6/10/2023 0 Comments Ted chiang bookIn the amazing and much-lauded title story (the basis for the 2016 movie Arrival), a grieving mother copes with divorce and the death of her daughter by drawing on her knowledge of alien languages and non-linear memory recollection. Stories of Your Life and Others presents characters who must confront sudden change-the inevitable rise of automatons or the appearance of aliens-while striving to maintain some sense of normalcy. Combining the precision and scientific curiosity of Kim Stanley Robinson with Lorrie Moore's cool, clear love of language and narrative intricacy, this award-winning collection offers listeners the dual delights of the very, very strange and the heartbreakingly familiar. This new edition of Ted Chiang's masterful first collection, Stories of Your Life and Others, includes his first eight published stories.
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6/10/2023 0 Comments Local woman missing by mary kubicaThere is the belief that bad things can’t happen here, and yet they do. In a relatively tight-knit, upper middle-class neighborhood, like the one in Local Woman Missing, people know their neighbors. There’s a false sense of safety in the suburbs as opposed to the city. Why do the suburbs make such a scary setting? I started with the character of Delilah and her escape from captivity, not knowing then how or why she found herself living in such horrible conditions. I wanted to explore this more and examine what it’s like for the missing to return to society and become reacclimated with their families. So often, when we hear of missing people on the news, the story ends with their return. What inspired you to tell you this story? Kubica sets her seventh novel in the scary suburbs for the perfect Halloween thriller. In Local Woman Missing, Kubica creates a riveting tale of a long-lost child and two missing women. Mary Kubica’s novels have been translated into over thirty languages and have sold over two million copies worldwide. Her last novel, The Other Mrs., coming soon to Netflix, was a LibraryReads pick for February 2020 and an instant New York Times bestseller. One critic advised: “If you can’t sleep-in, don’t start reading this at night.” 6/10/2023 0 Comments Dagon lovecraftHe escapes on a lifeboat and drifts aimlessly, south of the equator, until he eventually finds himself stranded on "a slimy expanse of hellish black mire which extended about in monotonous undulations as far as could see. In the unnamed narrator's account, his cargo ship is captured by an Imperial German sea-raider in "one of the most open and least frequented parts of the broad Pacific". The story is the testament of a tortured, morphine-addicted man who relates an incident that occurred during his service as an officer during World War I. It is considered by many to be one of Lovecraft's most forward-looking stories. Dagon was later published in Weird Tales in October 1923. It was first published in the November 1919 edition of The Vagrant (issue #11). It was written in July 1917 and is one of the first stories that Lovecraft wrote as an adult. "Dagon" is a short story by American author H. Title page of "Dagon" as it appeared in Weird Tales, October 1923, where it was published for the second time. 6/10/2023 0 Comments Under the dome stephen king bookExciting for the Dome Four who used one of Joe’s robots (cause he has one) to investigate the abyss and find out they have a connection to the outside world, and exciting for “Big” Jim who found all the competition to his rule preoccupied elsewhere. Suddenly, the world of the show has been opened and the possibilities are indeed exciting.Įxciting for Barbie as we learned that he was in Chester’s Mill on a mission to get some unrevealed information about an energy conglomerate. This little twist is a good way to get the story away from Chester’s Mill, to show what the outside world is like during the time of the Dome. The abyss somehow led to the neighboring town, the one with the obelisk that the Dome Four have been seeing, the one located in the town where Jim’s wife and Junior’s mother dwells in, the one that may contain the secret of the Dome. Not really, but how awesome would that have been? But of course Barbie isn’t dead, Instead, his plunge took him to Subterranea where he was caught in a war between Tyrannus and Mole Man. 6/9/2023 0 Comments Metamorphoses bookThe palace of the Sun towered up with raised columns, bright with glittering gold, and gleaming bronze like fire. Bk II:833-875 Jupiter’s abduction of Europa. Bk II:812-832 Aglauros is turned to stone.Bk II:787-811 Envy poisons Aglauros’s heart.Bk II:737-751 Mercury elicits the help of Aglauros.Bk II:676-707 Mercury, Battus and the stolen cattle.Bk II:633-675 Chiron and Ocyrhoë’s prophecies.Bk II:612-632 Phoebus repents and saves Aesculapius.Bk II:596-611 Coronis is betrayed and Phoebus kills her.Bk II:508-530 Juno complains to Tethys and Oceanus.Bk II:496-507 Arcas and Callisto become constellations.Bk II:466-495 Callisto turned into a bear.Bk II:441-465 Diana discover’s Callisto’s shame.Bk II:381-400 The Sun returns to his task.Bk II:344-366 The sisters turned into poplar trees.Bk II:329-343 Phaethon’s sisters grieve for him.Bk II:301-328 Jupiter intervenes and Phaethon dies.Bk II:178-200 Phaethon lets go of the reins.Bk II:90-110 Phaethon insists on driving the chariot.This work may be freely reproduced, stored and transmitted, electronically or otherwise, for any non-commercial purpose. Kline © Copyright 2000 All Rights Reserved 6/9/2023 0 Comments The hippie paulo coelhoThey embark on the journey in the company of fascinating fellow travelers, each of whom has a story to tell, and each of whom will undergo a personal transformation, changing their priorities and values along the way. She convinces Paulo to join her on a trip aboard the Magic Bus that travels across Europe and Central Asia to Kathmandu. There he meets Karla, a Dutch woman in her twenties who has been waiting to find the ideal companion to accompany her on the fabled hippie trail to Nepal. Paulo’s travels take him from South America to the famous Dam Square in Amsterdam filled with young people wearing vibrant clothes and burning incense, meditating and playing music, while discussing sexual liberation, the expansion of consciousness, and the search for an inner truth. In Hippie, he tells the story of Paulo, a young, skinny Brazilian man with a goatee and long, flowing hair, who wants to become a writer and sets off on a journey in search of a deeper meaning for his life. If you want to learn about yourself, start by exploring the world around you.ĭrawing on the rich experience of his own life, best-selling author Paulo Coelho takes us back in time to relive the dreams of a generation that longed for peace and dared to challenge the established social order. Her pangs of remorse made her more complex than just the all-around the "bitch" a couple characters say she is. Ella, on the other hand, can be incredibly callous and selfish, wrapped up in her own efforts to get ahead in the world and experience the finer things that she never could before. It's so formulaic I hardly consider that a spoiler. We don't get a lot of women like her in fiction-Sadie's type of character is more usual: the girl who stands out but just wants to go unnoticed learns to find her strength. Not because she was a likable character, but because she wasn't. The sisters were great characters, and I particularly liked Ella. I waffled over whether to include this in my "good world-building" category and I'm going for it, though mostly because this time wasn't familiar to me and yet I could see everything clearly in my mind's eye. I don't know much about urban England in the 1660s, though I've read about life in the country, particularly during the plague-so this trip to the city taught me a lot. A fun and fairly fluffy bit of historical fiction. I very much enjoyed it, though it didn't have much depth. 6/9/2023 0 Comments The dog stars novelNarrated by a man who is part warrior and part dreamer, a hunter with a great shot and a heart that refuses to harden, The Dog Stars is both savagely funny and achingly sad, a breathtaking story about what it means to be human. But what he encounters and what he must face-in the people he meets, and in himself-is both better and worse than anything he could have hoped for. As Hig ponders early in the novel: So I wonder what it is this need to tell. It’s an ode to friendship between two men, a story of the strong bond between a human and a dog, and a reminder of what is worth living for. Risking everything, he flies past his point of no return-not enough fuel to get him home-following the trail of the static-broken voice on the radio. The Dog Stars is a love story, but not just in the typical sense. But when a random transmission somehow beams through his radio, the voice ignites a hope deep inside him that a better life-something like his old life-exists beyond the airport. In his 1956 Cessna, Hig flies the perimeter of the airfield or sneaks off to the mountains to fish and to pretend that things are the way they used to be. His wife is gone, his friends are dead, he lives in the hangar of a small abandoned airport with his dog, his only neighbor a gun-toting misanthrope. Hig survived the flu that killed everyone he knows. J2:03pm AP EXCLUSIVE: In a seven-figure deal, New Regency Pictures has preemptively acquired film rights to the Peter Heller bestselling novel The Dog Stars, a package that comes. A riveting, powerful novel about a pilot living in a world filled with loss-and what he is willing to risk to rediscover, against all odds, connection, love, and grace. I made the Batgirl comparison, but a comparison to DC's Harley Quinn series is also apt given the choice of moving forward by plot or fiat of character, Constantine: The Hellblazer seems to choose the latter every time. That's all before the last issue, a series of one-panel sight gags while Constantine plays exorcist-for-hire. But of those five issues, about a sum total of one issue is spent on flashbacks to Constantine's early life (perhaps not entirely unexpected), one is spent on Constantine tricked into the middle of a supernatural business dispute, and one spends an extended sequence on a tour of haunted New York. Going Down is ostensibly about a demon shadowing John Constantine and his travels from New York to London to try to get rid of it, over five of the book's six issues. It comes off for me like John Constantine by way of Batgirl of Burnside, which admittedly might have been exactly the tone this book was going for, but the complexity isn't sufficient to stand up to those halcyon days of DC's in-universe "Mature Readers" titles. 1: Going Down is mature and clever, but also meandering and perhaps a tad too hip. Ming Doyle and James Tynion's Constantine: The Hellblazer Vol. The "DC You" Constantine series is likely closer to what ardent Hellblazer fans are looking for, but my sense is the series still has a ways to go to achieve that Vertigo tone. 6/8/2023 0 Comments Aline mckenna lisa kleypasHer dad had passed on and she still loved McKenna and he still loved her so what was the problem? I suppose if Aline had told McKenna her reasons from the beginning there would have been no book or story. The reasons that Aline couldn't admit to how and why they parted twelve years earlier just didn't sit well with me. Follow that particular scenario up with Aline's accident the whole situation had me turning the pages so fast I couldn't seem to get enough.įor me Again the Magic slowed down at the "Twelve Years Later" part. The way they ended their relationship was heartbreaking. I felt the connection between Aline and McKenna and I truly felt the despair of them not being together. I think I'd rather give this book a 3.5 stars but not a 4. This story occurs before both of the fabulous Hathaways and Wallflowers series. Again the Magic takes place in Stoney Creek which is near the Hathaway's setting from that Lisa Kleypas series. |