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I'm trying to remember the name of a book that was about this girl who was a witch or a fairy and was trying to help out a classmate of hers who was really sickly looking and possibly turned into an owl. There was also this little fairy boy who's name was Xii or Xie and he liked to pull the wings off flies. I've tried putting all kinds of different combinations into Google and have come up with nothing. I'm pretty sure the book started with an "A", something along the lines of "Athena..."
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Nov 27, 2009 08:15
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Jeece posted:
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Nov 27, 2009 09:45
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I'm trying to find a book I really loved as a kid, although it wasn't really a children's book as far as I can remember. It's a historical fiction about a group of British settlers landing in America and trying to establish a community. The captain writes his experiences down in a diary. Lots of the settlers die due to famine/illnesses during the winter, can't remember how or why but I think they then decide to try the forest instead of staying at the coast. I can't remember whether the book follows them here but they meet a tribe of indians who take them in, leaving no trace of them at the original camp but a tree with a word carved in it or something like that. I think the leader becomes the leader of the native american tribe. Fast forward many years, one tribe of native americans occiasionally has blonde children and some weird myths about people with strange weapons who gave them knowledge and spoke another language. All they have left of them is one book, the captain's logbook, which only their holy woman can read because only she knows the holy language. The book becomes lost when something bad happens to the camp. Fast forward even more years, white people want to build something in the reserve where the aforementioned tribe now lives, something about streamboats and the chief coming aboard to negotiate and a shootout. Also all the members of the tribe die because of contact with foreign diseases(a regular flu?) brought in by tourists. Everyone is dead, the end. It made such an impression on me when I was 9(I remember all this from 11 years ago...) that I really want to read it again, please help me SA!
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Nov 27, 2009 20:12
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PiratePing posted:Actual historical events Well, the first part is a narration of the actual events surrounding the disappearance of the Roanoke colony.
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Nov 27, 2009 20:44
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i'm trying to find a sci fi book i read a couple years ago. the setting is a society that's very stratified, literally. i guess the planet they're on is riddled with huge caverns or something, because people live on any one of 12 or 15 levels. the higher levels are richer and more powerful and as you go down from level to level the people get poorer and less educated. the main character starts near the bottom but he's some kind of genius and works his way up. eventually he reaches the pinnacle of society and learns some sweet martial arts along the way! the book wasn't all that great but i think it might make a decent christmas present for one of my nephews who's into this kind of stuff. oh! and there's some craziness concerning interstellar space flight. somehow people figured out how to move through some kind of fractal space to reduce distances. but there's monsters in the nether!
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Nov 27, 2009 21:15
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I was at Borders a few days ago and almost bought a fairly recent book about St. Vitus' Dance. I'm interested in picking it up on amazon now, but I can't seem to pin down the title. I remember the cover was a plain off-whitish grey, with a tiny little skeleton woodcut on the bottom, with the top picturing the bottom half of a dancing peasant, I think from around the waist down.
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Nov 27, 2009 22:44
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navyjack posted:Well, the first part is a narration of the actual events surrounding the disappearance of the Roanoke colony. Thanks, I think I found it! 
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Nov 28, 2009 01:41
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Archyduke posted:I was at Borders a few days ago and almost bought a fairly recent book about St. Vitus' Dance. I'm interested in picking it up on amazon now, but I can't seem to pin down the title. I remember the cover was a plain off-whitish grey, with a tiny little skeleton woodcut on the bottom, with the top picturing the bottom half of a dancing peasant, I think from around the waist down. The Dancing Plague: The Strange, True Story of an Extraordinary Illness
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Nov 28, 2009 06:52
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Yes, that's it exactly, thank you. I spent so much time googling variations on "dancing mania" and "dancing craze" and so on, "plague" never even occurred to me.
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Nov 28, 2009 07:40
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Ok this is a Si-Fi book. Main themes that i can remember are: Number of kids are being noticed across the globe to have exceptional abilities in a number of distinctions, one that is followed has an unprecedented ability for math (african kid). Each mark themselves with a blue symbol. There is a space program for deep space exploration, and the pilot is a genetically enhanced squid. It is a female, and before the flight she gets pregnant and leads to the creating of a space society of super smart squid that live off eating the stupid ones. Hope someone can help me out, I have been racking my brain for a while and cant come to a conclusion of title or author.
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Nov 29, 2009 04:46
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Biaga posted:Ok this is a Si-Fi book. Main themes that i can remember are:
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Nov 29, 2009 05:43
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I apologize for the vagueness and appreciate any help in advance: Earlier this evening a memory poppe din my head and I fruitlessly googled to try to track it down. It is a sci-fi sort of book; I read it around 2000 from a box of used books and it looked about 10 years old then. It has a blue cover with a planet and a starship on it. I believe the title is "Sovereign" but as you can imagine this is a tough word to track down on Google with weak search fu. I cannot recall the author at all. What I can recall of the story is fuzzy, but I think that the main character was a prince of some sort and lived a life of leisure until he was forced to man up to save his people? I also recall that a class of people -- or possibly everyone in this race -- were hermaphrodites or something along those lines? Again, any help at all is appreciated. edit: http://www.lulu.com/content/hardcover-book/sovereign/1366050 This is not it. edit2: Found it thanks to a site about alternative sexuality in fiction. The book in question: http://www.amazon.com/Sovereign-R-M-Meluch/dp/0451139240 The gimmick was actually that the hero was a bisexual male; the hermaphrodites are from another series altogether. Thanks anyway <3 Gtab fucked around with this message at 10:15 on Nov 29, 2009 |
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Nov 29, 2009 10:04
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I'm still trying to track down this short story. It's driving me insane. It's about a kid who befriends a new student at his school. The new kid is a little strange, but the main character feels sorry for him. Anyway, they spend a lot of time at the new kid's house, where new guy and the narrator play what starts out as a game. The new kid claims to have a sickly sister who can't be exposed to sunlight. She's bedridden, and the main character indulges his friend and talks to her. In the beginning, he thinks it's just his buddy doing a silly voice, but he eventually isn't so sure. In the end, the kid gets fed up with the game (over a long period of time) and wants to see what she looks like. He pulls back the curtain and there's nobody in the room. Does this sound familiar? I read it about five or six years ago on an online literary journal, but I can't find any traces of it anywhere now.
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Nov 29, 2009 16:56
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Trying to remember a few books I had to read back in elementary school. One is about a boy being abandoned in a forest, where he adopts a falcon and builted a house inside a giant tree. I recall there was a sequel where he returns to the forest years later with his sister or whatever, and they built a house in that location. Another book had a boy become a orphan, and first lived with a African-American couple until he had to leave, and then lived with a old man in a zoo's janitor closet. Can't recall more of the book from there other then the old man dying and he was forced to leave.
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Nov 29, 2009 21:22
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MY FANTASYS.zip posted:Trying to remember a few books I had to read back in elementary school. One is about a boy being abandoned in a forest, where he adopts a falcon and builted a house inside a giant tree. I recall there was a sequel where he returns to the forest years later with his sister or whatever, and they built a house in that location. The first one sounds like Hatchet by Gary Paulsen. I also remember reading it while I was in elementary school.
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Nov 29, 2009 21:37
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MY FANTASYS.zip posted:Trying to remember a few books I had to read back in elementary school. One is about a boy being abandoned in a forest, where he adopts a falcon and builted a house inside a giant tree. I recall there was a sequel where he returns to the forest years later with his sister or whatever, and they built a house in that location. First one is My Side of the Mountain. Seems to be a thread favorite, but I'm glad it was brought up - this was a book I had read a long time ago and forgotten about.
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Nov 29, 2009 22:13
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gruvmeister posted:First one is My Side of the Mountain. Seems to be a thread favorite, but I'm glad it was brought up - this was a book I had read a long time ago and forgotten about. Oh wow, I had completely forgotten that this book existed and that I had read it. I remembered that the novel had a scene where the main character goes to a town and gives venison to a kid there, and was trying to figure out why the main character of Hatchet wouldn't have immediately gotten rescued if he found his way to a town.
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Nov 29, 2009 23:43
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No one recognized the second? Maniac Magee One of my favorites from my grade school days.
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Nov 30, 2009 03:59
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Maniac Magee was one of my favorites too! funny that that MYFantasys.zip remembers all the details i don't. before this thread i only remembered that the kid was an orphan and he ran absolutely everywhere and he was in desperate need of a new pair of shoes. seriously though, how can you not remember all that running? lol
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Nov 30, 2009 04:17
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farraday posted:No one recognized the second? Wow, that is both books. Reading the details for Maniac Magee on Wikipedia made me recall some other details of the book I forgot, like the knot he untied, or moving in with his former rival. Thanks you guys.
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Nov 30, 2009 04:43
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I'm trying to find a short story about Jack Frost I read when I was in a kid in a children's magazine, probably Spider or Cricket somewhere between 1994-2000. Jack is a baker's apprentice/son/something but is also really good at painting, so he decorates the walls of the bakery. The king notices and orders him to paint the walls of his palace instead. His life there sucks, but every painting he does looks like it's about to come to life. At some point, the king orders him to paint a victorious tableau the kingdom's soldiers, but when he's done the soldiers look sad and miserable since that's how they'd look in reality. I think at this point the king gets mad and orders Jack to paint his portrait instead. Jack paints a huge mural full of horrible, miserable things and puts the king in it as the ugliest, most horrible thing of all. The king is so angry that he orders Jack tied to a pole outside for the night while a blizzard is raging. When the soldiers come back for Jack's corpse in the morning they find empty chains instead. The story ends with some kid noticing the frost on the windows, and his mother remarking that it looks like what Jack used to paint. Any leads at all would be awesome and thanks in advance.
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Nov 30, 2009 05:25
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Mad Mage Era posted:Oh my goodness, that just might be it. It's not a comedy - but it's not a YA book either by a long stretch. Edit: VVVVVV Oh god what have I done? VVVVVV Lemniscate Blue fucked around with this message at 15:01 on Dec 1, 2009 |
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Nov 30, 2009 19:47
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If it's not, it's still drat close, though I get the feeling the book I was looking at wasn't a comedy. Thanks!
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BatteredFeltFedora posted:It's not a comedy - but it's not a YA book either by a long stretch. I see. Even if it's not what I'm looking for, it still sounds like a good read. Again, thanks!
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Dec 1, 2009 05:01
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Hivemind, I -need- your help. I know neither author NOR title. The book/series I'm looking for is a pseudobritish war stories, about a young lieutentant who is assigned to an airship as their/one of their Combat Mages. Similar in tone to Temeraire, I think, but the premise is Imperial Britain with WIZARDS instead of Imperial Britain with DRAGONS. Any ideas?
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Dec 3, 2009 17:45
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I've never been able to ID these. I've googled and posted them on "find this book" threads before and no luck. Young Adult novel: I read this in the 90s. Teenage girl moves to a snobby ski resort town. She's poor and doesn't fit in. She makes friends with some weird, old money kids that live in a mansion on the non-ski section of the mountain, including a sickly kid who isn't supposed to leave the house. They are all obsessed with Hillary and Tenzing and Mt. Everest, including legends about some kind of mountain-dwelling, supernatural, bat-like creature. I remember thinking it was well-written when I was a kid; I want to see if I was hilariously wrong. tl;dr - Girls is emo and joins the rich kids' Mt. Everest expedition fandom. Collection of short stories from the Eastern Bloc: This might have been an old textbook for a college-level lit course. I'm guessing it was published in the late 70s to mid-80s. I'm looking for two stories from this book: 1) A cynical and humorous tale of a man falling out of a tall apartment building. The man watches some human drama play out through the apartment windows, Rear Window style, as he falls. He regains faith in humanity and then loses it again, as the drama starts with love and ends with adultery. The last line is something to the effect of, "Then, [protagonist name here] deliberately smashed his head against the pavement." 2)A satire. A group of kids are making a snowman in the square in front of a government building. The government officials think the snowman is an insulting parody of members of their government. They flip out and knock down the snowman. The story ends with the kids saying something like, "Oh no, no more snowman. Hey, I've got an idea! Let's make Premiere So-and-so! Let's make a big round belly, because he's a fat drunk! ..." Anyone? I think I'm doomed to never find these again. hotgreenpeas fucked around with this message at 09:19 on Dec 10, 2009 |
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Dec 5, 2009 23:18
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N/M
Slack3r fucked around with this message at 09:38 on Dec 7, 2009 |
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Dec 7, 2009 09:28
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Ferret posted:Hivemind, I -need- your help. Could this be Midshipwizard Halcyon Blythe by James Ward? It doesn't look like they're airships, and I haven't read it to know if it's Imperial Britain with wizards, but it was the only book I could find with a wizard who gets assigned to a ship during a war.
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Dec 7, 2009 22:19
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Mine was a YA science fiction book written in the late 50s or sometime in the 60s. The main characters were a brother and a sister in their late teens. Maybe they were twins? They had sandy hair, I remember that. The girl was kidnapped to go out to the asteroid belt, where the spacers lived. If I recall, solar radiation rendered the male spacers only able to father boy children, so they would go on raiding parties to the planets to kidnap women so that they could continue to have families. I remember that the copy I read was hardcover, and that the dustjacket was blue.
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Dec 8, 2009 02:41
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nightchild12 posted:Could this be Midshipwizard Halcyon Blythe by James Ward? It doesn't look like they're airships, and I haven't read it to know if it's Imperial Britain with wizards, but it was the only book I could find with a wizard who gets assigned to a ship during a war. Jesus gently caress yes it is I love you forever. It's been eating my mind forever. How did you dig it up?
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Dec 8, 2009 17:54
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Ferret posted:Jesus gently caress yes it is I love you forever. I searched through Google for a while with a bunch of different terms, turned up the Tremeraire series a bunch, and then went to amazon and searched for "wizard" in the sci-fi/fantasy category and checked the description of any book that sounded like it might be similar. Page 11 of the search results, #129, was Dragonfrigate Wizard Halcyon Blythe, which had a "customers also bought" link to Midshipwizard Halcyon Blythe. So, lots of typing in different poo poo and searching through lists of links and books. Glad I could help. 
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Dec 8, 2009 20:24
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This is actually a poem, or a song rather than book, but I figured someone here might know it. I don't remember much about it, I'm afraid. The length was unremarkable, it had good rhyme. I think it was set in a rural part of the US, possibly around the beginning of the 20th or end of the 19th century, and I seem to recall it was about some sort of journey, where someone died and someone else buried him. It might have been cold and snowy. There might've been some sort of repetition involved, but that's not certain. I know that's pretty vague, but I remember being absolutely blown away by the beauty of the rhyme, and figured someone might know it, as I remember finding out that it was a pretty famous poem known by many people in America. Edit - after a lot of searching using very flimsy memories I actually found what I was looking for! The poem is The Cremation of Sam McGee by Robert W. Service, so never mind.
Sputnyak fucked around with this message at 18:52 on Dec 9, 2009 |
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Dec 9, 2009 18:13
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Traintruction posted:I'm still trying to track down this short story. It's driving me insane. It's about a kid who befriends a new student at his school. The new kid is a little strange, but the main character feels sorry for him. Anyway, they spend a lot of time at the new kid's house, where new guy and the narrator play what starts out as a game. The new kid claims to have a sickly sister who can't be exposed to sunlight. She's bedridden, and the main character indulges his friend and talks to her. In the beginning, he thinks it's just his buddy doing a silly voice, but he eventually isn't so sure. In the end, the kid gets fed up with the game (over a long period of time) and wants to see what she looks like. He pulls back the curtain and there's nobody in the room. This sounds extremely familiar, and now it's going to haunt me too, because I'm positive I read this (or something very like) around the same time, and I can't for the life of me remember what it was.  I do have an idea though, which so far doesn't seem to be leading anywhere, but I'll keep looking. From what I can remember, however, this might have been writtten by Adam L.G. Nevill. His short stories were all over online journals a few years ago, but so far all I'm finding are just title lists which are not really so helpful. Do you remember anything else?
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Dec 9, 2009 20:26
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I'm hoping someone can help me out here --- The story involves a detective (I think) who is tracking down a missing / dead woman, I think at the behest of some rich dude who at one point flies the detective to florida (with some of his men, I think one of whom is referred to as "Lurch"). Turns out she's alive. The detective has a war buddy (?) that they end up freeing from jail (the buddy is under an assumed name) and there's a shootout on a bridge that kills the buddy (his car falls into the water) and lands the detective in trouble until it's revealed that there's video of the event (thanks drunk dude!) that matches his account. The woman accidentally reveals that she's "suspect" by the buddy after his death because she repeats a phrase that the detective and buddy always used to mean "danger" or somesuch. This is driving me crazy. I can't remember who the author or even the detective is. Please help a brother out.
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Dec 10, 2009 03:40
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LongSack posted:I'm hoping someone can help me out here --- Pretty sure this is Sacred by Dennis Lehane - part of his Patrick Kenzie/Angie Gennaro series of detective novels. I might be wrong but a lot of the details are very close to what I remember of the book from reading it several months ago.
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Dec 10, 2009 09:01
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Encryptic posted:Pretty sure this is Sacred by Dennis Lehane - part of his Patrick Kenzie/Angie Gennaro series of detective novels. I might be wrong but a lot of the details are very close to what I remember of the book from reading it several months ago. It's definitely Sacred by Lehane. It's not a war-buddy, the friend is a private detective who mentored Patrick Kenzie so he could get enough training hours to get his PI licence. This book http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Sacred/Dennis-Lehane/e/9780380726295
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Dec 10, 2009 21:28
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Thank you both.
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Dec 11, 2009 03:46
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Maybe someone can help me with this: I'm trying to find a short story I remember reading in a college class on prarie populism. It involves a poor tenant farmer and his wife who are taken in by another farmer, who decides to help get them back on their feet and help set them up with a new farm. They visit a local business man who dabbles in real estate, who agrees to rent them a dilapidated farm with the option to buy it later for a certain amount. After spending a year or so improving the place, the poor farmer finally saves the money to buy the place, only to be told by the real estate guy that the price has now tripled or something, because of the improvements that the family has made. The farmer thinks about killing the landlord and grabs a pitchfork, but drops it after seeing his daughter watching, and it ends with the farmer realizing he's looking at a lifetime of debt peonage. It was from the late 1800s or early 1900s I think. I can't remember the title or the author, it's been bugging me for days now. Ring any bells for anyone? edit: found it, it's called "Under the Lion's Paw" by Hamlin Garland http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/HNS/Garland/paw.html herbaceous backson fucked around with this message at 08:14 on Dec 11, 2009 |
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Dec 11, 2009 05:14
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I read a science fiction novel in the past couple years and I can't remember oh, most of it. But I do remember that there's a ship sent off into space with smart squid? something like squid, anyway, on it, meant to start the process of terraforming a planet. The squid that they sent was pregnant and had progeny who went on to be instrumental to the story as well. Anyone?
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Dec 16, 2009 10:58
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Was Taters posted:I read a science fiction novel in the past couple years and I can't remember oh, most of it. try this link: http://www.vondanmcintyre.com/squids/Squidliography.html (yes there are indeed SEVERAL series featuring talking squids in outer space). It's probably the Baxter Manifold series. There is a little bit of a story behind that site. The Author Margaret Atwood, famous for her stories about future dystopias where things are different than they are today dismissed the notion that what she was writing was science fiction. Science fiction, she said, was all "talking squids in outer space" thus to classify her work as such was inappropriate. Several writers of SF took umbridge at this, hence the lists of Squid stories (other than Baxter, author of the book you're probably looking for, who promptly declared himself to be the ONLY SF writer in the world).
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Dec 16, 2009 12:02
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Was Taters posted:I read a science fiction novel in the past couple years and I can't remember oh, most of it. Fatkraken's got a good answer, but I just reread Manifold: Time and it's the specific one you're thinking of.
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Dec 16, 2009 16:53
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