Furies of Calderon by Jim Butcher

Certainly a departure from the Harry Dresden books. Dresden falls into the "urban fantasy" genre, I suppose - a wizard whose base of operations is Chicago. This is high fantasy, with a twist.

I'm not sure it is exactly "a" twist. Every fantasy convention is turned just a few degrees off standard settings. For example, furies are entities associated with the four classic elements - air, earth, fire, and water - but they can also act as familiars for certain individuals. In fact, everyone "has" a fury - except one boy, Tavi.

Tavi takes the Frodo role - of the helpless, hapless hero, or maybe he is more like Garion, who turns out to be the high king or some such thing, raised in ignorance for his protection. There are definitely hints that he is much more than he seems. It was a little obvious at the end to have him blow off the awards ceremony with the First Lord to go fetch home his sheep.

I read this several years ago - and didn't remember enough to read book two - I think there are six books in the stack. I don't think I can go on immediately - there was so much action that I am really tired. Maybe I'll go back to one or another of the mystery series that I have been rereading - while I debate whether or not to go ahead and buy the Kindle versions - they would be so much easier to read.

Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery

I've reread this more recently than I had A Girl of the Limberlost. I was already doing quite a bit of reading on my computer desktop rather than on paper and downloaded almost all of the Anne books from Gutenberg just a couple of years ago. I had to order the last few on paper - those were the ones that I had never read before - on into the life and times of Anne and Gilbert's children.

I don't think Mother read these. I can't imagine why not, but I don't remember that she ever recommended them. My siblings may correct me at will - not that they need permission.

Anne is a quirky and engaging character. If the whole tone is a bit sentimental - consider the period. Anne gets into as much trouble as could be expected of any male character, but she is all girl - the hair dye episode is priceless - and flavoring the cake with liniment - and scaring herself silly with imagined ghosts - and taking a dare and falling off the roof - and on and on.

This is just a very satisfying read. I suppose there is also the comfort of familiarity, and now I have to decide whether or not to keep on going through all of them again.

Rite of Passage by Alexei Panshin

I never forgot that this was a terrific book - but I didn't actually remember much about it. Maybe the morals are a little pointed, but in a book aimed at young people that isn't necessarily a bad thing. I remembered vaguely that the overt rite of passage is the Trial - the children of the ship are dropped on a planet to survive for 30 days. I also remembered that it turned out very badly for the group of which Mia, our heroine, is a part.

That much reminds me of one of the Heinlein juvies - Tunnel in the Sky, maybe? At any rate, the final exam for their survival course is being dropped (via some transmat device) on a primitive world to survive. Turns out that the world is much nastier than anticipated - and some cosmic something or other disrupts the gate and they can't get them back. In this book, the world is colonized by humans and they are the major nasties, but there are also good guys and Mia must revise her prejudices.

Much more of the story takes place in the ship society than during Mia's trial, but the scenarios of bias and self-determination play out in a number of ways leading up to the Trial - and afterwards in the decision of the population of the ship with regard to the planet. Mia must deal with the fact that her adored father, while a truly good man, can be devastatingly wrong.

I am considering the suggestion that I use it as the novel for my English class. It would certainly be on the list of suggested reading if I ever got to teach SF.

The Long Walk by Stephen King (as Richard Bachman)

Interesting. Similar to The Running Man in some respects. Not so much the game show, or reality TV, feeling - in fact there is only casual mention of local media coming out to get some footage. One hundred boys are selected from the pool of applicants to participate and they start in northern Maine and walk to death. They must walk at a rate no less than four miles per hour and they do not stop until only one of them is still alive. If they slow down, they get three warnings and if they are not back on the pace in 30 seconds they are shot by the monitoring soldiers. No rest breaks, no sleep breaks, no potty breaks, no meal breaks. They are supplied with food and water to consume as they walk. I assume that King did the research on the physiological effects of such a thing; the effects he describes are pretty gruesome.

A little predictable - the narrator is one of the participants - so, since everyone but the winner is dead at the end, it is a fair bet that he is going to win. I suppose that King could have done an All Quiet on the Western Front number, but that doesn't really seem to be his style.

The setting is not so unregenerately distopic as The Running Man, but there are hints. The hero's father is not in the picture because he was "squaded" after speaking too freely against the government in action reminescent of the stories we have heard of the death squads in some parts of the world. In general, it seems very much like America in the fifties, while June Cleaver reigned and everyone went around trying to believe that everything was "jes' fine," to quote Grundoon (sp?) a well-known political figure of the time. Except, of course, for the fact that they selected 100 of thousands of volunteers and killed them one by one.

On a different, but related subject: I love my Kindle!!!!

Ghost Ship by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller

I'm sorry. I have enjoyed this series very much - I have reread all of them several times, and I suppose that I will read future books as well, but I will resent it. There will be more Liaden books - I can't think of anything I have ever read which left more and more blatant openings for future stories. I don't think any of the multitude of story lines was definitively resolved. Consider the pot boiling.

Hangman by Faye Kellerman

So the serial killer and his girlfriend hang the girl and do their best to pin it on an innocent bystander who turns out to be a serial killer in his own right. In addition, a friend of Decker's has gone missing and he suspects the psychotic husband, who runs a string of casinos and brothels and is a contract assassin. The friend has dumped her teenage son who is a general all-round genius and piano virtuoso, on the Deckers. Along about that point it starts to get complicated.

Good storytelling, great characters, I believe that the Kellerman dumps the kid there to give Decker some home interaction and his own kids are pretty well grown and out of trouble. I have missed several of these, but I seem to remember that family interactions are the method Kellerman uses to illuminate Decker's character and she has worked his family out of its troubled youth making it necessary to put one in.

She does a really good job of leading the reader to a conclusion then taking a spin in a totally different direction, keeps it interesting.

A Girl of the Limberlost by Gene Stratton Porter

I know I wrote this up back early in the week when I finished it. Must have been Tuesday - after Body Work and before The Running Man. I remember distinctly because I included a couple of links - I guess I must have been more tired than I thought and forgot to push the "publish post" button after I previewed it. Trust me on the timing, it did NOT take me six days to read The Running Man! If it had, I would never consider it for a developmental English novel.

So, about A Girl of the Limberlost, it was one of my mother's favorite books when she was a girl and she encouraged all of us to read it - and a pack of others by Porter. I did read it, I can't answer for my sisters, but that was many and many a year ago. I quite enjoyed it this time, too, although I don't think I read and reread it as Mother did.

The girl, Elnora, lives on the edge of the Limberlost, which is a real swamp (or was) somewhere in Indiana. She was a country girl and caught and mounted moths to pay her way through high school. The author was a naturalist and the natural history included is quite authentic. In the book, Elnora desperately needs a particular moth, an imperialis, to complete a collection which would finance her first year in college. This moth is so beautiful that in the story a ball gown is made with the moth as inspiration.

There is a lot of discussion of the particularly beautiful large moths, which include the luna moth (which haunts those sleep-aid commercials). We used to see lunas around the trailer we worked in down at the tox lab in central Arkansas. There was another very large moth that we saw as well, and I wondered if that was perhaps it was the imperialis. Naturally, I opened a browser window and googled images for "moth imperialis." As I expected, there were any number of pictures of the moth (not the one we used to see). What I did not expect was a picture of a ball gown. It wasn't the gown from the story, which I don't suppose was ever actually made, this one was based on the luna moth - but there was a reference to the story. The designer explained her reasons for choosing the luna for her inspiration rather that the imperialis as in A Girl of the Limberlost. So (maybe this is why I forgot to publish my post) I spent some time poking around her website. It is fascinating; she is a textile and costume historian and does meticulous reproductions of historical costumes as well as original design work. In case anyone is interested, her URL is http://thedreamstress.com/. If you want to see the luna gown: http://thedreamstress.com/category/costume/luna-moth-gown/.

And besides all that, I did enjoy the book very much. It is definitely old fashioned and perhaps a little too sweet sometimes, but it isn't as ponderous a read as much of the literature of the period. And they all lived happily ever after - and sometimes that is really very nice.

The Running Man by Stephen King (as Richard Bachman)

I said that next I was going to read something different, something not my usual fare, something I had never read before. I think this qualifies. Some time ago, at a student's insistence, I read a novel by Stephen King. It left me uneasy for months. I concluded that King's gift is that he brings horror so close to the mundane that you can't help wondering, just a little bit ...

If I understand correctly, the Bachman books are early works that King published after he was a successful author. That makes sense with what I saw here. It is distopic, and horrific - but not in the way that his more usual books are horror. The events and their world are hideous and dreadful, but not supernatural or perverse.

A colleague wants me to use it as the novel for my English class next semester. I had been thinking of The Hunger Games - and this is in some respects similar. I think it is unfortunate that King used year references in the story - because he wrote it a long time ago and the dates are all in the second half of the twentieth century. I've read enough SF and such that it doesn't bother me, but I'm not sure if kids would cope as well, especially ones who are not particularly strong readers.

It would be fun to let students chose between the two - I can imagine some interesting discussions.

Body Work by Sara Paretsky

V.I. Warshawsky hasn't lost a step since the last one that I read. I guess I am going to have to go back and pick up what I've missed - add those to the list.

In this one, she gets involved quite without deliberate intention in a murder which turns out to be related to another murder and for which an Iraq vet with PTSD is framed. Along the way we draw in a defense contractor, a loan shark/drug kingpin, and a woman whose club act consists of having people paint on her. Oh, and did I forget the woman who plays heavy metal on authentic renaissance period instruments - and V.I.'s cousin Petra?

Lots of characters, lots of Warshawsky-scale action - it kept me turning pages. I have read other books by other writers with fewer characters and a more straight-forward plot which were much more difficult to follow. I am amazed and delighted by the way that Paretsky keeps all the balls in the air without causing me to lose sight of where they all are at any given point in time. Not to mention the way that her descriptions of Chicago in winter make me so very thankful that I no longer live anywhere near there.

A Free Man of Color by Barbara Hambly

Another reread, but what a good one. There are any number of mysteries placed in historical settings, from ancient Rome to medieval England to rennaisance France and even into imaginary futures (e.g. Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov), but this series is set in New Orleans in the first half of the nineteenth century. Americans are moving into the city and the long-standing Creole culture is beginning to crumble from the weight of its own assumptions. The detective in the series is a musician and surgeon - and colored, not black - black implies full African descent, and colored that the individual in question has some white blood.

Benjamin January, the son of one of New Orleans' placees, the mixed blood mistresses of the traditional Creoles, has returned to New Orleans after a number of years in Paris where he studied and practiced medicine, to find the city greatly changed by the shifting power structure. He finds himself the most convenient suspect in the murder of one of the demimonde and must solve the mystery to save his own life as well as a former piano student of his.

Summer School or Why did I think this was such a great idea?

Okay - I promised myself that I would total up pages after I got my research paper turned in, so here goes -
Human Learning by Dr. Jeanne Ormrod - 534
Object Lessons by Eavan Boland - 254
Outside History by Eavan Boland - 152
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte - 258
Shirley by Charlotte Bronte - 608
some of Collected Poems of H.D. - ~80
about half of Uneven Developments - by Mary Poovey 250
Minimum of 8 research sources - 200
total - 2336
Pages written ~40
Two class presentations

Busy four weeks.

Okay, maybe that isn't so much compared to some of the previous months' totals, but if we are going to make that sort of comparison then there needs to be some sort of "page equivalence" factor. A page of Human Learning has at least as many words as four pages of your average murder mystery - and I read the book twice, once before the class began and again on the assignment schedule. That edition of Wuthering Heights only ran 258 pages for the story, but I figure them at about 2 paperback pages each, I've seen Wuthers in fairly normal looking paperbacks, but the print is really small. Throw that into the sum and we're looking at about 5000 pages.

I "reviewed" Wuthering Heights and Shirley when I read them a couple of months ago.

The ed psych book was actually quite entertaining for something of that sort. I might actually send the woman a birthday card. Lots of very real examples which are easy to remember.

Eavan Boland is going on my bedside table permanently - amazing stuff.

I am now looking forward to about six weeks of reading nothing but escapist fiction. I've already started and should finish that one tomorrow. Except, of course, for reading a stack of possible novels for the Developmental English class which I will be teaching this fall. Should be fun after four years of nothing but math.

Pilgrimage by Zenna Henderson

I actually finished this a couple of days ago, but this server was acting up and I couldn't get it posted. Try, try again. I really didn't exactly take the month of June off, no tropical beaches or rustic cabins in the mountains far, far from the madding internet, just summer school. Just summer school - right. Once I get the last "bit" (a 20 page research paper) done, I'll total up the pages I read during the month of June - the total is truly staggering.

This book was my "just a few pages to keep my sanity" reading. I hadn't reread it in years. It is still as magical as it was when I was a kid and read the individual stories in my dad's back issues of Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine. They were mostly printed during the fifties, back in the days when Isaac Asimov was writing snarky footnotes to the "kindly editor" which were printed with responses to the "gentle reader" and every couple of issues had an extremely shaggy dog story featuring the inimitable Ferdinand Feghoot (I believe Asimov was the perpetrator of these as well).

The first of "the people " stories I read was "Gilead," the second in the chronology. Every time I reread it I was in tears for Peter and Bethie. In actual fact, I think the stories stood so well on their own that I would have preferred to see them presented as simply a collection rather than this loose novelization, a la I, Robot. Of course, I do know that short story collections by lesser known (NOT lesser) writers do not sell well. At least, like the Asimov, they didn't mess with the stories at all, just constructed a multi-windowed frame to contain them.