The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy

It is 1792. The Reign of Terror grips Paris, France, and hundreds of aristocrats are being sent to their deaths at the guillotine. Only one mysterious person dares to stand up to this bloodshed: the elusive Scarlet Pimpernel. Though no one knows who he is, the Scarlet Pimpernel saves the innocent from death, employing incredible disguises to escape the French revolutionary government and bring his charges safely to England. Naturally, the French government doesn't like this much, and sends its best agent to track the Pimpernel down.

Written in 1905, this tale of espionage and secret identities has been credited as the grandmother of James Bond and other super-spies. The book's only negative aspect is that the good Baroness Orczy occasionally falls prey to the snobbery of her aristocratic rank and the prejudices of her time. However, in spite of these lapses, the story is filled with wit, swashbuckling, and a good dose of romance. This novel remains a classic for a reason.

Only You Can Save Mankind by Terry Pratchett

Johnny Maxwell is your average teenage kid. He avoids doing homework and spends most of his time hanging out with friends or playing video games. One night, while playing the computer game “Only You Can Save Mankind,” a strange message flashes across the screen: We wish to talk. We surrender.

Rather than obliterating the alien’s spaceships in order to set a new high score, Johnny nobly accepts the game aliens’ surrender. Then things really start to get weird. The game aliens expect to be properly treated as prisoners of war. They demand safe passage back to their home planet, as well as several thousand orders of hamburgers and fries to feed their fleet.

In this mind-bending, reality-warping novel from Terry Pratchett, nothing is quite as it seems. How are the aliens able to enter Johnny’s dreams from the game? Why is everyone else’s copy of “Only You Can Save Mankind” now broken? Is this all a dream, or is it real? And will Johnny be able to save the alien race from the most dreaded enemy of all – humans?

Set during the first Gulf War, Only You Can Save Mankind is a crazy tale of real and virtual warfare that is as darkly funny as it is insightful. As Pratchett writes in the introduction: “On your computer: games that look like war. On your TV: war that looked like a game. If you weren’t careful, you could get confused….” Indeed.

Five Poets of the Pacific Northwest

One of the advantages to spending a lot of time in the library is that occasionally you find some rare treasure of a book hidden among the bestsellers. Five Poets of the Pacific Northwest is an older anthology; it was complied in 1964, shortly after the death of notable northwest poet, Theodore Roethke.

All of the poets in this small anthology are northwesterners, either by birth or inclination, and all have been noticeably influenced by Roethke’s work. The similarities end there, however, for all five have distinct styles and differ greatly in subject matter. Some write about loss in a lyrical style much like that of the Chinese poets, others focus more on simple, earthy language to describe the landscape of the northwest and their travels through it.

This is a lovely little volume, well worth reading for anyone fond of poetry and the beautiful northwest.