Space Station Mir

The fact that this is necessary irks me a little, but then another part of me thinks this is really cool. Maybe having different prizes is a way that we can appreciate differences-as long as we're clear that we're only getting a limited perspective. It's nice to see some of these authors getting attention (even though Hilary Mantel doesn't need it). Here's the Long List for the Women's Prize for Fiction, formerly the Orange Prize. Should we have an American prize for women writers? What do you think?

5. Contact by Carl Sagan Contact is Carl Sagan's elegantly written love letter to math and the mysteries of the universe and the probability of life on other planets. Ellie, or Eleanor Arroway, spends her life dedicated to contact-with life on other worlds. After her father dies young, her contact with the other inhabitants of her own planet is fleeting and insubstantial. The story is primarily Ellie's, the story of a dedicated, determined young woman who achieves her greatest dream. But it is also the story of a nation and a planet. Sagan explores how Earth, circa his imagined late 1990s, would react to proof that life on other planets exists. The religions, the politics, the international tensions. The science. The disbelief. The security concerns. The aliens themselves are somewhere between E.T. and War of the Worlds on the friendliness scale. Perhaps a little bit like the mice from the Hitchhiker's Galaxy , if not quite so murderous. Not very Vulcanesque either...

Top Ten Tuesdays -I will stop lying to you about my TBR lists. What I'm really going to read this spring will be articles and books related to my M.A. thesis-oh and books and articles for classes too: 1."The Country-House Poems of Lanyer, Jonson, Carew, and Marvell: Emblems of Social Change in the Seventeenth Century" by Diane Batchelet Gill 2. Women Writing of Divinest Things: Rhetoric and the Poetry of Pembroke, Wroth, and Lanyer by Lyn Bennett 3. Writing Women's Literary History by Margaret Ezell 4. Penshurst: The Semiotics of Place and the Poetics of History by Don Wayne 5. "The Gender of Religious Devotion: Lanyer and Donne" by Michael Schoenfeldt 6. " 'Let Us Have Our Libertie Againe': Aemilia Lanyer's Seventeenth Century Feminist Voice" by Lynette McGrath 7. " 'Whom the Lord with love affecteth': Gender and the Religious Poet 1590-1633" by Helen Wilcox 8. "Aemilia Lanyer and the Politics o...

My university's library held a book sale last week. On the final day, hardbacks went for $1 and paperbacks for 50 cents. Not to miss out on the bloodbath, I braved the musty stairs into a dimly lit room. I came across gems, such as a book of Saxon Medieval Poetry, a compendium of the works of sixteenth-century Spanish composers, and a tempting biography of George Sand. While I made it my mission to find the lowest-brow possible fiction, others squabbled over a copy of Orlando Furioso (Nah Nah Nah Nah Nah, I all but heard the winner exclaim) and required boxes to cart out their loot. I emerged with: 1. Cleopatra's Daughter by Michelle Moran I hope I like it better than her other book, but man, she does a great job choosing subjects I'm interested in that hardly anyone has written about. 2. Jane Austen: A Life by David Nokes Okay, it's kind of academic, but it's not in my super-specific area, SO it counts as pleasure reading. 3. Scarlett by Alexandra R...

At first, I thought, what a great Top Ten Tuesday topic! I feel like there are so many series that I hear about that I haven't gotten a chance to start. But then...how to narrow it down? And what about all the stand-alone books I want to read? So here are a randomly selected ten series I'm interested in reading... 1. The Grisha Trilogy by Leigh Bardugo The first book, Shadow and Bone , sounds like a lot of other YA/dystopian fiction that I have enjoyed lately. 2. Thursday Next series by Jasper Fforde An alternate Britain where they mess around with classic novels? This has a lot of awesome potential (and potential to make me angry, but I've heard good things). 3. The Inheritance Trilogy by N. K. Jemisin The Hundred Thusand Kingdoms (the first book) has been on my list forever. I need to get on this. 4. The Dreamblood Duo by N.K. Jemisin And, in the meantime, she's started another well-received fantasy series... 5. The Ship Breaker series by Paolo Bac...

This week's Top Ten Tuesday is "Top Ten Authors That I'd Put On My Auto-Buy List (basically an auto-buy list is no questions asked..you love this author so much that no matter what they wrote next you'd buy regardless of genre or subject matter)." There are plenty of authors whose entire works I want to read or have read-but most of those are no longer among the living. If I try to keep it to living authors... 1. Junot Diaz 2. Ann Brashares 3. Susanna Clarke 4. Margaret George Non-Living Authors on Auto-Buy 5. Jane Austen 6. L.M. Montgomery 7. Louisa May Alcott 8. Madeleine L'Engle 9. J.R.R. Tolkien 10.David Eddings

4. The Liberation of Jerusalem (Gerusalemme Liberata) by Torquato Tasso Did you know that The Iliad and The Odyssey are not the only epic poems produced in Western civilization? I mean, presumably you could have guessed as much since "epic poem" is a whole genre and Homer was (and is) so widely influential, but from the typical grade school and even university curriculum, you'd never know other epics exist (okay, The Aeneid too). Until you get to grad school that is. Torquato Tasso, a sixteenth century Italian, was a scholar and poet intimately familiar with classical epic and the more recent romance genre (so cleverly mocked by Cervantes in the same time period). The Liberation of Jerusalem is his attempt at the ideal Christian epic, which he lays out in theory in his Discourses , which I highly recommend to anyone interested in the epic genre. Among other things, he suggests that romances are really a sub-genre of epic, that only Christian miracles and not classi...

So the real Top Ten Tuesday this week is "Top Ten Favorite Romances," presumably in honor of Valentine's Day. But I don't read a lot of romance-focused books and would just end up reproducing my list of Top Ten Romances I Think would Last Outside the Book . Thus, a far more entertaining list of my top ten LEAST favorite romances. 1. Pamela and Mr. B from Pamela by Samuel Richardson Ugh. Marrying a wannabe rapist. Ugh. 2. Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester from Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte Ugh. Marrying a lying bigamist. Ugh. 3. Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy from Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen Ugh. Marrying a stuck-up prig. Ugh. 4. Bella Swan and Edward Cullen from Twilight by Stephanie Meyer *Disclaimer* I have not actually read the whole book. However, the guy creeps into her house to watch her sleep? STALKER. Don't date him, girl. 5. Juliet Capulet and Romeo Montague from Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare Romances that end in dea...