I’m going to date myself horribly here, but…I’m an old-school fan of the guy in the grey hat. Think Kerr Avon ofBlake’s 7.The guy you could never quite predict. Or Han Solo until about halfway throughThe Empire Strikes Back. Are they going to do the right thing? Are they going to follow their heart? And it’s so satisfying when they do! Of course, it’s equally satisfying when they go right ahead and sucker punch the bad guy, ‘cuz hey—only the good guys give warnings, right?
Sweet is a novella set in the universe of Love Stories on 7th and Main. A friend recommended it to me and I gobbled up the whole series in a week or two.
Spider Villalobos settled in Metlin to escape life in a gang. When his past catches up with him, which choice will he make? Run away? Return to the gang? Or follow his heart?
I love this entire series because the town of Metlin is so vividly detailed. The characters feel like people I’d like to know, and I definitely want to go browse in INK or grab a slice of pie from Café Maya!
Sweet is a standalone romance novella from USA Today Bestselling author, Elizabeth Hunter.
He survived by always being in control. She’s about to make him melt.
It’s 2004, and Daisy Rivera knows two things: she’s going to end up disappointing her parents’ fondest hopes and dreams in roughly six months, and somehow she’s going to figure out how to kiss the mysterious tattoo artist two shops down from her grandmother’s cafe that everyone calls Spider.
Spider Villalobos knows one thing: if he gives into temptation and makes a move on Daisy, his fresh start is over.
Why does anyone love poetry? Because it turns you on, because it lights you up. Because it presents the world in fresh-minted, vigorous and deeply affecting language. Because it deepens your sense of the world. I read a lot of poetry! I mean, a lot!
I’ve only recently come across August Kleinzahler’s work but it would be hard to find more dynamic, tough, urban poetry. I’ve read and re-read him and every time I look at one of his poems it just gets better!
The first broad retrospective of August Kleinzahler's career, Sleeping It Ofƒ in Rapid Citygathers poems from his major works along with a rich portion of new poems that visit different voice registers, experiment with form and length, and confirm Kleinzahler as among the most inventive and brilliant poets of our time. Travel―actual and imaginary―remains a passion and inspiration, and in these pages the poet also finds "This sanctified ground / Here, yes, here / The dead solid center of the universe / At the heartof the heart of America."
Both my books have a survival theme. Whether it’s foraging for mushrooms, wild camping, or trying to survive lockdown, I’ve always been interested in the relationship between endurance and creativity; what happens when humans are pushed to their limits. After teaching English in a secondary school for 25 years, I decided that I wanted to write a book of my own. I hid away in my caravan in West Wales, living off tomato soup and marshmallows, to write The Island. The books on this list represent the full gamut of survival: stripping yourself raw, learning nature’s lore, healing, falling, getting back up again. Ultimately, to read is to escape into story. To read is to survive.
A survival book list should definitely contain at least one treasure from your childhood. This one never left me and it’s a book I return to for its haunting, beautiful, disturbing depiction of Marianne, the little girl who dreams what she draws. Battling against a mysterious, unnamed illness, she escapes from the daily monotony by drawing a house, and a boy, and some sentinel stones. Slowly, this dreamworld becomes her reality. As the children struggle to break out of their house, surrounded by them, the stony watchers, the reader is dimly aware that it mirrors their fight to recover from their sickness. Lyrical, very scary, and a cliffhanger ending like no other, it is deservedly a classic.
I first read it when I was 10, the exact same age as Marianne (the story begins on her birthday), and I have reread it for the umpteenth time forty years later.…
'I could get in,' Marianne thought, 'if there was a person inside the house. There has got to be a person. I can't get in unless there is somebody there. 'Why isn't there someone in the house?' she cried to the empty world around her. Marianne is no child prodigy at drawing. Confined to her bed with an illness she finds a pencil in her great-grandmother's workbox, but the house she draws is as unsatisfying as always - like a shaky doll's house with grass as unlike anything growing as ever. But that night she dreams and rediscovers her drawing…
I believe that spiritual awakening is a service to the universe, and not just for our own enlightenment. Spirituality generally has been viewed as a return to some other realm of consciousness, rather than a means to awakening what we think of as divinity in life. There can never be a “finish line” to spirituality, as there is no end to the possibilities which collective co-evolution can bring about. The only way that intractable problems of humanity will ever be resolved is if a large number of people awaken to higher states of consciousness, while firmly grounded in life.
This book contains numerous research studies on subtle energy, energy medicine, and new technologies to measure phenomena that have generally been thought of as outside of the realm of Western science. What I learned from the research in this book is that it is possible to conclusively prove that the world we live in is much more interconnected than we realize. Theoretical frameworks, methodologies, and explanations are available that challenge our usual notions of time, space, and non-locality. Reading this book will show any open-minded readers that a dualistic frame of reference will never enable us to understand the universe that each of us is an integral part of.
As a child, I felt profoundly dissatisfied by the pat and cardboard cutout explanations that some teachers offered for life and the universe: there had to be more! I decided to go into science. The explanatory power of science is 'next level,' to use a contemporary phrase, and unless and until we explore it, we'll miss the beauty and sheer wonder of the universe. Neither should we overly specialize: science is not compartmentalized, but vastly different fields of science feed into and reinforce one another. Popular science has an essential role to play: irrespective of how arcane hard science may appear to be, its story can always be told in everyday words.
The first time I came across this wonderful book, I did the inevitable double take: I had happened to study infinity in its many possible renditions, and the title of this superb book seems to be a mistake: an obvious, silly contradiction in terms, because we can always add one to any purported 'biggest number in the world' and thereby immediately produce an even bigger number. Yet...This book describes the weird, weird world of huge numbers, the race amongst a rarefied coterie of aficionados to find ever bigger specific, provable numbers, and much else besides.
From cells in our bodies to measuring the universe, big numbers are everywhere
We all know that numbers go on forever, that you could spend your life counting and never reach the end of the line, so there can't be such a thing as a 'biggest number'. Or can there?
To find out, David Darling and Agnijo Banerjee embark on an epic quest, revealing the answers to questions like: are there more grains of sand on Earth or stars in the universe? Is there enough paper on Earth to write out the digits of a googolplex? And what is a…
With a PhD in astrophysics, cosmology is my day job. My research focuses upon the dark-side, the dark matter and energy that have shaped the evolution of the universe. My scientific journey began long ago with “How and Why Wonder Books”, from dinosaurs and evolution to astronomy and space exploration. I have always devoured tales about the fundamental universe, not only the immensity of the cosmos around us, but also the lives of the tiny bits-and-pieces from which matter is made. I still read a lot of popular science, especially on the history of life on Earth, and the future impact of Artificial Intelligence.
Cosmology encompasses our modern understanding of the universe, but what a strange universe it is, born in a fiery Big Bang, dominated by the dark-side, and expanding into a never-ending future. In his classic book, Harrison lays out the science of cosmology, exploring the nature of the Big Bang, the meaning of expansion, and our place in a seemingly infinite cosmos. With a lucid style, I love Harrison’s tour of modern cosmology. It is not just required reading for the cosmologist in training but is also essential for anyone wondering just how our universe works.
Cosmology: The Science of the Universe is an introduction to past and present cosmological theory. For much of the world's history, cosmological thought was formulated in religious or philosophical language and was thus theological or metaphysical in nature. However, cosmological speculation and theory has now become a science in which the empirical discoveries of the astronomer, theoretical physicist, and biologist are woven into intricate models that attempt to account for the universe as a whole. Professor Harrison draws on the discoveries and speculations of these scientists to provide a comprehensive survey of man's current understanding of the universe and its…
I am a new grandma, and this was the first book I bought
for baby’s new library.
Every card of the major arcana (22 cards) is explained positively in simple language (one card per page). From The Empress card, “You are cared for,” to the Chariot card, “If you push yourself toward what is good and true, nothing can stop you,” to the Star card, “If you do feel sad, trust in how beautiful the universe is.”
The book shows a little girl
acting out each adventure through the day. This little board book is magical!
Discover a world of insight and mindfulness in this playful board book introduction to Tarot!
Help the littlest Tarot readers discover their inner world! As one baby journeys through the day, facing down the many challenges of being a tot, readers will get to know the Tarot deck and the insight and strength that can be drawn from each card. Tarot can be used as a form of meditation--filled with mindful moments and self-reflection, each of the 22 cards in the Major Arcane provide a chance to ground your little one in the moment.
Science is truth and always evolving as we discover new things. Like a child, scientists are always asking "Why this? Why that?" Great scientists like great artists are childlike or at least manage to harness the wonder of their childhood self. If a child is interested in the world around them they will never be bored. It will set them up for life and that's a truly precious thing.
I love a lift-the-flap book, and this is one of my favorites. Neale Layton manages to cram the Big Bang theory and the first 13 billion years of life in the universe into nine spreads fizzing with flaps and pop-ups drawn in his wonderful, scratchy, childlike sketches.
This pop-up book is literally larger than life! Neal's unique perspective on Evolution, the beginnings of the world and the Big Bang theory presents life in a format accessible to even the very young - a perfect gift book for all. With pops, flaps and tabs.
I have loved escaping into different worlds for most of my life and all of these authors have inspired me to delve into worlds that don’t exist. They have taught me how to craft and expand my own made-up fantasy worlds. Not only inspiring my writing, but also giving me moments where I can escape from the world for a time and let my imagination run riot. I wanted to give readers the same chance to do just that in my latest book Realm of Dragons, Fight for the Crown, and I have these tales to thank for that. Truly great fantasy writers give us the chance to escape.
A simple explanation of this book is Althalas is a thief and lives his life looking for the next heist he can pull off, until the Goddess Dweia hires him to save the world from the desolations of her evil brother Daeva and his henchman Ghend. The telling of this tale is anything but simple. The authors have drawn on past civilisations that can be easily recognised to the reader, such as the Roman and Viking, adding their own lore and history to it. It is richly described and draws the reader to become invested in Althalas’s troubles and successes, along with all of his personable and flawed companions. It is an enjoyable read, and I dare you not to fall in love with Emmy.
A fabulous brand new Eddings standalone fantasy, set in an entirely new magical world.
Burglar, armed robber and sometime murderer, our hero Althalus is commissioned to steal a book from the House at the End of the World by a mysterious cloaked stranger named Ghend. At the House at the End of the World, he finds a talking cat... in the same room as the book Ghend described. What he can't find once he's in the house is the door by which he entered. Only 2467 years and an ice age later does Althalus re-emerge with the cat, Emmy. He's…
I believe that in our real world, most heroes are like any other human, exhibiting the struggles, the moral dilemmas, and the psychological battles any human would be. And that is what makes a hero so great. They rise above the internal and external struggles to become something better and something others can look up to. Heroes are not supposed to be Superman. They are Batman, struggling with the darkness of trauma and the weight of responsibility like everyone else.
Elric of Melnibone is an anti-hero. He is a bad guy who worships a god of chaos and delights in doing bad things. Pressured by family, a sense of duty, and a deep devotion to both his lover and his friends, he begins to question his life and his culture up until now. The lack of caring weighs on him as he vacillates between a world of evil and chaos and a world of law and goodness.
Feared by enemies and friends alike, Elric of Melnibone walks a lonely path among the worlds of the multiverse. The destroyer of his own cruel and ancient race, as well as its final ruler, Elric is the bearer of a destiny as dark and cursed as the vampiric sword he carries - the sentient black blade known as Stormbringer.
Containing the novel which perhaps did the most to propel Elric to the forefront of the fantasy genre, along with associated short stories and other material, this volume is a vital part of any fantasy reader's library. With an introduction by…
