Book Review: The Adventures of Arabella Ashby Trilogy

I originally became aware of this series when I read the short story, "The Wreck of the Mars Adventure" in Old Mars, an anthology of stories about Mars, edited by George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois. This introduces the setting, where space is filled with breathable air. This means that ordinary sailing ships can be modified to sail between celestial bodies. The short story describes the first attempt to sail to Mars and was rather enjoyable. The Arabella trilogy is set later in the same world. The author's intent was to write a clockpunk [1] regency novel.[2] I was intrigued by the idea and thought that Leann might like that concept, so we started reading them together.[3] The books in the trilogy are: Arabella of Mars, Arabella and the Battle for Venus, and Arabella the Traitor of Mars.

Book Review: The Spiderwick Chronicles

There are quite a few children's books and young adult books that came out while I was in college and working on my doctorate that I never found the time to read. One such series was The Spiderwick Chronicles. In reality, I'd heard of the books, but I wasn't really aware of the series until the movie came out. Since moving back to Utah, I've been listening to books on CD when I travel to and from work. So, rather than read these books, I listened to audio recordings. The first five books were read by Mark Hamill. The three "beyond" books were read by Andrew McCarthy.