Bloody Jack

Bloody Jack [sound recording] : [being an account of the curious adventures of Mary "Jacky" Faber, Ship's Boy] / by L.A. Meyer ; read by Katherine Kellgren. – Roseland : Listen & Live Audio, p2007.

6 compact discs (8 hrs.) : digital ; 4 3/4 in.
ISBN: 9781593160944
Unabridged
Subtitle from container

1. Orphans --Fiction. 2. Pirates --Fiction. 3. Sea stories. 4. Seafaring life --Fiction. 5. Sex role --Fiction.

813.54

After the death of her parents and little sister, Mary Faber is turned out on the streets of London where she bands together with other orphans to beg and steal to stay alive. When the gang’s leader is bludgeoned to death in an alley, she decides it’s time to change her living conditions. Removing his knife and clothes from his dead body she cuts off most of her hair; changes her outfit, and heads for the docks. There H.M.S. Dolphin is taking on cabin boys. She tells the recruiters that she can read, and she’s signed with the Royal Navy as cabin boy Jack Faber. Life aboard the Dolphin, while rough, is a good deal better than life on the streets – as long as no one discovers she’s a girl.

Meyer, a former naval officer himself, has written a whopping good adventure tale with an eager young heroine who gets herself into multitudes of scrapes and escapes as fast as the fascinated reader can turn the pages. An added treat in the audio edition is Kellgren’s ability to give convincing voices to all of the characters, whether they’re Jacky’s Cockney accents, the English and Irish seamen, French pirates, Jamaicans, or Americans, all are vibrant and convincing. The sure pace of her narration adds another touch of excitement to an already thrilling tale.

iHCPL Games and Gaming #36: The Wide World of Online Role Playing Games

Exercises:

1) Spend 15 minutes (not including the time it takes to set up an account) exploring Runescape by going through the tutorial. Did you find it easy to learn how to get around?

I worked through about 45 minutes of the Runescape tutorial, but as a non-gamer, I found it disorienting to move about and as a result, my character is rather clumsy. It was also weird walking through other characters to talk to someone.

2) Write a blog post describing the Runescape character you created. Alternatively, if you are already a gamer and play an MMORPG, describe the character you play with and relate a fun experience you had playing the game.

How do I describe my character? He’s a cataloger from this world trying to learn how to fish, chop, walk, and toss spells in the Runescape world. It’s a tedious process, and frankly, he’d rather be reading.

iHCPL Games and Gaming #35: Games? In the Library?

1) Spend 15 minutes trying out one of the web-based games mentioned: FreeRice, WordSplay, online Sudoku, or try one of the games meant for kids.

I worked away at FreeRice for 45 minutes until I got up to level 49 of 60. This was certainly a brain-stretching exercise. I’m glad the game is multiple-choice instead of fill-in-the-blank. It introduced me to scads of new words. It’s as much fun as the OED.

2) Make a blog post about your thoughts on the benefits of gaming and the game you played. Did you find it easy to learn the rules and get started? Can you think of any skills the game might help you build?

It was very easy to learn the rules and get started. Besides the obvious vocabulary-building skill, I was delighted to see that it can also be used to drill on these subjects:

• Chemical Symbols

• English Grammar

• Famous Paintings

• French

• German

• Italian

• Multiplication Table

• Spanish

• World Capitals

Vanity Fair

Vanity Fair / by William Makepeace Thackeray; read by Frederick Davidson. — Ashland : Blackstone Audio, 2006.

1 sound file (29 hrs, 25 min.)

Software version: OverDrive Media Console 1.0

File size: 423020 KB

ISBN: 0786142200

1. British -- Europe -- Fiction. 2. England -- Fiction. 4. Humorous stories. 5. Satire. 6. Social classes -- Fiction.

823.8

A biting and witty satire on English social life and customs during the first part of the nineteenth century, its subtitle is “a novel without a hero,” and it could also be added without heroines. Yet the book’s two central characters, the virtuous but dim and naive Amelia Sedley and the amoral, clever, congenial Becky Sharp both display admirable and distressing qualities as they rise, fall, and rise again in society. One of the great virtues of Vanity Fair is that while it is told in hilarious prose, with short burst of genuine pathos, it was praised by its contemporaries as a thoroughly realistic account of the society that it portrays.

Davidson’s dry and somewhat snooty tone as a narrator is a perfect match for Thakeray’s prose. His choice of voices for the characters and his skill as an actor are excellent. It is hard to imagine a better match of reader and text. This edition is twenty-nine and a half hours of pure delight for the listener.

The last universe

The last universe / William Sleator.— New York : Amulet Books, 2005.

215 p. ; 21 cm.

ISBN: 0810958589

1. Brothers and sisters – Fiction. 2. Maze gardens – Fiction. 3. Quantum theory – Fiction. 4. Science fiction. 5. Space and time – Fiction.

813.54

Susan hates pushing her brother around the garden in a wheelchair. It’s not her brother she minds, although they never were very close before he got so sick. It’s the garden that creeps her out. It’s so big and there’s the long dark passageway between overgrown trees before you come to the dark pond where her great-aunt drowned as a girl. Strange exotic flowers grow there. And when you look out the second story bathroom window you can see an overgrown maze in the center of it; but when you walk through the garden you can never find it. Until one day they do. It’s the day after they come back from the pond and the path moves and comes out at a different place than it has ever come out before.

An appropriately chilling story that entertainingly illustrates some of the strange concepts of quantum physics, including an appearance by Shrödinger’s famous cat that’s both alive and dead at the same time. In this garden the physics of the atomic and subatomic world became the physical laws of the larger world, and people, plants, animals, and universes become only clouds of possibilities before their own eyes.

Rainbows End

Rainbows End / Vernor Vinge. — 1st ed. — New York : Tor, 2006.

364 p. ; 25 cm.

ISBN: 9780312856847

"A Tom Doherty Associates book."

1. Alzheimer's disease—Fiction. 2. Libraries – Fiction. 3. San Diego – Fiction. 4. Science fiction. 5. Spy stories. 6. Virtual reality—Fiction.

813.54

Step a few decades forward in the 21^st century and view a world on the brink of dystopia or destruction. The intelligence services of Europe, Japan and India make a horrifying discovery, someone has successfully developed weapon for mind control that can be broadcast electronically. They soon know, or seriously suspect the source for the weapon is a huge biotech complex in San Diego, California. What they don’t know is that one of their own is the man who plans to enforce peace on the world using the weapon.

Meanwhile in San Diego, aged poet Robert Gu gets the latest treatment for Alzheimer's and his failed eyesight. As a poet he wrote great works of art, as a person he’s obnoxious and insulting. Having him once again conscious of his surroundings and able to interact with others is a source of mixed emotions for his family. There’s a lot he doesn’t like about this new world to which he’s been awakened. The automobiles all drive themselves, computers are built into your clothes, and most people walk about in a cross between California and their personal choice of virtual reality. But most of all he misses books printed on paper. He goes over to the University of California at San Diego to visit the library. He discovers that all the paper books are about to be digitized and shredded. But when he joins the protest movement against the book destruction, he unwittingly crosses paths with the foreign intelligence services and the rogue agent they’ve hired to be the cutout man.

This near-future thriller keeps the pace moving as the reader tries to find out what’s real and what isn’t, what’s going on, and will the author need to call in the Marines to save the world before it’s all over? It also throws up a lot of ideas about the interaction between technology and society, ideas that are both morally and politically stimulating. Rainbows End is the winner of the 2007 Hugo Award for best novel.

The Adventures of Super Diaper Baby

The Adventures of Super Diaper Baby : the first graphic novel by George Beard and Harold Hutchins / [Dav Pinkley].— New York : Scholastic, 2002.

125 p. : ill. ; 20 cm.

(Captain Underpants)

ISBN: 0-439-37606-8

1. Infants Comic books, strips, etc. 2. Superhero Comic books, strips, etc.

741.5973

The Adventures of Super Diaper Baby is a book overflowing with potty humor befitting the sensibilities of its supposedly nine-and-a-half and ten-year-old authors and its real target audience. It’s also laugh out loud fun for those of us who can measure our age in multiples of decades – if you’re not offended by the potty humor. If you are, the penultimate page has an offer to send the publisher a self-addressed stamped envelope, “And We’LL send you more offensive stuff.” The Flip-O-Rama animation pages delightfully fulfill the cover’s promise of “Action” and “Laffs.” All in all this a delightfully silly book.

However, the reader should be aware that there are other judgments on this title. According to Pam Santi, the Riverside, California grandmother whose request to ban the book was rejected by Riverside Unified School District in 2003, “There’s just no moral value to that poop character.”