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Kyreol and Terje grew up as children together in the Riverworld, but left it many years ago and now live in the Dome City, where Kyreol has trained as a pilot and to travel to other planets and study other peoples. Terje still visits the Riverworld to observe the hunters and their rituals while staying unobserved himself. Terje is beginning another visit to the Riverworld just as Kyreol is about to leave for her first off-world trip, to the planet Xtal. Kyreol's mother, Nara, has some presentiment or dream of danger but doesn't know what exactly will happen or what to do about it; and both trips end up being quite different than anyone expected.

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I wanted to re-read Emma after watching one of the many movie adaptations, especially when it occurred to me I hadn't read it in quite some time. After watching and then reading in a short time period, I feel that the movie versions invariably make Emma seem to be a bit of an idiot -- whether due to the fact that the story is compressed for time, or the need to visually telegraph what is going to the viewers. In the book, it's rather more subtle. Emma is a lively, intelligent, imaginative creature who makes some errors in judgement - which are actually fairly reasonable, especially when you consider the fact that your perspective is usually rather skewed when your involved or close to what is going on, and particularly when someone is actively trying to deceive you.

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In a dismal future, with an economy and environment in shambles, people live in "stacks" - vertical scaffolding of trailer parks - or are homeless, and they spend all their time in the virtual world of OASIS. When the inventor of OASIS, James Halliday, dies with no heirs, he releases a video explaining he has hidden an "easter egg" challenge somewhere within OASIS, and the first player to find the three keys and complete the three gates will inherit his wealth and majority stake in the company. This world reminded me somewhat of the movie "The Matrix," but in this case everyone chooses to take the blue pill because reality is so terrible and the many worlds and galaxies of OASIS are so enticing. The story is told from the perspective of Wade Watts, aka Parzival (the name of his OASIS avatar, referencing the grail quest) or "Z" to his friends, the person who found the first key.

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Arthur Penhaligon is the asthmatic new kid at school. He didn't know about the Monday run and doesn't have a doctor's note explaining how very bad his asthma is - so the teacher makes him run. When he's lying in in a field, collapsed and barely breathing, something strange happens that might be a hallucination, but isn't. A fragment of the Will left by the Architect has escaped the dead sun where it has been imprisoned for millennia, and manages to trick Mister Monday into giving the lesser key to Arthur, fulfilling the bare letter of the law of the Will (since Arthur is an heir and very near death).

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By the end of Starcrossed (which I read last October), Helen has learned that not only is she a Scion, a member of a superhuman race descended from the demigods of Greek mythology, but also that she is the Descender-- a special Scion who can physically enter the Underwold and may be able to end the curse on the Houses, the blood lust incited by the Furies which forces them to kill members of other houses or any family members who are kin-killers. This book picks up shortly after that, and Helen is exhausted because she spends every night in the Underworld, stuck and and in pain; she's emotionally upset because she is still incredibly drawn to Lucas (the Paris to her Helen), even though they are apparently cousins and now they really can't be together-- since inbred Scions tend to be the dangerous kind of crazy, in addition to that whole problem of uniting two of the Houses resulting in a war. Eventually, Helen finds a new ally to help her with her quest in the Underworld: a young man named Orion.

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The story of the cool, collected, imperturbable Englishman Phileas Fogg and his passionate, good-hearted, sometimes hapless manservant, the Frenchman Jean Passepartout, and their famous trip around the world. Fogg lives his life completely by regimen, every day the same down to the minute he arrives at the Reform Club (he fired his previous servant because he couldn't keep up that schedule). Then, suddenly, on a bet-- to prove it can be done, and that "the unforeseen does not exist"-- he sets off around the world. He doesn't do it for the money that is wagered; in fact, he spends nearly all of the remaining half of his fortune that he didn't wager, so by winning he just breaks even. He doesn't do it for the adventure or to see the sights; Passepartout does quite a bit more looking at sights than Fogg, who is simply planning his next train or steamer. Certainly, Fogg doesn't shy away from adventure-- he saves Auoda from suttee because he has time, and he calmly and repeatedly bails out Passepartout, even to the point of chasing after American Indians to rescue him.

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Kylara Vatta is about to graduate from Spaceforce Academy on Slotter Key at the top of her class when a scandal erupts that she unwittingly, innocently played a role in - and, to save face, they kick her out. Her family has a vast shipping empire, and to get her away from media attention and give her something to do, they make her a captain and send her on a "milk run" with an experienced crew to babysit her-- she's taking the Glennys Jones to Lastway. At the first stop she comes across a possible money-making venture and decides to risk it, hoping to make enough money to buy the old ship she's captaining for herself and repair it, rather than scrap it for salvage as she is supposed to do. Naturally, something goes wrong-- and Ky's military training ends up being very important.

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An introduction to the bizarre and entertaining Discworld (a world that is actually shaped like a flat disc, carried by four elephants who stand on the back of the great turtle A'Tuin). We follow the hapless (but lucky) tourist Twoflower, his semi-unwilling guide, the wizard (of sorts) Rincewind, and Twoflower's luggage made of sapient pear-tree wood, as they traipse about and see various parts of this strange world - from the seedy, greedy inhabitants of Ankh-Mopork, to a forest with dryads and a temple for an ancient, unspeakable evil, through the dry seas to the Rim of the great disk, where the waters spill off the edge of the world into space, and finally they become the unwilling guests of the Krull, who have constructed a metal fish to fly off the edge of the world and take a closer look at the great turtle.

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Honor Harrington is thrilled to take command of her first space cruiser in the Royal Manticoran Navy, the light cruiser Fearless. She is a bit dismayed, however, when she learns that they are gutting her normal armaments and defenses to put in a grav lance - a powerful new weapon that can only be used at very close range, the whim of an admiral currently in favor. They test out the new ship in some war games, and with some cleverness and subtlety, Harrington is able to get close enough to take out a superdreadnought. But as soon as the other side knows about the grav lance, it's useless, and they lose exercise after exercise, which is demoralizing for Harrington's crew. Finally, when the grav lance experiment is seen to be a failure, Harrington and the Fearless are punished by being sent to Basilisk Station, which is actually strategically important (a wormhole junction), but politically contentious and has somehow turned into a dumping ground for incompetent officers. Naturally, it turns out to be very fortunate indeed that Honor is actually incredibly competent.

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Brigitte is complacent and comfortable in her life - until she loses her job (where she has loyally served) and her boyfriend of 6 years (whom she'd always assumed she'd marry) dumps her to leave for his dream job, running an archaeological dig in Egypt. Brigitte tries to continue working on her own book, a definitive anthropological look at women's suffrage that she has been working on for years. She can't make any progress, so she goes to visit her mother and decides to help with some research on their family genealogy - first going to Salt Lake City. Then, when she discovers an Indian woman's name, Wachiwi, amongst their French aristocratic ancestors, Brigitte gets interested and follows the story, first to Indian archives and then eventually to France. Eventually she uncovers the story of a Dakota Sioux chief's daughter who was captured by the Crow, then seen with a Frenchman, and eventually made her way to France, where she was presented at court, married a Marquis, had children, and helped defend their Brittany chateau during the French revolution. Of course, along the way Brigitte comes into her own and is befriended by a kind Frenchman, an author who helps with her research.

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Chris and his daughter Becky created the imaginary world of Tamarisk wen Becky was a little girl going through scary leukemia treatment. They invented a world with fabulous colors and fascinating colors, and told stories about Princess Miea night after night in Becky's bed, before bedtime. Now, Chris has a strained relationship with his teenage daughter, and the haven't told any Tamarisk stories in the 4 years since Chris and Polly, Becky's mother, were divorced. Suddenly, Becky discovers that Tamarisk is real, and that she can visit - and even take her father - but only from her childhood bed, where they invented Tamarisk, now in her father's apartment.

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Tory (Victoria) Brennan is grand-niece to the famous Temperance Brennan. She lives on Morris Island with her father, who is a professor at Charlotte University and a researcher at nearby Loggerhead Island. Tory hangs out with the other kids who live on Morris - Ben, Hiram, and Shelton - and together they stumble into an adventure and discover a decades old unsolved murder. While wandering on Loggerhead Island, they run into a group of chimps, one of whom has found some soldier's dog tags, now heavily encrusted; they sneak into an unused lab to clean the tags, and while they are there they discover a secret experiment being done on the island wolf-dog pup Cooper. They Rescue him and nurse him back to health, but somehow they all get sick, even though parvovirus shouldn't be contagious to humans; they also start to experience weird side-effects somehow related to this cross-bred parvovirus variant with wolf DNA.

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What could be just another run-of-the-mill fantasy novel-- with an oppressed people, and a rebellion brewing to overthrow the evil tyrant, and the obligatory orphan-waif discovering her powers -- somehow isn't. I think the biggest reason for this is the unique metal-based magic or "allomancy," which is fascinating and different from any other magic I have ever read about. There are "mistings" and "mistborns" who can burn metals for different effects, and there are also the secretive, nearly wiped out Terrismen who can use metal to store things - knowledge, power - in what they call "metalminds." The rebellion is a bit different, too-- instead of the normal, honorable rebels, the ringleader Kelsier recruits a crew of cons and thieves, which is why he thinks they might actually be able to succeed.

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I know that Dickens' tended to write the "big, baggy monster" type of novel, but this one seemed much bigger and baggier than other Dickens' I have read. You are introduced to characters briefly who leave the novel for chapters at a time, but then much later come back into the story, sometimes in significant ways for the plot. When we first meet Mr. Merdle, he seems like a tangential character (the husband of a woman Fanny and Amy Dorrit meet), but he gets a whole chapter to himself about his very high, significant position in society (due to his wealth), and his complete unease among the people of "society"-- although later, of course, he plays a pretty significant role in the story. The book follows mostly the story of "Little" Dorrit, or Amy- a young woman who was born in the debtor's prison at Marshalsea, where her father has lived her entire life; and also Arthur Clenham, who takes an interest in Little Dorrit.

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