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.