Lighthouses are such a fixture of the North Carolina coast that we take them for granted, but the concept and the technology was developed in England and Scotland, largely through the perseverance and genius of the family Stevenson. Robert Louis Stevenson was a scion of this family, and a disappointment to his father when he showed little interest or aptitude for engineering, showing a bent instead for frivolous pursuits (such as writing classics of English literature). I learned here that lighthouses were not universally admired -- whole towns made their living by salvaging (or pillaging) wrecked ships, and a light to warn away their economic base was the last thing their people wanted. The places where lighthouses needed to be built were another challenge -- the descriptions of the violence of the sea on these exposed headlands makes enthralling reading.

This off-beat Down Under adventure begins in an insular and newly-wealthy fishing village with its own rough ways of enforcing the monopoly on status of the locals, and ends up traversing an awful lot of Australia. The characters are tortured and strange and have some grisly secrets, but their struggles with themselves and each other make enthralling, and ultimately satisfying, reading.

Did you know that it's almost impossible to measure your longitude unless you have a really accurate clock? Preferably one that is not affected by the movement (and temperature changes, and corrosion) on board a sailing ship? This is the story of the seventeenth-century quest for a means, and the battle for acceptance of the inventor of such a clock against the Astronomer Royal, who was sure the same end could be accomplished by astronomical observations on the moon. (It can't.) This book is satisfying for the technically- and historically-minded, but it lives through the human dimension -- the personal struggles, the rivalries, the machinations. The original edition had only a few illustrations of the incredible machinery described, but an illustrated edition is now available.
For those who have read the Patrick O'Brien books, this will give you a new insight into how it was that Captain Awbrey was also an astronomer and a mathematician!

Charlotte Bronte meets Terry Pratchett! In an "alternate reality" England where Wales is an Iron Curtain People's Republic and the Crimean War has been going on for 131 years, heroine Thursday Next goes up against a fiendish villain who is threatening characters in classic works of fiction. Time-travel paradoxes confronted with aplomb, and it's especially enthralling if you don't actually know or remember "Jane Eyre" very well. I enjoyed reading this in parallel with the model, and getting to know Mr. Rochester through the eyes of two (very) different women.

Alice was framed! A refugee princess from a Wonderland brutally conquered by her aunt, the Red Queen, Alice Heart tries to tell her story to the Reverend Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), but he thinks she's making it up and converts her story into a pretty fantasy. The reality is much grimmer, as Alice seeks to right the wrongs and defeat the evil Red Queen and her deadly shape-shifting minion, the Cheshire Cat. Definitely not for children, but highly recommended!
- Allen Moore