Space Station Mir

I'm a week behind on Top Ten Tuesdays . Not sure if I'll catch up, but here's the Thanskgiving post. 1. L.M. Montgomery 2. Louisa May Alcott 3. Madeleine L'Engle 4. J.R.R. Tolkien 5. C.S. Lewis 6. Susanna Clarke 7. Jane Austen 8. William Shakespeare 9. Aemilia Lanyer 10. Elizabeth Cary 11. Margaret Cavendish

42. Ready Player One by Ernest Cline Of all the serendipitous books that have been #42 on my annual reading list, this is the most appropriate. Arguably even more so than the Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide, because this book is all about references. Ready Player One is infused with every geeky or nerdy or dorky tidbit that you could possibly conjure. I wish I had more time to do it justice, but this is the book that I'm recommending to every science fiction fan I know. This should have been the theme book for Dragon Con. Besides the impressive breadth of references, spanning Star Trek to the Whedonverse to Pac-man and Mario, Tolkien to Lewis to Douglas, Hughes to Spielberg to Goldman, the characters are just so darn likable. Wade Watts, the protagonist, is positively adorable. He's a savvy kid in a bleak vision of the future, who is, obviously, up on all of the above geeky types of knowledge, a loyal friend, and charmingly naive as a would-be lover. (Confession: If I we...

I'm a little late for Top Ten Tuesday this week. After this post, I'm taking a medical leave of absence from the blog for an indeterminate period of time in order to catch up from a medical leave of absence in real life. 1. Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien 2. The Complete Works of Shakespeare 3. Harry Potter 1-7 by J.K. Rowling (series are counting as one book because I say so, okay?) 4. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (the real one and maybe the one by Douglas Adams too) 5. Anne of Green Gables, Emily of New Moon, and A Tangled Web by L.M. Montgomery 6. Little Women series by Louisa May Alcott 7. Time Quartet by Madeleine L'Engle 8. C.S. Lewis' space trilogy 9. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy 10. All of Jane Austen's novels Okay, I cheated, and there are still way too many books I want to bring. Can my deserted island have a library? Pretty please?

41. Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche I read this for a class, but I didn't have the time to devote to it that it clearly deserves. The prose is beautiful, but together, I'm not sure what it all means-and many think that was deliberate on the part of the author. If you want to find justification for murder here, you can. If you want to find atheism here, you can. If you want to find any way of looking at the world differently, of looking at the world the way you've always felt it should be or never realized before now it could be-this is the apple you want to bite. "You want to live 'according to nature'? O you noble Stoics, what fradulent words! Think of a being such as nature is, prodigal beyond measure, indifferent beyond measure, without aims or intentions, without mercy or justice...think of indifference itself as a power-how could you live according to such indifference?" (Section 9)

This week's Top Ten Tuesday, hosted by the Broke and the Bookish . Top Ten Favorite Kick-Ass Heroines (aka The Usual Suspects) 1. Katniss Everdeen from The Hunger Games 2. Hermione Granger from Harry Potter 3. Katsa from Graceling 4. Beatrice Prior from Divergent 5. Jo March from Little Women 6. Anne Shirley from Anne of Green Gables 7. Art3mis from Ready Player One 8. Polgara from Polgara the Sorceress , the Belgariad , and the Malloreon 9. September from The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making 10. Meg Murry from A Wrinkle in Time

40. The Art Forger by B.A. Shapiro What is a forgery? Where does the fault line between artwork and forgery lie? Or, as Claire Roth, the protagonist of B.A. Shapiro’s elegantly layered new novel The Art Forger might say, the craquelure . In 1990, thirteen paintings were stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. The museum has offered a $5 million reward, but none of the paintings have ever been found. This much is true, the rest is Shapiro's fiction. The Art Forger opens in 2011, at the South End studio of young Boston artist Claire Roth, who makes her living as a painter of high-quality reproductions. Dubbed “the Great Pretender,” by her peers, Claire has more than a little to prove when she is asked to make a copy of a Degas painting in exchange for a one-woman show at a prestigious gallery. When the painting she is to copy arrives, she recognizes it immediately as one from the Gardner. While the moral dilemma is a problem for Claire, there’s a greater se...

Top Ten Tuesdays are hosted by the Broke and the Bookish . There was a similar post last October, so it's more of a challenge to think of some new ones! 1. The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making by Catherynne M. Valente The main character, September, loves fall and pumpkins and her favorite color is orange. There's a memorable autumnal feast and several weird, wacky characters. 2. Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak Max's costume brings him to a land of wild beasts... 3. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis The scene where the Witch captures Aslan with all of the various ghouls and evil people helping her feels very Halloween-ish to me. 4. The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley The main characters are all mystical and use all sorts of disguises, and memorable events take place on Samhain, the Celtic originator of Halloween. 5. The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux A man in a mask is the central...

39. This Case Is Gonna Kill Me by Phillipa Bornikova I received this for review from Tor paperbacks and read it recently in one feverish night. While legal dramas are not really my cup of tea, this one has a most intriguing premise-imagine a world ruled by Vampires, Werewolves, and Alfar (Elves). Linnet Ellery is a human raised in a vampire household who scores a job at a top law firm. Of course, only men can be partners since only men can become vampires, but it's a big break for a human woman. However, when her boss is killed and it's looking like she could be next... Yeah, it's that kind of story. But the world is fantastic-I'm dying to know more about it and the little snippets that Linnet gives are absolutely worth the mediocre plot and (at times) stunningly banal language. Bornikova has a wicked imagination, I just wish she knew how to package it better. On the Acknowledgments page, Bornikova thanks Ian Tregellis for "many great ideas about the world ...