![]() ![]() Only those courageous enough to risk everything have a hope of fighting off this advancing evil.Ī few months ago, I picked up the fifth book in Tales of Goldstone Wood, Dragonwitch, and was immediately drawn into the series. ![]() Soon the Dragon King himself is in Parumvir, and Una, in giving her heart away unwisely, finds herself in grave danger. Una, smitten instead with a more dashing prince, refuses Aethelbald's offer and ignores his warnings. A dragon is rumored to be approaching Parumvir. ![]() Prince Aethelbald from the mysterious land of Farthest shore has traveled far to prove his love and also to bring hushed warnings of danger. She dreams of a handsome and charming prince, but when the first suitor arrives, she finds him stodgy and boring. Princess Una of Parumvir has come of age and will soon be married. Also by this author: Golden Daughter, Shadow Hand, Dragonwitch, Starflower, Moonblood, Veiled Rose, Fallen Star: A Short Story of Goldstone Wood, Draven's Light ![]()
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5/30/2023 0 Comments Daughter of the siren queen![]() ![]() ![]() Despite the danger, Alosa knows they will recover the treasure first. When Vordan exposes a secret her father has kept for years, Alosa and her crew find themselves in a deadly race with the feared Pirate King. And she takes great comfort in knowing that the villainous Vordan will soon be facing her father’s justice. Still unfairly attractive and unexpectedly loyal, first mate Riden is a constant distraction, but now he’s under her orders. Not only has she recovered all three pieces of the map to a legendary hidden treasure, but the pirates who originally took her captive are now prisoners on her ship. I was super excited to find out I didn’t have to wait long at all for the sequel – Daughter of a Siren Queen – to come out.Īlosa’s mission is finally complete. Pirates are my jam! And that book became one of the best things I read last year. One of those months included a book called Daughter of the Pirate King and came with a bunch of pirate-y themed goodness. ![]() And Owlcrate had some leftover boxes from previous months. When I first discovered book boxes, I found Owlcrate. ![]() ![]() ![]() Le Guin & Her Cohort Wendell Berry Zadie Smith ![]() ![]() Parker Ross Macdonald & Margaret Millar Shel Silverstein Stanislaw Lem Stephen King Toni Morrison Ursula K. Wodehouse Philip Roth Rachel Carson Ralph Ellison Randy Watts Ray Bradbury Robert A. Tolkien Kurt Vonnegut Lee Child Loren Eiseley Louise Erdrich Louise Penny Lovecraft and Howard Malcolm X Margaret Atwood Marianne Moore and Her World Mo Willems Neil Gaiman Norman Mailer Octavia Butler Pat LaMarche and the Charles Bruce Foundation P.G. Thompson & New Journalism James Baldwin Joan Didion John D. White, James Thurber, and Their World Eric Sloane Georges Simenon Hunter S. Authors Agatha Christie Albert Camus & His World Alistair MacLean Amy June Bates, Artist and Book Illustrator Anthony Burgess Arthur Conan Doyle Ayn Rand The Bronte Sisters Carl Hiaasen Charles Bukowski E.B. ![]() The Fountainhead - WHISTLESTOP BOOKSHOP WHISTLESTOP BOOKSHOP ![]() 5/30/2023 0 Comments The player of games![]() ![]() The Culture is committed to a Whorfian thesis about language, and its language has been designed to facilitate the flourishing of the Culture. ![]() Perhaps the humans are thought the useful redundancy of the Culture. In this volume of the series, we never learn what keeps the machines from killing the humans they outsmart. Its ruling ideology (it's called a 'philosophy' by themselves) is 'Strength in depth redundancy over-design." (239) This is an ideology of precautionary principles. Jointly these two societies inhabit the Culture, which is extremely powerful in the galaxy. This intergalactic human society is surrounded by an, in part, hidden machine-culture in which super smart machines and networks reveal consciousness and intelligence that outstrip anything we are capable of. The action starts in an imperial, utopian somewhat anarchic (there are few laws) society with little scarcity (nor money) and not much death full of semi-clever drones that serve and keep humans alive. The Player of Games is a clever science fiction novel, but here I want to treat it as a contribution to Socratic Political Theory ( recall here and here). Gurgeh never ceased to be fascinated by the way a society's games revealed so much about its ethos, it's philosophy, its very soul.-Iain M. ![]() 5/30/2023 0 Comments The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin![]() ![]() It is a deeply moving testament to the power of story, the nature of belief, and the unrelenting pull of familial bonds. Golden-boy Simon escapes to the West Coast, searching for love in '80s San Francisco dreamy Klara becomes a Las Vegas magician, obsessed with blurring reality and fantasy eldest son Daniel seeks security as an army doctor post-9/11 and bookish Varya throws herself into longevity research, where she tests the boundary between science and immortality.Ī sweeping novel of remarkable ambition and depth, The Immortalists probes the line between destiny and choice, reality and illusion, this world and the next. The prophecies inform their next five decades. The Gold children-four adolescents on the cusp of self-awareness-sneak out to hear their fortunes. It's 1969 in New York City's Lower East Side, and word has spread of the arrival of a mystical woman, a traveling psychic who claims to be able to tell anyone the day they will die. If you knew the date of your death, how would you live your life? ![]() ![]() Meghan and Jack are experiencing financial and marital troubles – but from Agatha’s perspective, lonely and stocking shelves, it looks pretty sweet. It is obvious that Agatha envies Meghan, unaware that life inside her beautiful home is more complex than the view from over the fence. ![]() The narrative pivots between Meghan, who has two young children and a husband working in television, and Agatha (Laura Carmichael, from Downton Abbey), who is single and works at a local mini-supermarket. ![]() But when it comes to skeletons in the closet, the admission of an unintended child is nothing compared with the various kinds of jiggery-pokery and dangerous liaisons in store. The words are the beginning of a blogpost Meghan – a mummy blogger and social media influencer – is writing. Voiceover narration begins, telling the audience: “It’s time to let you in on a little secret, we didn’t plan to have another child.” The first episode opens moodily, with an image bathed in midnight blue depicting Meghan (Jessica De Gouw, recently in SBS’s sexting-themed drama The Hunting) and her husband Jack (Michael Dorman) lying in bed. ![]() Generally in a good, nail-biting way, rather than “get outta town, this is stretching plausibility” – though at times there is a faint element of that too. The directors, Jennifer Leacey and Catherine Millar, pull off no easy feat, pushing viewers into a psychologically tense space where walls feel like they are closing in and the actions of certain characters become maddening. ![]() 5/30/2023 0 Comments Amsterdam novel by ian mcewan![]() Gorgeous, feisty Molly had other lovers, too, notably Julian Garmony, Foreign Secretary, a notorious right-winger tipped to be the next prime minister. Both Clive Linley and Vernon Halliday had been Molly's lovers in the days before they reached their current eminence: Clive is Britain's most successful modern composer, and Vernon is editor of the newspaper The Judge. ![]() On a chilly February day, two old friends meet in the throng outside a London crematorium to pay their last respects to Molly Lane. In lesser hands, such a mix might be lethal. The four McEwan novels-Booker Prize-winning Amsterdam, Enduring Love, Black Dogs, and The Innocent-included in this Reading Group Companion, showcase the author's range and skill as he delivers unlikely, and welcome, combinations of suspense, ethics, philosophy, and political and religious ideology. When you read his earlier works, you'll wonder why he didn't win it sooner. When you read Ian McEwan's most recent novel, Amsterdam, you'll understand why it won the Booker Prize. ![]() 5/30/2023 0 Comments Kindred octavia butler![]() ![]() Spoiler alert: Important details of the novel are revealed below In the end, Dana is faced with the dilemma of having to kill Rufus herself to prevent the monster in him from taking full shape – but then again doing this means she may never get to exist in the future. It turns out this little boy is her ancestor and that she has to travel more often into the past to save him every time he’s in trouble if she ever is born in the future.ĭana takes on this task – however physically and emotionally daunting it is – and saves, educates, and cares for him, but it wasn’t long until she realizes that his ancestor is growing into a monster. Suddenly, she falls sick and wakes up in the past, where she has to save a little boy from drowning. ![]() In ‘ Kindred‘, Edana, or Dana as she is mostly called in the book, is a black young woman in her twenties who is constantly – and without her consent – being drawn back through time to save her white ancestor, Rufus, from being killed and preventing her from being born in the first place.Ģ6-year-old Dana has just moved with Kelvin into a new city and is trying to get her career back on track – amid a burning desire to know more about her family. ![]() 5/29/2023 0 Comments Gameboard of the gods![]() I siphoned this hardcover out of the Bargain Books shelf of my local bookstore under the false impression that it constituted yet another classic YA novel, courtesy of Richelle Mead: witty, kickass, and unputdownable. Gameboard of the Gods, the first installment of Richelle Mead’s Age of X series, will have all the elements that have made her YA Vampire Academy and Bloodlines series such megasuccesses: sexy, irresistible characters romantic and mythological intrigue and relentless action and suspense. ![]() As their investigation races forward, unknown enemies and powers greater than they can imagine are gathering in the shadows, ready to reclaim the world in which humans are merely game pieces on their board. When Justin and Mae are assigned to work together to solve a string of ritualistic murders, they soon realize that their discoveries have exposed them to terrible danger. ![]() ![]() Raised in an aristocratic caste, Mae is now a member of the military’s most elite and terrifying tier, a soldier with enhanced reflexes and skills. But Justin is given a second chance when Mae Koskinen comes to bring him back to the Republic of United North America (RUNA). ![]() In a futuristic world nearly destroyed by religious extremists, Justin March lives in exile after failing in his job as an investigator of religious groups and supernatural claims. ![]() 5/29/2023 0 Comments Topdog underdog yahya![]() Taking place, according to the program, here and now, the script nevertheless alludes to an earlier New York of street hustles and SRO hotels. Godot came to mind because Topdog's only characters, Booth and Lincoln - the names were their father's idea of a joke - inhabit a world that is both naturalistic and an existential limbo. ![]() (Well, maybe Beckett's modernist masterpiece, just a little.) Yet nothing in the theatre exists in a vacuum and sometimes the ghosts of dramas past can't help making their presence known. It's doubtful that Suzan-Lori Parks had either play in mind when writing her 2002 Pulitzer Prize winner. At the Golden Theatre, while taking in the superb teamwork of Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Corey Hawkins in Topdog/Underdog I saw brief, yet unmistakable, flickers of both Waiting for Godot and, surprisingly The Gin Game. Sometimes in a Broadway theatre, one experiences a kind of pentimento effect, glimpsing traces of productions that previously occupied the same stage. ![]() Theatre in Review: Topdog/Underdog (Golden Theatre)Ĭorey Hawkins, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II. ![]() |