Throughout the entirety of this book’s length, I was thinking of how best to frame it to you guys. Because I think it’s really good, and I want more people to read it. I have a soft spot for end-of-the-world/invasion/post-apocalyptic fiction, and Fear the Sky offered me something wholly different and unexpected: a rich story that isn’t just a vehicle for the decimation of society. Imagine Independence Day, only the aliens are smart enough to send (ten years in advance of their invasion fleet) a […]
“Who needs flowers? Roses fade, but flaky soap available from the PX lasted months. “
I loved the topic of this book, I wasn’t so much in love with its execution. I listened to this one via audiobook, as has become a new obsession of mine, and I’ve noticed that listening to books as opposed to reading them can really highlight poor editorial choices. There were many cases in the course of reading this book where we were revisiting information for the third or fourth time and it bothered me. Not enough to stop listening to this book, but enough […]
A River Runs Through It…..My Latest Book Club WWII HistFic
This is my book club’s choice for this month. We’ve done plenty of WWII historical fiction, but none quite this epic…it spans 1915-1952 in the town of Burgdorf, Germany. Trudi Montag is a Zwerg (dwarf) woman living in Burgdorf with her father Leo who owns the pay-library. At the start of the novel, Trudi is 4 years old and newly realizing that her stature sets her apart and makes her undesirably “outsider”. Trudi also discovers that she is a natural storyteller, and her position in the […]
“The best way to know someone is to have a conversation with them.”
Neal Stephenson’s writing process must be insane. This is my third book of his and I am continually astounded by the level of obsessive technical detail present for whichever field happens to be the critical science du jour in each book. Snow Crash took great liberties with neurolinguistics, but it was still clear that Stephenson had done his homework and there was a foundation of knowledge there. Jumping straight to his most recent novel, I found Seveneves stunning, not just because of, again, the amount […]
Vonnegut’s little war book.
There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces. One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters.” So basically everyone I’ve ever talked to has read this book before me, and I’m kinda pissed off about that. Why didn’t y’all tell me I needed to read this? I know most people had to […]
Keep calm and — bloody hell, it’s The Happening!
I absolutely adored this book. But not in the way I typically do. Wyndam does not paint a rich tapestry of a post-apocalyptic England, nor is he particularly adept at creating complex and layered characters. But he masterfully accomplishes what so many current writers flail at mindlessly: a believable world that feasibly explores the varying degrees in which people abandon their ideas of what society can be in the aftermath of cataclysm. But this was written in 1951. The veterans of WWII had yet to […]
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