Space Station Mir

21. A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin I watched the first episode of the HBO mini-series and decided to finally read the borrowed book that had been sitting on my shelf for a month or so. What I can say is that this book is enthralling. I had a hard time putting it down. Martin, a well-known fantasy writer that I've been planning to read for years, creates a fantasy world of Seven Kingdoms where winter and summer each last for years. One of the longest summers in memory, nine years, is coming to an end, and winter is coming. We meet the Stark family, a Great House from the North, who once were kings, but are now united under the ruler of the Seven Kingdoms. The father, Lord Eddard Stark, helped win the throne of the current king Robert Baratheon. The mother, Catelyn Stark, is of the Tully family of Riverrun, a Southron Great House. Their five children are Robb, Sansa, Arya, Bran, and Rickon. Eddard also has a bastard son, Jon Snow, who lives with the family, but whose mother...

20. King Lear "Oh reason not the need..." it's hard not to feel pity for an elderly man thrown out in a rainstorm. Yet what did he do to Goneril and Regan to make them behave like that? Lear is no wise old man for sure, and in his haste to censure, damn, and disinherit his own children, it's no wonder they've followed his example. What happens when mistreated children are put in charge? Chaos, murder, and mayhem. Gloucester's eyes are plucked out, Lear abandoned, good men banished, and good women hanged. All for parents' failure to see the results of their own actions; Gloucester cannot see that his treatment of his bastard son Edmund fosters resentment, Lear cannot see the bruises from his favoritism for Cordelia and how his daughters actually feel about him. Lear may be a story where we feel sorry for the old and disgusted with the young, save the faithful Edgar and Cordelia, but it's a tragedy not only of misjudging evil, but mistakenly fostering it...

19. Kenilworth by Sir Walter Scott I've wanted to read Kenilworth for years, ever since I heard of its existence. The story of Leicester and Elizabeth by the author of Ivanhoe ? I'm in. Scott tells the story of the murder of Amy Dudley, Leicester's wife, whose death is still a mystery, though often imputed to her husband's ambition to be king. He converges Amy's story with Leicester's later secret marriage to Lettice Knollys, creating a plot that differs from history, but has its roots and intentions in a greater mythical rendering of an Elizabethan legend. In Scott's fiction, it is 1575, and an impetuous Leicester, ambitious favorite of the queen, marries an equally impetuous, obscure minor noblewoman, Amy Dudley. He elopes with her, but instructs her to keep the marriage secret and essentially keeps her under lock and key at a secluded manor, Cumnor Place, in Berkshire County. Her guardians are Anthony Forster, who was a man suspected of colluding in the ...

18. The Belgariad Volume Two: Castle of Wizardry and Enchanter's End Game by David Eddings These last two novels only heightened my admiration for Eddings' writing. In the first book, we see a resolution of what has come before, the Quest for the Orb, as Garion takes his place as the Rivan King and Ce'Nedra seethes at being a lower rank than her intended husband. It also sets us up for the Final Battle between Garion, the Child of Light, and Torak, the Maimed God or Child of Darkness. We get to know the entire cast of major and minor characters much better here, which helps explain how they act later. I also like how each character, down to the most minor, could clearly have another book or legend written about them, and I hope Eddings does. I especially want to know what happens to Relg, the zealot, and Taiba, former slave and Mother of the Lost Race, and their future child, for whom the Gods have a special fate in store. The second book details the parallel journeys o...