1. Author is a woman: Dragonflight by Anne McCaffrey 04/01 Review

6. Title has a color word in it: Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 04/04 Review

27. Set during WWI or WWII: The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer  10/04  Review     

38. Newest release by a favorite author: Golden in Death by J.D. Robb  11/04 Review

41. Characters involved in politics: Yeah, no. Read Vendetta in Death by J.D. Robb 14/04 Review and roll 1 die.

47. Snake - go back to 19

19. Set in the UK: The Bloody Chamber: And Other Stories by Angela Carter 18/04 Review

28. Written between 1900 and 1999: The Grand Sophy by Georgette Heyer 23/04 Review

36. Set in Central or South America: Too scattered for Amado, I read a short Bodoc for children and call it. Review

37. Has won an award: Started Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie  05/01 Review

45. A book that has been on your tbr for more than one year: I counted so wrong before, but I was listening The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin  while cleaning and cooking this weekend and still works. Will post review in a bit. Meanwhile

54. Is more than 400 pages long: Huh... well... I've got Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens on the dock. And Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson. Either ought to go over that...

by Stanley R. Lee

This is a quirky story that might fall under Dystopian, though it comes from an era when that meant science fiction. Civilization lives in a dome with completely controlled weather conditions and a society that runs on conformity, until Mr. Humphrey Fownes takes an interest in the weather outside the dome.

His house shakes, and investigations into why lead to some astonishing results.

Anything more would give the story away completely, but I will say that the story lacks explanation as to why things happen as they do and is a part of that ancient body of science fiction from times when we didn't expect the writers to make us understand the science behind things.

Red Moon - Kim Stanley Robinson

Well, China has colonised the Moon and the rest of the world is playing catch-up, making the dusty, cratered lump of rock a giant political football. Shenanigans start up there, involving internal Chinese politics, but things turn international when a murder is committed and blamed on an American...an odd series of chases and attempts to hide follow, as "global" revolution looms.

"Global" in quotation marks, becuase KSR argues that only the USA and China matter any more and that they have become economically co-dependent. I personally think one Vladimir Putin would dispute the first part of that analysis. It smacks of the over-simplification prevalent in the Cold War era USA that Europe was nothing but a potential battle field to be fought over by the binary Superpowers.

It was amusing to find charcters from KSR's novel, Antarctica, playing key roles, thus linking this book to that but also, by extention, to the Science in the Capital sequence. Additionally, strong reference is made to events in the USA that are the material of the novel, New York, 2140 - but that's ~100 years in the future of this book, so he's just recycling those ideas.

I struggled to connect with the protagonists here and felt distanced by a fair amount of apparent Luggage Syndrome, which was disappointing. Neither the best nor the worst by Robinson.

Wells on Middleton's A Yorkshire Tragedy:

I have a hunch that Middleton, working with frenzied inspiration, sketched the play from the opening of what is now the second scene, found that it came out far too short for independent performance, embarked upon a process of expansion by writing an introductory scene in a more relaxed manner, decided that this didn’t work, and as a way of cutting his losses turned the whole play over to a printer who agreed to publish it provided he could say it was by Shakespeare. I cannot prove this; but equally, so far as I know, no one can disprove it.

And this is what sets Wells apart from other Shakespeare scholars for me - he acknowledges when he can't prove something, and still makes you think about the possibility of his theory having merit.

He died in August 1637, aged 65, and was buried in Westminster Abbey, where his memorial stone bears the inscription: ‘O rare Ben Jonson’. His status as the most distinguished and productive literary figure of the previous forty years was recognized by many printed tributes – far more than had marked Shakespeare’s passing – including the publication of a collection of memorial poems; and a second, much enlarged, three-volume edition of his Folio appeared in 1640.

For the remainder of the seventeenth century Jonson’s reputation and influence equalled and possibly exceeded Shakespeare’s, but in the eighteenth century the balance shifted, above all with the virtual deification of Shakespeare from the time of the Garrick Jubilee, in 1769, onwards.

Jonson was an interesting character - tho Marlowe is still the most intriguing to me right now. 

The next chapter is about Middleton, but I will need to leave this to tomorrow evening ... together with the rest of the book (I need to return the book to the library on Friday).