Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
Cloud Atlas is one of those books that has been sitting on my shelf for years. A book I find at a used book store and I am excited to buy and bring home and not read. Every time I go to look at my shelf to pick out a new read, it sits there, judging me. “You bought me five years ago, and all I’ve done is sit here between Ulysses and Great Expectations. Are you ever going to, you know, read me?” ‘Sure, […]
The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking) by Katie Mack
This is your universe, and it’s ending one second at a time. Some day, likely after our Sun has gone supernova and life as we know it has ceased to be, the universe will come to an end. I had heard of the hypothesis of the heat death of the universe before, and like all semi-informed people I thought I would become an expert by reading the first section of the Wikipedia entry on it. Turns out, the universe might be more complex than three […]
Shift by Hugh Howey
I read Wool, the first book in the Silo trilogy, before the pandemic about 5 billion years ago in 2019. I thoroughly enjoyed it, though I did not know it was a series when I started it. After spending so much time reading series like Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, etc. I really was trying to read more standalone single stories, and after hearing some short reviews of the second novel not being as good as the first, I did not […]
Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel
“…because if we start talking about it then we’re going to be here all day talking about it, making diagrams with straws.” Thankfully, Emily St. John Mandel also makes the choice to not get bogged down in discussing time travel. Hell, the last Avengers movie probably does more dissection of the implications and intricacies of time travel than Sea of Tranquility, and I mean that as a compliment. I think Sea of Tranquility is a great example of a “soft science fiction” story in the […]
Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros
I am a sucker for a good fantasy book in a school setting. I am sure a lot of that is due to Harry Potter, but I think an academic setting provides a good skeleton for a story. They almost always start shortly before a school year, and run all the way until a final exam. I am sure Fourth Wing will invite many comparisons to Harry Potter and the Hunger Games, but it reminded me quite a bit more of The Poppy War by […]
The Stand by Stephen King
Almost no event in fiction grabs me more than the collapse of society. Something about how people live when the structures of our society collapse always pulls me in. Seeing the things characters view as important or unimportant after all of the comforts of every day life start to fade away. I do not want civilization to crumble, by any means, but it always makes me wonder about what type of person I would be in that situation. Anyway, that is why I bought a […]
