Various ‘Hunger Games’ contests abound, including stamped ‘Mockingjay’
Source: examiner.com
‘Tis the season for fan site-sponsored contests featuring The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins.
Up first, Novel Novice is giving away a copy of Mockingjay personally stamped by Collins, along with a Mockingjay pin and a Hunger Games bag clip. That contest ends on December 13th, so get your entries in soon.
In another contest ending December 15th, HGT Fansite is giving away a box set of The Hunger Games trilogy and a copy of The Hunger Games: Training Days strategy game.
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del Rey spectra 50 page fridays Anne Mccaffrey & Elizabeth Ann Scarborough
Source: sf-fantasy.suvudu.com
Every Friday, we here @ Del Rey Spectra will place a 50 page excerpt of a selected title on Suvudu. Whether it be science fiction, epic fantasy, alternate history, horror, urban fantasy, paranormal, the possibilities are endless.
This week’s excerpt comes from Catalyst, by Science Fiction legends Anne McCraffrey and Elizabeth Ann Scarborough. Science fiction? Fact. Cats in space? Fact. That’s really all that needs to be said. Well, not entirely, let us see what esteemed Del Rey Spectra editor Betsy Mitchell has to say about Catalyst:
“Cats… in… SPAAAACE!!!! That’s Del Rey in-house shorthand for the charming series written by Anne McCaffrey and Elizabeth Anne Scarborough, properly titled Catalyst and Catacombs. The books star a furry crew of so-called Barque Cats: prized felines that have become essential to the well-staffed space vessel. Assisted by humans―Cat Persons―with whom they share a deep and loving bond, the Barque Cats are responsible for keeping spacecraft free of vermin, alerting crews to environmental hazards, and acting as morale officers.
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Almost 2011?! We’re Still Working on 2009
Source: good reads
The end of the year is nearly upon us. Here in the US, the weather is getting cooler (yes, even in California), the days are getting shorter, and the holiday season is underway. One sign the season has begun is the deluge of year-end, best-of lists. The New York Times has released its 10 Best Books of 2010, and the Goodreads Choice Awards are up and running, already having received over 64,000 votes.
One of my favorite end of the year series is The Millions Year in Reading. I like it because it focuses on the best books people read in 2010, regardless of when they were published. After all, not everyone reads only the latest, newest books. Many of us are still working our way through the hot books of 2000, let alone the bestsellers from 2010. In fact, books are unique, in that a reader in 2010 might finish Eat Pray Love, a bestseller from 2006, one day and begin Pride and Prejudice, first published in 1813, the next.
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Chanukah Day 7: Guest Post by Rachel Swirsky & Book Giveaway
Source: blog.42scifi-fantasy.com
Thoughts on Jewish Identity, Jewish Fantasy, and
People of the Book: a Decade of Jewish Science Fiction & Fantasy
by Rachel Swirsky
When I was eleven, I remember a boy my age asking, “So which is it? Are you an atheist or a Jew?”
His tone was one of skeptical indignation. He was clearly intimating that he’d caught me in a lie because I’d described myself as both. The weird thing was that my perspective immediately flipped to his. Even as I explained that the situation was more complicated than either/or, that I was both Jewish and an atheist, I saw him as right. I saw myself as a liar.
I suppose that was a tiny fragment of what W. E. B. DuBois describes as double consciousness—a “sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others.”
In my own head, I am a Jew and I’m not a Jew. I have the heritage. I’ve got some of the Ashkenazic cultural markers—the Chinese food on Christmas Eve and the movie on Christmas Day, the Jewish studies classes and the stint on the editorial staff of my college’s Jewish newspaper, the Jewish nose which skipped me but adorns my eldest brother (“Sometimes I think it just keeps growing,” my gentile sister-in-law confided to me once), the anti-Semitic comments cribbed from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion that end up in my blog comments, the inevitable smattering of Yiddish.
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Dream of Perpetual Motion Author Dexter Palmer’s Top 10 Books Read in 2010
Source: omnivoracious.com
These are ten of the best books I read this year; there’s no unifying theme here other than that I read and enjoyed all of them, and no order except the order in which I read them over the year.
The Bascombe Novels—Richard Ford. Over the course of the three novels in this omnibus, the character of Frank Bascombe becomes one of the most convincingly realistic characters in American fiction. Independence Day is the best of the trilogy, but all three books will amply reward your time.
You are Not a Gadget—Jaron Lanier. This book will force you to rethink the way you relate to the Internet; even if you don’t agree with all of Lanier’s ideas, they are definitely worth engaging.
Collected Stories—Lydia Davis. At least a couple of the stories in this collection are shorter than this description of the book, yet all of them feel complete.
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What do you think of the book lists? What were your top 10 books of 2010?
Join us in the forum to discuss!
