Monthly Archives: March 2006

It Was Seven Minutes After Midnight

I have just uncovered a vast conspiracy. Remember all those books we had to read in high school English classes? Sometimes they didn’t make sense and when we asked why, we’d be told that the novel was stream-of-consciousness writing and an unreliable narrator, and James Joyce was BRILLIANT and obviously if we didn’t think so,…

Alas, Babylon

The other day, Stick lent me Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank. I’m not sure whether Stick remembered my penchant for post-apocalyptic novels, or if he just wanted me to stop kibbutzing his WarCraft game. Alas, Babylon is yet another post-apocalyptic novel, written in 1959. Frank writes like he’s a military technical writer. (Stick: That’s because…

Reading Lists for Grownups

A few years after I left college, I began to realize that there was a lot of literature I hadn’t read. (I still haven’t read a lot of good stuff that everyone reads, like anything by Mark Twain or Charles Dickens.) I decided I wanted to do something about it by giving myself reading assignments….

5 Fantastic Fiction Books

I read as much and as often as possible — ficiton, nonfiction, magazines, newspapers, cereal boxes… anything with words, really. And usually when I’m done reading something (usually some sort of book), I’ll write a quick review I can refer to later, to jog my memory. As I was skimming through the reviews of the…