Space Station Mir

Happy late Top Ten Tuesday! Top Ten Phrases That Instantly Make Me Pick Up a Book 1. Science fiction 2. A cross between Jane Austen and J.R.R. Tolkien-basically if it mentions a book or author I love (especially more than one), I will take a look. 3. Nineteenth century Britain/Victorian 4. Elizabethan/Renaissance/Tudor/Stuart 5. Strong heroine 6. Epic fantasy (although this tends to be overused) 7. Hugo/Nebula/Man Booker/Newberry award winner 8. Washington D.C./Boston/Chicago-a book set in a place that I'm familiar with 9. Venice/Rome/London-a book set in a place I really want to travel to 10. Weird/unusual/quirky-I look books (or at least the idea of books) that are different

Happy Top Ten Tuesday! It's been a little while for me. Books I Thought I'd Like More Than I Did 1. The Second Empress by Michelle Moran I wanted to like it better than I did, and the novel did have its strong points in the characters and history, it just wasn't as developed as it could have been and the writing could have been better. 2. At the Mercy of the Queen by Anne Clinard Barnhill I was really interested in the Anne Boleyn story from Madge Shelton's point of view, unfortunately the writing was so painful I couldn't get through it. Madge just kept babbling about herself in anachronistic language and her character was such a weak, whiny girl. 3. Neuromancer by William Gibson It won a Hugo and a Nebula and I'm generally a huge sci fi fan, but this world was just too hard to get into and I wasn't invested enough in the characters to try. 4. The Dark Is Rising by Susan Cooper I thought I would love this Arthurian legend-based kids' ...

In class (I got in!) we are reading The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin. The subtitle is "an ambiguous utopia." I've read other books in the Hainish Cycle, and this one is both noticeably different and recognizably Le Guin. It's the first in chronological order, and the protagonist discovers the equations that will lead to the ansible-"an instantaneous communication device." In the rest of the cycle, this is the device that the protagonists use to record their observations of other worlds. Shevek is the only protagonist in the cycle (at least of those I've read) that is of the race that he observes. However, he is and is not. Shevek is from Anarres, a desert mining colony on the moon of Urras, a water-rich planet. On Anarres, the Odonians have built a two-hundred-year old anarchist commune, where nobody owns anything. On Urras, the larger powers are still "propertarian" (i.e. capitalist) and exploit their resources, using a money economy...

Grad school is subsuming my life, but I came across this definition in the reading for a class I'm hoping to take (*fingers crossed*) on Utopian Science Fiction: "SF is a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author's empirical environment." -Darko Suvin, "Metamorphoses of Science Fiction." That would seem to count a lot of fantasy novels as SF, which traditionally upsets the SF hardliners. However, it jives well with my view of the genre and its uses (and pleasures). Thoughts?

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...