Christina, an orphan, is sent to live with her uncle Russell and his boys at their country place, Flambards. Son Mark loves the hunt, William dreams of flying. Loved the Masterpiece Theater adaption, enjoyed the series when I read it years ago, and enjoy this coming-of-age tale again.
Miranda, a teen-age girl in Pennsylvania, records the changes in her life when an asteroid-hit Moon changes its orbit. Gets pretty bleak, and the diary style wasn't very exciting for me. By page five I decided I was bored, but I read the WHOLE THING, and it was worth reading. Good survival advice in there, too.
You can tell which sister is going to die, the noble, heroic, religious one. Poor Beth, you could see it coming, couldn't you? Oh, wait, wrong book. Alex is going to Catholic high school in New York when the asteroid hits the moon and knocks it a bit askew in this companion to Life As We Knew It. He tries to take care of his two sisters, but things just get worse and worse.
Very nice pictures by the author illustrate this 51 page book which takes us through a whaling trip in the 1800s. Published in 1974, there is no mention of protests against whaling in the paragraph about contemporary hunts.
Food and murder. This is great!! This one is based on the characters and a story created by Virginia Rich. Mrs. Rich created the Eugenia Potter series but passed away before writing this book.
A rather confusing cast of characters, mostly fat, try to lose weight, or not, in heaven and here on earth. I found the hot dog description interesting, I might try tomatoes on a dog. Oh, did I mention the vampire parakeets?
Words I Had To Look Up:
Ophidiophobe (pg. 48) -- Fear of snakes. Kakophaphiophobia ( pg. 80) -- Kakorraphiaphobia is the fear of failure. Typo?
Chalyatchkie stick (pg. 87) -- No definiton found.
Emmis about the whole geschichte (pg. 95) -- Can't find definion for "emmis", but
the rest is about the whole story/history.
Fraktur characters (pg. 153) -- A typeface from the 16th century with a broken or
fractured appearance.
Transmigrational (pg. 181) -- To pass from one body to another at death,
soul-wise.
Prepossessing (pg. 191) -- Creating a favorable impression.
Gemutlich (pg. 208) -- German, pleasant.
Shmendrick (pg. 214) -- A spelling variation, it is Yiddish for a stupid person.
Pneumatic blonde (pg. 147) -- Well, Anna Nicole Smith was one.
Objet trouvé (pg. 224) -- In French, a found object.
Chent (pg. 240) -- Silly me, it is a mispronounciation of chant!
I've read this before, and semi-recently, too, but it's not on the list so I downloaded the Project Gutenberg e-book edition and read that.
Great story!
A mystery story by an author I thought just did science fiction.
A gun hobbyist is shot while cleaning his new pistol. Is it an accident, or is it...MURDER??
I read the Project Gutenberg e-book edition.
If you are not familiar with General Semantics you can look it up, it is mentioned five times in the story.
Quote:
"My colored boy, Buck" -- Well, that's not offensive!
Quote:
"like Bill Nye's Puritans' -- Not THAT Bill Nye, this one was an American humorist, Edgar Wilson "Bill" Nye.
Quote:
"and a Woolworth store with a red front that made it look like some painted hussy who had wandered into a Quaker Meeting.
" -- Paints a picture in my mind!
Quote:
"The women seemed to have erected a temporary tri-partite Entente-more-or-less-Cordiale.
" -- The sisters don't get along...
Quote:
"pull a Russ Columbo on himself." -- A famous musician that was shot accidently by his friend.
Quote:
" Skinner was working on the rifle with an insufflator." -- A squeeze bulb to blow air, I guess.
Quote:
"What started the hostilities this time?" Rand asked, going up the stairway with her. "Oh, Geraldine lost Nelda's place-marker out of the Kinsey Report, or something." She shrugged."
Quote:
"a monstrous ululation
" -- The act of ululating; a long, loud, wavering cry or howl.
Read the Project Gutenberg edition.
A guy seeks revenge on the psycho who killed the guy's new wife. Searches the universe for him!
Quote:
How would you like to be my girl on Marduk?" Myrna thought that over carefully. "I'd like to, but I couldn't. You see, I'm going to have to be Queen, some day." -- Myrna was maybe my favorite character.
Quote:
"You are quite the cynosure..." -- a person or thing that is the center of attention or admiration.
I read this collection of stories before, but it does not seem to be in the database. Nothing distinguishes these stories to me. I noticed the publisher cheaped-out by running one story into another, no blank space between stories. I guess The Ghost Maker was the best story.
Thirty-odd stories, most of which I liked a lot, and most of which are not too long. I was surprised to learn he is still, at this writing, alive. A grand old man!
Quote:
One hundred and thirty-one men, women, and children simultaneously were converted into maltreated chunks of barbecued meat falling through the sky. their roster included the pilot, the copilot, the third pilot, and eight other members of the flight crew; plus, among the passengers, mothers, infants, honeymooning couples, nonhoneymooning but equally amorous couples who did not happen to be married to each other, a middle-aged grape picker returning home after a five-days-four-nights all-expense tour of Sin City (which he had found disappointing), a defrocked priest, a disbarred lawyer, and a congressman from Oregon who would never now achieve his dream of dismantling NASA and preventing the further waste of the taxpayer's funds on space, which he held to be empty and uninteresting.
Whoever they had been when whole, the pieces of barbecue all looked pretty much alike now. It did not matter. Not one of the passengers or crew had died unhappy, since they had all been touched by the comet. (Some Joys Under The Star, pg. 240.)
Words I Had To Look Up:
Winterhilfe (pg. 353) -- A Nazi Germany program to help poor Germans.
This is a great book I picked up from the free books box at the library. It has some wonderfull stories. My favorite was "The model of a judge" by William Morrison.
Words I Had To Look Up:
meretricious --pg. 32.:
like or relating to a prostitute; brassy: tastelessly showy; gilded: based on pretense; deceptively pleasing; Found at:
wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn
adiabatic--pg. 142: Changes in temperature caused by the expansion (cooling) or compression (warming) of a body of air as it rises or descends in the atmosphere, with no exchange of heat with the surrounding air.
spieltier--pg. 132: [“The Lady Who Sailed the Soul” by Cordwainer Smith] shapeshifting pet
Quote:
"Hitler had once said that the true victory of the Nazis would be to force its enemies, the United States in particular, to become like the Third Reich - i.e. a totalitarian society - in order to win. Hitler, then, expected to win even in losing. As I watched the American military-industrial complex grow after World War Two I kept remembering Hitler's analysis, and I kept thinking how right the son of a bitch was. We had beaten Germany, but both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. were getting more and more like the Nazis with their huge police systems every day."
-- Philip K. Dick, Notes on Oh to be a Blobel! (1979)
Stories by Lester Del Rey, Frederik Pohl, Damon Knight, A.E. Van Vogt, and jack Vance. I'd say my favorites were The Miracle Workers by Jack Vance, and Day Million by Frederick Pohl.