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Friday, August 29, 2008

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A young girl (12) named Tiffany Aching sees a monster come out of the river, and decides to take care of it. She is helped by some new friends .. six inch men who are blue and kin to Celtic warriors. They talk with wonderful accents, and will fight anything that moves. Their heads are weapons, and one headbutt can down a horse. They are quite hilarious. Tiffany's younger brother (who is sticky and always wants more sweets) is stolen, and she must go to save him. To do so, she must go to another land, which is touching theirs (and is evil). It is a land of nightmare, where there are webs in which one can be caught that make you dream, and if you eat any food, you stay in the dream forever. And nightmare dogs that are also horrible. There is a queen who is in charge of all the dreams, causing people to join in her dream, and not allowing them to leave.

The little blue men are my favorite part of this story. They are hilarious. “We are a famously stealin' folk. Aren't we, lad? Whut's it we're famous for?” [their leader] “Stealin'!” shouted the blue men. “And what else, lads?” “Fightin'!” “And what else, lads?” “Drinkin'!” “And what else?” There was a certain amount of thought about this, but they all reached the same conclusion. “Drinkin' and fightin'!” “And there was summat else,” muttered the twiddler. “Ach, yes. Tell the hag, lads!” “Stealin' and drinkin' and fightin'!” shouted the blue men cheerfully. [pages 99-100]

Title:The Wee Free Men
Author: Terry Pratchett
Date published:2003
Genre: Fantasy, Humor
Series: Discworld
Number of pages: 375
Notes: recommended by jewell and levi

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Monday, August 25, 2008

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The next book after Gaudy Night, beginning with letters to and from various people. The story comes out that Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane get married .. rather quietly, without telling everyone. They evaded reporters in such a way that they actually had a bit of quiet (unusual for Lord Peter Wimsey). Wxcept that .. the house they go to stay in, which is in the country, happens to be the place where a man is found dead the day after they arrive. So their quiet honeymoon turns into questions and inquiries and possibilities and ponderings and murder investigations. With which, of course, they help. :)

One of the best parts of this book is the relationship between Harriet and Wimsey. They really do love each other, and it is clear throughout the story. As a married couple, it is good for them to delight in one another, and they do this quite gladly. One enjoyable chapter centers around them coming up with all the reasons and ways various people could have committed the murder, and with their intellectual capacities in full play, they come up with more than one might think. These are two people who have chosen each other, and must make adjustments because of it .. but they know they have chosen well and want to learn to love each other well and fully, without causing the other to change in ways that would be detrimental, losing themselves somehow. Worth reading again.

Title:Busman's Honeymoon
Author: Dorothy Sayers
Date published:1937
Genre: Mystery
Series: Lord Peter Wimsey Mysteries
Number of pages: 381
Notes: borrowed from mom

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Tuesday, August 19, 2008

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This is a book about five current missional groups: InnerChange, Servant Partners, Servants to Asia's Poor, Urban Neighbors of Hope, and Word Made Flesh. Bessenecker writes about the fact that historically, radical Christ-followers step away from the Church and to the the poor in order to call the Church back to the poor. These followers live simply, among those who are poor, making a difference in the small scale, suffering with and being present with their neighbors. He talks about how these people are radical not simply as an end, but in order to pursue Jesus. There are five different pursuits he focuses on: Jesus' descent into humanity, intimacy with Jesus, relational wealth, the Kingdom, and the edges.

Nice to read this book because I am part of one of the groups he discusses, and it's encouraging to know there are a number of us out there. And that this is not such a strange calling .. many throughout history have been similarly called to love those on the margins and to step down instead of reaching for those things the world values. Bessenecker makes these ideas accessible for the reader, without using fancy language or trying to prove his point strongly .. stories and examples from today are more than enough to do that.

Title:The New Friars
Author: Scott Bessenecker
Date published:2006
Genre: Spiritual, Nonfiction
Number of pages: 175
Notes: from t. lockie

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Monday, August 04, 2008

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cover of A World Divided

This volume collects three different Darkover novels, all of which deal with the clash of cultures when Darkover is once more connected to the Terran space empire. All three books focus on young men of mixed or confused ancestry (whether they know it or not-- mostly not) who come to Darkover and are drawn by the strangeness of Darkover. Darkover society is still feudal and hierarchical, and their technology is based on psi-powers augmented by matrix crystals, but only the elite and gifted upper class tend to be powerfully gifted. It's interesting to see the conflicts in culture and the differences in attitude; in one case, a young Terran and Darkovan must join forces to cross wild territory together, and it takes both of their cleverness and different education to get them through-- tracking and hunting on one side, and basic knowledge of compasses and geography on the other. In another case, a Terran who had played with lenses as a hobby is brought in to teach the Darkovans (to help them battle forest fires) and is shocked that the intelligent, quick-learning man he is teaching doesn't know how to read. They explain to him that Darkovans don't make a "fetish" of literacy like the Terrans do-- they leave that to specialists and prefer to learn directly, with direct human contact.

All three of the stories were engaging, although I think they got better as they went on, since I found it much harder to put the book down when I was in the middle of the second two stories. They are also set in roughly the same time period, so there are some common characters and even some of the main characters show up in other books as minor characters (and sometimes at different points in their lives).

In Star of Danger, teenage Larry comes to Darkover with his dad (who comes there to work). Larry is immediately taken with the new world and longs to see more of the place and the culture. He explores the city, even parts of it that aren't safe for most Terrans, and ends up making friends with Kennard, the son of Lord Alton. Larry gets the chance to spend time in real Darkovan culture, and ends up getting tangled up in the politics and warring groups. Eventually, Larry discovers what the reader probably figured out long ago-- his mother was Darkovan, and he belongs to both worlds.

Jeff Kerwin is the main character in The Bloody Sun, and like Larry, he has ties to Darkover and returns there by means of the Terran space empire. He was raised in an orphanage there, but when he inquires as an adult there is no record of him, and when he wanders the Darkovan parts of the city he is mistaken as one of the Comyn, the gifted, red-haired lords of Darkover. Eventually he finds his way to the Tower of Arilinn and is trained in his psi powers to join them in a "circle", powerful enough to accomplish feats that would rival Terran technology, such as locating oreand mining it (this is done with the aim of proving that they can retain the Darkovan way of life and keep the landscape unspoiled, while still moving forward in technology). This book verges much more on the politics of Darkover-- there are no longer enough Keepers and matrix mechanics for the towers because the discipline required is so great and the old traditions are causing problems-- most notably the virgin-worship of the young Keepers and insistence that she remain a virgin lest she lose her power. Like Larry, Kerwin isn't all that he seems-- in fact, he turns out to be full-blooded Darkovan and the child of an earlier Keeper who attempted to change the traditions of virginity associated with the post, but failed to convince people. Through his experiences as a Terran and discovering his psi abilities, Kerwin recognizes that the psi powers aren't limited to the upper-caste Darkovans, as had been long thought, which opens new possibilities for the interchange of technology and knowledge between Terra and Darkover, as equals.

In Winds of Darkover, Dan Barron is the space-port equivalent of an air-traffic controller, but one day when he is caught up in an incredibly vivid daydream and almost crashes the landing spaceship, he is suddenly stripped of his position, and packed off to teach the Darkovans how to make lenses so they can build telescopes for fighting forest fires. On his trip to the forest outpost, he meets Lord Alton and is accompanied by Alton's foster-son Larry. They both notice some kind of psi-sensitivity, but they don't know quite what is going on. Meanwhile, bandits have beseiged and taken over the lonely outpost of High Windward-- the head of the family is blind Loran, who cannot save his family but instead decides to break ancient Darkovan law and uses his laran powers to take over Barron's mind and use him as a body to come aid his enslaved people and sisters. It works, but it changes several lives in the process and also brings up issues of Darkovan traditions with regard to who can be trained in the use of their laran gifts.

Title:A World Divided - compilation of The Bloody Sun (1965), Star of Danger (1965), and The Winds of Darkover (1970)
Author:Marion Zimmer Bradley
Date published:2003
Genre:Science Fiction
Series:Darkover
Number of pages:688

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Sunday, August 03, 2008

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cover of The Time Traveller's Wife

This is the strange, out-of-order love story of Henry and Clare. Henry is a "Chrono-Displaced-Person": he has a genetic disease that causes him to travel through time-- but he can't control it, so he is constantly ending up in unlikely or inconvenient places, naked (because nothing goes with him when he travels), and having to fend for himself or rely on the few people who know his secret, if he's in a place and time when they know about it and can help. For Clare, the first time they meet is when she is a girl and Henry is an older man who is already married to her. For Henry, the first time they meet is when he is a young man working in a library-- but Clare is so excited to finally meet him in real time, and already knows the future self that he has not yet become.

There is a brilliance to Niffenegger's concept-- this is an incredibly unique story, and it's well told; every section is labeled with the age(s) of Henry and/or Clare, which helps to alleviate some of the confusion. Henry is often hearing things from people in the past that suddenly make sense of things they've said to him before (in his past, their future); and to some extent, the reader gets to experience a bit of this as well: getting parts of the story now, through Clare's eyes, and part of it later, through Henry's perspective. However, there is a disturbing aspect to the morals and ethics of this story that bothered me; the narrative touches on it at moments, but then dismisses it too easily for my taste. An older Henry corrupts his younger self on one of his first times travelling-- teaching him how to steal wallets and unlock doors so that he will be able to fend for himself when he's on his own in time. The older Henry feels a twinge of guilt about this, but for him it is a necessity-- and, what's more, it has already happened in his past, so he can't change it (this comes up more frequently-- causation in Henry's life is quite tangled because of the things that have already happened, and he explains at various points to others and even himself that he can't change anything when he's in the past). Likewise, the older Henry worries that he is perverting Clare through his relationship with her as a girl and then a young woman-- even though he is careful, of course the very fact of Henry being there changes her and makes her different from all the other girls. I was also troubled by the idea of cheating on one's spouse with a future or past version of them.

For all the brilliance of the idea of this book, I found myself slogging through it just to finish, and I finally figured out why when I met Henry and Clare's daughter Alba. She is a delightful character; afflicted with the same time-travelling disease that Henry has (although perhaps with a little more control), but clever and smart and-- perhaps what is strikingly different from the other characters-- happy and well-adjusted. Alba is the first character in the book that I actually liked. The other characters, even Henry and Clare, are so unhappy and messed up-- they have sad childhoods (in many of his time trips, Henry revisits the scene of his mother's death over and over) and mixed up relationships with their friends. There is a sadness about Clare, because she is nearly always waiting for Henry-- waiting for him to come visit out her out of time, waiting for him to come back from his time trips. And the murky ethics of it all is disturbing to me-- but there is none of that in Alba. For Henry, his disease is a curse that warps his life and eventually destroys him; for Alba, in a way it is a blessing because of the moments out of time that she gets to spend with her father.

This book was recommended to me by several people (I don't remember who all); my first hint that it might not be the kind of book I first thought was when I looked for it in a bookstore and it wasn't in the Science Fiction section.

Title:The Time Traveller's Wife
Author:Audrey Niffenegger
Date published:2003
Genre:Fiction
Number of pages:560
Notes:recommended by several people; gift from Jane

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