5 airship adventures for teens

List by Danielle

"Invention, my dear friends, is 93 percent perspiration, 6 percent electricity, 4 percent evaporation, and 2 percent butterscotch ripple."

~ Willy Wonka, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

Steampunk, wonderful steampunk! I've been reading my way through the YA category of this year's Locus Awards for sci-fi and fantasy, and two of the five books nominated this year have a distinctly steampunkish feel (though Ian McDonald's very enjoyable Planesrunner is actually 'electricpunk', taking place in a parallel universe where oil has never been used as a source of energy). All of the books below have plenty of adventure, interesting and imaginative settings, awesome steampunk technology and brave, smart, resourceful heroes and heroines. They're really good for readers who aren't scared of a little dose of science with their fiction - a little bit of 'how the rollercoaster works' alongside the whole rollercoaster ride. All that, plus - airships! Air pirates! Mid-air battles!

5 books shared between me and my valentine

List by Danielle

The eskimos had fifty-two names for snow because it was important to them: there ought to be as many for love.
~ Margaret Atwood

This is a shout-out for all of us out there who might not be celebrating a grand romance this Valentine's Day, but who have happy, bookish, geekish memories to treasure anyway.
Sharing books can be a real expression of love... there's the excitement you get when you stumble on something you think your sweetie will enjoy, because you know some of what ticks their fiction-lovin' boxes... the pleasure if you get it right, and they pick it up and run with it... the lingering discussions of favourite characters and plot points afterwards... the race for sequels, prequels, the author's entire back catalogue. Usually I'd end up in a queue for the library copy while he raced ahead with a stealthily purchased ebook, but he's a faster reader anyway, and he knows better than to spoiler me (though I swear he gave away at least one of the key events in A game of thrones without meaning to).
Here are just some of the books we've shared over the years.

Top 5 sci-fi books from childhood

List by Danielle

As for courage and will - we cannot measure how much of each lies within us, we can only trust there will be sufficient to carry through trials which may lie ahead.
~ Andre Norton

New books are wonderful, but old books, stains, funny smells and all, are another pleasure altogether. Our Research Centre stacks have a trove of YA books from the distant past with the gloriously 70s-style covers I remember from my own childhood reading, with all of the terrible psychedelic 'space' pants-suits you could wish for. I've just finished H.M. Hoover's Another heaven, another earth, something I'd not come across before, but something that stands out in stark contrast to the newer YA I'd been reading lately. Don't get me wrong, I love recent YA to pieces, and it's cool seeing sci-fi dystopias making a comeback, but it was a nice change to read something that didn't wrap itself up in teen angsty knots, didn't obsess over forbidden love, and dealt both thoughtfully and emotionally with the ethics of colonisation from the points of view of both colonisers and colonised.

I'm not a big sci-fi reader, and I haven't read most of the classic authors, but I do remember a handful of great sci-fi stories that I read and re-read as a kid, including another H.M. Hoover that I was lucky enough to be able to buy, second-hand, ex-library, with all of it's stamps and everything. These stories had everything I was looking for, and more - excitement and adventure, great characters in tough situations, moments of despair and triumph - all the stuffs of good storytelling. So feel free to add your own recs in the comments, I'd love to take a tour through other folks' favourite space adventures!

Top 5 loveable rogues

List by Danielle

"I only got myself/And this big old world/But I sip that cup of life/With my fingers curled"
~ lyrics from Thomas O'Malley Cat, from the Aristocats

This list was inspired while watching tv with the kids over breakfast; (trying to avoid) watching Alvin and the Chipmunks: the squeakuel, to be precise. (I have just requested the soundtrack on the urging of my eager 5 year old, and am full of inner glee that I'm not the one who drops her off to school, which is when it'll get played.) High point of the morning's viewing was noticing that Zachary Levi plays the 'hapless human' in this round of chipmunkish hijinks; also known for his TV role of Chuck, you might know him better as Flynn Rider (or should that be Eugene Fitzherbert) from the recent Rapunzel flick, Tangled.

When I saw Tangled, I thought that Disney (and Zachary Levi) had really got it right - he was the epitome of 'loveable rogue'. Full of equal amounts of eye-twinkling charisma and the ability to really irritate, flippant even in the face of certain danger, pulling chaos behind him like a kite, and bursting with schemes and plans and a passion for life. He might take a cynical view to humanity in the abstract, but when he finds that one special person to infiltrate his well-guarded heart, he would risk anything to protect them. I think that's where the 'loveable' part comes alive for me - watching someone with a serious survival instinct battle with the ferocious loyalty and compassion lurking deep down.

Tosca, feel free to step in if I sound too much like I'm writing copy for the back of a Silhouette title!

Loveable rogues. SIGH.

Top 5 wild, weird Western crossovers

List by Danielle

"The first thing you find out when yer dog learns to talk is that dogs don't got nothing much to say."
~ The first line of 'The knife of never letting go', by Patrick Ness

Wikipedia goes into loving detail about some of the newfangled flavours of Western out there, from the Weird West or Science Fiction Western (which seems to have a more historical setting, albeit one that plays fabulously fast and loose with real history, see 'Cowboys vs Aliens' or Cherie Priest's award-winning steampunk westerns) to the Space Western, in my heart always associated with by Joss Whedon's wonderful (and forever shiny!) 'Firefly' and 'Serenity'. Okay, the boundaries of these sub-genres are as fluid and fiddly as most genre distinctions seem to be, but the lists of films, TV, graphic novels and books cited show that there's some exciting storytelling to be exploring, out on the frontiers.

Top 5 novels where life is a game

List by Danielle

Cards are war, in disguise of a sport.
~ Charles Lamb

I'm halfway through the second book in Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games trilogy at the moment. Maybe it's just one of those moments where you find the right book at the right time (often after a string of less-satisfying reads), but it's almost unputdownable. I'm not kidding, my hubby has to bully me to go to bed at night because I keep telling myself, just one more chapter, just one more chapter, what the...?! okay, just one more chapter.

It's Collins' conflicted characters and her understated approach to the vastly emotional subject matter that I'm really enjoying, but there's something about a story built around a game that just appeals (all you other roleplayers in the house say howdy). There are more than a few great reads out there that play with the idea of life as a game - here are some of my favourites.

Top 5 dragons

List by Annie

"People have freaked out when I tell them that my dragons are scientifically based...what else can you call a genetically engineered life form?"
- Anne McCaffrey

For centuries dragons have held our imaginations – whether as destroyers or protectors.

For that reason, there are so many dragon stories out there, it’s really hard to pick just a few… so I haven’t picked a top 5, more a selection sorted by age / reading level, with a few honourable mentions.

As a young teen, my reading-teeth were cut, as it were, on Anne McCaffrey’s Pern novels. (Don’t get me started on the whole fantasy / science-fiction argument with these. Yes, they are dragons. But...they are dragons, genetically modified by humans who have travelled to their planet on space ships.)

Even before this intro, one of my fav books, and a comfort re-read, was Green Smoke by Rosemary Manning. (It nearly made the final list, but we have so few copies around, I didn’t think it was fair.)

Knowing my mother (she who introduced me to McCaffrey in the first place), if there had been any dragon picture books around, I would have had those, too.

Working from younger to older – with the understanding that anyone from that age and up should read it. Picture books should be enjoyed by all. As I pulled the list together, I realised that I’d managed to pick humorous stories. That’s the way it goes sometimes… so slightly more serious books became honourable mentions.

Top 5 dystopian movies of all time according to Snarkerati.com

List by Snarkerati.com

"Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted. That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history."
- Aldous Huxley

Last year sometime I came across the word 'dystopia' in relation to fiction and films. Somehow or other I had gotten to 35 and had never heard it before. Turning to Twitter (as I do at most times for quick answers) I asked 'What are dystopian novels?' It was Tim Jones, New Zealand poet, fiction writer and editor, who answered my query. Even better, he didn't just tell me what it was, he listed some examples (such as Brave new world by Huxley, Fahrenheit 451 by Bradbury, The handmaid's tale by Atwood and even The road by McCarthy to name a few) and then suddenly a lightbulb went on. I knew what he was talking about because I'd read some of these books. In fact, as a teen so much of what I'd been drawn to was, in fact, about dystopias rather than utopias - I just hadn't realised that that's what they were called. Which made me wonder about dystopian films - what were they? Had I seen them and not known? And how soon could I get my hands on a list to compare? A little Google-fu (Google is my boyfriend, I swear, geez) and I ended up at Snarkerati.com a pop culture site (which features a lot of celebrity gossip), who had, back in 2007, put together a fantastic list of their Top 50 Dystopian Movies of All Time. It made for great reading and prompted some intense discussions with siblings about a lot of the placings *sigh* It's never boring in our house though I often wish it were. We've listed the Top 5 from their list - this being a Top 5 blog and all - so you can see how your choices stack up against Snarkerati. And as a final note - two things: 1) Equilibrium at #50? Shut the front door! Really? I would've had it in my top 20 for Bale's fight scenes alone! and 2) We don't hold Mad Max 2? Shut the front door! Woe is me :(

Top 5 items I requested and took home but couldn't remember why I wanted to read/watch them when I got there so brought them back

"The advantage of a bad memory is that one enjoys several times the same good things for the first time."
- Friedrich Nietzsche

Do you request books like crazy just because? You know, you see the cover in the catalogue and go, 'Oohh, lookit the pretty, shiny,' and put it on hold? Do you read a review that pumps a book so brilliantly you think, 'Oohh, come to mama!' and then put it on hold? Does a friend recommend a book so well that you immediately say to yourself, 'Oohh, yeah, that sounds like me!' and then put it on hold? Sometimes it seems like I'm forever putting books on hold and then getting them home and going, 'Whoa - why did I want to read this again?' If this sounds like you, then honey, you're my kinda people ;)

Top 5 cyberpunk science fiction

List by Paul/NextReads

"It's a strange world."
- Elijah Snow (character from Warren Ellis Planetary series)

Cyberpunk science fiction - what is it? Simply put, cyberpunk is a subgenre of science fiction. If you're anything like me that still leaves you with a 'What the...?' kinda feeling. The term was originally coined in the early 80s (yes, the era of legwarmers, banana clips and Square Pegs) and is a mix of low life, pop culture and high tech - think of hackers & artificial intelligence in the post-dystopias of the near-future (thanks Wikipedia). The titles below were ones that featured in one of Paul's NextReads science fiction newsletters. Since that list went out we have actually found a few more (thanks to The Cyberpunk Project website) which have been added as an 'Honourable mention below'.

Top 5 scenes in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back

List by Natalie

A long time ago, in a galaxy not that far away, The Empire Strikes Back was released in movie theatres. 30 years ago this month, in fact. If this list makes you feel nostalgic for some Skywalker family drama, Manukau Libraries will let you borrow a copy. Just don't fail us by not bringing it back, because some of our librarians have turned to the Dark Side.

Top 5 doomed sci-fi romances (on film)

List by Danielle

'You've been in my life so long, I can't remember anything else.'
- Ellen Ripley, to the alien (Alien 3)

I love my sci-fi, but it's not kind to lovers... there were *way* too many candidates for this list. For every happy couple scampering off together into the sparkly space forest a la Avatar, there were a dozen couples torn cruelly asunder by aliens, gravity, space-crazed psycho killers or simply the cold, empty vaccuum of space ...