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I purchased and read this book because it was the ebook was sale for 99 cents, and the description of the protagonist intrigued me: a woman math professor on the run, who sees patterns and numbers and also knows about poker from her father. I was rather disappointed with the character of Dr. Renee Carter-- she seems like the generic pretty-lady plucky heroine, with a few trappings and comments to remind us she works as a college professor. Dr. Carter accidentally gets in trouble with some bad guys because, in her role as mentor to the campus poker club, she notices a statistical anomaly that would significantly benefit the owners of the website. Because of this, a couple of bad guys come to "take care of" her and the other professors she consulted about the data. When the hit men frame Renee for the murder of the local sheriff, she ends up on the run with the regional detective who was called in, Trent Schaefer. Carter can tell there is something off about Trent (he's a little too good at surviving on the run), something he's not telling her, but she never really does figure it out, and the best that can really be said is that she survives.

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Warning! This book is dangerously engrossing. I started it in the evening, thinking I would just read a few chapters before I went to sleep, and I ended up staying up much later than I intended. (I think the last book I read like that was The Hunger Games...). Helen is a teenager who lives on the island of Nantucket, and she does her best to avoid attention (attracting people's attention actually gives her painful cramps); this is difficult, because she is very tall, quite beautiful, and stronger than a girl her size should be; she is afraid that she might be a freak, but doesn't admit it to herself and does her best to keep others from thinking it. The book begins just as the school year is about to start up again, and the whole island is buzzing with gossip about a new family that has just moved to the island. Helen isn't particularly interested in them, but she has started seeing visions of three bloody women (the Furies, but she doesn't know that), and having strange nightmares that seem a little too real; and the first time she sees some of the Delos boys at school, she launches herself at Lucas with an immediate, irrational hatred and tries to kill him. Eventually, Helen discovers that Lucas and his family are special, and that she is like them--they they call themselves Scions-- and that is really only the beginning of her discoveries. Apparently, the Fates are really into re-runs, and one of their favorites is the Starcrossed Lovers.

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Ajao Bjault and Yoninne Log-Wot are an archeologist and space pilot team form Novamerika doing an initial investigation of the planet Giri, using cameras and microphones and computer technology to learn the language and the culture of the local people, who seem to be primitive miners and farmers. Their companion colony ship is on its way down to join them on the surface, in spite of Ajao's concerns that they don't understand the culture enough, or their strange roads, or a whole class of words... And he turns out to be right, because those words they didn't understand were the ones for the Talent all the mammals on this planet have, in varying degrees: seng (a kind of far-sensing), reng (teleportation), and keng (a kind of remote-killing by jumbling a person's insides). The ferry landing goes drastically wrong, since they underestimated the power and sophistication of the local people, and Ajao and Yoninne are captured and become caught up in the political machinations of the Summer and Winter Kingdoms. Their one initial ally is prince Pelio-- heir to the throne, but himself a "witling", with so little of the Talent that he is considered a cripple, and needs to be attended by his watchbear, Samadhom, for protection from others.

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Red Phaedrus the gladiator was born a slave and unacknowledged bastard son of a Roman merchant in the household, son of a northern slave woman; when his owner died he was sold, and then sold again to be a gladiator. Phaedrus survives four years as a gladiator (no small feat), and when Governor Sylvanus Varus celebrates his appointment in Corstopitum with an elaborate four days of games, Phaedrus draws the lot of dueling to the death with his one friend among the group. He nearly loses, but when he survives he wins his freedom-- which, it turns out, he doesn't really know what to do with. Fortunately (or, perhaps unfortunately), his red hair and northern face catches the eye of a merchant who has a particular use for him.

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This is a collection of short essays, taken from Chesterton's column in the Daily News.  He describes them as "a sort of sporadic diary - a diary recording one day in twenty which happened to stick in the fancy - the only kind of diary the author has ever been able to keep."  They range widely in topic-- from fairy tales, to art and color, to travel, and morality, and what it means to be human.  As he says in one essay, "let us learn to write essays on a stray cat or coloured cloud."  Many of them are little stories of moments in time, an interesting experience or an instant of insight; as he describes in one of these essays, the kind of moment that has "no explanation and no conclusion; it is, like most of the other things we encounter in life, a fragment of something else which would be intensely exciting if it were not too large to be seen."  Some of them are more entertaining or illuminating than others, but overall I quite enjoyed reading this book.  Because most of the pieces are fairly short, it is an easy book to read a little at a time.

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Another story of the adventures of the brilliant Master Li and his stout peasant assistant Number Ten Ox in an ancient China filled with myths and monsters, with a new mystery for them to unravel. A monk from the Valley of Sorrows comes to seek the assistance of Master Li, because one of the monks has died strangely (perhaps murdered), and the Laughing Prince has been seen-- a psychotic ruler of the valley generations ago who destroyed the beautiful land with his mines, and who experimented on peasant "volunteers" to learn anatomy. Part of this mystery is a strange fragment of a manuscript that the dead monk had found, which delights Master Li immensely and is what initially draws him in to the mystery-- a forgery so beautiful and perfect in form and calligraphy, but so obviously a forgery by the content, with words and phrases that the original author would never choose.

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Jerusha Abbott (or Judy, as she decides to call herself) is the oldest girl at the John Grier Home (an orphanage), and when the subject of her future comes up at a Trustee meeting, along with the fact that she is quite good in school (particularly in English)-- they read a humorous essay she's written for school about the Wednesdays when Trustees come to visit the orphanage, and one eccentric Trustee decides to pay for her to go to college and educate her as a writer. He prefers to remain anonymous - she doesn't even know his name, and all she sees is a tall silhouette, and a shadow from car headlights that looks like a daddy-long-legs spider, which is where Judy comes up with her nickname for him. His only requirement for putting her through college is that she write him a letter once a month. From there on, the book is told entirely through Judy's letters to her benefactor as she goes through her four years of college. The book is a quick, entertaining read, and Judy is delightfully engaging letter-writer: the letters change style depending on her mood or the things she is learning in college, and she is good company.

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This fun novelette (even shorter than a novella!) takes us into the world of Theodora Baumgarten, a student at Winfrey High School where just about everyone (except her) wants to get into the fiercely competitive IASA Space Academy. The story is told from Theodora's perspective, with her wry commentary on everything that goes on; she'd wanted to do remote learning but her mother was a "nostalgia freak", and her dad went along with the idea because he wants her to be independent, and what better place to do that than in a crowd? Shortly after the story begins, there is a mandatory assembly called, and the rumor is that one of the students has been selected to for Space Academy. No one is more surprised than Theodora that it is her name the visiting admiral announces-- particularly since she didn't apply, and really doesn't want to go into space. But things happen very quickly, no one will listen to her protests that she didn't apply and doesn't want to go (mostly because none of them understand why you wouldn't want to go or be selected for something so prestigious), and she is whisked away to Space Academy where she is sent aboard the RAH (a spaceship named for Robert A. Heinlein) and launched into space before she can clear up the mistake. Fortunately, she's got a good friend on the outside, Kimkim, who can hack into just about anything; they manage to re-establish communication and work together on figuring out just what has happened.

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