |
Kender, Gully Dwarves, and Gnomes | Margaret Weis | null | The book is a compilation of 10 short stories from various authors taking place in the fictional world of Krynn: # "Snowsong" by Nancy Varian Berberick. This tale tells the story of an early adventure of the Companions. Tanis Half-Elven and Sturm Brightblade are caught in a blizzard and their only hope of being rescued lies in the kender, Tasslehoff Burrfoot. # "The Wizard's Spectacles" by Morris Simon. # "The Storyteller" by Barbara Siegel and Scott Siegel. # "A Shaggy Dog's Tail" by Danny Peary. This story tells the tale of an abusive soldier's hunt for escaped prisoners, and his encounter along the way with a solicitous witch. # "Lord Toede's Disastrous Hunt" by Harold Bakst. This is the story of the (first) demise and death of the Dragon Highlord, Fewmaster Toede. # "Definitions of Honor" by Richard A. Knaak. This is a tale of a young Knight of Solamnia, Torbin, who rides to the rescue of a village against a minotaur. # "Hearth Cat and Winter Wren" by Nancy Varian Berberick. This is another tale of an early adventure of the Companions. A young Raistlin Majere uses his magic to help his friends against an evil wizard. # "'Wanna Bet?'" by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman. This is the tale of Caramon Majere's three sons: Palin, Tanin, and Sturm Majere who accidentally find themselves in an adventure to recover the Graygem of Gargath after losing a bet with a mysterious dwarf named Dougan Redhammer. This tale is also reprinted in the novel, The Second Generation. # "Into the Heart of the Story" by Michael Williams. A gnome, Virum, tells his version of authorship of the songs involved about the heroes of the War of the Lance. # "Dagger-Flight" by Nick O'Donohoe. A tale told from the viewpoint of a dagger involved in the novel, Dragons of Autumn Twilight. |
The Tooth of Crime | Sam Shepard | null | The play is set in a vaguely described science fiction future dominated by "The Game," a conflation of rock music and violence played by "Markers" under the direction of "The Keepers." Hoss has struggled to become the top Marker, only to find himself doubting his own abilities in the face of opposition from "Gypsies" who operate outside of the official rules. Act 1: Eager to make an outing, Hoss is frustrated when the Star-Man advises him against it on the basis of his astrology. Hoss learns that his rival, Mojo Root Force, has encroached upon his territory in Las Vegas in a move of questionable legality. After getting word that a Gypsy from Vegas is on his way to attack him, Hoss calls an old friend, Little Willard, for backup, only to find that Willard has committed suicide due to his inability to cope with his status. These successive revelations exacerbate Hoss's self-doubt and his belief that the old way is dying, and he attempts to perk up his confidence by challenging the Gypsy to a shiv fight. Act II: Before the duel (which has been changed from a shiv fight to battle of words under the guidance of an official referee) Hoss and Crow attempt to psych each other out. While Crow learns to imitate Hoss's walk and style, Hoss intimidates Crow by taking on the voice of an old Western gunslinger. Despite an ostensibly effective second round in which he takes on the voice of a Delta bluesman, Hoss loses the battle when Crow exposes Hoss's "Fear that he's crackin' busted in two." After killing the Ref, a desperate Hoss begs Crow to teach him the new style. Ultimately, however, he decides to commit his last authentic act by killing himself, for which Crow commends him. The play ends with Crow assuming his place on Hoss' throne, with Becky quickly shifting her loyalty. |
The Grotesque | Patrick McGrath | 1,989 | Wheelchair-using Sir Hugo Coal narrates this tale of vice and murder at stately Crook Manor. Unable to communicate with those around him, the quirky Sir Hugo watches and listens, recounting recent events that began with his daughter's engagement, followed by the disappearance of her fiancé and the subsequent investigation. Of particular note is new butler Fledge, whom Sir Hugo believes is not only the cause of the troubles at the estate, but seeking to replace him as lord of the manor and in Lady Harriet's bed. |
Boxy an Star | Daren King | 1,999 | Boxy an Star tells the story of the relationship between two young lovers, 'Bole' (Thomas Boler) and 'Star' (Stacey Brain), Bole being the narrator of the story. The 'Boxy' in the title is the couple's friend and drug dealer. After a party at Boxy's flat, at which Bole and Star consume a large number of Boxy's spangles and Es and confuse a duvet with a bag of drugs, they go to visit Star's friend Prim and have afternoon tea. Invited to stay the night, the pair later awake and, forgetting where they are, become frightened and decide to escape, encountering Prim's boyfriend Gary on the way who they think is a 'Mephisto Conjurer' due to his 'smoking stick'. |
A Woman in Amber | Agate Nesaule | 1,995 | A Woman in Amber begins with Agate Nesaule as an adult. She is a successful professor of Women’s Studies and 20th century American Literature at the University of Wisconsin Whitewater. Despite her outward professional success, Agate lives with an inner turmoil caused by her memories of war and perpetuated by her husband Joe. Nesaule finds herself in therapy, depressed and unable to come to terms with the root cause of her depression. On the advice of her therapist Ingeborg, Agate learns she can not begin to heal until she is able to tell her story; the story of what happened to her and her family during World War II in Latvia and Germany at the hands of the invading Russian soldiers. So she begins her story by admitting that she was in Germany during the last year of the war and that she was starving. From this first admittance, Agate begins to tell many stories related to her hunger. She tells how she was prompted by her mother to beg the Russian soldiers, in Russian, not Latvian, for food. Later in life, she mistakenly tells this same story to her husband Joe. He mocks her time and again for the way in which she was forced to beg for food; suggesting she enjoyed it. Agate remembers how the Russians looked at her as if she were a goose singing. Agate relates the shame of going hungry and living with the belief she was not worth feeding. As the war progresses, things do not get much better for Agate and her family. When the Mongolian (perhaps Mongoloid) Russian soldiers arrive, her father is forced to leave with the rest of the men. The women and young girls are taken to a basement where the women are repeatedly raped. Agate is young enough to escape this, but careful provisions must be made for her fifteen year old cousin Astrida. Agate’s mother Valda is understandably destroyed by the Russian occupation and the horrors that occur in the basement. When they are finally let out of the basement, the soldiers lead the women and girls into the woods. Everyone believes they are to be executed. Valda makes preparations to drag Agate with her to the front of the lines. Valda reasons if she and Agate are first, they will not need to see the others die. Agate does not wish to die, what ensues is a physical tug of war with her mother for her life. The struggle Agate has with her mother that day remains a constant tension between the two. Agate is unable to see Valda’s love for her and desire to save her from pain. Later, the reader comes to see that Valda did care deeply for Agate and loved her very much; particularly in Valda’s description of her desire to prepare Agate for her wedding day, a preparation Valda was never able to follow through on. Unfortunately for Valda and Agate, the trauma of war and the distance their shared experiences placed between them left no time to reconcile before Valda’s death. Later, Agate and her family journey to Berlin where they are admitted to a Displaced Persons camp. Here they are given food and shelter. The family would move many times during the next several years, going from camp to camp and beginning life again. Agate attends Latvian school while in the camps. At age twelve, Agate and her family leave the camps and immigrate to the United States. We learn of Agate's life in the United States and her parents' financial struggle. Agate must adapt to life quickly in the United States. A quick learner, Agates teaches herself English in one summer. The first book she learns to read in English is Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind. An excellent student, Agate receives a scholarship to attend Indiana University. While there, she meets her future husband Joe. Agate’s family does not agree with the marriage, and it finalizes the distance between Agate and her mother. During the next twenty years Agate receives her doctorate degree, has a son named Boris, and becomes a successful professor at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. Constantly living with Joe’s put downs, harassments, and minimization of the trauma she endured in the war, Agate represses her feelings of depression and tries to carry on with her life. Though they are separated for much of their adult life, Agate and Beate rejoin each other when Beate’s husband Uldis dies alone and penniless from alcohol poisoning. Despite being distanced from the Latvian community in Indianapolis where her father remained very active, Agate retains a close tie to her Latvian heritage. When a friend asks what he may bring Agate from Latvia, she asks for some Latvian soil. It is party due to her connection with Latvia that her new husband John is able to find a way into Agate’s heart. Throughout her life, Agate admires an amber pendant that her mother wore and then passed down to Agate. John gives Agagte a similar piece of amber. Through his respectful and receptive listening Agate is fully able to heal when she tells John her story and finally finds acceptance. |
The Swish of the Curtain | null | null | It tells the story of seven young people in three different families who form an amateur theatrical group, the Blue Door Theatre Company. The children write, produce, direct and act in their own plays, each of them harnessing a particular talent. Nigel designs scenery, for example; Jeremy composes music; while Sandra makes costumes. During the course of the book, each of the young people realises a particular ambition. It is "Bulldog", who shines in comic roles, who realises his ambition to create the elusive "swish of the curtain". At the book's climax, the "Blue Doors" enter a drama contest which they have to win in order to be allowed to attend dramatic school to realise their dream of a career in the professional theatre. |
She and Allan | H. Rider Haggard | 1,920 | Wanting to learn if he can communicate with deceased loved ones, adventurer and trader Allan Quartermain seeks a meeting with the feared Zulu witch-doctor Zikali. He tells Allan he must seek out a great white sorceress who rules a hidden kingdom far to the north, and he charges Allan to take a message to her. He also gives Allan a necklace with a strange amulet, carved in Zikali's own likeness. Zikali claims it has great magical powers that will protect Allan on his journey, but he must on no account take it off. Allan is initially scornful of Zikali's claims, and sets off for the coast, but a series of odd events force him to go north in spite of his own wishes. On the journey he encounters Umslopogaas, a fearsome Zulu warrior chieftain. Umslopogaas tells Allan that he has discovered that he is about to be deposed and murdered, so he decides to leave his village and accompany Allan on his quest. Allan is again skeptical, but a few days later Umslopogaas and his band of warriors meet up with Allan's party, and Umslopogaas cements their friendship when he saves Allan from being killed by a lion. Journeying into unknown country, they come to a remote settlement called "Strathmuir" run by a Scot, Robertson, a drunkard and former sea captain, who lives there with his beautiful daughter Inez. Her Portuguese mother had died years earlier and her father has now taken native wives and sired several children with them. A few days later, Robertson takes Allan on an expedition to hunt hippopotamus, but as they return they are intercepted by Allan's servant, Hans, who had stayed behind. He reports that, in their absence, Strathmuir has been attacked by a band of cannibal warriors from the north, who have killed and eaten many of the villagers (including Robertson's wives and children) and kidnapped Inez. Allan, Robertson and Umsoplogaas set off in pursuit. At one point they catch up to the cannibals, and Allan and Hans almost succeed in freeing Inez, but her servant panics and alerts their captors, who escape. They track the cannibals through the treacherous swampland that surrounds the lost kingdom of Kôr, and as they approach the great mountain the cannibals turn and attack Allan's group, but they are driven off by the arrival of Bilali, the servant of Ayesha, who tells that that She has been expecting them, and that he is to bring them into her presence. Allan is summoned to meet Ayesha, who is camped among the ruins of the ancient city of Kôr. Ayesha remains veiled, although she briefly reveals herself to him, but in spite of her allure, he manages to resist her power, and throughout the story he remains skeptical of her claims that she is immortal and has supernatural powers. Some days later Robertson disappears from the camp to seek out the rebel Armahagger who are holding Inez captive, hoping to rescue his daughter and, if possible, to kill their chief, the dreaded Rezu, who is also rumoured to be immortal. Allan and Hans learn that this rebel group are the descendants of an ancient sun-worshipping cult who perform human sacrifice, and that Inez will be married to Rezu and installed as Queen of all the Armahagger if they defeat Ayesha. Knowing that Rezu is preparing to attack and try to overthrow her, Ayesha seeks help from Allan and Umslopogaas in the coming battle, asking Allan to lead the army of Kôr. He reluctantly agrees, but when Ayesha brings him before her generals, they at first refuse to accept him, until he displays the "Great Medicine", the amulet given to him by Zikali. Though outnumbered three-to-one, Allan draws up plans that he hopes will give Ayesha's army a tactical advantage, but he has little confidence in her Armahagger soldiers. As they advance, Hans scouts ahead; he discovers that Inez's unfortunate servant has already been eaten, and that the rebels have captured Robertson and intend to sacrifice him and eat him before his daughter's eyes. Soon after, a Zulu scout returns to warn that some of Ayehsa's soldiers are spies for Rezu, and that the enemy know their plans have set an ambush just ahead. Allan quickly draws his men into a defensive square just before Rezu's forces attack; they hold their ground against the first two waves, but the square breaks under a third onslaught. Allan fears all is lost, but at that moment a glowing apparition of Ayesha appears in their midst, bearing a wand, and she moves forward towards Rezu's soldiers, who become paralysed as she advances. Heartened, the Kôr soldiers surge forward, slaughtering most of Rezu's army. As they reach the enemy camp, they see Rezu kill the helpless Robertson with an axe. They now confront the fearsome Rezu himself, a huge, bearded giant seven feet tall; Allan fires two heavy-gauge bullets, which hit Rezu, but they have no effect, and they realise he is heavily armoured. Now Umslopogaas steps forward and challenges Rezu to single combat. A desperate struggle ensues, and although Umslopogaas carries an ancient axe rumoured to be the only weapon that can kill Rezu, he makes no impression against Rezu's heavy armour. Finally Umslopogaas employs a ruse - he appears to flee, enabling him to reach higher ground, from which he makes a rapid run-up to Rezu. Leaping into the air, he strikes Rezu down from behind with a mighty blow as he vaults over the giant's head. Ayesha's soldiers then surge forward and, before Allan can examine him, they hack Rezu's body to pieces. Allan and Hans now race to the tent where Inez is being held; she seems drugged or cataonic, and as they enter the handmaidens who guard her all commit suicide, and Inez is freed. The day after the battle, Allan and Hans watch from a distance as Ayesha addresses her surviving troops and punishes the captured traitors. As she speaks, a fierce storm blows up, and lightning flashes around Ayesha and the captives, but it leaves the faithful soldiers unharmed. When the storm clears, Ayesha has vanished, and when they move forward to examine the captives, they find them dead, although their bodies are quite unmarked. The next night Ayesha summons Allan to receive his reward. He balks at fulfilling his wish to see if his loved ones survive beyond the grave, but Ayesha takes control and her power paralyses him; he feels himself dying and his spirit moving into another realm. He sees visions of his family, but their spirits seem unaware of his presence; only the spirits of a faithful dog and an African woman whom he had loved seem aware of him and able to communicate with him. When he revives, Ayesha questions him but, despite his experience, he remains profoundly skeptical and he argues with Ayesha over what has transpired. Later that night Allan meets up with Umslopogaas, who tells him of his own experiences. By now Inez has fully recovered from her ordeal although, as Ayesha had predicted, she remembers nothing of her traumatic experience or her father's death. Allan and Umslopogaas have no desire to remain, so Ayesha arranges for the surviving members of the party to be escorted back to Strathmuir. We learn that Inez never recovers her memory of what had transpired, and she is never told the truth; she eventually she retires to a convent. Umslopogaas returns to his people to face his destiny, and Allan returns to Zululand to deliver Ayesha's message to Zikali. |
The A-List | Zoey Dean | 2,003 | The A-List follows the character of Anna Percy, who has been raised on New York City's Upper East Side. Anna has grown up living a life of privilege and many rules, which she somewhat jokingly refers to as "This is How We Do Things Big Book, East Coast WASP Edition". Anna moves out to Los Angeles with her father in the hopes of getting an internship in the entertainment industry as well as to reinvent herself in a new environment. While traveling to LA, Anna meets the handsome Ben Birnbaum, with whom she has an immediate connection. Ben invites Anna to the wedding of A-lister Jackson Sharpe, which she accepts. Once Anna arrives in LA she discovers that her father has stood her up at both the airport and lunch in order to indulge in marijuana, leading Anna to believe that her father doesn't want her with him. Later that same day at the wedding Anna meets Samantha "Sam Sharpe, Camilla "Cammie" Sheppard, and Delia "Dee" Young. Because the trio all have large crushes on Ben, they are upset at Anna's appearance as his date and spend much of the evening trying to get his attention. This results in Anna's designer dress getting ruined and Sam getting rejected, which causes the two to bond. Sam invites Anna to attend a Warner Brothers New Year's Eve bash. A jealous Cammie attempts to break up Anna and Ben by convincing a big producer that Anna is a hooker, but fails. After the party Cammie goes to her mother's grave, Sam and a group of partiers goes to her father's house to get drunk, and Ben and Anna go to his father's boat to have sex. Anna tells Ben that she is ready for sex. Ben appears to accept, only to desert Anna while she is asleep under the pretext of getting his car. During a charity project, Anna discovers that she has gotten food poisoning from an expired yogurt she'd eaten earlier in the day. While caring for Anna, Dee confesses that people look down on her because of her short stature and spirituality. Dee also confesses that she believes that she's pregnant with Ben's baby, which unbeknownst to Dee is not true. At the end of the book Anna is enrolled at the same high school as the other girls, has broken up with Ben, and had her internship fail to work out. Sam and Dee show an interest in becoming friends with Anna, which causes Cammie to feel threatened. |
Every Inch a King | Harry Turtledove | 2,005 | The book centers around Otto of Schlepsig, a circus performer and tightrope walker, who is surprised to learn that he's an almost dead-ringer for Prince Halim Eddin, recently invited to become king the newly independent country of Shqiperi. Fed up with his life in the circus, Otto, and his friend, the sword swallower Max of Witte, get some uniforms and set out to take the Prince's place as King of Shqiperi. |
Music on the Bamboo Radio | Martin Booth | 1,997 | The story begins with the Japanese army’s defeat of the China forces occupying Hong Kong on 25 December, 1941. Nicholas is an eleven-year old boy whose parents have both suddenly disappeared in the chaos of war breaking out. As the Chinese come to do a home to home search, three loyal family servants, Tang, his wife Ah Mee, and the gardener Ah Kwan take Nicholas and they escape to Kowloon as Hong Kong Island is no longer safe. Upon reaching the shore of Kowloon, Tang and Ah Mee disguise Nicholas as a Chinese boy and the trip continues to Tang's home village, the village of Sek Wan. Nicholas passes the years of the war here with Tang and his family. He is given the Chinese name Wing Ming. During this time, many events happen. Nicholas makes a dangerous journey back to Kowloon to get quinine cure to the malaria Tang has contracted. He also helps the Communist partiasn army – The East River Column Fighters- to translate instructions for using heavy explosives. Nicholas joins the partisan army on a mission to Kowloon where they blow up a railway bridge and weaken the position of the Japanese army. Yet his most dangerous job would have been to deliver a medicine into the prison of war camps (POW camps). Taking news or items to prison camps is nicknamed "playing music on the bamboo radio". Nicholas does more than expected by entering the camp itself because the person who he was supposed to pass the medicine to had the fever. Exhausted and worried, Nicholas narrowly escapes the clutches of the Japanese with the help of the prisoners and finally reaches the safety of Sek Wan village. As the war comes to an end, Nicholas returns to his home on Hong Kong Island, and when he returned, everything is ruined, his home is badly damaged. As he walks through the house he finds his mother. Nicholas does not recognise her, she seems much older and exhausted, but he knows it is his mother. It is nearly four years since he was last at home. At first he introduces himself as Wing Ming, then he remembers that he is Nicholas Holford. |
The Gray Prince | Jack Vance | 1,974 | Schaine returns to Koryphon from school off-world, met by Kelse. They and Jerd are to meet their father, Uther, who has said he just learned something that is a splendid joke. Glissam agrees to visit Uaia with them. However, Uther is ambushed and killed by Retent Uldras. Schaine, Kelse, Jerd, and Glissam survive a similar ambush and reach the Madducs' domain Morningswake. Uther Madduc was exploring the Palga before he was killed. Jerd, Glissam, and Kurgech go into the Palga to discover what he found. After various encounters with the Wind-runners, they find the secret: an ancient temple built by Erjins, who are in fact fully sentient. They return to Morningswake, to learn that the Mull has ordered the land barons to give up their domain. The land barons defy this decree, and form their own Order of Uaia. Jorjol incites several hundred Retent Uldras to invade Morningswake. This attack is defeated by the Order's militia. A committee of the Mull arrives at Morningswake. Gerd escorts them to the Erjin temple, where he explains the first part of Uther Madduc's joke. The Mull has demanded that the land barons yield to the claim of the Uldras, who were there first. But the temple shows that the Erjins are sentient, which makes the Szintarrese slaveowners. Near the temple is the depot from which tamed Erjins are shipped. There they discover that the Erjin mounts and servitors exported by the Wind-runners are actually warriors, who at that very same moment are uprising and destroying their supposed masters. Erjin "servitors" seize control of Szintarre from its effete inhabitants. Erjin "mounts" turn on their Retent Uldra riders, but the combative Uldras defeat them. The Order of Uaia's militia (including Submission Uldras) fly south and defeat the Erjins in Szintarre. Returning to Uaia, they defeat a second and larger Uldra attack incited by Jorjol. This experience chastens some of the Szintarrese reformers, but the others persist in their campaign. Now Gerd Jemasze reveals the rest of Uther Madduc's joke. The temple shows that the Erjins were there before the Uldras, so they have an even better claim to the land. Furthermore, the temple's decorations depict Erjins arriving in spaceships and in combat with Morphotes: Morphotes are in fact the oldest inhabitants and "rightful" claimants to the land. Gerd, speaking for the land barons, tells the Szintarrese that to be consistent they should either revoke their decree against the land barons, or else give their own country to the Morphotes as well. |
Election | Tom Perrotta | 1,998 | The novel centers on a high school in suburban New Jersey, where students are preparing to vote for their school president. The story takes place in 1992, amidst the U.S. Presidential Elections that year. Tracy Flick is an unpopular girl but very ambitious, intelligent and manipulative; however, she is not quite as perfect as her classmates assume. She had a heated sexual affair with her former teacher, and after Tracy told her mother of their relationship, his career and marriage were ruined. Mr. M, one of Tracy's current teachers, learns that Tracy is taking part in the election, and feeling that Tracy needs to be taken down a notch, prompts Paul Warren (a student of whom he approves) to run against her. In turn, Paul's outcast lesbian sister, Tammy, begins a reckless campaign to be school president in retaliation to her ex-girlfriend who is now dating Paul. The novel ends with Mr. M ultimately losing his job as a teacher when it is found that he has sabotaged the election by pocketing Tracy's winning votes- making Paul the winner of the presidency. Mr. M then ends up working in a car dealership. |
Hrolf Kraki's Saga | Poul Anderson | 1,973 | The story is presented as if related by a female story-teller in an Anglo-Saxon court, the author feeling it would have been about that time that the legend would have reached its fullest development, and such a teller would have been least likely to abbreviate it. The Danish king Halfdan is murdered and his position usurped by his brother Frodhi. Halfdan's young sons Helgi and Hroar go into hiding to escape his fate, successfully eluding Frodhi until they reach adulthood and can take vengeance on their father's killer. On attaining the kingship themselves they rule together. Helgi, a warrior and sea-rover, visits the equally warlike queen of the Saxons, whom he woos overbearingly. Sent packing, he later returns and rapes her, a union resulting in a daughter, Yrsa, who years later becomes an instrument of vengeance when Helgi encounters and marries her. Only after they are wed does her mother reveal Yrsa's parentage. Haunted, Yrsa leaves Denmark to wed Adhils, King of the Swedes, and Helgi is ultimately killed in battle attempting to win her back. Hrolf, the son of Helgi and Yrsa, is raised in the household of Hroar, becoming his adherent and supporter. After Hroar's death Hrolf eventually becomes his successor. He builds up the realm and assembles a band of famous warriors, most notably Hjalti and Bodvar Bjarki, a were-bear and one of a trio remarkable brothers, the others being Elk-Frodhi and Thorir Houndsfoot. The story goes on to relate the personal tales of these champions. After a reign notable for prosperity at home and successful war abroad, Hrolf visits the court of Adhils to see his mother and attain recompense for his father's death. Feigning hospitality, Adhils does his best to destroy his unwanted visitors through rigged tests of their prowess, while Yrsa warns Hrolf of his treachery. At length the animosity is brought into the open and the Danes fight their way out of Adhil's stronghold, taking his treasure with them. Pursued by the Swedes, they scatter the treasure along the ground to delay them and successfully escape. This "sowing" of the field of Fyrisvellir later becomes a famous incident in Norse legend. But during this adventure Hrolf has managed to offend the treacherous god Odin, giver of victory. He returns to Denmark knowing he must henceforth avoid war, as his luck in battle has left him. The end comes through treachery from Hrolf's half-elven half-sister Skuld, a witch married to Hjorvard, one of his sub-kings. Inciting her husband to revolt, they secretly raise an army and rise suddenly, besieging Hrolf in his hall. Hrolf's champions are roused from sleep and rallied by the chanting the Bjarkamál, a famous Old Norse poem whose origins supposedly lie in this event; it has been largely lost, but Anderson presents a partial reconstruction as part of his story. Hrolf's warriors fight valiantly, but the witchcraft of Skuld prevails, and after a long, terrible battle the defenders fall. Hjorvard does not last long as king, being killed by Vogg, a weakling Hrolf had befriended who in consequence had sworn to avenge him. Skuld herself is soon overthrown by an army led by Elk-Frodhi and Thorir Houndsfoot, come to avenge their brother Bodvar Bjarki. The realm goes to pieces, to be eventually pulled back together in part by a remote kinsman of Hrolf's. |
To Sir, with Love | E. R. Braithwaite | 1,959 | Ricky Braithwaite is a British Guiana-born engineer who has worked in an oil refinery in Aruba. Coming to Britain on the verge of World War Two, he joins the RAF as aircrew. Demobbed in 1945, he is unable to find work, despite his qualifications and experience, meeting overt anti-black attitudes. But after discussing his situation with a stranger whose name he never learns, he applies for a teaching position and is assigned to Greenslade School, a secondary school in London's East End. Most of the pupils in his class are totally unmotivated to learn and largely semi-literate and semi-articulate. But he persists, despite finding that they are unresponsive to his approach. Braithwaite decides to try a new approach, and sets some ground rules. The students will be leaving school soon, and will enter an adult society, so he will treat them as adults, and allow them to decide what topics they wish to study. In return, he demands their respect as their teacher. This novel approach is initially rejected, but within a few weeks, the class is largely won over. He suggests out-of-school activities, including visits to museums, which the kids have never thought about before. A young teacher, Gillian Blanchard, volunteers to assist him on these trips. Some of the girls start to speculate whether a personal relationship is budding between Braithwaite and Gillian. The trip is a success and more are approved by the initially sceptical Head. The teachers and the Student Council openly discuss all matters affecting the school and what is being taught. The general feeling is that Braithwaite's approach is working, although some teachers still advocate a tougher approach to the kids. The mother of one of the girls comes to speak to Braithwaite, feeling that he has more influence than she has with her impressionable daughter, who is staying out late and might be getting into trouble. In the meantime, Braithwaite and Gillian are deeply in love and are discussing marriage. Her parents are openly disapproving of a 'mixed-race' marriage, but realise that they're serious and both intelligent people who know what they are doing. de:To Sir, With Love tr:Öğretmenimize Sevgilerimizle |
The Ascent of Rum Doodle | William Ernest Bowman | null | The narrator, "Binder" (his radio codename), is asked by the "Rum Doodle Committee" and its chairman, "Sir Hugeley Havering," to lead an expedition to climb "Rum Doodle", the highest mountain in the world (with an elevation of 40,000 and 1/2 feet), in the remote (fictional) country of "Yogistan". He assembles a team of climbers to play all the roles seen in the parodied literature: * Burley, the "strong man"; * Constant, the "linguist"; * Jungle, the "route finder"; * Prone, the "physician"; * Shute, the "photographer"; * Wish, the "scientist." It rapidly develops that each of the climbers is utterly inept in his nominal field of competence, as they demonstrate in a series of chaotic adventures en route to Yogistan; for example, Prone endures a never-ending series of illnesses, while Constant mispronounces a Yogistani word (the language hinges on variously "pronounced" belches and gastrointestinal rumbles) and offends a "short but powerful" Yogistani wielding a knife, having informed him that he lusted for the man's wife — not his intention at all. Binder handles these mishaps with typically British aplomb, having been reassured by the expedition's sponsor that "to climb Mont Blanc by the Grépon route is one thing; to climb Rum Doodle is, as Totter once said, quite another." Somehow the group does make it to Yogistan, where they hire Yogistani porters, parodies of the Sherpas who were the indispensable indigenous porters and mountain guides (and sometimes climbing partners) to many of the great mountaineering expeditions. However, the Yogistanis do not share the invariable positive attributes of the Sherpa — quite the contrary. Hijinks ensue, as the expedition cook, "Pong", produces food so inedible that the expedition tries (unsuccessfully) to continue on up the mountain without him; the inevitable fall into a crevasse leads to the consumption of the party's champagne (brought along to celebrate reaching the summit and for "medicinal purposes") during the rescue attempt; and scientist Wish embarks on a never-ending quest for "Wharton's warple", an endangered species indigenous to the mountains. Eventually, Binder and a colleague manage to stumble to the top of the lofty spire the group has been approaching ... only to find that they have climbed the wrong mountain (and to see the porters, with Prone in tow, climbing the right one). |
Curious George Flies a Kite | H. A. Rey | 1,958 | One day, George is left alone at his house, and of course he is curious. As he is looking out the window he sees a tiny house he wants to explore. Curious George jumps out the window, crawls over a fence and makes his way to the small house he sees. Inside the house are many bunny rabbits, and George accidentally lets one out. He struggles for a bit but finally is able to get the bunny back into the house. As he is walking back, he sees a man fishing and wants to join. As George is trying to fish, he falls in and a neighbor boy named Bill comes to help him as he gets out of the water. Bill is very friendly and wants to show George his new kite. George loves the kite and Bill trusts George to watch the kite while he leaves to get his bicycle. Of course, George is curious so he begins to fly the kite. At first he thinks it will be OK but soon the kite takes off, along with George. Curious George flies high up in the sky, and has to be rescued by the Man in the Yellow Hat in a helicopter. He returns the kite to Bill who then rewards George with his very own pet bunny from the bunny house he explored in the beginning of the book. |
The Queen of Air and Darkness | T. H. White | 1,939 | The Queen of Air and Darkness is the second book in the four-part work The Once and Future King which chronicles White's own version of the legend of King Arthur. Although it is the shortest book in the series, it is a vital point in the story for several reasons: *Arthur invents the idea of the Round Table, which was central to the plot of the third and fourth books. *Arthur also defeats barons those rebelling against him, thereby securing his role as king. *Arthur's understanding of "might vs. right" is explored more deeply in this book. *The Orkney faction is introduced. These four children (Gawain, Agravaine, Gaheris, and Gareth) become major characters for the rest of White's work. *King Pellinore gets married and has several children who will become important in The Ill-Made Knight. The novel begins with the four Orkney children, Gawaine, Agravaine, Gaheris, and Gareth, telling each other stories late at night. As they speak, it becomes clear that they have great respect and love for their mother, the beautiful Queen Morgause, although she does not devote herself entirely to motherhood, but has a desire to understand and unlock her magical powers whilst her husband, King Lot, is off to war against King Arthur. We also learn that Arthur's father, Uther Pendragon, had raped Morgause's mother, Igraine, making Morgause Arthur's half-sister (although no one is yet aware of this fact except for Merlyn, who had forgotten to tell it to Arthur). Arthur is still being tutored by Merlyn, although the relationship between the two has changed. Instead of seeing Merlyn as an almighty sage, Arthur treats him as more of a friend throughout the novel. Despite this, Merlyn still attempts to teach Arthur how he can create a perfect society out of his newly-formed kingdom. Arthur is unimpressed, and would rather be off fighting wars than taking care of peasants. Meanwhile, back in the Orkney Isles, the four Orkney children are bored and seek a story from their own tutor, St. Toirdelbach, a very different teacher from Merlyn. He tells them a story, but quickly becomes annoyed with the boys, and threatens to hit them with his shelleleigh if they refuse to leave him alone. This is one of White's best examples of how different the loveless childhoods of the Orkney children were from the happy childhood of Arthur. As the children are walking on the beach after visiting St. Toirdelbach, Sir Grummor Grummursum and King Pellinore arrive on the shore in a magic barge. Along with them is a Saracen knight named Sir Palomides who has apparently befriended them between the previous book and their arrival on the Orkney islands. The trio had previously been in Flanders where Pellinore fell in love with the Queen of Flander's daughter. The knights entered the boat and had been unable to turn it around, causing Pellinore to become so lovesick, he no longer wishes to hunt the Questing Beast, his lifelong passion. Arthur, meanwhile, is preparing for the battle against Lot's Gaelic warriors which lies ahead. He has begun to buy into the idea of chivalry, and of "might vs. right." He announces to Merlyn that he plans to first put down Lot's rebellion and then use that power to enforce justice throughout his kingdom. Morgause is pleased that the three bumbling knights have landed because they have no idea that England is at war with Orkney. She takes advantage of their ignorance and attempts to make them fall in love with her. She attempts an unsuccessful unicorn hunt with the knights. The boys consult St. Toirdelbach and then attempt to catch a live unicorn to present to their mother. They almost succeed but Agravaine kills the unicorn in a fit of rage (the boys were pretending the virgin who lured the unicorn was their mother and Agravaine hated the unicorn for touching their "mother"). The other three brothers are angry, as they believe Agravaine has ruined their chances of getting a reward from their mother. Only Gareth feels sorry for the unicorn. Morgause is not pleased at all that they succeeded where she failed; on the contrary, she has them whipped. Meanwhile, on the plains of Bedegraine, Arthur is making final preparations for his battle. Arthur announces his idea of the round table, and Merlyn informs Arthur that another king has such a table. Ironically, this king is the father of Arthur's future wife, Guenever (sic). Sir Kay, Arthur's foster-brother, says that he believes that if war will help the conquered race to live a better life, they should be conquered. Merlyn angrily informs him that there is a certain Austrian who shared Kay's views, and "plunged the world into bloody chaos." This is an allusion to Adolf Hitler. Sir Palomides and Sir Grummore, concerned about King Pellinore's lovesickness, plan to impersonate the Questing Beast and lure him back to chasing it. Their plan backfires when the real Questing Beast appears and chases them; they spend the night caught half-way up a cliff. Morgause, frustrated that the knights have not fallen for her, decides that her children matter more to her. Gareth rushes to the stables to tell his brothers that she loves them, and he arrives to find that Gawaine and Agravaine are in a heated argument. Agravaine wants to send a letter to Lot, informing him of the three knights and telling Lot that Morgause is cheating on him. Gawaine is infuriated by the idea, and he considers it betrayal to their mother. The argument ends when Agravaine threatens Gawaine with a hidden knife, and Gawaine nearly kills him. White explains that Gawaine was never able to get over these kind of sudden passions he underwent, and that they would plague him for life. Merlyn knows that his time with Arthur is nearly up, as he will soon be locked up for a thousand years. Arthur is distressed, and asks why Merlyn can't avoid the imprisonment that awaits him. Merlyn tells Arthur a parable which explains that no-one can escape fate (the famous story of a man who learns of his death, then rides to escape death, but ends up running into Death while escaping.) He also warns Arthur about Guinvere and Lancelot, but Arthur is too saddened by Merlyn's departure to take the warning to heart. Early the next morning, King Pellinore is walking alone on the beach when he spots Palomides and Grummore stuck on the cliff, with the Questing Beast waiting for them below. He explains that the beast has fallen in love with them (as she thinks that they are her mate when they were in disguise), and refuses to slay the creature. He simply holds it down while Grummore and Palomides escape to Morgause's castle. Pellinore is reunited with Piggy, the daughter of the Queen of Flanders. He returns to the castle to find that the Questing Beast is waiting outside the castle. Around this same time, Merlyn has begun his journey to find Nimue and passes by them. He advises the pair of knights to psychoanalyse the Questing Beast. They do so, but it backfires and the Questing Beast falls in love with Sir Palomides instead. Pellinore gives up chasing the beast then and Sir Palomides takes up the job. Arthur has engaged Lot in a fateful battle which would determine who would rule Britain. Arthur overcomes Lot with a sneaky ambush in the night, despite Lot's larger number of soldiers. Contrary to the code of "chivalric" battle (or White's version, at any rate) he also attacks the enemy knights first rather than the foot soldiers. Arthur seemingly finally realizes the wrong behind slaughtering the peasants for the fun of the rich knights, as Merlyn had insisted in his lessons. Assisted by the French noblemen, Ban and Bors, Arthur wins the battle. The defeated Lot returns home, and the three English knights are shocked to learn that Orkney has been at war with England. Morgause heads south to England in order to reconcile with the English, and brings with her children and the three knights. Arthur holds Pellinore's wedding to Piggy, as he remembers Pellinore fondly as being the first knight he ever met. At the same time, St. Toirdelbach also has a marriage. After the ceremony, Morgause seduces Arthur and becomes pregnant. It is then that Merlyn, far away in North Humberland, remembers that he had forgotten to tell Arthur that Morgause was Arthur's half-sister. Therefore, Arthur's adultery is also incest, a very grave sin. Morgause becomes pregnant with Mordred, who will one day come to ruin his father's kingdom. |
Dragons of Glory | null | null | Dragons of Glory is both a sourcebook and a strategic-level board wargame which depicts the overall war between the draconians and the defenders of Krynn. The set describes the war and the opposing armies, using Battlesystem statistics for both sides. Dragons of Glory is a simulation game, designed to allow players to produce their own historical timeline of the events in the world of Krynn for an ongoing Dragonlance campaign. By keeping a record of forces' positions over time, news can be related to the player characters, who can encounter various armies, creatures, or leaders at appropriate points. |
Dreamside | Graham Joyce | 2,001 | The novel opens in February 1986 with Lee Peterson waking up and going about his daily routine before heading to work. But something is off. Lee takes an egg from the refrigerator and tries to break it into a frying pan. It doesn't break. He tries again; it wobbles. Lee then wakes up. He begins his routine again only to wake up again. This happens a number of times, like the peeling of one layer of onion off another. Lee calls these occurrences repeaters. The phone rings and he wakes up again to hear a voice that he hadn't heard since his college days: Ella Innes. The first thing they say to each other is that it's happening again. They thought they could escape Dreamside only to find that over ten years later, it is once again worming its tendrils back into their lives. Lee and Ella meet to discuss why this was happening to them now and what to do about it. Believing that either Brad or Honora is traveling to Dreamside and causing the effects to manifest in the others, Ella convinces Lee that they must find their other two classmates. Lee reluctantly agrees to go find Brad while Ella searches for a reclusive Honora. The novel flashes back twelve years earlier to April 1974 when Lee, wanting desperately to start a conversation with Ella, joins a lucid dreaming study that she shows interest in. The group consists of a variety of students, some pretending that they lucid dream and those that legitimately can. Over the semester, the group dwindles to a few students. At the end, Professor L.P. Burns picks Ella and Lee along with Brad and Honora. Burns' decision to select two pairs of the opposite sex may have been deliberate: over the course of the study, Lee and Ella become intimate. Brad, an obnoxious yet skilled lucid dreamer, wishes the same scenario between him and the shy Honora. The professor is conducting a double-blind study. The lucid dreaming serves as a distraction to study group dynamics. However, Burns' interest in the dream data increases as the four began showing promising results with the exercises. Brad and Ella are the first to contact one another in a shared lucid dream. The dreamscape mirrored a park setting that the couple had copulated in near the beginning of their relationship. Brad and Honora have less luck. The Professor, wishing to set the foundation for a share dream space between the four, takes the students for a weekend vacation to a rural cabin owned by a colleague of his. A few miles down the road is a scenic lake with a single ancient tree leaning over it. After the trip, the four finally meet in Dreamside. This world vaguely mimics the lake area. As Lee and Ella perform sexual experiments in Dreamside, Brad aggressively pursues Honora in hopes of being able to experience what the other couple is. Honora rejects him, saying that she wishes to remain a virgin. Brad argues that it wouldn't count in Dreamside. Around this same time, the group discovers certain frightening aspects of Dreamside. If they stop paying attention to themselves, the dreams begin to meld and sink into the ground, water, or tree. Also, the occurrence of repeaters have increased. The students feel as if the waking world and the dreaming world are beginning to interweave. Concerned, Professor Burns decides to bring the experiment to a conclusion. Before the matter can be discussed further, the students find out the next day that Burns has died. Against Professor Burns' wishes, Brad, Lee, and Honora decide to continue the experiments. During one particular session, Brad finally forces himself upon Honora in Dreamside and rapes her. Honora wakes up in her own bed to find that her sheets are stained with blood. At this point Honora goes into seclusion and withdraws from any more experiments. The novel flashes back into the present where Ella finds Honora who is now a grade school teacher. Honora confides with Ella that she had a miscarriage in the real world, but gave birth to a daughter in Dreamside. This girl, who is now approximately twelve years of age, is now making appearances in the waking world. The four dreamers meet together in the real once again and try to figure out how to rectify the problem they left behind. Then one night they are all pulled in back to Dreamside. The world is now ice-covered and barren. A hurricane-strength storm whips through the dream and in the middle of it, they find Honora and Brad's daughter. They try to escape, but the storm rages on. Honora lets go of the others, saying that the girl wants her to join her in the raging waters. Brad chases after her and pulls her from the water before either falling or jumping in. He's never found, in either world. |
Knitting Under the Influence | null | null | Sometimes it feels like their weekly knitting circle is the only thing that keeps Kathleen, Sari, and Lucy from falling apart. Their fine-gauge scarves may look fabulous, but their lives are starting to unravel... For years, beautiful, flighty Kathleen has been living off of her famous actress sisters. When she moves out, she misses her life of luxury and begins to think that marrying rich might be an easy way to get it back. Lucy is dating the man of her dreams-gorgeous, a brilliant scientist, going places-but when an animal rights group targets him, she wonders whose side she's really on. And Sari finds herself suddenly face-to-face again with the "it" boy from high school who still has "it"- he's gorgeous, sensitive, and kind, and he has a son who needs Sari's help. But can she ever forgive him for what he did to her brother a decade ago? Caught between life, love, and pursuit of the perfect cast-on, these three friends learn that there are never any easy answers, except maybe one-that when the going gets tough, the tough gets knitting. |
The Armageddon Rag | George R. R. Martin | 1,983 | Frustrated former hippie novelist Sandy Blair becomes involved in the investigation of the brutal murder of rock promoter Jamie Lynch: the heart had been torn from Lynch's body. Lynch had managed several bands, including the legendary rock and roll group, the Nazgûl (named for the demonic creatures in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings). He was found dead on the tenth anniversary of the Nazgûl's break up, his bloody body placed on top of the band's West Mesa concert poster; during that concert at West Mesa, New Mexico, the Nazgûl's lead singer Patrick Henry "Hobbit" Hobbins had been mysteriously murdered. Lynch's high-profile death soon opens the door for a Nazgûl reunion tour, which slowly begins to eerily mirror the events of their original West Mesa tour. Interviewing the surviving members of the band while tracking down his old friends from the 1960s, Blair meditates on the meaning of the flower power generation as he cris-crosses the U. S. He eventually becomes the Nazgûl's press agent and is soon swept up in the frenzy of their successful reunion tour and an oncoming supernatural convergence, whose nature he must uncover in order to solve the murders of Lynch and Hobbins. The novel is notable for the detailed account of the history and repertoire of its imaginary rock band, including concert set lists and album track timings. Each of the novel's chapter headings open with actual famous rock lyrics, whose meanings resonate throughout that chapter. |
Nineteen Minutes | Jodi Picoult | 2,007 | The story begins on March 6, 2007 in the small town of Sterling, New Hampshire, tracking the lives of a number of characters on an "ordinary day." The characters include Alex Cormier, a superior court judge; her daughter Josie, a junior in high school; Lacy, Lewis, and Peter Houghton; Detective Patrick Ducharme; and several victims-to-be. At the local high school, Sterling High, the story follows a routine day of students in classes, at the gym, and in the cafeteria. Suddenly, a loud bang is heard from the parking lot, which turns out to be a bomb set off in Matt Royston's car. As the students are distracted by the noise, gun shots are fired. When Patrick, the only detective on the Sterling police force, arrives at Sterling High, he searches the school to seek out the gunman, who is alleged to be a student. After passing several dead and wounded victims, Patrick traps and arrests the shooter, Peter Houghton, in the locker room, where he finds two students, Josie Cormier and Matt Royston, lying on the floor surrounded in blood. While Matt is dead, having been the only victim shot twice, Josie is not seriously injured, but only shocked: she cannot remember what happened. The shooting kills ten people (nine students and one teacher) and wounds many other people. Throughout the book, time flashes back and forth between events before and after the shooting. In the past, the reader learns that Peter and Josie were once close friends. Peter was frequently the target of severe bullying at school, and Josie often stuck up for him. The friends slowly drifted apart as they got older: Josie joined the popular crowd in order to protect her own interests, seeing her relationship to Peter as embarrassing. The story pictures Peter as an outcast at home as well; Peter believes his older brother Joey is favored by their parents. Joey is a popular straight-A student and athlete, but feels it necessary to ridicule Peter to protect his reputation, even fabricating a story that Peter was adopted. When Joey is killed in a car accident in 2006, Lacy and Lewis Houghton are too upset to pay attention to their remaining son, causing a bigger rift between Peter and his parents. In their sophomore year, Josie begins dating Matt, a popular jock who leads his friends Drew Girard and John Eberhard in bullying Peter. Matt often calls Peter "homo" and "fag," leading Peter to question his sexual orientation. The bullying intensifies once Matt begins dating Josie, in his possessive efforts to keep her away from other boys. On one occasion, Peter approaches Josie after school to try talking to her. Matt beats him up, leaving Peter humiliated in front of the school. The flashbacks also reveal several subplots: the difficult relationship between Josie and her single mother Alex, Alex's dilemma of being a judge and a mother, Peter's escape from bullying into to the world of video games, Josie's fear of falling out of the popular crowd and her suicide back-up plan when she does, Matt's abusive behavior toward Josie, Josie's pregnancy and subsequent miscarriage, as well as Lewis Houghton's hunting lessons with his son Peter. One month before the shooting, Peter realizes that he has feelings for Josie, and sends her an email expressing his love. Courtney Ignatio reads this email before Josie and has Drew forward it to the entire school. Courtney then convinces Peter that Josie likes him. Peter asks Josie to join him later during lunch, only to suffer public humiliation as Matt pulls down Peter's pants and exposes his genitals to a cafeteria full of students. Peter's psychotic break is triggered on the morning of the shooting when he turns on his computer and accidentally opens the email he wrote to Josie. After the shooting, Peter is sent to jail while the trial proceeds. The probable cause hearing is waived as Peter admits to killing ten people and wounding nineteen others. Jordan, Peter's defense attorney, uses battered person syndrome caused by severe bullying and abuse as a basis to convince the jury that Peter’s actions were justified as a result of his suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Jordan argues that he was in a dissociative state at the time of the shooting. In the final stage of the trial, Josie reveals that she was the one who shot Matt the first time after grabbing a gun that fell out of Peter's bag. Peter later fired the fatal second shot. Peter promised her he wouldn't tell anyone what she had done, and he kept this promise, happy to have Josie as his friend again. Josie shot Matt because she hated herself for loving him. Peter is convicted of eight counts of first-degree murder and two counts of second-degree murder (manslaughter) and is sentenced to life in prison. A month afterward, Peter commits suicide by stuffing a sock into his throat. At the end of the book, one year from the date of the massacre, Josie has received a five-year sentence for accessory of manslaughter and is regularly visited in jail by her mother. Throughout the book, Josie never told the whole story, instead repeating, "I can't remember." When Josie admits to shooting Matt, Peter's sentence is reduced. Alex and Patrick, who are expecting their first child, walk the halls of the high school. Sterling High has been extensively remodeled after the shooting. The cafeteria, the gym and locker room where the massacre took place have been replaced by a large glass atrium with a memorial to the dead in the center, a row of ten white chairs bolted to the floor. A plaque declares the building "A Safe Harbor." |
The Cat Who Played Brahms | Lilian Jackson Braun | 1,987 | Jim Qwilleran decides to get out of the city for a while and go on vacation to Moose County, Pickax, in the countryside. He stays at a lakeside cabin, owned by his old friend, Aunt Fanny. He has plans to write a book, however his plans get delayed when a peaceful fishing trip catches a body. Or is it simply an old tire, like the locals claim? |
Wolf Moon | Charles de Lint | 1,988 | A werewolf is hunted by a harper; trying to escape, Kern finds himself at an inn and decides to stay. His past has a tale of trying to find acceptance as a man and a werewolf and being nearly killed for revealing what he truly is. He decides at this inn to love the woman there and never reveal his animal nature. However, the harper has found him and threatens everything Kern now holds dear. |
No Name | Wilkie Collins | 1,862 | The story begins in 1846, at Combe-Raven in West Somerset, the country residence of the happy Vanstone family. The first scene is a wonderfully dramatic legal thriller. The reader is introduced to Mr Andrew Vanstone, Mrs Vanstone and their two daughters Norah, age 26, happy and quiet, and the irrepressible Magdalen, just 18, beautiful but with a steely jaw. They live in peace and contentment, looked after by their governess, Miss Garth. Magdalen likes nothing better than to read at her window while her personal maid combs through and through her long hair. “Private theatricals!” is the cry as she signs up for a performance of Sheridan’s “The Rivals”. She finds herself a talented actress and falls in love with Frank Clare, the good for nothing but handsome son of a neighbour, whom she entices into the play. They are to be married, their fathers agree, and then the bottom drops out of their world. Mr Vanstone is killed in a local train crash, and Mrs Vanstone dies in childbirth. The girls discover from the lawyer Mr Pendril that their parents have only been married a few months and the wedding invalidated their will (which left everything to the daughters). The daughters have no name, no rights, no property and the entire family fortune is inherited by an older brother Michael Vanstone who has been estranged from the family for many years. With the help only of their loyal governess Miss Garth, the two girls set out to make their own way in the world. From the second scene onwards, the character of the novel completely changes. It becomes comic as the confidence tricksters try to outdo each other. This scene is in York, where Magdalen enlists the help of Captain Wragge, a distant relative of her mother’s and a professional swindler. He helps get Magdalen started on the stage in return for a share of the proceeds. His wife Matilda, a huge clown of a lady, has to be kept in check. Her head is full of recipes and dressmaking. Scene three is in Vauxhall Walk, Lambeth. Magdalen, having earned some money, forsakes the stage and plots to get her inheritance back. Michael Vanstone has died and his only son, Noel Vanstone is sickly and looked after by his housekeeper, Virginie Lecount, a shrewd woman who hopes to inherit his money. Magdalen goes to Lambeth disguised as Miss Garth to see how the land lies, but Mrs Lecount sees through her disguise and cuts a bit of cloth from the hem of her brown alpaca dress as a keepsake. Scene four is in Aldborough, Suffolk, where Magdalen tries to carry out her plot to regain her inheritance by marrying Noel Vanstone under an assumed name, with Captain and Mrs Wragge posing as her uncle and aunt. Wragge and Lecount plot and plot in their attempts to outdo each other. In the end, Lecount is sent on a false errand to Zurich, and Magdalen and Noel are married. Captain Wragge arranges the marriage on condition that he will never have to see Magdalen again once it has happened. Scene five is in Balliol Cottage, Dumfries. Noel is alone, as his wife has left to visit her sister Norah in London. Mrs Lecount is back from Zurich and explains who his wife really is, with the help of the cut bit of cloth from the brown placa dress. Noel at her direction rewrites his will, cutting off his wife and leaving a legacy to Lecount and everything else to Admiral Bartram his cousin. He encloses a secret letter, asking Admiral Bartram that the money be passed to young George Bartram, but only on the condition that he marry someone not a widow within six months, thus ensuring that Magdalen cannot marry George for the money. The strain of this scheming is all too much and he dies from a weak heart. Scene six is St John's Wood where Magdalen has lodgings. Estranged from Norah and from Miss Garth, who she thinks betrayed her husband’s whereabouts to Lecount, she hatches a crazy plot to disguise herself as a maid and infiltrate herself into Admiral Bartram’s house to look for the Secret Trust document. Her own maid Louisa helps to train her in return for Magdalen giving her the money to marry her fiance, the father of her illegitimate child, and move to Australia. The Seventh scene is at St Crux on the Marsh Essex and is very gothic, as Magdalen (working under Louisa's name as a parlour maid for Admiral Bartram) stalks through moonlit decaying halls and looks for rusty keys to help her find the all important Secret Trust. Eventually she manages it by following Admiral Bartram as he sleepwalks, but is discovered by his sidekick Mazey and thrown out of the house. The last scene is set in a poor lodging house, Aaron’s Building. Magdalen is ill and destitute, about to be carried off to hospital or the workhouse, when a handsome man appears and rescues her. It is Captain Kirke, a sailor who had seen and become enamored of her at Aldborough. Meanwhile Norah has married George Bartram, thus placing the inheritance back into the Vanstone family. Magdalen, in her illness and recovery, vows to be a better person and never again undertake any malice. Kirke and Magdalen profess their love for one another. |
Marazan | Nevil Shute | 1,926 | Philip Stenning is a commercial pilot, trained during the First World War. After his engine fails, he crashes and is rescued by an escaped convict, Denis Compton, who turns out to have been framed for embezzlement by his Italian half-brother, Baron Rodrigo Mattani, who is smuggling drugs into England. The story tells how Stenning plays a key role in breaking that drug ring. It involves episodes characteristic of Shute: flying, small boat sailing, and a love story. Stenning was a major character in Shute's first (unpublished) novel Stephen Morris. Stenning also crops up as a comparatively minor character in Shute's next two novels So Disdained (1928) and Lonely Road (1932). |
Orlovi Rano Lete | null | 1,959 | The book involves several young boys and girls and their role in assisting the Partisans in fighting the Germans invading Yugoslavia during World War II. There are allusions throughout to mythology such as the children's fear of the drekavac (monster) which they are told lives in the forest. The children are forced to conquer their supposed fear in order to assist the Partisans. |
So Disdained | Nevil Shute | 1,928 | Peter L. Moran, the narrator, is agent to Lord Arner. Driving home after a dinner in Winchester, he picks up Maurice Lenden, who in 1917 had been a fellow pilot in the Royal Flying Corps. The story tells how Lenden had been flying a photographic espionage mission for the Russians, how he came to be doing that, and discusses the morality of acting as a traitor to his country. As in Marazan the book expresses respect for the Italian Fascist movement of the time. The validity, or otherwise, of that political position requires considerable historical perspective. Philip Stenning (the first person narrator of Marazan) appears again in this novel, once again portrayed as a 'rough diamond' with a debatable sense of moral justice. |
The Throwback | Michael Carroll | null | The plot is based around the ancient Flawse family, landed gentry based at the falling-down Flawse Hall, (near "Flawse Fell") in the wilds of Northumberland, just south of the Anglo-Scottish border. The single remaining family member is a cantankerous octenegarian named Edwin Tyndale Flawse. His illegitimate grandson Lockhart (aka "the Bastard") combines sexual and educational innocence with an alarming propensity for violence when he or his wife is threatened. The old man was born in the late 19th century, and his main aim in the very autumn years of his life is to find the father of his bastard grandchild and flog him within an inch of his life. The plot involves the pair making a double marriage while on a cruise, Edwin to the grasping middle-aged Mrs. Sandicott (who desires to marry a very rich old man with as short a lifespan remaining as possible) and Lockhart to her innocent and beautiful daughter Jessica (who knows as little of real life as he does and wants nothing more than a stereotypical male hero). One plot strand has the older couple moving to Flawse Hall; the pair immediately begin fighting as she realises that the old man has no immediate intention of dying and that Flawse Hall is not the aristocractic seat she imagined. The house has no electricity or modern appliances, and is located miles from the nearest town of Black Pockrington and the nearest railway station of Hexham, and thanks to a clause in her new husband's will although she will inherit everything after he dies, she can never leave or else she'll forfeit the entire estate. The other strand has Lockhart and Jessica moving to Sandicott Crescent in the south London suburb of Purley and fighting an innocents' battle together against the modern world. Lockhart is not at home in his new suburban environment and subsequently loses his job in his mother-in-law's accountancy firm (courtesy of and in retaliation by his mother-in-law when Edwin's will includes another clause stating that if Lockhart ever finds his natural father the entire Flawse estate and inheritance immediately reverts to him) and longs for home. Unable to get another job since he doesn't statistically exist (thanks to his grandfather's refusal to register him with a birth certificate or with the National Health Service), Lockhart embarks on a prolonged, complicated, merciless and ultimately successful campaign to evict the tenants of the houses owned by Jessica so that they can be sold. The finale has the two strands reunited back in Northumberland and involves the inevitable discovery that the spirit of the Flawse family lives on in "the Bastard" but is spiced up by several deaths, the inclusion of a human taxidermist, extensive use of sound equipment and a vicious battle with the taxmen and "the excise men" (Her Majesty's Customs and Excise Department)). |
The Great Pursuit | Tom Sharpe | 1,977 | Frensic and Futtle is a small and successful literary agency. But following a successful court case by a woman who claimed to have been libeled by one of their authors, the agency rapidly loses business. One day, a manuscript for a book called Pause O Men for the Virgin arrives at the agency, together with a note from the author's solicitor, saying that the author wishes to remain anonymous and that the agency has carte blanche on how it deals with the book. The book turns out to deal with the love affair between an 80-year old woman and a 17-year old youth. The populist American publisher Hutchmeyer agrees to sign a deal to publish the book in the United States for $2 million, providing the author carries out a promotional tour of the country. Sonia and Frensic decide to use aspiring but unpublished author Peter Piper to stand in for the anonymous author. But when Piper receives a proof copy of Pause from the publisher by mistake, it takes a certain amount of persuasion and arm-twisting from Sonia Futtle to convince Piper to travel to America. |
Nappily Ever After | null | 2,000 | The novel tells the story of a young woman, Venus Johnston, who has grown weary of her four-year releationship with her boyfriend, and having to maintain her long, dark hair. Resolving to create a new, independent life for herself, she leaves her boyfriend and cuts her hair to an almost-bald stubby look. Her ex-boyfriend shortly begins dating another woman, sparking feelings of doubt and jealousy in Venus. |
The Island of the Mighty | Evangeline Walton | 1,970 | Gwynedd in north Wales is ruled by Math, son of Mathonwy, whose feet must be held by a virgin at all times except while he is at war. Math's nephew Gilfaethwy is in love with Goewin, the current footholder, and Gilfaethwy's brother Gwydion tricks Math into going to war against Pryderi so Gilfaethwy can have access to her. Gwydion kills Pryderi, Prince of Dyfed, in single combat, and Gilfaethwy rapes Goewin. Math marries Goewin in compensation for her rape, and banishes Gwydion and Gilfaethwy, transforming them into a breeding pair of deer, then pigs, then wolves. After three years they are restored to human form and return. Math needs a new footholder, and Gwydion suggests his sister, Arianrhod, but when Math magically tests her virginity, she gives birth to two sons. One, Dylan, immediately takes to the sea. The other is raised by Gwydion, but Arianrhod swears that he will never have a name or arms unless she gives them to him, and refuses to do so. Gwydion tricks her into naming him Llew Llaw Gyffes (Llew Skilful Hand) and giving him arms. She then swears he will never have a wife of any race living on earth, so Gwydion and Math make him a beautiful wife from flowers, and name her Blodeuwedd ("Flowers"). Blodeuwedd falls in love with a passing hunter called Goronwy, and they plot to kill Llew. Blodewedd tricks Llew into revealing the means by which he can be killed, but when Goronwy attempts to do the deed, Llew escapes, though wounded, transformed into an eagle. Gwydion finds Llew and transforms him back into human form, and turns Blodeuwedd into an owl (Blodeuwedd, literally "Flower Face," means "Owl"). Goronwy offers to compensate Llew, but Llew insists on returning the blow that was struck against him. He kills Goronwy with his spear, which is thrown so hard it pierces him through the stone he is hiding behind. |
Rab and his Friends | John Brown | null | "Rab and His Friends" is a simple story of how John Brown's teacher and employer, Doctor James Syme, taught and operated. The other main characters are Rab, a ferocious dog, his owner the Howgate Carter Jamie, and the Carter's ailing wife. The story begins with a fight between Rab and a bull-terrier and ends with the faithful sheep dog's funeral. Ailie had a lump in her breast. “One fine October afternoon I ( the student ) was leaving the Hospital and saw the large gates open and in walked Rab with that great and easy saunter of his. After him came Jess, now white from age, with her cart and in it a woman carefully wrapped up, the Carrier leading the horse anxiously and looking back. When he saw me, James, (for his name was James Noble), he made a curt and grotesque bow, and said, Maister John, this is the mistress; she has got a trouble in her breest some kind of income we are thinking. By this time I saw the woman's face; she was sitting on a sack filled with straw with her husband's plaid round her and had his big coat with its large white metal buttons over her feet. Had Solomon in all his glory been handing down the Queen of Sheba at his palace gate, he would not have done it more daintily that did James the Howgate Carrier when he had lifted down Ailie, his wife. Rab led the way into the consulting room, grim and comic, willing to be happy and confidential, Ailie sat down, undid her open gown and her lawn handkerchief round her neck and without a word showed me her right breast. I looked at and examined it carefully. What could I say? There it was, hard as stone, a centre of horrid pain. Next day my master, the surgeon, examined Ailie. It could be removed; it would give her speedy relief. She curtsied. "Tomorrow” said the kind surgeon - a man of few words. The following day, at noon, the students came in, hurrying up the stair, eager to secure good places. The theatre is crowded; much talk and fun, and all the cordiality and stir of youth. The surgeon with his staff of assistants is there. In comes Ailie: one look at her quiets and abates the eager students. That beautiful old woman is too much for them; they sit down, and are dumb. These rough boys feel the power of her presence. She walks in quickly, but without haste; dressed in her mutch, her neckerchief, her white dimity short-gown, black bombazeen petticoat, showing her white worsted stockings and her carpet shoes. Ailie stepped up, and laid herself on the table, as her friend the surgeon told her; arranged herself, gave a rapid look at James, shut her eyes, rested herself on me, and took my hand. The operation was at once begun; it was necessarily slow; chloroform was then unknown. The pale face showed its pain, but was still and silent. Rab's soul was working within him; he growled and gave now and then a sharp impatient yelp; but James had him firm. It is over; she is dressed, steps gently and decently down from the table, looks for James; then turning to the surgeons and the students, she curtsies, - and in a low, clear voice, begs their pardon if she has behaved ill. All of us wept like children; the surgeon happed her up carefully, - and, resting on James and me, Ailie went to her room. We put her to bed. James said, 'Maister John, I'll be her nurse”, and as swift and tender as any woman, was that horny-handed, peremptory little man. As before, they spoke little. For some days Ailie did well. The wound healed 'by the first intention'; for as James said, 'Oor Ailie's skin's ower clean to beil'. The students came in quiet and anxious. She said she liked to see their young, honest faces. Four days after the operation, my patient had a sudden and long shivering, a 'groosin', as she called it. Her eyes were too bright, her cheek coloured; she was restless, and ashamed of being so; mischief had begun. On looking at the wound, a blush of red told the secret; her pulse was rapid, her breathing anxious and quick, she wasn’t herself, as she said, and was vexed at her restlessness. We tried what we could, but she died in three to four days. No asepsis, a dog in theatre and no anaesthesia. Speed, trust and hope. |
The Book of Sorrows | null | null | The Book of Sorrows begins almost exactly where the last book ended. The great war is over and Chauntecleer and his animals are all mending the damage that it left. Chauntecleer leads them on a journey to find a new resting place, while the climate slowly changes from summer to autumn. Early in their journey the animals are obligated to care for Russell, the fox, one of the main characters from the last novel, who suffered poisoning from biting into too many basilisks during the conflict. Russel's injury has caused his lips and nose to crack and ooze. It seems that it will never heal because the fox has trouble keeping quiet. Pertelote, Chauntecleer's wife, is reduced to drugging the fox with a narcotic in hopes that it will keep him from using his mouth long enough for it to heal. Freitag, the mouse brother who is closest to Russel, tries continually to get him to stop talking, but- of course- the fox doesn’t listen. He instead brings Freitag to a nearby stream where he emphatically tells him how to catch minnows with his tail until his lips and nose begin to crack and bubble. The fox eventually breaks down during his lesson to the mouse and cries out, "I only want to talk!" The animals hear him and come to calm him down. He is near death and his injuries have retrogressed. The fox seems to have lost his will to live, for he is no longer speaking. Chauntecleer begins to help Russell eat, by first placing the food in the foxes mouth, and mechanically grinds the fox's teeth with his own wings. But the poison has rotted the roots of Russels' teeth, which loosen during Chauntecleer's feedings. Chauntecleer then begins chewing the food with his own mouth, and spitting it into the foxes, but it soon becomes apparent to him that he is feeding a lifeless corpse. Devastated by his death, Chauntecleer and his company move farther away from the land where the war took place. Along the way they contact a beetle named Black Lazarus, a grave digger. Chauntecleer requests a special grave for the fox, one by the great ocean, Wyrsmere, which requires that the beetle first line the grave with stone, lest the body be washed up. The animals have a service for their fallen comrade and then continue on, looking for a new resting place. Eventually they come to a pleasant hemlock tree rooted near a river. Here the animals make their new home. In a canyon nearby, two coyotes are making a new home for their growing family. They find a crippled bird who can only say two things: “Jug Jug” and “Tereu.” What is unknown to the coyotes is that the bird is guarding a hole that is somewhere in the canyon- one that, when the bird descended, led her to the center of the earth where she found Wyrm who managed to trick her into drinking some of his putrid essence, causing her tongue to rot and crippling her form and speech. At the hemlock tree it is discovered that Chauntecleer is on a downward spiral into a deep depression brought on by the loss of Russell and Mundo Cani. At one point the rooster walks down to the river, stands over it and sees his reflection. After a few moments he simply decides to let himself fall into it, and be swept away into the more violent currents. As he is drowning the rooster actually begins to think his end would be for the better, considering his horrible guilt. Just as he is about to die he is rescued; pulled ashore by the Dun Cow, who begins to clean him. Chauntecleer questions why she decided to save him, and feels that he cannot stand her cleaning him, for he is completely undeserving of compassion. The Dun Cow leaves him, and the rooster resolves to simply lie there, and sleep, for as long as he could stand. The animals manage to get by without Chauntecleers attention. Instead the rooster simply walks about in a fog of delirium and self pity. Even when he is sleeping, he suffers, for in his dreams he hears horrible singing that taunts him in his sorrow. Chauntecleer only becomes more conscious when he comes upon the sight of Chalcedony, one of his hens, feasting on nothing but locust shells. The fatter hens have left her nothing in the way of seed or grass, and thus she is emaciated. The rooster seeks to console her. He promises to set things right, and to care for her until she is well, for he feels that this may be the only thing he can actually do to earn any sort of redemption; is to try to help others in the present. Unfortunately, though, the rooster is quickly pulled away from the animals again, for the remains of Russell the fox have re-animated due to the dark influence of Wyrm on his body. Pertelote, upon hearing this report from Chauntecleer’s general, John Wesley, rushes to the ocean side, where Russell’s grave is. She gets there in time to see Chauntecleer, bruised and cut, committing the twice killed body to the ocean Wyrmsmere. Pertelote comforts him by holding him and stroking her husband, but he admits that he cannot stand it, for the love of his subjects is more than he thinks he deserves. Ultimately Chauntecleer decides that he can at least do his best to restore some order to his people, and thus keep Chalcedony from starving. The rooster returns with his wife to the hemlock tree where he instates upon his kind a new law. Chauntecleer intends for them now to live in socialism; each animal scouring as much food as they can, and then laying it down in food bins, where it will be distributed evenly among them all. This new form of order comes as a great revival to the animals, which causes their quality of life to improve, and their feeling of leadership returning. Soon, animals from all over begin to come to the hemlock tree, for the cold winter months have made them desperate and hungry, and they all seem willing to file themselves under this new law in exchange for enough to feed their families. The forest comes alive with brotherhood and order, yet the rooster still holds on to a deeply seated depression. This becomes increasingly hard on his wife, as any affection is rejected by Chauntecleer in his guilt. The rooster’s dreams also become worse, as the evil songs begin to sing of Russell and Mundo Cani. Chauntecleer begins to think that these dreams may actually be the product of Wyrm. In the background he can always hear a woman’s wretched sobbing and two completely indistinguishable sounds. Chauntecleer spends his nights stalking around his territory, still shrouded in a mist of sorrow. Chauntecleer’s redemption finally comes to him in the form of a coyote named Ferric, who has come to find food for his newborn children. Upon finding Chauntecleer’s kingdom, he integrates himself and begins taking sufficient provisions for his family. Ferric does this a few more times before he and Chauntecleer actually communicate. He learns about the coyote’s home, his children and wife, and the bird with no tongue. When he inquires the name of that bird, Ferric only knows to repeat the only things that the bird can say: “Jug Jug” and “Tereu.” These are the words that Chauntecleer hears in his nightmares, which lead him to believe that the bird would know how to travel into the earth. Chauntecleer’s mood improves. He begins crowing in triumph and rallying the animals together to his cause. He promises them all that he has the ability to go and rescue their savior, Mundo Cani, and thus bring back to their society the greatness of the times before the war. At first, Pertelote is overwhelmed with excitement and enthusiasm over her husband's newfound passion for life, but that is soon replaced with dread when she comes to understand her husband’s plan. Her fears that Chauntecleer's mission is nothing short of suicide are confirmed when he confides to her of his attempt to rescue Mundo Cani and defeat Wyrm and he knows that his chances of survival are slim. The next morning Pertelote sees him standing by the hemlock with a band of animals that have agreed to go with him to where the coyote lives. Chauntecleer mounts a black stags antlers and rides off as the herd of animals set out on a journey to redeem their leader. Eventually, the animals are led to the crippled bird by Ferric the coyote. Chaunteleceer asks the bird to reveal the location of Wyrm. The bird complies by leading him behind two bushes where he finds the opening. Chauntecleer enters the darkness followed by his general, John Wesley. John Wesley traverses the cave to the bowels of the planet, where he finds the skeletal remains of Wyrm, covered in small glowing worm-like parasites that act as a light source. The weasel finds Chauntecleer sitting inside the Wyrm’s skull, clutching a smaller skull in his wing. John asks if he has defeated Wyrm, to which Chauntecleer replies that Wyrm had been dead when he found him, and that his essence had been consumed by the parasites all around them. He then reveals that the skull he is holding is the head of Mudo Cani, who died after three days in the earth. Chauntecleer feels that he is robbed of his only chance to redeem himself, and therefore feels that he should simply lie in the earth until he expires. John Wesley refuses to give up on his master, however, and to coaxes him back to the surface. The Weasel eventually steals the precious skull from Chauntecleer’s grasp and runs all the way to the entrance with it, taunting Chauntecleer to keep him following. The two animals emerge from the hole in the earth; the weasel first, and then Chantecleer. Chauntecleer attacks the weasel with his spur, cutting at John Wesley’s haunch, which he just brushes off and continues running through the canyon. The rooster in all of his rage, leaps onto the black stag that had carried him there, and commands him to take after the weasel, reinforcing it with a sharp jab of his other spur, deep into the stag’s side. The animal reacts to the pain by starting a stampede of all the confused animals that had come along with Chauntecleer. The weasel manages to stay ahead of them just long enough to reach the coyote’s den where one of the young coyotes comes to John Wesley's rescue. The Weasel tries to warn the young coyote of the incoming danger, but not before his mother, Ferric’s wife Rachel comes out to see him as well. In the end, the stampede of animals comes rushing after John Wesley, and though he manages to escape with his life, the coyotes are crushed under the stampeding herd. The animals scatter, and the rooster reclaims the skull from where John Wesley left it and begins his long walk home, leaving the two dead coyotes and a hidden general alone. Meanwhile, the animals at the hemlock tree are facing an oncoming snow storm, and with Chauntecleer away, the full force of leadership begins to bear down on Pertelote’s head. The weather continues to grow harsher, and although Pertelote crushes any rebellion with the memory of Chauntecleer, the unity of the paradise begins to fade. Eventually the rooster returns home in very poor shape, for the long stormy path that he’s taken has left him dirty and cold. The animals are indifferent when they see him, as they were expecting to see the glorious party return with him alongside Mudo Cani yet find only a tattered rooster with a skull. Pertelote confronts Chauntecleer about his journey, and is solemn when she hears bout Mundo Cani and Wyrm’s death. Chauntecleer says that now the only thing left for him to do is give Mudo Cani a proper burial, and with that he leans in to embrace his wife, who is taken back as one of the glowing string-like parasites comes climbing out of his nasal passages. Chauntecleer feels shunned by his wife and decides to rest in the hemlock tree. By now the bird can hear the voices of the worms inside his head, even when he is not asleep. As he sits on a branch of the hemlock tree, they tell him that the animals are plotting a revolt for his unfulfilled promises. In fact, the wolves in the area are actually trying to turn the animals against their ruler, threatening to kill anyone who is loyal to him, but the paranoia that the parasites instill in Chauntecleer only makes the situation worse. It is when he is sitting in the tree that he begins to notice the scared accusing look in all the animals faces, and combined with the voices’ subliminal suggestions, their staring causes him to leap up in a bit of rage and crow, “What have I ever done to you?” After this outburst the animals begin to disperse to unknown fates, and soon, all but the original hens have left. In a bout of insanity the rooster leaves the hemlock and goes with the skull of Mudo Cani to bury it. Pertelote goes after him, following him all the way to the ruins of the fortress that was built during the summer’s war, knowing that the wolves would surely find him there and kill him. She tries to confess her love to him, and explain her revulsion earlier, but he disregards it all, saying that she must have been a liar from the beginning who never loved him. Eventually the wolves arrive to kill Chauntecleer, but he manages to defeat them in a glorious battle, using only his wits and war-spurs. He is left quite ravaged by the fight, though, both mentally and physically. The rooster can see that all of the animals that had forsaken him before have returned to see his great battle- even Ferric, whose wife and children were killed by Chauntecleer’s actions. The rooster’s pain climaxes when he discovers that Ferric is so quick to forgive him, and begins to lick him where he has been wounded. Chauntecleer cannot stand to accept the love of the Coyote and recoils from him. In the end, Chauntecleer is in so much pain from the suffering he has caused, confusion he feels over his people and his wife, and sick influence of the parasites inside of him, that he can only resolve to take his war-spur and cut himself open, and let all of the evil worms within him drain out with his blood. Pertelote comes over to him and holds him gently, singing to him, and trying to comfort him in his last moments of life. Chauntecleer appears to have some sort of relief in death, and the last thing he says before passing on is that he could not manage to bury the skull of Mudo Cani, because his nose was far to big to fit in any of the holes he dug. |
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