Space Station Mir

8. The Rape of Lucrece by William Shakespeare This is not a book nor is it a play, it approaches the length of the latter and I feel like I deserve the credit of the former for reading it. This is a lyric poem, one of two attributed to Shakespeare including Venus and Adonis in my ginormous edition of The Collected Works of Shakespeare (the second Riverside edition, if you want to know). I'd read Venus and Adonis before, and found it amusing, this was my first read of Lucrece , which was predictably not amusing. I did learn that the Rape of Lucrece is the founding myth of the Roman Republic, after the chaste Lucrece was raped by Tarquin, last king of Rome (that is, before the Caesars), and then killed herself, the people of Rome overthrew and banished him. Pretty cool that a woman had that power. Of course, not cool how she gets it. This is in some ways a very standard lyric poem, it's got the iambic pentameter and the tiring repetition and descriptions of things that would ap...

7. Steal Across the Sky by Nancy Kress I have raved about Kress' Beggars in Spain and been underwhelmed by her more recent Dogs . I picked this one up at the library, and I'm glad I did. I was not impressed and did not find it a satisfying read by any means. The concept is certainly intriguing; an alien race calling themselves the Atoners land on the moon and ask for Twenty-One Witnesses to be transported to other planets to observe in order to discover the crime that the Atoners committed against humanity ten thousand years ago. The book takes place in the very near future and contains the experiences of some of the Witnesses and the aftermath when the Witnesses return to Earth and divulge the nature of the crime. The Atoners deleted human genes for the sixth sense; the ability to see the dead. Here is where my analysis of the book will hopefully become interesting. While I felt the novel to be lacking in several senses (har har), it is consistent with what I believe my ficti...

6. The Tragedy of Mariam, The Fair Queene of Jewry by Elizabeth Cary I was fascinated to read this sixteenth century woman's reinterpretation of the story of Miriam, the Maccabean princess who was married to Herod, the Greek-Macedonian King of the Jews in the first century CE. Her story is related in Josephus, a Jew who chronicled several events of the era. Her husband had her killed after she allegedly spoke to him with too much anger and pride. He put aside his first wife to marry her because she was of the bloodline of King David, seen as the rightful rulers of the Jews, and then had her grandfather and brother,who had stronger claims to the throne than him, killed. Cary makes of this story a female-centered tragedy that I saw as equal to Greek and Shakespearean tragedy. The plot, language, and characters are internally cohesive and consistent. Mariam is proud of her heritage, and both in love with Herod and resentful of him for the murders of her family. Her mother Alexandra ha...

5. The Two Gentlemen of Verona by William Shakespeare My second read, first for a class, not one of the plays I've seen performed except for the snippet of it in Shakespeare in Love . Although it's one of the lesser known and least performed of Shakespeare's plays, I didn't find any lack of amusement while reading. Sure, it's inferior to As You Like It or Much Ado about Nothing , but we've still got witty women, clueless, boorish male love interests, and perhaps the most successful and sympathetic of absurd servants in Launce. What I remembered most about reading this play were Launce's speeches about his dog Crab. While he condemns Crab as a villain, he's willing to sit in the stocks and be whipped lest his dog hang for the various crimes of stealing puddings and pissing indoors. That, my friends, is true love. The contrast with Launce's devotion to his dog is sharp in comparison to his master Proteus' swift abandon of his paramour Julia for hi...

I saw this quiz on The Boston Bibliophile and decided to have a gander. The results surprised me a little, but are also surprisingly accurate in some ways! You're Fahrenheit 451 ! by Ray Bradbury Having wanted to be a firefighter much of your life, you've recently discovered the job wasn't exactly what you were looking for. While ignorance seems like the result of oppression, it all began with people just wanting to be ignorant. As you realize more about the sordid world around you, you decide to watch less TV and work on your memorization skills. Though your memory will save you in the end, don't forget to practice running from dogs as well. Take the Book Quiz at the Blue Pyramid .

4. Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson Somewhere in my childhood, I missed reading this classic, despite having two copies of A Child's Garden of Verses . My boyfriend recently reread this and suggested I do so, so I borrowed his copy and spent a night immersed in the ultimate pirate fantasy for a boy of a certain age. I can't say much for plot, language, or character, but as I am currently in a fiction workshop, I was looking for what made the story tick, and it clearly has a sense of urgency and adventure and makes use of a cliffhanger at the end of nearly every chapter. I did notice that Long John Silver's speech in particular kept nicely in character, "and I'll lay to that." He is clearly the most psychologically complex of the characters, the rest of the adults seem either dull or blindingly stupid. So the hero is our adolescent boy narrator Jim Hawkins, and from the praise of the adults around him, including the malicious Long John, and the feats h...

2. The Romance of Tristan & Iseult As Retold by Joseph Bedier Translated by Hilaire Belloc and Completed by Paul Rosenfeld As the list of authors/translators etc. implies, this work can only be described as a mishmash and not a consistent narrative in any respect. That is, it is told as a consistent narrative, but it is not. Bits and pieces are taken from French and English poets that are themselves transcribing older legends and the more modern author put in some of his words in keeping with the older dialect, and THEN it was translated by more than one person! However, I think the point of Arthurian legends and the associated stories (and Arthur comes into this surprisingly little, considering how often Tristan shows up in Le Morte D'Arthur ), is that they're not "accurate" in language, the themes of romance and death and fate and Christianity are what is important and the characters are the vessels of these lessons. It is amazing how God is always on the side o...

1. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins My first read of 2011 started the year off on the YA fantasy angle I wanted. Collins' book kept me enthralled through plane, Metro, and bus rides and I finished it in one epic day of travel. Her dystopian world is convincing in its own context and her protagonist Katniss manages to be a strong, likable heroine without compromising one jot of authenticity.I felt throughout that there was more to the world than seen in the book, and I imagine more of it will be divulged in the next two books of the trilogy. Collins takes a very old idea, of pitting children against each other in a battle to the death, and infuses it with cultural and historical significance and a deep message about government control. The plot has its twists and turns, but the protagonist's reactions remain the most interesting thing about the book. Of course, this is also what the in-text audience is interested in, which sets up a creepy parallel between the reader and the ...

57 can be my official number for books read in 2010, it's a tad embarrassing that the last book I read last year was Sister of the Dead . However, I started the New Year off right with a trip to Barnes&Noble (as my patient, loving boyfriend stood by) and bought The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins and The Collected Works of T.S. Spivet by Reif Larsen. The former was a bit of an impulse buy, influenced by my late trashy/fantasy kick and a zeitgeist around the book blogs that YA is where it's at. The latter has been on my list since I attended a panel with Reif Larsen at the first annual Boston Book Festival and when I saw it in the bookstore, I knew I had waited long enough. Apparently, the hardcover is no longer available new and I decided not to wait and buy used, so mine is paperback. However, seeing as the hardcover has some extra features and I expect to enjoy the book a lot, I might see if I could arrange some trade at a later date. Like last year, I've decided no...