Books

[Kathy Li]

Wait. You went and looked it up? After I spent all that time putting it into the Books FAQ? (Mock indignation.)

Garrett--yeah, I'd forgotten about that paragraph. I mean, the first thing I always think of when Ishmael is mentioned is how come Spock never notices that Aaron Stempel looks just like his dad...

[Stormwind]

Looking at the previous posts made me go look up what else DD wrote for Star Trek... I didn't remember that she'd written The Wounded Sky, or My Enemy, My Ally... I loved those two.

Right now I'm re-reading David Eddings Tamuli series... also Mercedes Lackey's 500 kingdom books, plus her newest Foundation.

I've recently reread Kathryn Lasky's Starbuck twins trilogy, that is a cute one. It starts with Double Trouble Squared, then Shadows in the Water, and finally A Voice in the Wind. I thought they were cute and prays she writes more of them. They were out of print but recently were rereleased.

[Garrett Fitzgerald]

Guess-the-original-character

If this is all a bit much, but you've been having fun with DD's Star Trek novels, then I'd recommend grabbing Ford's Star Trek novel, How Much For Just the Planet? Garrett and I can decode some of the supporting cast for you upon request.

Yeah, but only because I looked it up, because I just had to know. I've only met one of the supporting cast -- I suspect Kathy has met all of them at one time or another? :-) I was seriously kicking myself for missing Neil Gaiman's appearance -- I mean, how much more obvious could Ford have gotten?

If you want to play the "Who _is_ that" game with another Trek novel, look up Ishmael, by Barbara Hambly.

Over by the bar voices were raised as a scruffy-looking spice smuggler got involved in an argument over a girl with a pair of brown-uniformed pilots from some down-at-the-heels migrant fleet.... The girl by the bar, he noticed, had watched calmly as the altercation between the pilots and smuggler had degenerated almost to the point of fisticuffs, then finished her drink and departed on the arm of a tall, curly-haired man in the eccentric garb typical of space-tramps--the combatants had continued their quarrel undeterred.

[Kathy Li]

Ok, I've probably mentioned this book, like, a gazillion times already, and it's probably out of print by now. And it's a hard-cover anthology which makes it a hard sell. But it's an anthology by John M. Ford. It's called The Heat of Fusion and Other Stories, and it's one of the jewels on my bookshelves. Many of the pieces in it are blank verse poems of insane beauty and intricacy, and I read them over and over. This is not something you race through once, but go back to over the decades, finding more and more as you go.

Every Christmas, I tend to take out one of the poems and read it aloud. I believe that Mike initially wrote it as his Christmas card that year. Jane Yolen sent it to someone she knew was editing an anthology of Arthurian myth-inspired fantasy short stories. He'd closed the anthology, but once he read the poem, he opened it back up again. It's nice to have it now in a place with Mike's other far-flung masterpieces.

The poem is in blank verse. It's called "Winter Solstice, Camelot Station". And here are the opening lines:

Camelot is served
By a sixteen-track stub terminal done in High Gothick Style,
The tracks covered by a single great barrel-vaullted glass roof framed upon iron
At once looking back to the Romans and ahead to the Brunels.
Beaneath its rotunda, just to the left of the ticket windows,
Is a mosaic floor depicting the Round Table
(Where all knights, regardless of their station of origin
Or class of accommodation, are equal),
And around it murals of knightly deeds in action
(Slaying dragons, right wrongs, rescuing maidens tied to the tracks). ...

And it also has "The Hemstich Notebooks" which I simply, absolutely cannot read out loud because I can't get enough air into my lungs when I'm laughing so hard. I almost got a hernia the first time I read it. It's basically a pastiche of macho authors. From "Glitz in the Afternoon":

Even at the cold hour there are many people in the mall. There are the women, and the children, and the skateboard ones, and the old ones with their cheap wine in the bags of paper. The elevator music is very loud and the restrooms are for those with steel in their hearts. It is much like the bazaars of the east except that the children are not for sale.

There are other men there, but there are never many. Most look straight ahead, thinking only of the thing they have come to buy, and plan a route that leads them on a true line from the trackless seas where their cars are parked to the store where they must buy the thing. ... They go only to the store where the thing they want is, and they buy it and they go away.

That is good and clean and honest. But it is not shopping.

To shop is to go into the mall alone, carrying only the card and a little cash for food from the places that will not accept the card. A man does not know what he will shop for before he sees it, but when he sees it he will know. It may be in a window or on a table or behind a glass case, but it will call to him. Maybe he has seen it before, in the possession of another at a restaurant where the tablecloth tastes better than the food does. Or in the magazine with the pages that fold out in the middle, the pages that fold out suddenly when you are trying to buy it and stick it inside a copy of the National Review. The thing he shops for will smell good and it will please the eye and it will probably be matte black. It will cost like a bastard. Men know this. It is why so few men shop well. ...

Every piece in this anthology is worthy of a quote. I'll stop, though, even though I'd love to make you read bits of "The Lost Dialogue" (a Daedalus/Icarus piece) or "Dateline: Colonus" (an updating on Oedipus at Colonus). I'll just link you to two poems of Mike's I know are on line: "Troy: the Movie" (written long before Brad Pitt made that phrase so much funnier) and one written in the wake of 9/11, called 110 Stories.

If this is all a bit much, but you've been having fun with DD's Star Trek novels, then I'd recommend grabbing Ford's Star Trek novel, How Much For Just the Planet? Garrett and I can decode some of the supporting cast for you upon request.

[Garrett Fitzgerald]

Whose Body?

When I decided to mention this here, I had forgotten that Kathy had started off the thread with a Sayers reference. :-) I just found http://digital.library.upenn.edu/wom...hose-body.html, the full text (with commentary) of Dorothy L. Sayers' first "Lord Peter Wimsey" novel, Whose Body?. It's the only one in the public domain in the US at the moment. If you're in a different county where it's still considered to be in copyright, I'd suggest not following the link. :-)

[bookgirl]

Fourteen-year-old Leven Thumps is no ordinary boy, but that's exactly what Sabine and his dark shadows want him to believe. The evil forces know the fate of the world and the dreams of all mankind can be saved by only one boy with a powerful gift--a gift he has yet to understand or control.Leven, a.k.a. "Lev," lives a wretched life at the Rolling Greens Deluxe Mobile Home Park in Burnt Culvert, Oklahoma. But his life is about to change and his destiny be fulfilled as he learns about a secret gateway that bridges two worlds--the real world and Foo, a place created at the beginning of time that makes it possible for mankind to dream and hope, aspire and imagine. "Foo is an entire realm hidden in a fold of the mind, a very real place," says author Obert SkyeBut Foo is in chaos, and three transplants from that dream world have been sent to retrieve Lev--Clover, a mischievous, fuzzy, foot-high sidekick; Winter, an odd girl who can freeze things; and Geth, the rightful heir to the monarchy of Foo. Lev's mission: to destroy the hidden gateway before Sabine can find his way out of Foo and into the real world where he plans to reign supreme." Its a really fun book. I wouldn't say it was "the best book ever" but it's still a fun read. The fourth book in the series just came out a couple months ago.

[fernie]

i havent read leven thumps but i have read one book by the same author, the book was really good, it was called the 13th reality

[Zirsta]

Yeah smile. He also leaves eternal unfinished business with what's-his-face, when he escapes death and leaves for the "overworld" we live in. Obviously he has sinister plans, but what? Very bad ending all round.

[smile]

Ash78 - yay! Another person loves them! I'm very very happy

Zirsta - I completely agree about the end of Firewing - he is between child and young adult author, but I read them in elementary school and that is a major thing to do to a kid! I was upset, and decided to change the ending myself.

The Inkblood and Inkseed tir=tles would've been really weird... I just can't see it as Inkseed especially.

I haven't read the "Leven Thumps" series, what are they about?

[Kathy Li]

Originally posted by Zirsta:
Really? They tried to call Inkspell Inkblood?

Other way 'round on this one. Funke is German. She writes in German. The books are then translated into English. The original title of Inkspell is Tintenblut. That translates (literally) to Inkblood. My guess is they went with Inkspell as a marketing thing. You put blood in the title and folks probably think it's a horror novel, or at best dark fantasy.

[bookgirl]

Has anyone read the "Leven Thumps" series? I've read the first one and thought it was pretty good. Not amazing, but still really interesting. I've heard that each book gets better. There is four in the series now.

[Zirsta]

Really? They tried to call Inkspell Inkblood? And Inkdeath Inkseed and Inkdawn? That's.... different. I think they let her stay with the titles because the last parts (heart, spell, death) are the words Mo had to write in the book of immmortality for the Adderhead that would make him die. Maybe they decided to keep the original titles because they represent more than just the plot, but a key part of the trilogy.

[Kathy Li]

I read Inkheart and Inkspell, but haven't gotten my hands on Inkdeath yet. I'm also happy that it's called "Inkdeath", since way back when worlebird and I were discussing the lame way the titles were being translated. Tintenherz and Inkheart is fine. But Tintenblut should be "Inkblood", not Inkspell. And Titentod (Inkdeath) was called a no-go title and was going to be Tintensaat (Inkseed), but the English title was going to be Inkdawn (eyeroll), so it's nice to know that Funke's original title prevailed in both languages.

[Ash78]

oh my gosh smile, I love Airobrn. I read it in school for Battle of the Books several years ago, and I immediately fell in love with it
Hey guys, guess what? I got a friend of mine to read the YW series, and he gave me a bunch of books. Such a Pretty Girl, by Laura Weiss, is about a young rape victim. Very powerful. nd the Edge Chronicles. Don't know who it's by, sorry, but it's very cute. And I have to recommend Dracula, by Brahm Stoker, of course. A classic. And The Host, by the beloved Stephenie Meyer, I made him read those as well. Hope you get a new read out of this! Dai'

[Zirsta]

I haven't read Airborn, but I've read other books by Kenneth Oppel. The Sunwing/Firewing/Silverwing Trilogy. They are good, but the end of Firewing is really bad. I mean, what author in their right mind kills the main character? It ruins the end.

He also wrote a new one, Darkwing. I haven't read it, but it's sort of like the trilogy, but about a thousand years in the future.

Anyone read the Guardians of Ga'Hoole? I didn't think so, but just in case... The War of the Ember was released yesterday. It is the 15th and final book in the series. It's better than some of the other recent ones, but a horrible ending. Soren kills Nyra, but Coryn gets killed, and Soren becomes king. Also, another author, Kathryn Huang Knight is going to write a book about some stories of Ga'Hoole, even though there are 16 books already.