A staple of old school science fiction is the lone man stranded on a desolate world who had to survive on his wits alone. The Martian by Andy Weir follows boldly in that tradition with a fun tale filled with adventure and ingenuity. Our hero finds himself stranded on Mars when his fellow astronauts leave him behind. They can be forgiven for this since they thought he was dead. And thus we start a long journey into the trials and tribulations of being a human on Mars. This is a fun book filled with bad jokes and hard science, or…
Category: book review
The Wild Truth–Wildly Boring
A lot of people came away from reading Into the Wild without grasping why Chris did what he did. Lacking explicit facts, they concluded that he was merely self-absorbed, unforgivably cruel to his parents, mentally ill, suicidal, and/or witless. Jon Krakauer Foreword to The Wild Truth Into the Wild is an amazing book about an idiot who starved to death in Alaska. Yeah, I’m one of those people that read Into The Wild and had no sympathy for Chris and his mindless vision quest/walkabout. It was a gripping book, but I had the feeling that Chris was a kid with…
The Art of Asking
It’s been a while since I read a book that I wanted to take out into the streets and push into people’s hands and say:’Here, you HAVE to read this!’ I really loved The Art of Asking, but part of that may be my own mild obsessions with twitter, blogging, and the idea that you can get rich online if you find your people. That whole street performing thing is also failry close to what I did when I was taking portraits on the floor of a busy Wal-Mart store at Christmas time. I’d never heard of Amanda Palmer or…
Proof of Heaven
I had a lot of problems with Proof of Heaven, starting with the fact that all of his ‘proof’ is of the ‘because I say so‘ variety. Like any other zealot, Eben Alexander believes that his word is all anyone needs to take everything he says as absolute truth. Instead of taking a scientific look at his near death experience, he jumps right into I Was With The Great God Om mode. He says that he never took NDEs seriously, but now that he has had one, he’s a pure evangelist for the fact that his hallucinations were absolutely real.…
Wild
Wild tells the story of a lone woman’s trek along the Pacficic Crest Trail, commonly referred to as the PCT. This is a hiking trail that goes from Mexico to Canada along a range of mountains and deserts and forests. A world that measured two feet wide and 2,663 miles long, as Cheryl Strayed so eloquently puts it. I’m not a hiker, but I have enjoyed the books about the PCT that have found their way into my hands. Wild is more than a book about hiking, it’s also about Cheryl’s life, the death of her mother, and the hazards…
Not That Kind of Girl
Lena Dunham is the soon not to be twenty-something uber star of her generation. Her book, much like her TV Show, Girls, is filled to the brim with hip and trendy lingo that helps to add a bit of spice to stories of sex, drugs, and illnesses. She is a fan of footnotes, but they are never where I need them. Her footnotes explain how she was feeling and not what the hell JAP means (best google guess is Jewish American Princess) or what Adderall is supposed to be used for when college kids aren’t getting stoned on the stuff.…
Hotel Honolulu by Paul Theroux
The story of a man who used to be a writer, but takes a job as a hotel manager when he falls in love with Hawaii. It’s a collection of 80 short stories, with a loose fitting narrative that weaves a few of the elements from one story into the next. Some of the stories are fun, others silly, and several are just tragic. Like any good novel, you wind up becoming attached to these people, even though many of them only have walk on parts of a scene or two, they leave a lasting impression. There were a number…
Lock In by John Scalzi
John Scalzi has written a few very fun books, including Red Shirts and Old Man’s War. Lock In covers a lot of familiar Sci-fi territory, but it’s still fun. One of the major gimmicks in Old Man’s War was that old people could trade their used up old bodies in for shiny new bodies that were very tough. This is kind of a foundantion story about how this tech might have come into being. We have a lot of people who got sick with a disease that left them paralyzed, but conscious-thus locked in. So naturally our hero is a…
Cryptonomicon
A few Spoilers All writers love doing research. There’s nothing quite as fun as, say, deciding to write a book about Nazi submarines and then going about the business of becoming the world’s leading authority on Nazi Submaries. The reason to do this is that when you mention, in passing, in one or two paragraphs, that funny looking little shinny bit of metal sticking out of the wall just so is called (Insert Proper and Correct Nomeclacure Here) and not a thingamajig or whatsit. The danger, of course, is that the writer will not just drop a few random Nazi…
Sandman Slim
We start off with our hero escaping from hell. He wakes up on a pile of burning trash in LA. He talks about the hard times he had Downtown, as he likes to call Hell. Turns out his is a Magician, part of a group of supernatrals living among the humans. There are a lot of Angels and Demons and other things that are not quit the normal creepy crawlers of horror stories, but are pretty close. One thing leads to another and he pretty quickly meets an old friend and cuts off his head. He’s good at this kind…