Archive for Titles

Books, Books, and More Books

Posted in Art, Books, Entertainment, Life, Uncategorized, Writing with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on April 1, 2012 by urbannight

Yesterday I spent hours rating books on Goodreads.  I found books I know I read and can’t really remember anything about.  I did not find books I read but can’t remember titles.  Memory is a very strange thing.

There are two young adult books I would love to find again.  The first is about 4 kids how are sent off on a mission that is to be an end to their formal education if they succeed.  They don’t waste space on candy bars.  Their instructors get really annoyed and make them take the candy bars.  Things go sideways on the mission, they are stuck out there longer than their supply of candy bars so they run out.  Then their friendships start going pear-shaped.  Turned out the candy bars had something in them to help suppress some of their hormones and they start going though the emotional side of puberty will stuck on a dangerous planet in the middle of a mission that turned out to be far more dangerous than they expected.  I also think that they might have wanted to do something for their final mission project that they were told they could not do, so they filed a totally different mission but went on to do the one they wanted instead.  Which was why they didn’t have the right amount of the candy and when they didn’t show up on time the school wouldn’t know where they really were to come rescue them.

The other book was similar in a few ways.  It was also young adult science fiction.  I think darkness might have been in the title somewhere.  It’s about several older teens from different planets.  I’m not sure if it was a comparable to a specialty high school are a bunch of young people who had just finished the equivalent to high school and were now starting some think of military or spacer program.  The main character is a young man who is a small giant.  He was a farmer from a colony planet with different gravitational forces.  People eventually ended up taller and more massive and very strong when on more standard human gravity planets.  It also dealt with a mission that didn’t go as expected and had these young adults dealing with romantic issues they never really faced before.

Both were excellent books and I read them over and over and over again.  So why can’t I remember titles or authors I don’t know.  On the second, I can picture the cover.  But after over 20 years, if it is still in print anywhere, cover art would have changed.  But it probably is not in print anymore.

As it is, I think I’m going to order some Teresa Edgerton books have been out of print for a long time.  I can get a new copy of the first for 3 dollars or a used copy for one penny and then shipping.  Funny when the shipping is more than the cost of the book.  I had both the first and second trilogy.  But when we moved into that house and the hot tub went in, a pipe had been damaged and the storage room had flooded.  We hadn’t even finished unpacking yet.

This was a great series heavily influenced by the historical peoples of the UK.  Welsh, Scottish, Pictish and so on.  But a highly mythical version of those people.  I spent years trying to find copies in used book stores before I eventually just gave up.  I gave up before Amazon.  I’ve only recently started to replace missing and lost and damaged books that I miss.

In order to try to save some of the damaged books, I remember laying out all the damaged books in the bath tub and spending a lot of time with a blow dryer trying to salvage books.  I don’t remember all the books I lost, but I lost the 6 books in the Green Lion and Celydonn trilogies and the 3 books in the Midori Snyder Queen’s Quarter series.  I’ve discovered they have been reprinted as young adult fantasy instead of adult fantasy and the series name has changed to the Oran Trilogy.

I may contemplate ordering those as well.  Only Books one and two.  I still have book three.  I wonder if some of those books I vaguely remember reading were also in that one box on the bottom.  I know there were more books I was not able to salvage.