Space Station Mir

I've been on a trashy book kick since I've been home from school, probably because I just got back from one of the most intense semesters of my life, reading and otherwise. After sifting through a lot of dense philosophy and High Literature (what I'm calling Joyce and Faulkner, probably my two least favorite authors not counting the likes of Dan Brown), I was craving a re-read of The Devil Wears Prada and finally read Sister of the Dead , a macabre fantasy novel a friend bought me several years ago that never looked appealing at any given moment. Well, it was honestly pretty horrible, although the author did incorporate some Elvish, which has to score some points. What I don't get is why science fiction and fantasy almost always have the best ideas, but more often than not sub-par writing. Why don't great ideas and great skill naturally go together? I've been privileged to read mostly the best; Tolkien, L'Engle, and books I've read more recently like J...

So I left off in July with No. 32, but my summer reading didn't end there. Unfortunately, I've lost the list, but I know I read Woodsburner by John Pipkin (33), Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel (34), and Mary, Queen of Scots and the Murder of Lord Darnley (35) by Alison Weir. That brings the total to 35 for the summer. In September, before classes had gotten too intense, I managed to read some books I'd gotten earlier from Bookmooch, Alice Sebold's memoir Lucky (36) about her rape and the trial that followed, which I was primarily interested in for background on The Lovely Bones , and Company of Liars (37) by Karen Maitland to see how she re-imagined The Canterbury Tales . I would call it more closely a riff on some of the ideas of The Canterbury Tales and The Decameron , a group of people on the road with a common goal from the former, and people hiding from the plague from the latter. However, the format was very much that of modern fiction rather than poetry or a ...