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Thursday, April 29, 2010

Lists and adventures

I was reading this this morning (Crazy Aunt Purl), about how she loves to re-read books and watch movies over and over, and some of her commenters said they don't do that. I do have favorite movies that I can watch many times, but I almost never re-read a book. I think it seems like wasted time to me. But it got me thinking, because I do have a few books that I have read more than once. So I made a list. I could only come up with five.

Ten Five Favorite Books

  • Ladder of Years - Anne Tyler
  • Miracle and Other Christmas Stories - Connie Willis
  • Timeline - Michael Crichton
  • Under the Dome - Stephen King
  • American Gods - Neil Gaiman

It was easier to come up with ten movies.

Ten Fifteen Favorite Movies

  • Beverly Hills Chihuahua
  • Bolt
  • The Phantom Menace
  • The Money Pit
  • Grosse Pointe Blank
  • Christmas With the Kranks
  • Love Actually
  • School of Rock
  • The Bourne Identity
  • The Terminal
  • Home Alone
  • The Commitments
  • Robots
  • Under the Tuscan Sun
  • The Incredibles

I've been working my way through the free Kindle books that I've downloaded from Amazon over the last year or so. I don't download every free one that is offered, but if I think there's a possibility that I might enjoy it, I do. Sometimes I'll read a few pages and decide I don't like it, and will delete it, but there have been some that I've really enjoyed, and have gone on to buy other books from the same author, so it seems that, at least from my perspective, the strategy works.

The latest series that I've been reading is Elizabeth Moons "Vatta's War" series. I would never have purchased the first book, "Trading in Danger," at the bookstore--it looks very military, very much a "space opera." But I tried it, and I loved it. So much so that I'm reading the rest of the books in the series. I'm currently reading the third one, "Engaging the Enemy," and finished the second, "Marque and Reprisal" over the weekend. There are two more.

The series is about a young woman who is something of a black sheep in her very business-minded family, a family who owns a very successful shipping company. The woman, Kylara, declines to join the family business, and instead decides to go into the military, and enrolls in military school. Through what was basically a misunderstanding, she's thrown out of the school, and comes home in disgrace.

In order to get her out of town until the scandal blows over, her father asks her to take command of an old spaceship that needs to be take to the scrapyard. He assigns her a basic crew, and sends her off. All hell breaks loose after that. I'm really enjoying reading about Ky and her adventures.

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