Race Relations

And now, two different articles that relate to race:

Disney Goes Black: First Disney Animated Feature Starring A Black Leading Character (is it though? does anyone know?)

Iran Condemns the US... for producing Frank Miller's 300.

I must say, I am looking forward to 300... despite never having read the graphic novel.

More Book Recommendations

The Mortal Engines series by Philip Reeve (Mortal Engines, Predator's Gold, Infernal Devices and A Darkling Plain)... even though I'm only on book two, I think this series is incredible. It's about... globalisation. (ok, I'm chortling to myself now, and everyone else is looking at me funny!)

No, it's about "Municipal Darwinism"... a far-future post-apocalyptic world in which those that survived the Sixty Minute War took to turning their cities into large, mobile urban predators.... Cities on wheels, cities on tracks, floating cities, flying cities, cities that roam the wilderness looking for smaller cities (and towns and villages) to devour wholesale in their monstrous jaws, to be torn apart for raw materials and spare parts...

It also has airships. With gasbags and gondolas.

It's very imaginative, thrilling, and good.

It claims to be Young Adult or Teen fiction. This is a lie; or (at least) a glaring example of the problems of labelling and pigeonholing fiction... because it's also one of the better fantasy books I've read recently. 

(nb. I'm not necessarily saying that all Young Adult or Teen books are rubbish... I'm just saying I wouldn't necessarily put this book into the Young Adult/Teen section myself purely because it has teens as its main characters. But then, people have said the same about Phillip Pullman haven't they?)

ETA: First line of the first book as a taster: 

"It was a dark, blustery afternoon in spring, and the city of London was chasing a small mining town across the dried-out bed of the old North Sea."