The Dark Knight Rises

Forests' worth of writing has already been done on this subject, no doubt, and I'm not sure how much there really is to say.  I've been a huge fan of Nolan's take on Batman from the beginning, and despite a few minor flaws, Batman Begins and The Dark Knight are way, way up on my list of movies I could watch repeatedly forever.

The Dark Knight Rises (or TDKR from here on out) is the last of Nolan's trilogy, and picks up 8 years after the death of Harvey Dent in The Dark Knight.  Thanks to laws passed in Dent's name, Gotham is cleaner than it's ever been, but Jim Gordon is still torn up a bit by the lie he and Batman fabricated to keep Dent's name clean.

Queen of the World

Queen of the World is the debut novel by Ben Hennessey, a fantasy story that follows the adventures of Sarene, a young girl who's grown up in the farmlands of Tamir, but is forced to embark on a long and difficult journey after her home is attacked.  The book begins with an introduction to Sarene and her family as they go about their daily lives, and cutaways to other characters bring in the hunter Kanderil, Hawk (a bandit-type fellow), and others.

Each of the characters that we meet are significant in some way, despite being so disparate and distant in the beginning, but their individual threads are more than interesting enough to keep me hooked - I wanted to know who they were, and how they'd end up influencing Sarene's journey.