My most recent addition to the database is the birth year for each author (when available). I want to see the age at which authors are publishing their books. I just started doing this a few days ago, though, so I don’t have that information for most books. Look for it next month. September stats: 226 reviews (-29% from last month) Average rating: 3.61 stars (-1.4%) Most popular book: Ready Player One by Ernest Cline (4 reviews; 4.25 avg) Most popular author: Eric Van Lustbader […]
The only rival to the cold detachment of science is the cold detachment of Arthur C. Clarke
Years ago, while still in college, my girlfriend and I went on a year-long Star Trek binge by renting all of The Next Generation, Deep Space 9, and Voyager from Netflix. One night, after watching a few episodes, I went outside to put the disc (this was before Netflix was predominantly a streaming service) in the mailbox, and noticed the night sky emblazoned by a full moon. I stood beneath the pristine glow of that autumnal moon and pondered our place in the universe. I […]
We are all just dust jackets for books.
This year, I promised myself that I would devote more of my time to reading classics, and reflecting on the books I’ve chosen to read, I’m a little shocked at how many classics I’ve somehow skipped over the years. Fahrenheit 451 is a great example. When do people normally read this, and what was I doing instead? Maybe it’s weird that I never read this book, but, being on a science fiction kick, now seemed as good a time as any. Being perfectly honest, I didn’t […]
Point Counterpoint, or: How I learned to Stop Worrying and Enjoy the Show
Like the two disconnected eyes of some monstrous oracle, these books look out of their respective time periods, casting forward to try and envision a future that could arise from contemporaneous events. One sings of nationalistic pride in service to the state, while the other firmly declares that war is a pointless and exploitative endeavor whose only benefit is the fostering of an unwieldy bureaucracy feeding on the health of its people. These books are diametrically opposed to one another, but each also serves as […]
Remember when car phones were a thing? Yeah. That was almost 30 years ago.
Until about three years ago, you could have added this author to the list of things I’d never heard of. Now, I know that she has a net worth over $100 million, has 200 million books in print, and has been translated into 40 different languages. And, prior to my wife telling me about her a few years ago, I’d never heard of her. It’s amazing that someone so popular never even dances close to my radar. Next time you’re struggling to find something to […]
If you could see me now…
I’ve been impressed with the writing of H.G. Wells thus far. War of the Worlds was as good as I’d hoped: as exciting as the Spielberg movie, but without the insufferable children and tedious family dynamics. The Time Machine, while a tad dry, was still well-written and enjoyable. The Island of Dr. Moreau was fairly straight forward, but was masterfully executed, prescient, and surprisingly humane relative to other books of its era (think Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, or some of Rudyard Kipling’s work). The Invisible Man completes […]
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