Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk
It was the Fall of 1999 and I was a junior in high school. I’d stayed after school for some reason, was waiting to get picked up by my mom, and was sitting outside on the concourse in front of the school cafeteria – probably reading a book – when a student walked up to me. I didn’t know the guy, but he started talking about a movie that just came out called “Fight Club”. He said it was amazing, and proceeded to describe the […]
Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler
The country is on the brink of anarchy. Technically, there are still local, state, and federal governments but they aren’t able to handle many if any of the nation’s problems. Unemployment, homelessness, illness, drug abuse are all rampant. Because of these woes, individuals frequently turn to drugs and/or violence to try and solve their problems. But for 18 year old Lauren, her family, and her cul-de-sac, they turn to each other. They have walled off their road and turn to each other for protection and […]
V for Vendetta by Alan Moore and David Lloyd
“I’m thinking of taking my family and getting out of this country soon, sometime over the next couple of years. It’s cold and it’s mean-spirited, and I don’t like it here anymore.” Surprisingly, the above quotation does not come from V for Vendetta, but from Alan Moore’s 1988 introduction to the graphic novel for the original DC Comics run. At the time, Margaret Thatcher was entering her third term as Prime Minster of the U.K., and Moore was despairing about, among other things, the treatment of […]
The Kingdom of God Is Within You: Christianity Not as Mystic Religion But as a New Theory of Life by Leo Tolstoy
I took a long, weird road to this book. I grew up in Texas with public-service-minded parents of faith. I was a political science major turned public-interest lawyer turned political staffer. Public service, making the world a better place, all of it. In my mind, Jesus’ line about rendering to Caesar what’s Caesar’s meant that, in my democratic context, I had to work the system for good. I navigated the classic political argument of the “problem of dirty hands” with all of that in mind […]
“Without knowing it, he had constructed a gigantic vertical zoo, its hundreds of cages stacked above each other. All the events of the past few months made sense if one realised that these brilliant and exotic creatures had learned to open the doors.” Not far from where I live, across the border into Belgium, you’ll find yourself in the Ardennes, a collection of rugged forests, ragged mountains and quaint, picturesque towns where it’s perfectly okay to have a beer at 11 AM and where French […]
During the past few days, a couple of interesting stories crossed my screen and they are so perfectly related to my current review that they simply must be referenced. First came the #LikeAGirl campaign from Always, encouraging us to turn that pejorative expression into a compliment. Then came this story from NPR about women writers in science fiction: Women are Destroying Science Fiction and That’s OK — They Created It. As I have just finished Ursula K. Le Guin’s classic The Dispossessed, I must say […]
