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Mmmm... beauty and the beast, where the beast is a vampire. How intriguing is that? McKinley's writing is always enjoyable, and this book is no exception. Sunshine is a baker who one day reaches the tipping point, and realizes she is fed up with her mundane life at the coffeehouse (where almost all her friends and acquaintances are from), and goes out to the lake. This choice leads to more dangerous choices. To situations most humans would not come out of alive. But Sunshine does -- and brings with her a vampire, the worst of the Others. How is that possible? Can she control her own abilities? What are the desires of her heart?

One of the few people Sunshine knows outside the bakery is her landlady, Yolande. Who happens to be a wardskeeper (someone who is really good at making wards to keep people safe and has earned this honored title). Sunshine is keeping secrets from everyone she loves with nobody to talk to, and one day her seemingly helpless old landlady comes out for a chat. Yolande speaks Sunshine's secrets to her, in such a way that makes Sunshine feel safe and cared for. Keeping secrets from those we love is hard -- and something I'm glad I don't have to do often (although I keep reading books and watching shows about people who do ...). But to have someone who already knows your secrets -- that is truly a gift. Someone who not only knows your secrets but still trusts you and relates to you without fear or disgust. Someone who has their own secrets, but is willing to share those. Hmmm... in the middle of so many questions and fear there can be a safe relationship or two.

Title:	Sunshine
Author:	Robin McKinley
Date published:	203
Genre:	Horror
Number of pages:	405
Notes:	Repeat reading

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In a world where stars have denizens known as luminaries, Sirius, the dog-star, is on trial for destroying another luminary and misusing a powerful Zoi. Because the details are hazy, Sirius is punished by being sent to Earth in the form of a dog to look for the missing Zoi that fell somewhere to England. There, he is adopted by Kathleen, a young Irish girl who is living with her uncle's family because her father is in prison in Ireland. In dog form, Sirius grows from a puppy into a dog and learns to understand English, and carefully begins to search for the missing Zoi. As he does, he becomes more acquainted with the beautiful and surprisingly powerful Earth, with all its strange and wonderful children, and Sol, the luminary of Earth's solar system. It's a wonderful story told from a dog's perspective, but there's also so much more because of the larger vision of a cosmos inhabited by effulgent beings which are something like angels.

In some ways, this book offers a wonderful picture of incarnation. A luminous, powerful being is sent to Earth in the flesh and blood form of a helpless puppy. And even though Sirius is so powerful in his natural state, he is limited by his new form-- especially when he is a puppy. He has both a dog nature and a green, powerful nature that doesn't quite fit into his dog body. But he is also able to learn many things from being a dog; one thing that got Sirius into trouble during the trial was his horrible temper, and as a dog he has to learn to control himself-- partly because the humans have power over him and could have him destroyed, but more often because he doesn't want to make things worse for Kathleen, who he quickly comes to love. As a dog, he also learns to read people-- which ones are kind and likely to give a dog scraps, and which ones are cold and heartless, likely to kick a dog (such as Duffie, Kathleen's aunt who makes her do all the housework). Eventually, Sirius discovers that his luminary Companion (the denizen of the smaller, pearly star in orbit near the green dog-star) is the latter, only he never recognized it when he himself was a luminary.

At one point, Sirius gets Kathleen to read an astronomy book aloud to him-- and he's surprised that humans have any picture at all of the universe, even though it bears only minimal relation to his real home. And just as the stars are beings in this world, so too are the moon and Earth. They help out Sirius as they can, and he learns how powerful and rich (and beautifully green) Earth is-- and also comes to know the power inherent in being a child of Earth. Eventually, Sirius comes face to face with one of Earth's darker children: Arawn, Lord of the Underworld. This portrait of a powerful, dark, suffering being is quite masterful, and adds interesting depth to Jones' story, suggesting that there is more going on, more than we can see or perceive both out in the stars as well as deep under the earth.

Title:	Dogsbody
Author:	Diana Wynne Jones
Date published:	1975
Genre:	Fantasy
Number of pages:	261
Notes:	repeat reading

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What a delight -- a McKillip book during vacation. A variety of characters have lives that intertwine more than they realize. The safety of their kingdom is held in the hands of those who are unlikely, but also both powerful and gentle. A young princess has recently become queen. An orphaned translator intercepts a book with an alphabet only she can read. Two friends grow up together and discover a way to do all they dream, which is impossible. 3 separate tales (and their own larger stories) are drawn to one ending, where each has a vital role to play, and seeming weaknesses are suddenly strengths and characteristics to depend on.

The Queen of Raine is young and is not her father. Her advisor is an old witch (in a good sense -- not a hag!), who is frustrated at all the work she must do. Through a series of events, it is discovered that the Queen of Raine does not her father's skills -- but she does have magic powers and unexpected wisdom. This Queen has the unlikely ability to hide -- to go into the magic forest and to be told secrets and kept safe and quiet. She can also be invisible so that others go on with their business and let her in on truth. This comes in very useful -- the innumerable army is coming to conquer her land, and she gets all the other magicians to help her hide her kingdom and people. It works .. and the land they come to is desolate, decaying, empty. at least that's how it appears ...

The powerful mage who has supplied the means to this king and his army to conquer untold lands is slowly revealed through the story she writes of herself to her daughter. She hid herself in a disguise so she could be near the man she loved -- the king. To keep it secret, since his marriage day, nobody but him has truly seen her or heard her voice. She is feared and honored, but not known or loved by any but him. When he discovers how powerful she is, he asks what she wants from him. One thing only does she ask of him -- a child. Nepenthe is that child. At the end, the mage is asked to choose between her lover and her daughter -- to choose between power and being seen. How often we seek to hide, to be something we are not -- even for good reasons. But what great freedom is offered to us when we choose to step out of hiding and be as much ourselves as is possible. What great freedom comes in truth.

Title:	Alphabet of Thorn
Author:	Patricia McKillip
Date published:	2004
Genre:	Fantasy
Number of pages:	304
Notes:	Borrowed from lark

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Another one of Alan Moore's unique and creative comic books. This one is set in the Victorian age, and gathers together several of the heroes and monsters from the fiction of the time into one extraordinary league. The characters include Mina Murray (formerly Mina Harker, of Bram Stoker's Dracula), the adventure Allan Quartermain, Captain Nemo, the Invisible Man, Jekyll/Hyde, and Holme's adversary Moriarty. Many times I wished I was more familiar with the works that these characters come from, because they are all quite fascinating. There's a quote at the front of the book about the difficulty of distinguishing between monsters and heroes which seems particularly apt.

The book starts with Mina Murray slowly gathering the league together, at the behest of Campion Bond and his unknown boss. The league eventually discovers a disaster brewing in London, and of course there's the usual double-cross by the unknown boss (having an invisible man to trail your suspicious funder seems to come in handy), and they manage to avert the destruction of London.

The volume also includes a short story about Allan Quartermain travelling forward in time in a drug-induced haze and meeting H. G. Well's Time Traveller along with John Carter of Mars and one of Carter's descendants. It was an odd story, but interesting-- and reminded me that I would like to read John Carter of Mars at some point.

All the credits and writing about the story are humorously done in Victorian style, which I found quite entertaining (although some of the actual content seemed a little too racy to fit with that). Apparently, lots of the more minor characters also reference Victorian fiction (perhaps a bit like the hidden characters in Top 10), but I guess I'm not well-read enough to catch most of them.

I read somewhere that part of the reason Moore could create this series is because all of the characters are now in the public domain. That's pretty cool, and makes me even more sad for the crazy state of copyright laws now, because I'm sure there are other people with crazy, fascinating ideas like this, but the books can't be written yet.

Title:	The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume One
Author:	Alan Moore
Date published:	2000
Genre:	Graphic Novel
Series:	League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
Number of pages:	192

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This book presents an enjoyable mingling of Bangladesh and London, past and present, freedom and obligation, stoicism and emotion. Nazneen, a woman from a village in Bangladesh, is married to a Bangladeshi man who lives in London. At birth, the midwife believes Nazneen to be dead, but then she begins to breathe .. and Nazneen's mother decides to leave her to Fate. Nazneen lives, but this idea of accepting Fate plays a large role in her life. The attitudes in London are entirely different from what she knows, although she lives in a Bangladeshi community in an estate (big apartment buildings). How to marry all these things which seem to not fit together .. what does it look like to raise children and learn to live with and love a husband, to resign oneself to Fate, to ask questions that might be too dangerous to answer?

Nazneen has one sister, Hasina, who is beautiful. Too beautiful. She eloped at a young age and since then the only contact these sisters have is letters. Ali uses these letters to full extent, including them periodically throughout the story. They give updates about Hasina's life, about how Bangladesh is changing, share stories from their childhood, shed insight into their worldview. Hasina's letters do this, while Nazneen's letters are short and just give brief details about her life. Hasina does not agree with Nazneen or her mother's desire to just give in to Fate -- she fights and hopes for things to change and asks questions. Sometimes the letters were too much, and rather annoying -- but generally gave a good taste of some contrasts between Nazneen's present and past life.

Nazneen continually refers to Fate, and wonders what she really feels about it. Her mother left her to Fate and she lived. Her mother taught her to accept whatever fate brings. Nazneen seeks to lose her feelings, so that she is not angry or happy at what Fate brings her. But this becomes too much of a challenge. Some things really must be delighted in. Others must be mourned and fought and questioned. Nazneen comes to see this, and realize that she can play an active role in her own future -- not just a passive one. This is a piece of hope. Hope is not just that I can do something worthwhile - but also that there are worthwhile things to be done. Ideas worth believing in and acting on. Hope is that God is active, present, and will return to make all things as they were created to be -- under and in Him. But as humans we are not simply spectators, but participators and watchers and those who are involved. Nazneen comes to realize this and chooses to accept the responsibility it brings .. and that is a change worth reading about.

Title:	Brick Lane
Author:	Monica Ali
Date published:	2003
Genre:	Fiction, Cultural
Number of pages:	492

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In a totalitarian England desolated and isolated from the rest of the world by nuclear war, V is an anarchist who dresses like Guy Fawkes and uses violence to break apart the current regime and remind people that freedom is important. V is an interesting and enigmatic hero/anti-hero. It's never made completely clear if he has any super powers-- he seems to move faster than the police or "fingermen," but it's also pretty clear that the existing regime isn't used to much resistance. One of the great lines, which summarizes the main thrust of the book (and stays with you afterwards), comes near the end when detective Finch finally tracks down V and faces him. V responds: "Did you think to kill me? There's no flesh or blood within this cloak to kill. There's only an idea. Ideas are bullet-proof."

Shortly after finishing the book, I watched the movie (I usually try to read the book first, although this may be the first time I've done so for a comic book movie). It was interesting what they changed-- such as updating the desolation to include biological warfare, making Evey a more appealing character, condensing and combining certain parts of the story (which is obviously necessary for a movie), leaving the many side characters out. Even the portrayal of England is much more clean and comfortable than the dirty, desolate, dark impression I got from the book (conveyed largely by the artwork, although also in the language). I think the totalitarianism in the book is a bit more extreme (for instance, cameras and microphones in every house, on every street), which makes the extremity of V's tactics seem a little more acceptable-- because only something extreme would shake people out of their situation.

The one thing that they carried over unchanged, and that worked perfectly, was the jail sequence-- Natalie Portman did an amazing job with this, but it's also a testament to Alan Moore's writing that this part of the story and the secret letter from the unknown woman prisoner are so effective, and translate so perfectly (unchanged) to the screen. They did, of course, turn V into a bit more of a wise-cracking superhero and added a few big fight sequences (although, really, not as much as you would think the creators of "The Matrix" might). I was a little disappointed that they turned the political situation into a bit more of a mystery and made the dictator clearly evil and responsible for the situation, where in the book morality and culpability is a bit more murky.

The book includes an interesting & entertaining essay by Alan Moore, written sometime during the middle of the series run, about the genesis of V. It also includes two short graphic stories set somewhere within the V story, one of them without any words at all.

Title:	V for Vendetta
Author:	Alan Moore (writer), David Lloyd (artwork)
Date published:	1998
Genre:	Graphic Novel
Number of pages:	286

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A hilarious, enteraining book that is worth re-reading every now and then. I always describe this to people as a time-travel mystery romance Victorian novel-- and that gives some idea of the originality of this book. Even though I've read it before, I still found myself chuckling and laughing out loud. And even though I know the answers to all the various little mysteries, I was still amazed at how very many clues (that I had missed before) there were scattered through the story. Part of Willis' genius is that she can use all the standard mystery clichés and turn them into something completely new. Another part of her brilliance, and the charm of this book, is the narrator's voice, including the effects of time-lag.

In the world Willis creates, time-travel is handled by the historians (in this case, at Oxford). When the corporations discovered they couldn't loot the past (because that would cause incongruities), they lost interest. However, funding is always scarce, so when a money-making proposition comes along, they take it-- little knowing the demands that will be made by Lady Schrapnell and her project to rebuild Coventy Cathedral (in Oxford), including tracking down such oddities as the Bishop's Bird Stump.

The book is narrated by Ned Henry, and at the beginning of the book he is severly time-lagged because he's been working hard doing time-travel research for Lady Schrapnell (and the deadline for the cathedral is coming quickly). According to Ned, "one of the first symptoms of time-lag is a tendency to maudlin sentimentality, like an Irishman in his cups or a Victorian poet cold-sober." Every now and then Ned will start rhapsodizing about something, and then he (or someone else) will catch himself. Having a future time-traveller experiencing the Victorian age also gives the opportunity for lots of wry commentary-- for instance, Ned's explanation that the repression in Victorian society was due to the enormous over-abundance of furniture and the great care that was required to move among it all. Every now and then Ned will mistakenly refer to something that hasn't happened yet (usually under his breath), like the Titanic, and then looks around and hopes no one was paying attention.

The other brilliant thing about this book is the portrayal of time as a chaotic system. Willis is able to give a very understandable sense of this, partly through the ongoing argument between two eccentric Oxford dons and their view of history-- whether it is shaped by individuals or natural forces (of course, chaos theory includes both). Ned and his fellow time-traveller Verity are trying to steer history to the correct course (as they know it), and don't know how much or how little effect something like a cat, or a dog might make in the grand scheme of things. Towards the end Willis gives one dizzying glimpse of the significance of the actions that take place in this story and their part in the larger chaotic system of the time continuum, but then the characters almost immediately discount it as a sketchy theory, leaving the reader to wonder.

Title:	To Say Nothing of the Dog, or How We Found the Bishop's Bird Stump at Last
Author:	Connie Willis
Date published:	1998
Genre:	Science Fiction
Number of pages:	493
Notes:	repeat reading

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Ignore the cover picture, ignore the book jacket. This novel is not about South Africa’s apartheid-era “law governing the relationships between the races.” Rather, it is the story of an honorable man’s emotional and spiritual struggle with sin and weakness. It is a story about the virtue that humans can attain and the pride and pain that entangle us. Too Late the Phalarope, a work often overshadowed by its more famous counterpart, Cry the Beloved Country, is one of the best books I’ve ever read.

First, Alan Paton’s writing is deceptively simple, yet betrays deep insight into human thoughts and feelings. His words sweep past the veils and maneuvers that people often use to conceal unworthy motives, revealing the fear and hunger that alternately lead us to both hide from and love each other. Yet Paton’s incisive methods are so gentle, so compassionate, that it is evident that he means the stripping away to also heal. It is charged with hidden emotion but not sentimental, sympathetic but not blind, clever but not smug. It is perfect.

Although some people try to make this book out to be a pointed statement against the injustice of apartheid, it’s not. It tells of a young Afrikaner policeman, Pieter van Vlaanderen, who is a giant among his people: renown rugby player, decorated war veteran, upstanding citizen, honest, kind, and authoritative. But he fights secretly against his own fallibility and corruption. He and his family are such a complex mix of pride, honor, Puritanism, restraint, reserve, and love that this struggle plays out painfully and tragically.

Title:	Too Late the Phalarope
Author:	Alan Paton
Date published:	1953
Genre:	Fiction
Number of pages:	284
Notes:	At least the 5th reading

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