Thursday, January 27, 2011

Eschatology

"He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away." -Revelation 21:4 (ESV)

And there will come a time, you'll see, with no more tears.
And love will not break your heart, but dismiss your fears.
Get over your hill and see what you find there,
With grace in your heart and flowers in your hair.

-Mumford and Sons, "After the Storm"

We are not alone
We feel an unseen love
We are sons and heirs of grace
We are children of
A light that never dims,
A love that never dies
Keep your chin up child
And wipe the tears from your eyes.

-Thrice, "Music Box"


Why is it that verses like Revelation 21:4 and songs and passages that reflect that idea so often just make me have the feeling of tears, make me want to do the very thing whose cure they speak of? Is it that I want to open a wound so that it might be healed? Or--what I think more likely--is it that on this side of such a promise, all we really have to do is cry and cling to our faith, cling to that hope?

Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Daily Quote

The more I think about this quote, from Thomas Moore's Soulmates, the more I completely agree with what Moore says, about the true way to help people:

We may think that "it's only right and proper" that a person change her ways and that her soul be something other than what it is, but this kind of thinking moves us away from the person's own nature. Sometimes it appears that there is more moralism in the field of psychology than there is in religion.

Saturday, January 22, 2011

Don't Read This One, It's Really Long

On the Transfiguration of Grape Juice

I.

When paradox saved my life,
Chaos ensued, and peace.

II.

And you sat there, holding my hand,
And worlds and worlds were at your command.

III.

If you want to become human,
A stor mo chridhe,
You may have to die to yourself in order to rise again.

IV.

Ceilidh framed in painted glass,
Changing colors with the shadows that pass.


A stor mo chridhe,
I told you,
Though maybe I failed to love you or know you,
And all the things I showed you,
Glittering fireworks on eagles' wings,
Scamping hedgehogs fighting over gems of emerald green,
A bounding doe,
Suspending in the snowy air,
Brown-on-white,
Eyes wide and dark like pits of chocolate.
All of this was a glittering monstrosity,
Like 80's New York as envisioned by the 50's.

And the same with you, a stor:
For you we must live in order to live,
Must change before we can change,
Change before we can change
Before we can...

If you want to become human, love,
You may have to die in order to rise again.

Shall these bones live?

O believer, I was told,
God died for you,
So that you could live for Him.
O the glory of your obedience when
In the waters of baptism
You come to Him,
In obedience,
In submission.

I was told, O
Believer,
You must do
You must do this and that and these,
You must live in order to live,
You must become a true son
Of the living God.
You must believe, and do,
and serve.

When you throw off the artifice
Of symbol that has polluted your life,
And decide to decide,
When you learn to live in order to live,
Then your real life begins.

Ceilidh framed in painted glass,
Changing colors with the shadows that pass.

See this grape juice?

It is a symbol.

See this bread?

It, too, is symbol.

Have you made your decision?

Then you may partake.

There's a boy in an old chapel,
In an old chapel where the stained glass
Was entertainment, all entertainment, all you!

O Believer!

Leap to leap and live to live!
Come and obey!
Drown yourself in God's water!

Ceilidh framed in painted glass,
Changing colors with the shadows that pass.


O shadows, please pass,
Please stop smiling upon me,
Please stop showing me the chinks in the armor
Of the world.
And yet, if you do,
I fear I will waste away.

And the boy, sitting in his pew,
Picks up a rock, and shatters the glass.


V.

And there you sit, there in my memory,
Holding my hand;
And worlds and worlds
Are at your command.

And in my memory, I throw
Down your hand, I run for the door
Throw myself into the sea,
The water washing over me,
But it is cruel, it is stinging,
The brine of the salt is in my mouth,
My nostrils,
Tearing at my skin,
But not making me new.

I had to find a loving God.

I climb from the sea and a man
Drapes a towel over me
And offers me a snack;
He calls it a snack.

I had to find a loving God.

O man, I said,
Your grape juice is an illusion,
And your bread is a conjurer's trick.

If your grape juice is but a symbol,
If your bread is not a body
If the body of Christ is not a body
But wax paper merely,
Why bother?
For the sake of obedience?

I had to find a loving God.

The works were too much,
And the weight of doing tore me down.
Shall these bones live?
I could not leap in order to leap
I could not leap
I could not
And I was not obedient
Never obedient
Shall these bones live?
For all my efforts, all my fights,
All my storm-winged glittering jeweled flights,
Under the halo of the stars
My tending of others' scars,
I was not good enough, I was not strong enough.
Shall these bones live?

And you, a stor, there in my memory
Still hold my hand,
And still you have worlds
At your command.


VI.

I had a pyramid once,
A grounding-place between skull and earth,
Death and birth,
A great thing made all
Of stone, and dirt, and dead men's bones,
New flowers and old skulls,
The smell of Orion,
The dust of Demetrius.

The Trinity was there too,
Three points uniting all,
Inevitable.

A bird perched upon my pyramid,
White as a lily,
A desert flake of snow,
Small head darting about in quick-step with itself,
It chirruped and tweeted,
Then cackled,
A deep throaty rumble emerging
From its tiny neck;

And upon my pyramid, the dirt trembled.

And deep inside my pyramid
An evergreen started to grow,
Branches spreading, budding,
Splitting the earth and the dust and the bone and the dirt
Inside my pyramid.
A trickle of rocks and dirt skittered down
My pyramid's side,
Then with an explosion of salty mist
The evergreen burst forth
Flinging dirt and rock and skulls,
Orion's belt and Demetrius' dust,
Lily-blossoms and orange petals,
Out across the land.

VII.

When paradox saved my life,
Chaos ensued, and peace.

I love you,
But maybe that's not enough.
Maybe you have to love me too.
And if you do,
If you do,
Maybe we have to leap.
Do we have to leap before we can leap?
Do we have to leap before we can even get there?

That's it. I refuse.
This labyrinth, self-created, where
All the Minotaurs are sleeping,
Where Perseus' shining thread
Is but the dust of dreams and uncertainties,
The thread ferrying our fallacies,
This labyrinth is not worth the sacrifice of navigation.
Sometimes the soul lives in sacrifice,
But sometimes sacrifice must cease to live to save the soul.

When paradox saved my life,
Chaos ensued, and peace.
Then it was that I saw,
Saw the deep love and grace at the bottom of the universe,
Saw the transfiguration of grape juice,
And, thank God,
It did not depend upon me.
The symbol was the thing,
The water was the blood,
The body and blood
Were the bread and wine, not
A symbol, not a snack,
Did not depend upon my belief,
And, thank God,
They did not depend upon my obedience.
Light will issue from the sun,
The stars will pinprick and then go supernova,
The lilies of the field will be clothed,
And deep grace will reverberate
Throughout the universe,

Without relying on me,

Thank God.

Wednesday, January 05, 2011

Ethan's Literary Year in Review

As happened last year, herein shall follow the list of books I read this year, with commentary.

I racked up 101 books last year; this year I only did 68. However, as I said at the beginning of the year, I purposely read longer and harder books this year than last year.

One of my projects this year was to read all of F. Scott Fitzgerald. I did not fulfill this. I read all of his novels except his last, unfinished one; it still remains for me to read The Last Tycoon and all of Fitzgerald's short stories and miscellany. There was some purpose in not finishing Scott in a hurry, as the year closed: I was still a little sick of him. As much as I love the man, three of his novels in a year is actually quite enough.

Without further ado: the List of 2010.

1. Public Enemies, by Bryan Burrough [Half-read]
I intended to come back and finish this later, but have not yet done so. The half I did read was utterly fascinating. Burrough does as thorough a research and reporting job as it is possible to do, uncovering the story of the 1932-33 crime wave and breathing life into such figures as John Dillinger, Baby-Face Nelson, Bonnie and Clyde, and their many peers. At the same time, Burrough keeps from romanticizing them at all. For example, he calls Bonnie and Clyde a couple of vicious backwater criminals, killers utterly undeserving of the romance that sprang up around them. I thought the movie taken from this book to be fairly good, but this book is about a hundred times bigger, more detailed, and probably a thousand times more fascinating.

2. I, Robot, by Isaac Asimov
A science fiction classic, of course. There were a lot of things in it I liked, and it was a classic example of golden age SF's focus on the human side of its technology-laden stories. I got bored about 2/3rds of the way through, but I still recommend it.

3. Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, by Mark Twain
Twain thought this was his greatest work; I would be perfectly comfortable putting it on the same level as Huck Finn. Not funny, and therefore out of character for Twain, but what Twain lacks in humor here he makes up for in passion and in detail, and in his drawing-out of the drama of Joan's story. Twain is at his best when he assumes another's voice, and here he writes as the man who became Joan's personal secretary.

4. A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens
Probably the 7th or 8th time in my life I've read this book. The beginning never gets less disorienting, and the ending never ceases to make reading the whole book worthwhile.

5. Gorgias, by Plato
6. Phaedrus, by Plato
Plato doing what he does best: taking aim at our brains and blasting them into little pieces, thereby creating scholarly controversy for literally millenia to come. Both of these are worth reading; MAYBE they're worth reading the nine or so times it would take to fully understand them.

7. Oedipus Rex, by Sophocles
I am looking forward to this coming semester, as it appears that I will not have to read Oedipus Rex, even once.

8. Bartimaeus: The Amulet of Samarkand, by Jonathan Stroud
An enormously fun book, mainly for the character of Bartimaeus, an ancient Djinn conjured by a young sorcerer in a sort of alternate London run by magicians. Also, footnotes.

9. The Beautiful and Damned, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
My least favorite of Fitzgerald's novels, so far. The story of a torrid unhealthy love affair between a young couple in the early part of the Roaring Twenties. Fascinating in places, highly skillful in many places, but ultimately just sort of miserable to read.

10. Bhagavad-Gita, translated by Prabhavananda and Isherwood
A classic Hindu scripture, translated by two men enamoured of its importance. An extremely interesting read, especially for those interested in Eastern religions. I thought I found a lot of inconsistencies (I'd have to read through it again to give specifics), but I don't know if they're inconsistencies due to difficulty of translation, or simply because I lack context. Anyway, lots of heresy for the Christian, but worth reading perhaps for that very reason.

11. MacBeth, by Shakespeare
Still an overrated play. Still a lot of build-up for not really anything. Still a rushed ending. Shakespeare was still trying too hard. Actually, exact same thing could be said of the performance I subsequently saw at the Guthrie in Minneapolis.

12. Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte
I can see why so many people love it. I can. If I had been allowed to take my red pen and cut out the 60% or so of the text that could be cut without damaging the story at all, maybe I would have liked it more.


13. The Good Woman of Setzuan, by Bertolt Brecht
Brecht is an interesting fellow. His play here is rather blatant in the point it attempts to drive home, but rarely for an author like that, he did it with enough art that I didn't hold it against him.

14. Fences, by August Wilson
This is sort of very much a "Death of a Salesman" set in the African-American community in the 60s, but is a very good play for all that--I like it much better than "Salesman."

15. The Atlantis Enigma, by Herbie Brennan
Brennan is trying to make the case that Atlantis not only existed, but ran on crystal technology, and its remnant may be responsible for our world today. He does all this on the flimsiest of evidence, but boy, is it a fun read!

16. Joan of Arc: In her Own Words, edited by Willard Trask
I am NOT obsessed. Okay, maybe I have a crush on her. Maybe. Anyway, this book is REALLY eerie; her words are elegant, and calm, and even in an English translation a thousand years later, one can almost sense the real person here. Sends chills down one's spine.

17. Son of the Mob, by Gordon Korman
This book was fun, except I got bored about 2/3rds of the way through. An amusing one on which to waste an afternoon.

18. The Judging Eye, by R. Scott Bakker
Bakker is STILL one of the best fantasists writing today. This first part of what I believe will be a trilogy is fascinating, and by the time you get to the last third where a lot of it is basically a retread of the mines of Moria, there's so much else going on that you don't mind this.

19. The Knight, by Gene Wolfe
Wolfe is a better fantasist even than Bakker. His story of Faerie is somewhat maddening, but also fascinating, and Wolfe has this incredible penchant for taking things that shouldn't really be that emotional and making them somehow gut-wrenching.

20. Alan Mendelssohn, the Boy From Mars, by Daniel Pinkwater
21. Slaves of Spiegel, by Daniel Pinkwater
Pinkwater sells himself on being a subversive children's writer, on being someone too risque for the big publishers to touch. I was not impressed by him.

22. Tender is the Night, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
This was a fascinating novel, miles better than either "The Great Gatsby" or "The Beautiful and Damned." It may not have had the structural perfection of Gatsby, but the characters were more developed, more sympathetic, the prose was better, the story was more elegant and richer. This became my second-favorite Fitzgerald, after "This Side of Paradise."

23. Red Seas Under Red Skies, by Scott Lynch
SUCH A FUN BOOK. The second in the "Gentlemen Bastards" sequence, which effectively combines the Con Man and Epic Fantasy genres (read: two of Ethan's favorite things), and halfway through this book becomes a pirate story (read: now THREE of Ethan's favorite things).

24. How to be Alone: Essays, by Jonathan Franzen
Franzen has some fascinating stuff to say; his essays get a little whiny, a little self-righteous, and a little pretentious now and then, but at least he often KNOWS he is being this way and points it out himself.

25. Titus Groan, by Mervyn Peake
26. Gormenghast, by Mervyn Peake
27. Titus Alone, by Mervyn Peake
I cannot say enough good things about the Ghormenghast trilogy, so I won't try. Many, many modern fantasy writers will claim that it was Tolkien and Mervyn Peake who inspired them to write fantasy, and having read these three books, that makes perfect sense. If you have ever wanted to read a Gothic novel that was also good literature, these are the books for you.

28. First Encounters: A Book of Memorable Meetings, by Edward Sorel and Nancy Caldwell Sorel
29. Love That Dog, by Sharon Creech
30. Emmy and the Incredible Shrinking Rat, by Lynne Jonell
31. Victory, by Susan Cooper
About none of these do I have anything in particular to say. The last three are part of the slew of YA books I read toward the end of the summer. They are all fun, in their own way.

32. The End of the Beginning, by Avi
33. A Beginning, a Muddle and an End, by Avi
These two books, which take maybe half an hour apiece to read, are both the type of book only someone who has been writing for many years could come up with and execute. They glory in paradox, and because of that I gloried in them.

34. The Tiger Rising, by Kate DiCamillo
35. Because of Winn-Dixie, by Kate DiCamillo
Having already read DiCamillo's second two novels, and having loved both of them, I decided to read her first two. Neither of them quite made the all-time favorites list, but they are both really beautiful little books, and both eminently worth reading, for anybody.

36. Me and Orson Welles, by Robert Kaplow
Anyone who likes reading about old movies, Orson Welles, the Depression, the Theater, or a young man's coming-of-age should read this book. For me, who likes reading about all of those, it was perfect.

37. Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes, by Neil Gaiman
38. Sandman: The Doll's House, by Neil Gaiman
39. Sandman: Dream Country, by Neil Gaiman
40. Sandman: Season of Mists, by Neil Gaiman
41. Sandman: A Game of You, by Neil Gaiman
42. Sandman: Fables and Reflections, by Neil Gaiman
43. Sandman: Brief Lives, by Neil Gaiman
44. Sandman: World's End, by Neil Gaiman
45. Sandman: The Kindly Ones, by Neil Gaiman
46. Sandman: The Wake, by Neil Gaiman
For years, everyone said, "Read the Sandman books." For years, I was like, "Yeah, yeah." WOW. Sandman fans may get annoying, and it may seem like these books are overrated, but they're NOT. They're brilliant; if Allan Moore made the graphic novel literature, Neil Gaiman may be the one to make it great literature. Gaiman and his artists effectively tell a story that takes place pretty much literally everywhere, and everywhen, and sometimes nowhere and never.

47. Sandman: The Dream Hunters, by Neil Gaiman
48. Sandman: Endless Nights, by Neil Gaiman
The first, an illustrated Sandman short novel; the second, an anthology of stories about Dream and his siblings, written ten or so years after the last main sequence Sandman came out. Both well worth reading for those who liked the series.

49. The Girl Who Loved Animals and Other Stories, by Bruce McAllister
I found McAllister's story "The Courtship of the Queen" on Tor.com, and thought it was one of the most beautiful, touching fictions I had read in a long time. I wrote him an email telling him so, and he wrote me back and was very kind and gracious. Almost all of the stories in this book are remarkable in one way or another; some of them are truly great.

50. Theater/Theory/Theater, ed. Robert Gerould
58. Dramatic Theory and Criticism, ed. Bernard F. Dukore
I love theater theory in general; I hated most of its practitioners. Ho-hum.

51. Ironheart, by Victoria Tecken
68. Ink on Their Fingers, by Victoria Tecken and Benjamin Tecken
Two books by friends of mine. The first was probably the weirdest reading experience I've ever had: I was the narrator for the full-cast recorded book, and therefore I read it in bits and pieces and chunks, completely out of order, reading some sections many times, and some sections barely at all. The second book is short stories and poetry, ranging from decent to very very good. I recommend the first book to those who like YA fantasy; the second, to anyone who likes to read.

52. Miss Julie, by August Strindberg
53. Two Rooms, by Lee Blessing
More plays, more plays. Will I ever escape? "Two Rooms" is one of the saddest plays I've ever read. I did a monologue from it, which was great fun.

54. Noir: A Collection of Crime Comics, Various Authors
Very effective noir comics; those who write and draw graphic novels seem to really grasp the genre. Not for the faint of heart.

55. The Magician's Elephant, by Kate DiCamillo
DiCamillo seems to have mastered the creation of beauty, and of a well-told story. Again, recommend for anyone who likes stories.

56. The Mysterious Benedict Society, by Trenton Lee Stewart
Clever and fun, the book gets a little too far-fetched in places for my taste, but it's a good solid pleasure read.

57. Broadway Bound, by Neil Simon
Fairly typical Neil Simon. Semi-autobiographical, about two brothers in 1949 New York breaking into comedy writing.

59. Holding Onto Reality: The Nature of Information at the Turn of the Millenium, by Albert Borgman
I read this for a class. It's a brilliant history of information, charting it through its three phases of growth. Borgmann tries to calm some of the "internet hysteria," and to present a cogent argument for a balance of technology.

60. How to Conduct Organizational Surveys, by Jack Edwards et al.
Bore bore boring bored.

61. Selections from "Against Verres," by Cicero
Read in and translated from the Latin. Worth reading, in Latin or English, as examples of great oration, and as also just as history.

62. Following the Equator, Vol. 1, by Mark Twain
Twain's travels, mainly in Germany, in the 1880s. Vintage Twain. There are several chapters--notably, "The Great French Duel" and "Jim Baker's Bluejay Yarn"--that get reprinted solo in short story collections and the like. These DO tend to be the highlights, but if one needs a Twain fix, pretty much any chapter in here will do.

63. Showdown, by Ted Dekker
Dekker definitely knows how to tell a story, and the fact that his story involved more than a little magic, mystery, and bizarre fantasy suited me just fine.

64. Panzer Commander, by Hans von Luck
More of a personal memoir than a military history, though with plenty of the latter, von Luck's story of commanding Nazi tanks in WWII is fascinating and well worth reading.

65. Campaigns of Curiosity, by Elizabeth L. Banks
Banks was a female journalist beginning in the 1890s. She went to England, and employed a lot of gimmicks in writing interest pieces for London papers. She posed as a crossing-sweep, a laundry girl and a housemaid, among others, and wrote articles concerning her experiences. They are great fun to read, and anybody interested in the Victorian Era will probably find them fascinating.

66. Post-Scarcity Anarchism, by Murray Bookchin
My reaction to anarchist writers tends to be equally split between vehement agreement and wanting to punch them in the face. Bookchin caused much more of the former in me, which is not to say the latter was not present. This book was published in 1971, but the vast majority of it seems incredibly relevant.

67. The Mabinogion, by Anonymous Welsh Poet(s), translated by Gwyn Jones and Thomas Jones
Folk-stories and myths are interesting on many levels: there's the level of pure story, which is one major reason they should be preserved in the first place; there's the things they tell us about the culture of a time; there's the dissection and analysis of what they mean, where they came from, and how they were transmitted and changed; and there are sociological, psychological, archetypal, and anthropological options. Occasionally, the Maginogion was not interesting to me on any of these levels. Most of the time, it was interesting on all of them.

So. In Summary.

Books everyone should read
Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, by Mark Twain
A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens
Titus Groan, by Mervyn Peake
Gormenghast, by Mervyn Peake
Titus Alone, by Mervyn Peake
The End of the Beginning, by Avi
A Beginning, a Muddle and an End, by Avi
The Tiger Rising, by Kate DiCamillo
Because of Winn-Dixie, by Kate DiCamillo
The Magician's Elephant, by Kate DiCamillo
Me and Orson Welles, by Robert Kaplow

I'm not going to bother posting other categories this time; I think my comments should be a good guide if anything on the list looks interesting, and there's too much crossover and difficulty of categorization to attempt it.

Book List 2011

When I was in grade school, my mom cut out a big felt capital "E" and hung it on the bulletin board in the living room. (She cut out a similar Z for my brother.) Every time I read a book, I got to put a star on that E, and every time I had a certain number of stars I got a prize from the school Treasure Chest. However, after a while it was no longer about the prizes: it was about putting up one more star on that E, making the aggregation of stars more and more impressive. Sometimes, when I keep my annual book list, I feel as though it's only a leftover psychological manifestation of the giant E, as though all I am doing every time I finish a book is putting another star on that thing. Oh well. It's still a satisfying feeling.

This list to be updated throughout the year. Everybody be excited.

Book List 2011
1. Steampunk II (Anthology), edited by Ann and Jeff Vandermeer [Steampunk 1]
2. Reading Lolita in Tehran, by Azar Nafisi
3. Becoming a Writer, by Dorothea Brande
4. Human Narration as Communication, by Walter Fisher
5. The Story of the Irish Race, by Seamus MacManus
6. Everyman's McLuhan, by W. Terrence Gordon, Eri Hamaji & Jacob Albert [Media Ecology 1]
7. Mr. Mani, by A.B. Yehoshua
8. The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini
9. Blood Wedding, by Federico Garcia Lorca
10. Nectar in a Sieve, by Kamala Markandaya
11. Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe
12. 1000 Years of Irish Poetry, ed. by Kathleen Hoaglund
13. Understanding Media, by Marshall McLuhan [ME 2]
14. Imaginary Companions and the Children Who Create Them, by Marjorie Taylor
15. Actual Minds, Possible Worlds, by Jerome Bruner
16. The Court of the Air, by Stephen Hunt [SP 2]
17. Looking for Alaska, by John Green
18. Saint, by Ted Dekker
19. Larklight, by Philip Reeve [SP 3]
20. Going Bovine, by Libba Bray [Partial]
21. Disgrace, by J.M. Coetzee
22. The Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy of Mr. Punch, by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean
23. Chinese Cinderella, by Adeline Yen Mah
24. Amusing Ourselves to Death, by Neil Postman [ME 3]
25. The Golden Age, by John C. Wright
26. The Phoenix Transcendent, by John C. Wright
27. An Abundance of Katherines, by John Green
28. House, by Ted Dekker and Frank Peretti [Partial]
29. The Devil Knows Latin, by E. Christian Kopff [Classics 1]
30. Alchemy: Its Science and Romance, by the Right Rev. J. E. Mercer, D.D. (Sometime Bishop of Tasmania) [Alchemy 1]
31. Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card
32. Franny and Zooey, by J.D. Salinger
33. The Sorceror's House, by Gene Wolfe
34. Agamemnon, by Aeschylus, tr. George Thomson [Classics 2]
35. Going Out, Getting Dumped, and Playing Mini-Golf on the First Date, by Rev. Tim Pauls
36. The Greeks: Cosmology and Cosmogony, ed. by W.H. Auden
37. Mistborn, by Brandon Sanderson
38. Oh, What a Blow That Phantom Gave Me!, by Edmund Carpenter [ME 4]
39. Audrey, Wait!, by Robin Benway
40. Feet of Clay, by Terry Pratchett
41. De Profundis, by Oscar Wilde
42. One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
43. Cairo: a Graphic Novel, by G. Willow Wilson
44. Alice in Sunderland: An Entertainment, by Brian Talbot
45. Popgun: a Graphic Mix Tape, Volume One, edited by Mark Andrew Smith and Joe Keatinge
46. The Knife of Never Letting Go, by Patrick Ness
47. The Ask and the Answer, by Patrick Ness
48. Paper Towns, by John Green
49. Dumbing Us Down, by John Taylor Gatto [ME 5]
50. Monsters of Men, by Patrick Ness
51. Good Masters, Sweet Ladies: Voices from a Medieval Village
52. Stories, by Oscar Wilde
53. A House of Pomegranates, by Oscar Wilde
54. Lady Windermere's Fan, by Oscar Wilde
55. A Woman of No Importance, by Oscar Wilde
56. The Gutenberg Galaxy, by Marshall McLuhan (ME 6)
57. Serenity: Those Left Behind, by Joss Whedon and Brett Matthews
58. Serenity: Better Days, by Joss Whedon
59. Digital McLuhan: a Guide to Understanding the Information Millenium, by Paul Levinson [ME 7]
60. Behemoth, by Scott Westerfeld [SP 4]
61. The Empire of Ice Cream, by Jeffrey Ford
62. The Eyre Affair, by Jasper Fforde
63. Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer, 1943-1954 by Jeffrey Cartwright, by Steven Millhauser
64. Persuasion, by Jane Austen
65. Jasper Dash and the Flame-Pits of Delaware, by M.T. Anderson
66. National Monuments: Poems, by Heid Erdrich
67. Dangerous Laughter, by Steven Millhauser
68. The Half-Life of Cardio-Pulmonary Function: Poems and Paintings, by Eric Gansworth
69. Millions, by Frank Cottrell Boyce
70. Lady Audley's Secret, by Mary Elizabeth Braddon
71. Carmilla, by Joseph Le Fanu
72. The Medium is the Massage, by Marshall McLuhan et al. [ME 8]
73. Wonderstruck, by Brian Selznick
74. The Failure of Certain Charms: and Other Disparate Signs of Life, by Gordon Henry, Jr.
75. Freedom & Necessity, by Steven Brust and Emma Bull
76. The Failure of Certain Charms: and Other Disparate Signs of Life, by Gordon Henry, Jr.
77. King Solomon's Mines, by H. Rider Haggard
78. Fugitive Anne, by Rosa Praed
79. The Heartsong of Charging Elk, by James Welch
80. The Grass Dancer, by Susan Power
81. Boneshaker, by Cherie Priest [SP 5]
82. The Good Soldier, by Ford Maddox Ford
83. Underground Christmas, by John Hassler
84. The Painted Drum, by Louise Erdrich
85. Mason and Dixon, by Thomas Pynchon
86. The Early Church, by Henry Chadwick
87. Steampunk!, ed. by Kelly Link and Gavin Grant [SP 6]
88. The Sandman Papers, ed. by Joe Sanders
89. Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, by Frank Miller
90. Lost in a Good Book, by Jasper Fforde
91. Not Less Than Gods, by Kage Baker [SP 7]
92. Laws of Media, by Marshall and Eric McLuhan [ME 9]
93. Masters of Atlantis, by Charles Portis
94. The Color Purple, by Alice Walker
95. Lolita, by Vladimir Nabakov
96. Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer, by Stephen Millhauser
97. Y: The Last Man, by Brian K. Vaughan
98. The Justification Reader, by Thomas Oden
99. Extraordinary Engines, ed. by Nick Gevers