Of course, to me, the Four Questions start with Ma nishtana ha-lailah hazeh ... . However, the meme has something a little more personal in mind! It goes like this:
 

• Leave me a comment saying "Resistance is Futile."
• I'll respond by asking you four questions so I can satisfy my curiosity
• Update your journal with the answers to the questions.
• Include this explanation in the post and offer to ask other people questions

lady_ganesh asked me:

1. Who's your favorite character to write?
   
   Has to be Gojyo from Saiyuki! I think he lets the inner me come out and play.
    
2. What's your favorite offline hobby?
   
   The Young Lady heard me ask this outloud and said it has to be reading. I'll add photography - although that goes online once I post the pix to Flickr.
    
3. Do you go to conventions? (I can't remember.) Is there one you want to go to?
   
   I do like to go to cons sometimes. I used to run tournaments at gaming cons. Now I hang out and take pictures of people in costumes. I've gone to Katsucon the last couple of years and hope to do so again in 2010.
    
4. What's your favorite fannish possession?
   
   After the actual books and manga themselves, it has to be my big print of this picture (pefectly worksafe; click on the image once you get there so you can see the whole thing properly). telophase drew/painted this for me! I won her in a charity auction, and asked for something with four mysterious shop keepers from manga/manhwa. We have this framed and hanging in the dining room.

The f-list did fairly well, answering 7 out of 12 correctly. I probably could have been nicer and quoted less obscure works by Tanith Lee and Peter Dickinson, for example.

Reading all these lovely Yuletide book suggestions has made me think of books, books, and favorite books. Thus, this meme ganked from redbrunja some weeks ago:

1. Pick 10 of your favorite books or series.
2. Post the first sentence of each book. (If one sentence seems too short, post two or three!)
3. Let everyone try to guess the titles and authors of your books.

I'll strike off the prompts and credit the guessors as this goes on ... and I'm giving a round 12 lines, because 10 wasn't enough.

ETA: Now with answers to those not guessed!!

1. Everything starts somewhere, although many physicists disagree. - Hogfather by Terry Pratchett, guessed by hikari_mibu
    
2. I shall clasp my hands together and bow to the corners of the world. - Bridge of Birds by Barry Hughart, guessed by telophase
    
3. Her kiss burnt his forehead. Keyed senses, distracted by the powdery odour of shampoo, didn't at once register that the fire was frozen.  One Foot in the Grave by Peter Dickinson
    
4. It was gala night at the Royal Theatre, London.   Thursday's Children by Rumer Godden
    
5. July had been blown out like a candle by a biting wind that ushered in a leaden August sky.   My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell
    
6. Prime Predictor Tae ran-Kaeil was long dead, but he lived in the bellies of his aggressive progeny. - Courtship Rite by Donald Kingsbury, guessed by smillaraaq
    
7. Night, near the eastern edge of the walled, sloping grounds of the estate, with these walls, perhaps a quarter-mile from the house itself, at the small stand of trees, under a moonless sky, listening, he stands, absolutely silent.   Eye of Cat by Roger Zelazny
    
8. The plump young man with the ginger hair caused something of a sensation as he entered the inn. It was not intentional.   Cyrion by Tanith Lee (actually, the Young Lady guessed this one, looking over my shoulder. She has an LJ, but declined to log in and answer online ...)
    
9. The people in this book might be going to have lived a long, long time from now in Northern California. - Always Coming Home by Ursula K. Le Guin, guessed by smillaraaq
    
10. The [ship's] small galley table was was awash in data printout, paperfaxes ringed and blotched with brown gfi-stains, arrowed, circled, crossed-out, and noted in red and green ink till they were beyond cryptic. - Chanur's Homecoming by C.J. Cherryh, guessed by theloomofmoira
     
11. The hills rolled up to the moon on slopes of wind-bent grass, crested, swept down into tangled brier shadows. - God Stalk by P.C. Hodgell, guessed by estara
     
12. It began one day in the summer about 30 years ago, and it happened to four children. - Half Magic by Edward Eager, guessed by flemmings

Happy hunting!

From the American Library Association: "To Kill a Mockingbird has been challenged and banned nationwide because it contains racial slurs and adult themes."

For more about Banned Books Week, see Banned Books Week: Celebrating the Freedom to Read at the the American Library Association's site.

Author Jo Walton has a good review of C.J. Cherryh's AU martial arts novel The Paladin (on TOR.com).

Thanks to the associates at Shejidan for pointing this out.

Hamza Senesert was once a contender, a creative grad student with a talent for writing. Now he washes dishes in a trendy "fun" restaurant. His best friend Yehat Gerbles is in a similar state of career petrification: he works as a clerk in a video store, even though he's a (mostly) self-taught engineering wizard. Together, they share a house in a vibrant multi-ethinic neighborhood of Edmonton (Canada) called Kush, where they are the Coyote Kings, well-liked operators of a camp/afterschool activity center for the neighborhood kids and connoisseurs of science fiction, comics, and role-playing games.

Their weirdly pleasant world (weirdly, considering their job situations and Hamza's writer's block and broken heart) becomes a lot more weird and much, much less pleasant when Hamza meets and falls for a truly impressive woman of mystery named Sherem. All at once, these endearingly geeky lifelong buddies are mixed up with comic book-type villains who are all too real and deadly, strangely seductive drugs, and bizarrely horrific cults.

I really enjoyed this book, which plays right into my love of buddy stories and generalized geekdom. I will note that Faust is in love with language, and writes like it: this is in no way a straightforward narrative (indeed, it begins with an epilogue). It also includes several very gruesome, violent scenes, and Sherem is the only female character with more than a walk-on part.

Well, artillie was right to be suspicious of the publisher's response in the case of the cover of Justine Larbalestier's book Liar. As unusualmusic has pointed out on Alas! A Blog and Angry Black Woman - yes, there is now going to be a young African American woman on the cover, but in point of fact, she still doesn't look like the protagonist of the story, and the cover is still problematic.

This just in from the LJ racism_101 community:

A New Look for 'Liar'
"Proof of the power of the web: Bloomsbury Children’s Books has told Publishers Weekly exclusively that it will change the controversial cover of Justine Larbalestier’s Liar ... 'We regret that our original creative direction for Liar—which was intended to symbolically reflect the narrator’s complex psychological makeup—has been interpreted by some as a calculated decision to mask the character’s ethnicity,' Bloomsbury officials said ... "
- Publisher's Weekly

OK, cynics - how'd you like them apples? Yes, protesting can help!

This is why Science Fiction can’t have nice things

(A post on Alas! Blog on Amptoons, by The Angry Black Woman (also cross-posted on her own blog))

Via too many good folk to list:

"Oyate is a Native organization working to see that our lives and histories are portrayed honestly, and so that all people will know our stories belong to us. For Indian children, it is as important as it has ever been for them to know who they are and what they come from. For all children, it is time to know and acknowledge the truths of history. Only then will they come to have the understanding and respect for each other that now, more than ever, will be necessary for life to continue ....

"Our hope is that by making many excellent books available to encourage many more, especially from Native writers and artists. Oyate, our organization’s name, is the Dakota word for people. It was given to us by a Dakota friend."

If Oyate can raise $5000 by August 1 (that's Saturday - the day after tomorrow), they'll receive a matching grant (page at link includes donation information) that will allow them to upgrade their Web site (which is already a great educational and activist resource).

Even small contributions add up. Please think about helping.

So I found the following while poking around in some of the things rachelmanija had linked in her post about the on-the-cover whitewashing of the lead character in Justine Larbelastier's novel Liar. And coincidentally, I had already found it earlier today, on the previous break, when I was looking for people talking about Verb Noire on the Intarwebs. Clearly, Someone Is Trying to Tell Me Something:

White Readers Meet Black Authors
http://www.welcomewhitefolks.blogspot.com/
"Your official invitation into the African American section of the bookstore! A sometimes serious, sometimes light-hearted plea for EVERYBODY to give a black writer a try."

They're making a movie of The Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliff! The idea got a great reception at Cannes!

(Thanks to sovay for the tip!)

I'm honored but puzzled to discover that I am Ursula LeGuin.

You too can discover which fantasy author you are ... .

(I could have given more romantic, less cynical answers on some of those questions if the romantic choices hadn't been so completely extreme!)

Wow, I owe someone a huge hug and kiss! How wonderful!

It will surprise none of Jame's fans to discover that she is an Action Girl and Extraordinarily Empowered Girl, as well as an example of Dark Is Not Evil, Ensign Newbie (in To Ride a Rathorn), I Have Many Names, I Just Want To Be Normal, Last Of Her Kind, Person Of Mass Destruction, and Walking Disaster Area.

The tradition-minded people of the Ooni Kingdom have only distant legends of what it means to be born dada, as Zahrah was. Although her family love her, they don't really understand what it's like for the young girl to grow up with living vines twining in her hair, and some of her classmates are cruel. Only her best friend, Dari, appreciates her and encourages her to explore what she is. But when a frightening episode in their experimentation and exploration leaves Dari poised on the brink of death, Zahrah must embark on a fearsome quest to save his life.

(Read more ... )

Syrah Cheng's father is the billionaire founder of a cellphone company. Her mother - his second wife - constantly finds fault with her. Her father's two older children (already adults, one with children of his own) belittle her. Her classmates ignore her or try to ingratiate themselves because of her money. All 15-year-old Syrah wants to do is become a pro snowboarder - but a recent heart-stopping accident has damaged her knee badly enough that she's pretty sure she'll never snowboard again competitively, even if her parents would let her.

You can ignore the cover blurbs about her love life: what Syrah really needs is not a boyfriend, but a reason to exist. And she finds it.

I often enjoy children's and YA fiction, but I was rather bored with the first part of this. Syrah doesn't feel at home with her private school classmates, but she's a lot more part of the mainstream than I was at that age. Also, she is very self-centered - which I'm sure I was at that point as well. But about halfway through the book, when Syrah starts looking beyond her own issues, the story takes off in a big way. When I finished the book, I turned back and re-read it from that point: it's a very satisfying story, in the end, and even the slightly overwrought language at the climax works as the voice of a bright young teen.

(Read more ... with spoilers!)

In our world, in 1938, Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes suggested that Jewish refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe be settled in Alaska. The measure didn't pass — but in Chabon's book, it did. The number of Jews killed in the Holocaust in this AU was considerably fewer, but the modern state of Israel did not survive its war for independence. In the 70 years since, the Jews of Sitka have developed a Yiddish-speaking culture on the fringe of the frequently frozen wilderness of the north, but now their little world is coming to an end as the U.S. prepares to reclaim the District and cast out the vast majority of its residents. Unsurprisingly, many of the more religious residents of Sitka are once again speaking of the coming of the Messiah.

Against this End Times backdrop, police detective Meyer Landsman becomes obsessed with a murder all too close to home: a chess-playing junkie who was shot execution-style in Landsman's rundown apartment building. Who was this ruined man, and why was he killed? Is there a significance to the chess problem that was left set up in his room? And will Landsman, who has been told by his new supervisor — who is, just incidentally, his ex-wife Bina, for whom he's still carrying a king-sized torch — to consider the case closed because they have to have everything shipshape by the time the U.S. government takes over, ever solve the mystery?

I was reluctant to start this because it sounded too depressing, but I liked it a lot. The grimly funny prose, with its Yiddish sentence structure, just flowed off the page for me, and I found myself grinning or snickering several times each chapter. So it was a shock to look at Amazon's reader reviews — and find that significant numbers of people couldn't get into the book at all, found the language offensive or incomprehensible, and thought it too grim to finish. I guess I need to add YMMV. In my case, this is told in one of several accents with which I grew up (many of my New York cousins and their parents and our grandparents and great-aunts and uncles sounded more or less like this), as well as the style of humor to which I was accustomed. The idea of making terrible, cutting, and even vulgar jokes and humorous insults as the world is ending around you is an old tradition of our people, but clearly it doesn't work for everyone.

Arnold Spirit Jr., known as Junior, is having one heck of a life. He was born 14 years ago with hydrocephalus (water on the brain) and a mouth that eventually grew 10 more teeth than the norm. As a result of his brain problems and the surgery that he had at 6 months of age to correct them, he has serious vision problems, a huge head, seizures, a stutter, and a lisp. His family is dirt poor, his father is an alcoholic, .

But he is also a budding cartoonist, a Spokane Indian, a passionate, loving soul, and despite everything, an optimist.

In a whirlwind chain of events that starts when he realizes that his geometry text is 30 years old, loses his temper, and throws the book across the room, Junior enrolls the previously all-white high school in the town 22 miles away, loses and makes friends, becomes a basketball star, lands in the hospital, and experiences tragedy after tragedy among those he loves. And he still hangs onto his hopes through it all.

It sounds as though this should be a tragic, touching book - and it is. But it is also hilariously funny. It's illustrated throughout with drawings by Ellen Forney, which represent Junior's cartoons and drawings and add to the the book's charm and wit.

(Read more ... with spoilers!)

I liked this a lot: after I finished it, I went back and read all my favorite bits, and then started the whole book over again.

The setting is Italy in World War II. Four Buffalo Soldiers — members of the 92nd Division, which had African-American soldiers and white commanders — get cut off from their unit and find themselves trapped in a small, mostly ruined village that has already survived one devastating German attack in reprisal for suspected partisan activities. Smart, responsible Lt. Stamps, conniving, charming ex-street preacher Bishop, moony, trilingual Puerto Rican Hector, and the simple gentle giant Train, who has taken a badly injured Italian boy under his wing, spend several days in the village, wondering how to follow their orders to capture a German for questioning, waiting for their army to come and get them before the Germans do, and learning a lot about the villagers and themselves. When partisans show up with a German prisoner, things start to happen, fast and furious and ugly.

Link for more

This is a worthwhile read for anyone interested in this period of history. You should note that there are some grisly episodes of violence - it's a war story - but McBride has a journalist's detachment about these incidents and doesn't wallow in them, which helps.

I had a nice, fat package from Amazon awaiting me at home!

It contained but a single volume:

The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox