Top twenty

From Miss Erin.

What: Top twenty favourite books in no particular order. Don’t think about it for too long. Take twenty minutes only to compile your list. Bold the ones you’ve read, or reread, since you’ve started blogging.* Include novels, non fiction and plays.

The Goose Girl, by Shannon Hale
Blood Red Horse, by K.M. Grant
Princess Academy, by Shannon Hale
Honeymoon in Purdah, by Alison Wearing
Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen
Persuasion, by Jane Austen
Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader, by Anne Fadiman
Dominion, by Matthew Scully
Sabriel, by Garth Nix
The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, by C.S. Lewis
Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert
Habibi, by Naomi Shihab Nye
The Dark is Rising, by Susan Cooper
Never in a Hurry, by Naomi Shihab Nye
Cyrano de Bergerac, by Edmond Rostand
Surprised By Joy, by C.S. Lewis
Mere Christianity, by C.S. Lewis
The Screwtape Letters, by C.S. Lewis
Reading Lolita in Tehran, by Azar Nafisi


Try it yourself, and tell me if you do! Don't let it be hard.

*nota bene: LotR is the only one I haven't read since beginning this blog.

Title? Um...

"An average of 18 [U.S.] war veterans kill themselves each day..." (BBC News)


"At least 10,000 debt-ridden farmers have committed suicide in India each year over the last decade..." (also BBC News)

"If you're not ANGRY, you're not paying attention!"
- Protester's sign

"It's called Wednesday."

I finished The Miner's Daughter, by Gretchen Moran Laskas, just a little while ago. Lovely story. Review coming.

Yesterday I went on a field trip with my geology class to a variety of locations, including a peat bog where we got to walk on the peat mat over the water (wicked cool; we jumped simultaneously and felt it undulate a little) and Matthiessen State Park, where I saw Mennonites for the first time in my life and we hiked along a river in this beautiful sandstone canyon:

It was a lot of fun, although our prof hadn't warned us that we would actually be hiking...still, it turned out to be a good thing that I wore flip flops, even if I did have to wade through several inches of mud on various occasions, because I also got to wade in the river. :) Nice day. Oh, and I keep seeing out of the corner of my eye the rock I took from the canyon and thinking it's a biscuit (they had biscuits for breakfast this morning).
If you're using a feed reader, don't miss the poll I just put up. (It's about feed readers, you see. Heh.)
Mon...only a week and a half more of classes, then finals, then I go home.
Crazy.

Quest for a Maid

"When I was nine years old, I hid under a table and heard my sister kill a king."
Meg's sister Inge is a witch, and the spell she uses to kill King Alexander sets in motion a power struggle which threatens to tear Scotland apart. When Meg is chosen for the perilous journey to bring the rightful queen home to rule, she finds herself challenging Inge's power, and discovering more strength in herself than anyone knew she had. (Swiped from the back cover.)

Quest for a Maid, by Frances Mary Hendry, is a wonderful quasi-historical fiction adventure-fantasy story that I highly recommend. With interesting and skillfully drawn characters and complex relationships, the vividly portrayed setting of thirteenth-century Scotland and Norway, and a goodly amount of peril and intrigue, it's a highly original, fast-paced (once it gets going, which granted doesn't happen immediately), absorbing read. An altogether excellent book.

Grade: A+

N.B. Some profanity, but I didn't find it gratuitous. The target audience is probably the younger half of the teen range, but it never felt too young for me.

Nectar in a Sieve

Nectar in a Sieve, by Kamala Markandaya, is the story of Rukmani, an Indian peasant woman living in the former half of the twentieth century. There's very little that is happy about this book. By the time I was a third of the way into it, I felt like the pattern had been established: she was never going to have even a moderately secure and comfortable life, no matter how hard she tried or how much her life might be looking up at times.

So, emotionally, the book can be a difficult read - it's full of loss and struggle and hardship - though Rukmani's refusal to give up hope is somewhat uplifting. Sometimes. The writing itself is simple and graceful, with some downright lyrical passages. Nectar is a well-written novel that I especially recommend to readers who want to learn about poverty, India, peasant life, and the like through fiction.

Grade: B