1
Aug
2010
The Army of the Republic by Stuart Archer Cohen
I picked up this book a few months ago, read a couple chapters, got bored, put it back down. A few days ago I picked it back up and wondered how I could have possibly been bored the first time around.
7
Feb
2010
Spike: After the Fall by Brian Lynch and Franco Urru
Poor, poor Spike. He gets a made a vampire, gets dumped by his sire after more than 100 years of love and mayhem, falls in love with a slayer, gets a chip put in his brain by the government, gets a soul, gets the chip out, dies in the Hellmouth, gets brought back to Wolfram & Hart but is incorporeal, gets all corporealized, saves the world (again), and lands, with the rest of L.A., in Hell.
24
Sep
2009
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
Listen, O my brothers, as I relate to you a skorry tale of Alex and his droogs, who are real horrorshow malchicks, what with their bitvas, using everything from nozhes to fisties to booties, and tolchocking litsos, viddying the krovvy running red. That is, when they aren’t busy drinking the old moloko at some mesto or giving a devotchka the ultra-violent in-out in-out while they boohoohoo. The whole while Alex slooshies his droog Ludwig van in his gulliver, which might make him unusual because most nadsats slooshie real gloopy pop warbles that about makes him bezoomny.
23
Sep
2009
The Trial by Franz Kafka
Imagine this: you are a well-educated, upper-middle class. rising professional, who has never broken the law, and you have been put on trial for…something. You don’t know what it is, because nobody will tell you. Your education is no help because while the courts in which you are tried are legal, they operate outside of the realm of normal jurisprudence.
27
May
2009
1984 by George Orwell
You know how “Pick Your Five” is popular on Facebook right now, and one of them is called something like “5 Things I hate that everyone else seems to like”? Mine include things like running/jogging, dogs, yellow cars, etc. The book 1984 might not be in my top five of such a category, but it’s definitely up there.
14
May
2009
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
The title, “brave new world” comes from a quote in Shakespeare, from Miranda in The Tempest, “Oh…What brave new world that has such people in’t”. But keep in mind that “brave” in Shakespeare’s usage, and indeed, in the title, meant something more like “handsome” rather than courageous. And indeed, the citizens of Huxley’s futuristic dystopia are anything but courageous. They aren’t conditioned to be.
23
Apr
2009
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
This is a fantastic dystopian novel. Set some time in the not-so-distant future, America has taken fundamentalism to the extreme. Women are for cleaning, cooking, and making babies. Literally. This is not one of those societies where men believe that women should be barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen. It is a society that utilizes women either as status wives, handmaids (whose sole purpose is to bare children), or Marthas (cooks and cleaners, usually nonwhite). If a man can’t afford to clothe and feed all of them, he might get an econowife, who has to be all three.
21
Apr
2009
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
I would like to write a post-apocalypse book one day. I can never think of a good idea that would wipe out most of the population and destroy all buildings, though. McCarthy smartly skips this burden, by simply not telling us what happened. He starts his novel a couple of years after whatever sort of disaster happened. In fact, he doesn’t even give his characters names–they are perpetually referred to as “the man” and “the boy”. And yet, it is a book based mostly on emotion.
13
Apr
2009
World War Z by Max Brooks
There are several things I like about this book. First of all, Zombies. As a Millenial, I am immediately drawn, like a zombie to pulsating brains, to all things zombie, ninja, and pirate. Other generations may like these things, too, I know, but there seems to be some great obsession among my generation. God knows why. It’s just thing that we do. I mean, debating the best escape routes from whatever building you are in can take hours if you are surrounded by modern teenagers and twenty-somethings, and may actually only be settled by consulting Max Brooks’ Zombie Survival Guide. Gen-X may have had Vampires and Baby-Boomers may have had aliens and the bomb, but zombie obsession has taken a hold of young people today. Again, I am unsure as to the reason, except for the obvious (which if you are not a Gen Y member, may not be obvious to you, so please ignore that self-absorbed remark).
13
Apr
2009
Rant by Chuck Palahniuk
Set in a dystopian society, which may or may not be our future, present, or even our past, Rant Casey is picked apart, praised, feared, loved, by those he has left behind after his death, which may have actually been a disappearance due to time travel.
