The main character of "Bitten" is Elena Michaels, an ordinary woman - who also happens to be a werewolf. She lives in Toronto, Canada and writes for a popular newspaper. Elena is also the only known female werewolf in the world. This gives her a very special place in the werewolf world, and especially with the werewolf pack. She struggles to deal with her other-ness and to assimilate to the human world. She also contends with her terrible childhood, and with the man who bit her and turned her into a werewolf. Elena has managed to settle into a somewhat normal existence, living with her ad-exec boyfriend and ignoring her wolf side as much as possible. However, she learns that her Pack (the governing body of werewolves) is in trouble, and comes to their aid, flying to Stonehaven, the country estate of the pack Alpha. It is in Bear Valley, a fictional city in up-state New York. When Elena arrives, she is greeted by her ex-lover, Clayton Danvers, who is also the man who bit her and made her a werewolf (without her consent). Clayton is also the bodyguard and foster-son to Jeremy Danvers, the pack Alpha (leader). Elena learns that a local woman was found murdered on Stonehaven''s land, and that she had been savaged by what authorities thought to be a dog. However, the Pack has determined that she was murdered by a Mutt, a rogue werewolf. They track the mutt and find out he is a recently escaped killer, who has even more recently been turned by a bite into a werewolf. Clay and Elena chase him into a rave and after several of the partyers are killed, the police shoot him in wolf form. Soon, the rest of the Pack arrives on the scene to help with the problem: Antonio Sorrentino, his son Nicholas Sorrentino, Logan Jonsen, and Peter Myers. The werewolf Pack are the self-appointed governing body of the werewolf world, and they kill to keep the existence of werewolves a secret. This means if they feel any non Pack wolves(whom they term "Mutts") become noticeable to humans, they kill them. They kill humans too, but not as often. First, Logan and Peter are killed. This greatly saddens Elena, and she starts sleeping(cheating) with Clay again, without telling her boyfriend, Phillip. As Logan and Peter are not the best fighters, the Pack wonders why that would happen. They also wonder why any Mutt would dare to go near the Pack. Most are terrified of being noticed by them. Then Jeremy, the Alpha is attacked. Finally, the pack figures out that the "mutts", tired of being brutalized by the Pack, are trying to free themselves from their rule. To do this one mutt in particular, Daniel, who has reason to hate Clay from childhood, has started turning human killers and other escaped convicts into werewolves to fight the pack.

Bitten

Lyle works on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange and spends evenings seated close to the television, rapidly flipping channels, while his wife Pammy works at a "grief management firm" in the World Trade Center. While their marriage is free of problems and they have many friends, a cloud of ennui hangs over their domestic life. Pammy joins her friends Ethan and Jack on a trip to Maine, where they come to the realization that their collective nostalgia for simpler times and rural life is largely invented. Pammy begins a sexual relationship with Jack, who is in a homosexual relationship with Ethan, which ultimately ends in Jack''s inexplicable self-immolation at a nearby junkyard. Meanwhile, in a divergent and concurrent storyline, Lyle witnesses the shooting death of one of his acquaintances, George Sedbauer, on the floor of the exchange. Through this event, Lyle becomes privy to a vague conspiracy of violent terrorists targeting Wall Street, and his curiosity draws him into their fold. His recruitment and participation are equally inexplicable, a function of the draw of revolutionary activity and respite from the boredom of his ordinary life. His engagement with the radicals, themselves devoid of any morality or particular ideology, becomes more absurd when he attempts to inform on them to equally ill-defined government agents, and begins having sexual relationships with two other conspirators. Lyle discovers that J. Kinnear, one of the shadow key figures in the terrorist network, is a double-agent himself and the web of essentially meaningless conspiracies appears to be endless and be the end in itself; pursued not for chaotic ends, but for the sake of imposing structural order on what the "players" view to be chaos.

Players

The book is set in the non fictional town of Ramsa, New York, and centers around teenager Jessica Ashley Allodola. Jessica is gorgeous and has a perfect body, but the people in her town avoid her. At Ramsa High, many students are afraid of her and some think she''s a witch. Instead of trying to bond to people, Jessica writes books about vampires and witches. She has just published her first book, "Tiger, Tiger", under the pen name Ash Night. As her senior year starts, there are two new students, Caryn Rashida and Alex Remington. Jessica is instantly stunned by the fact that Alex looks exactly like Aubrey, a character in "Tiger, Tiger." However, since Jessica believes vampires aren''t real, she convinces herself that he''s not Aubrey. Both Caryn and Alex show an interest in Jessica. Jessica finds Alex fascinating but considers Caryn a nuisance. After a few clues, Jessica finds out that the books she has been writing are completely true. That Alex is actually the vampire Aubrey and Caryn is a Smoke witch. Many of the vampires wish to kill her for exposing their secrets. Aubrey had initially planned to kill her, but after meeting her, he''s uncertain of what to do. After Jessica is attacked by Fala, another vampire, Aubrey changes Jessica into a vampire. Throughout the story, Jessica pieces together clues regarding her birth. Her mother was Jazlyn and had been offered immortality numerous times by Siete, the creator of the vampires. After her husband''s death, the pregnant Jazlyn accepted the offer in a moment of desperation and Siete changed her. However, after years of life as a vampire, her regret became too strong. A Smoke witch, Monica, offered to give her back her humanity. Monica died in the process, but she succeeded. A few months later, Jazlyn''s child was born. However, the child, Jessica, held no resemblance to either of her biological parents. Instead, after almost two decades in an undead womb, she resembled Siete. Her green eyes, black hair, pale skin, and vampiric traces in her aura were all from him and Jazlyn could not look at her. So Jazlyn gave Jessica up for adoption.

Demon in My View

Jacen Solo, now the Sith lord Darth Caedus, continues his quest to "bring order" to the galaxy by taking it over. As he descends ever farther into the dark side of the Force, he becomes increasingly willing to sacrifice anyone and anything to achieve his goals. By the end of the novel, nearly all of Caedus'' family and friends have turned against him, including his secret lover Tenel Ka and nearly all of the Jedi. The sole exception appears to be Tahiri Veila, whom Caedus has been manipulating through the memory of his dead brother, and her lover, Anakin Solo. The novel also represents a turning point in Caedus'' evolution into a Sith. In the previous novel, Darth Caedus was willing to send a prison arrest warrant to his own parents Leia and Han Solo. Caedus is increasingly willing to commit atrocities (such as targeting the civilian centres and forests of Kashyyyk), and gives no second thought to sacrificing anyone, even family, to his ambitions. He begins to cherish the fear of his subordinates and in one example, orders the arrest and execution of one of his spies who was in danger of being exposed and executed by the Corellian government, in order to motivate others to refrain from returning to the Galactic Alliance when their covers were threatened. Inferno is also marked by the deterioration and termination of many of Caedus'' personal relationships as he ravages the galaxy. He sends troops to seize control of the Jedi Praxeum on Ossus, and subsequently orders the murders of all the adult Jedi at the facility, (which include his twin sister Jaina), in order to secure control over the children there. Ultimately this smaller conflict fails, but not without heavy losses on both sides. He manipulates his lover Tenel Ka into handing over her last fleet to him, leaving her and his daughter exposed to a coup d''état before she realizes the depths to which he has sunk and withdraws her support. He manipulates his cousin, Ben, into killing the deposed Chief of State, Cal Omas, only to warn Coruscant authorities that an assassination attempt is imminent. He then tortures Ben as part of a plan to make him a Sith apprentice, which is interrupted by Luke Skywalker, prompting a furious lightsaber duel that ends with Luke sparing Jacen when Ben''s danger of falling to the dark side becomes apparent to Luke. A subplot in the book reveals the existence of a hidden group of Sith on Korriban and further reveals the powers of Ship, the Sith vessel Ben recovered from Ziost.

Inferno

Bindy Mackenzie is a Year 11 student at Ashbury High, a prestigious private school in Sydney. She is a perfectionist and a high-achiever, focussing obsessively on her studies. When Bindy begins Year 11, she is horrified to discover that she must take part in FAD -Friendship And Development- a mandatory course aimed at helping teenagers deal with the issues that face them. Her teacher, Try Montaine, an American English teacher, takes a strong interest in each of the members of Bindy''s FAD group. The FAD course presents Bindy with a rather shocking scenario- she discovers that she is widely disliked by most of her peers, due to her arrogant and precocious attitude. Bindy begins a mission to seek revenge on her classmates, resulting in her becoming even more disliked. For Bindy, everything goes downhill from here. Her school life becomes miserable, her jobs become a struggle and her all-important grades suffer. Bindy also falls ill from a strange illness that only contributes to these problems. Bindy slowly realises the error of her ways and tries to make amends with her FAD group, her new attitude helping her peers to gradually learn to enjoy Bindy''s company as she changes as a person. In the meantime, Finnegan Blonde, Bindy''s partner from her FAD group, presents a possible love interest for Bindy as one of the first people to recognise her friendly and likable characteristics. However, as Bindy''s personality grows and adapts to make her a better person, her illness becomes increasingly worse, until she falls unconscious one night in an office at her school. Bindy is suffering from arsenic poisoning from a central character in the novel, and a complex mystery unfolds as to the character''s motives.

The Betrayal of Bindy Mackenzie

The story starts with Prince Charles entertaining some bored children at Balmoral. He tells them about an old man who, in search of peace and quiet (and a hot bath), has made his way to a remote cave at Lochnagar. He comes across a cave and, dragging a bathtub inside, claims the place as his own. The old man makes a lot of noise and mentions that his neighbours used to complain about the banging and noise coming from his home late at night. He chats to an animal he names Maudie, the original occupant of the cave, while setting up the apparatus for running his long awaited bath. Finally, all is ready and the Old Man appears in his tartan dressing gown, ready to step in to the bath. But, as he jumps in, he realises that the water is freezing and his squeals echo round the loch. He tells Maudie that he will have to wait for a bath until he has found a way of heating the water, and pulls the plug on his full bath. Unknown to the Old Man, his cave is near the underground home of the Gorn, a clan of Scottish pixies, who are responsible for pushing up the spring flowers in Scotland. The Gorn King is an inventor, and has created a curious device (which looks and sounds like a set of bagpipes) which reduces full grown flowers back to seeds. The seed will turn back in to a flower when it gets wet and the Gorn Queen and Princess declare that the King has changed the way everyone will work from now on. However, as they are discussing this, a flood pours down unexpectedly from above. When the Old Man emptied his bath, the water followed his complicated arrangements of pipes and in to the Gorn''s underground workshops, ruining the flowers and flooding out the workers. The Princess and her younger brother end up being washed away from their parents and come out of a tree stump alone and wet. They look up to find a ''giant'', tending to a huge pot over a roaring fire and the young Prince fears that they will be made in to soup. In fact the ''giant'' is the Old Man, who has found a way to heat his bath by lighting a huge fire underneath it. As he waits, still in his tartan dressing gown, he is suddenly hit by the Gorn King''s device, which has been picked up by the young Princess. He immediately shrinks to the size of a pixie and is taken away by the Prince and Princess, to see what his bathwater has done to their home. At first, he thinks he is having a strange dream, and so he appears callously unconcerned at the devastation, stating only that "I''ve never dreamed in colour before". This delusion lasts until he falls down a hole, hitting his head. As he exclaims at the pain in his head, it dawns on the Old Man that since you can''t feel pain in a dream, what he''s seen must be real and the damage is his fault. The Prince and Princess take the Old Man back outside but, to their shock, the whole world seems to be on fire. The fire underneath the Old Man''s bath has spread and is threatening the countryside. The Old Man offers to help, but he needs to be bigger before he can do anything. The Princess is reluctant to help the Old Man, but she relents and tells him that he needs to ''get watered''. With the help of Maudie, the Old Man is catapulted in to his bath and returns to normal size. He pulls the plug again, flooding the area and putting out the fire, while protecting the pixies'' underground home from further damage. The Old Man has learned that his actions affect others and that he must think of the consequences. The story ends with the Gorn sharing a huge bath with the Old Man, complete with water wheels and boats. When he is finished, the Old Man drains his bath using more of his special plumbing skills to reuse the water to reactivate the magic seeds and causing flowers to pop up all around. The story closes on the Old Man of Lochnagar and returns to Balmoral and Prince Charles. The children tell him that it was a good story, but that''s all, just a story. Charles replies that you never really know, and lifts a set of bagpipes from his desk and begins to play. After a few notes, the Prince is affected in the same way as the Old Man, shrinking to a tiny size and suggesting that his story was inspired by true events. The children he has been entertaining then race off through the house to find the bathtub, to restore the Prince to his rightful size.

The Old Man of Lochnagar

The Naked Ape, which was serialized in the Daily Mirror newspaper and has been translated into 23 languages, depicts human behavior as largely evolved to meet the challenges of prehistoric life as a hunter-gatherer (see nature versus nurture). The book was so named because out of 193 species of monkeys and apes only man is not covered in hair. Desmond Morris, the author, who formerly was the Curator of mammals at London Zoo, said his book was intended to popularise and demystify science. Morris made a number of claims in the book, including that not only does Homo sapiens have the largest brain of all primates but also the largest penis, and is therefore "the sexiest primate alive". He further claimed that our fleshy ear-lobes, which are unique to humans, are erogenous zones, the stimulation of which can cause orgasm in both males and females. Morris further stated that the more rounded shape of human female breasts means they are mainly a sexual signalling device rather than simply for providing milk for infants. Morris attempted to frame human behavior in the context of evolution, but his explanations failed to convince academics because they were based on a teleological (goal-oriented) understanding of evolution. For example, Morris wrote that the intense human pair bond evolved so that men who were out hunting could trust that their mates back home were not having sex with other men, and that sparse body hair evolved because the "nakedness" helped intensify pair bonding by increasing tactile pleasure.

The Naked Ape

Arturo Bandini is a struggling writer living in a residential hotel in Bunker Hill, a rundown section of Downtown Los Angeles. Living off the zest of oranges, he unconsciously creates a picture of Los Angeles as a modern dystopia during the Great Depression era. His published short story "The Little Dog Laughed" impresses no one in his seedy boarding house except for one 14-year-old girl. Destitute, he wanders into the Columbia Buffet where he meets Camilla Lopez, a waitress. Bandini falls in love with Lopez, who is herself in love with co-worker Sam. Sam despises Camilla, telling Bandini if he wants to win over Camilla, he has to treat her poorly. Bandini struggles with his own poverty, his Catholic guilt, and with the his love for an unstable and deteriorating Camilla. Camilla is eventually admitted to a mental hospital, and moved to a second one, before escaping. Bandini looks for her, only finding her as she awaits for him in his apartment. He decides to take her away from Los Angeles, and arranges to live in a house on the beach. He buys her a little dog and they go to the new place. He leaves her there, to get his belongings from his Los Angeles hotel room. When he returns, she''s gone. He tracks her down to the desert home of Sam, who is ill and dying. Before Bandini arrives, Sam has thrown Camilla out and she wanders into the desert. Bandini looks for her with an agonizing fear that he won''t find the women he loves and he doesn''t. He returns to Sam''s shack, looks over the empty desert land. He takes a copy of the novel he had recently published, dedicates it to Camilla, and throws it into the desert.

Ask the Dust

A Fan''s Notes is a sardonic account of mental illness, alcoholism, insulin shock therapy and electroconvulsive therapy, and the black hole of sports fandom. Its central preoccupation with a failure to measure up to the American dream has earned the novel comparisons to Fitzgerald''s The Great Gatsby. Beginning with his childhood in Watertown, New York, growing up under a sports-obsessed father and following his college years at the USC, where he first came to know of his hero Frank Gifford, Exley recounts years of intermittent stints at psychiatric institutions, his failed marriage to a woman named Patience, successive unfulfilling jobs teaching English literature to high school students, and working for a Manhattan public relations firm under contract to a weapons company, and, by way of Gifford, his obsession with the New York Giants. Exley''s introspective "fictional memoir", a tragicomic indictment of 1950s American culture, examines in lucid prose themes of celebrity, masculinity, self-absorption, and addiction, morbidly charting his failures in life against the electrifying successes of his football hero and former classmate. The title comes from Exley''s fear that he is doomed to be a spectator in life as well as in sports.

A Fan''s Notes

The story opens with Josef Divonne arriving in Rondo, on the shores of the Dead Delta of the Danube, having flown in from Lower Europe. Josef believes he is driven by ideology but, in fact, it is the mystery of his mother egg (he was a free born child) and his hero father''s (Uwe) record in the Purifications of Africa and the Italies which is really behind his uncertainty. Leaving the chateau outside 2me Lyon at the start of High Thermidor, he joins up with a bunch of dissidents - the Lovers of Rondo - in the ''free state'' of Rondo. Overwhelmed by all he sees, Josef goes native. After a short while, he decides to become a citizen of Rondo, embracing his personal god, Zinze, following the Sublime Path and obeying all the instructions of his mentor, Adnan. He divorces his wife by electric mail. Despite melancholy flashbacks to his childhood, during the Second Sida Cycle, he decides his future lies in Rondo. But all is not as it seems. After an illegal visit to the Circus with Nor Nor, an Asian he despises, he is confronted, in his cups, by a restaurant owner who whispers to him in Lower European ''S''gibt rien aqui!''. Slowly, Josef comes to realise that he is not in a ''free state'' but in a prison colony for dissidents. Waking on the night he is due to fly out of Rondo, he finds he has been left behind and that Nor Nor, his only true confidante, has been killed in a mysterious fall from a balcony. He also finds that someone has been stealing days from him, here and there, for many years. Josef is left in Rondo, as nothing more than the catamite of the great Adnan, leader of the first crossing to Rondo. He has a much coveted dragonfly in a glass case by his bed. But he has nothing. There is no home now. He will wear out his days in the realisation that to embrace the Stanislavsky method, in Rondo, is his only salvation.

Rondo

The book begins from the point of view of The Mysterious Stranger, also known as X, the renegade Ethical who has been contacting people in the valley and enlisting their aid. He had posed as the engineer Barry Thorne on the airship Parseval where he had murdered Milton Firebrass and several others, all of whom were fellow Ethicals. He is now posing as a Mayan named Ah Qaaq and is traveling in the company of the Chinese poet Li Po. Through his internal reverie he reveals some of his secrets. His identity had been discovered by Monat Grrautut, who was the director of the Riverworld project. Monat had recalled him to the Dark Tower to be judged. However, he used a remote command to kill all the inhabitants of the tower and stopped the resurrections so that agents in the valley could not return to the tower. Stuck in the valley like the others he began to make his way upriver, hoping to catch a ride on one of the riverboats. His reverie ends on one of the most traumatic days on the Riverworld. On that day the left bank grailstones fail to fire. They had done so once before, when the meteorite which Sam Clemens discovered, broke the circuit which powered them. That time the damage had been repaired by the Ethicals. But this time they are all either dead or stuck in the valley. One day after the grailstones fail the inhabitants of the left bank invade the right en masse, half of humanity dies in the conflict. At the same time Richard Burton and his friends have joined the crew of King John''s ship the Rex Grandissimus. They participate in the defense of the boat after the grailstones fail and Burton, masquerading as a Dark Age British warrior, eventually becomes King John''s security chief. One day Tom Mix, Jack London, and Peter Jairus Frigate apply to join the crew. Burton, recognizing Frigate, attacks him. Realizing his mistake Burton eventually becomes friendly with Frigate and becomes an ally of Mix and London. The false Frigate has disappeared, but his travelling companion, Monat Grrautut, has boarded Sam Clemens'' ship. Shortly after boarding, Monat is murdered by the renegade Ethical. Eventually the two riverboats reach Virolando, a wide lake which is the last inhabited stretch before the headwaters. It is also home to the pacifist Church of the Second Chance, where Hermann Göring has become a priest. King John and Clemens finally get to square off. Initially they begin with an aerial dog fight. When the planes are destroyed the two great riverboats attack each other. In the ensuing conflict both riverboats are sunk, most of the crews die, and the two captains are killed. King John is killed by Clemens and Clemens dies of a heart attack after being pulled from the water by his mortal enemy Erik Bloodaxe. Clemens dies before he notices that Bloodaxe has become an adherent of the Church of the Second Chance, and seeks no revenge against Clemens. Among the survivors are Burton, Frigate, Alice, Kaz, Joe Miller, Li Po, Ah Qaaq, and Nur ed Din. They are joined by the American piano player Tom Turpin, the English novelist Aphra Behn, a man claiming to be Gilgamesh, and the French soldier Jean Marcelin, Baron de Marbot. They take one of the ship''s launches, the only craft to survive the fight, and proceed upriver. They scale the waterfall at the end of the river and make their way, after much difficulty, to the polar sea. When they arrive at the tower they unmask Ah Qaaq as the renegade Ethical and take him prisoner. He explains his identity as Loga, son of King Priam of Troy. Like all children who died before age five, he was resurrected centuries ago and raised by the alien Ethicals to be one of their agents. He reveals also the purpose of the Riverworld. It is meant as a grand moral test, to allow humanity to progress to the point where they can achieve enlightenment. When the project is brought to a close the souls of those who have not achieved enlightenment will be set loose to wander the universe aimlessly. Loga became obsessed with sparing his earthly family this fate and worked to sabotage the project. He was the one who awakened Burton prematurely, recruited Clemens and the others, and he used satellites to direct the meteorite to land near Clemens. While this is all being revealed they discover that there is a problem with the computer which runs the tower. A part malfunctioned, and since no one was around to repair it the problem has reached a critical point. If nothing is done the computer will die, releasing all the stored wathans, or souls, of the people who died on the Riverworld. Without the wathans these people can never be brought back to life. In addition, Monat has locked out other users from accessing the computer. Göring, who had followed the group to the tower, attempts to fix the computer, but is killed by security measures put in place by Monat. Alice then devises a way to get around this programming, and deactivate the security. Loga then is able to repair the computer.

The Magic Labyrinth

Nancy is a fourteen-year-old girl who just wants to have fun while at a Garth Brooks concert with her friends. While there she has an asthma attack and an eighteen-year old boy named Collin helps her. He takes her outside and tells her to relax. From that day on she starts talking to him every day after school. One night, she invites him to her house when her mother is not home, and he rapes her in her mother''s bed. After that night, when she begins to look for Collin, it turns out that he does not study in the college he told her. She begins feeling sick later on, and easily exhausted. Then one day, when her mother takes her to the doctor, she has blood samples taken. She then learns that she has HIV and doesn''t know what to do; she just wants to die and feels that she doesn''t have anything on earth for her. She decides she wants to find Collin and have him go to jail for raping her. She describes his appearance to the police. Her closest friends do not know what is wrong with her, thinking her father is sick and that she has gone to Arizona because of it. She does not want to tell them that she was raped by a boy who she thought was the love of her life. While at school most of her fellow students do not know that she has HIV, but her friends support her the whole way. Nancy and her parents become closer even though her parents are divorced. Later she dies and wishes for her diary to be published so that other young teenagers like her can know the real truth.

Over 8000 Takeaways For Your Brain!

Read - Listen - Learn

Bitten

By Kelley Armstrong

Players

By Don DeLillo

Demon in My View

By Amelia Atwater-Rhodes

Inferno

By Troy Denning

The Betrayal of Bindy Mackenzie

By Jaclyn Moriarty

The Old Man of Lochnagar

No Author Listed

The Naked Ape

By Desmond Morris

Ask the Dust

By John Fante

A Fan's Notes

By Frederick Exley

Rondo

No Author Listed

The Magic Labyrinth

By Philip José Farmer

It Happened to Nancy: By an Anonymous Teenager

By Beatrice Sparks