Do you ever find yourself wanting a book to take longer to read, because you just want it to keep going and going? Would you neglect your children (if you had any) in order to finish the chapter you’re on, and then read “just a little” into the next chapter, hoping they won’t notice? Do you find yourself thinking of who else needs copies of this book, and how you can afford to buy each and every one of them their own personal copy?

Yep. It’s one of those.

Ready Player One is the nerdiest 80s nerd book I’ve ever read. In the first chapter, there’s about a dozen offhand references to things I loved that originated in the 80s, starting with The Breakfast Club and Heathers. At some point, one character says to another “We can dance if we want to. We can leave your friends behind.” There are puzzles to solve that involve being obsessively knowledgeable about things like Quest For the Holy Grail or WarGames.

The whole thing reads like one giant text adventure. There’s crazy Blade Runner technology. There’s a terrible future and a beautiful virtual reality. There’s a quite touching romance, and a tournament that everyone in the world wants to win. A ragtag group of mavericks fighting an evil cabal who wants to destroy the purity of their world.

It’s just a whole damn lot of fun. Stop reading this post and go find it at your local library. Or buy it. It’s definitely a book worth buying. I’m probably going to buy a copy for myself.

First of all, LOVE your work. Downton Abbey is SO GOOD. I love it. I love that you always give Maggie Smith awesome things to say, and that your costumers have decided that she should look a bit like a bird. I love how mean everyone is to each other, especially O’Brien and Thomas, and I love how you make sure that Mary always messes everything up. The show is so pretty, and the first season was wonderful. I love that you picked that lady who played the British Prime Minister in Doctor Who to play against Maggie Smith. The sets are so beautiful, and I’m glad that the first episode of this newest season has lived up to what you did in the first season.

But.

If you do anything to mess up the relationship between Mr. Bates and Anna, I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to forgive you.

That being said, how awesomely evil is Vera Bates?

And I know we’re in WWI now, but please, please, please don’t kill off anyone. Please. I don’t know if I’d be able to handle that. Anyways, the first episode of season 2? So good. Keep up the good work.

Yours truly,
Shannon

John Wyndham - The Kraken Wakes

What would humans do if the deepest parts of our oceans were invaded by an intelligent alien species, who made our lives more difficult through a policy of sinking ships that encroach on their territory? Well, if it was the 1950s, the western world would blame the Russians, and the Russians would blame the rest of the world. There would be lots of squabbling about lost shipping routes, lots of fear of an invader you can’t see or even reach. There would be boring parts about working for a new syndicate that was not the BBC, and if the main character’s last name was Watson, there would be a bad and often-repeated Sherlock Holmes joke that the reader grew to dislike almost as much as the narrator. It wasn’t until the sea creatures built tanks and starting attacking the coasts that this book got close to interesting, and it didn’t get to actually interesting until the sea creatures melted the polar ice caps. That was kind of badass.

It’s hard to make a book interesting when it is about the troubles of the shipping industry due to a threat that cannot be seen, or indeed, even fully comprehended. Wyndham almost succeeds. I was expecting more from the author of other books I’ve completely loved, and though this book was good, it wasn’t great. I would place it below The Chrysalids on my Wyndham Awesomeness List, which is something I just made up.

One last thing: the ending was totally weak.

Trouble With Lichen - John Wyndham

This book was written by the guy who wrote Day of the Triffids, and we should all know what I think of that book by now [it's awesome to the power eleventy billion]. I was expecting something along similar lines – an out of control plant species runs amok, humanity is threatened, and we are forced to face the moral questions that come along with fighting for survival in an increasingly cruel world.

That’s not what Trouble With Lichen is about at all, though I did keep imagining this silent creep of green mossy evil, slowly enveloping humans like a oozy blob, because it’s a funny mental picture.

One of my major complaints regarding classic-era science fiction is the dearth of female characters with responsibilities that go beyond making tea. I was a bit concerned when one of the first characters introduced was a woman named Diana Brackley, who was described as beautiful and well dressed. Bad sign. However, it was soon conveyed that Diana was weird. Extremely intelligent, Diana receives a scholarship to Cambridge and becomes an extremely gifted biochemist. While working at a research facility, she discovers a plant with the power to slow cell growth by a factor of three, effectively cutting the aging process by a factor of three. With no side effects!

Wyndham is great at exploring the moral and social fallout of great change. Most of this book is a dialog between Diana and the owner of the research facility, Francis Saxover, who also independently discovered the life-extending properties of the lichen. I really enjoyed reading Diana Brackley and loved that she was always about four steps ahead of everyone else in the book. The other characters were a little one dimensional, but that’s what happens when a story revolves around the actions of one particular person. Also I’m pretty sure she never made tea.

This book isn’t as good as Day of the Triffids, but nothing is. I liked it more than The Chrysalids, and think it’s a great example of what John Wyndham’s work. I’m going to pass this along to a few people I think would enjoy it.

This was a bookstravaganza book where only one person voted on the books. Cathey suggested I read this with a glass of Wyndham Estates Bin #999 and I think that’s a great idea. Wine + books = win!

The Year of the Flood - Margaret Atwood

I liked Oryx and Crake more.

I wish the apocalypse would have occurred closer to the beginning of the book. We already had a good idea of how the apocalypse came to be, I would have liked to see what happened after the end of humanity as we know it. It was excellent, but I wasn’t as interested in the nature cult as Atwood would have liked me to be.

Expedition To Earth - Arthur C Clarke

This is a collection of short stories originally published in the science fiction pulps magazines that were so popular in the 50s and 60s. Some of my favorite classic science fiction comes originally from these magazines, and most of it takes the form of short stories. I think the length requirements forced a sparseness that fueled the imagination of the readers that is often lacking in today’s epic tomes full of adjectives, run-on sentences and sparkly vampires.

There are eleven short stories in here, and I think my favorite one is called Breaking Strain. It is set on a supply ship destined for Venus. The two crewmen are thirty days away from their rendezvous point, when an asteroid punches a hole in their reserve oxygen supplies. They only have enough oxygen to keep the two of them alive for twenty days. The story turns into a tale of paranoia, as each crew member spends the remainder of the story trying to figure out when the other is going to kill them, ensuring there is enough oxygen to get one of them home. It’s like 2001, but instead of a murderous computer, it’s the crew members you have to worry about smothering you in your sleep.

Arthur C. Clarke is a great writer. Despite how unendingly boring the film is, 2001 is a great book, as is Childhood’s End and a number of his other novels. This book is about 80% great. A couple of these stories just didn’t make an impression on me. One of the things that did make an impression, though was that there was actual science in these science fiction stories. Random technologies were explained. The amount of gravity on moons of Mars was determined and made accurate to the story. Ships were all following parabolic trajectories and had limited fuel supplies. Everyone was terrified that the destruction of the earth would be soon, and it would be caused by atomic war. An interesting contrast to yesterday’s book, Oryx & Crake, in which the world ended due to genetic engineering.

The end of the world in Day of the Triffids was brought on by comets hitting chemical weapons stored on satellites, causing the mass blindness. Then the genetically engineered triffids got loose and started running amok. That’s right, Day of the Triffids is a double threat! Twice the apocalypse, in one amazing bundle. So you should read it instead of Expedition to Earth, because none of the stories feature the apocalypse.

Oryx & Crake - Margaret Atwood

I may have mentioned before how much I love The Day of the Triffids. In fact, I may have to write a second review of the book, so I can talk about how great it is all over again. The first review was a little too… detailed in the plot, and not detailed enough in the gushing about how great it is. Let me reiterate: Day of the Triffids is great. Fantastic. Creepy. Hopeful. I think it’s the best book I’ve read set during the end of civilization as we know it. I never thought that vicious plants would stick in my memory quite like it has. The image of a helpless populate, stumbling through the city streets hasn’t left my brain. The triffids themselves? Horrible caricatures of zombie plants with a description mostly left to the imagination? Great. Lovecraftian. The incompletely described monsters are always the best. It’s not a non-stop horror, and the character moments, and the learning to survive moments are touching and heartwarming. It’s. Just. So. Good. I want to stop writing this and go read it again but I don’t know who has my copy of this book.

…

I’m supposed to be talking about Oryx & Crake. Let me tell you why it reminds me of Day of the Triffids. It’s great. It’s not set during the actual collapse of society, it’s set a few months after, as our protagonist, Snowman, has to survive a new life with the genetically modified super animals. It tells us how society fell into this situation in long and vivid flashbacks. It’s got creepy creatures hiding in the shadows. And mad science!

The future described by Atwood is just horrifying enough to be true, and that’s one of the great things about Oryx & Crake. She does a great job of demonstrating a slippery slope that mad science can lead people down. I’m not actually concerned with genetically modified crops; I think their benefits at this point greatly outnumber the risks. Agriculture has always been a process of genetic modification: cull out the bad, keep the good, figure out how to make it better. However, the pigoon is a creepy almost-reality: a pig bred to grow replacement organs for humans. I’m not a big fan of this. Atwood does a good job with the incompletely described monsters.

I didn’t like Oryx. I couldn’t figure out why she was so monumental in Snowman’s life. It is sort of explained near the end, but to me she didn’t ring true. Crake on the other hand? Loner genius with crazy schemes and the brains to pull off his plans? I know him. She totally got the obsessive genius right. I didn’t really like Snowman that much, but I don’t think we were supposed to.

It has been suggested that at some point in her career, people stopped editing Margaret Atwood and let her ramble on incessantly like a blogger talking about how great Day of the Triffids is. This book does not suffer from this fault. Atwood’s writing is concise, and there isn’t much chaff here; just wheat. It’s didactic in parts — I get it: genetic modification is bad — but it doesn’t go overboard with sermonizing.

My least favourite end of the world as we know it book is The Road by Cormac McCarthy. It’s terrible. The thing that makes it terrible is nothing good ever happens in the entire book. Oryx & Crake is certainly lighter fare than that. It has a sense of humour and happy bits, even during dreadful situations.

So to summarize:
Oryx & Crake: great. Day of the Triffids: even better. The Road: bad.

Crake was a bit a dick, wasn’t he?

Anyways, this list is all about two guys near the end of the alphabet: John Wyndham, author of The Day Of The Triffids which absolutely everyone should read right now, and The Chrysalids, which everyone who was forced to read in high school should read again because it’s actually quite good. The other guy is Kurt Vonnegut, author of Slaughterhouse Five and Timequake and a bunch of other iconic stuff. I have a bunch of unread stuff by these guys on my bookshelves, and want to read something by one of them next. Here are your choices:

The Trouble With Lichen – John Wyndham

The Kraken Wakes – John Wyndham

Cat’s Cradle – Kurt Vonnegut

Player Piano – Kurt Vonnegut

The Sirens Of Titan – Kurt Vonnegut

As always, vote in the comments. Vote as often as you want. I will give bonus points to the most enthusiastic comment. Bonus points also to anyone who can tell me why they loved The Day of the Triffids. If you didn’t love it, I’ll read about that too.

Timequake - Kurt Vonnegut

I finished this book a week ago and don’t remember anything that was in it except it involved a timequake.

Which isn’t to say it was bad. I read it, and enjoyed reading it. It just didn’t stick.

And Then There Were None - Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie is awesome. This book was written 45 years before I was born, and it felt fresh and real. It was one of those page-turners where you neglect your friends and relatives in order to stay in the imaginary world conjured up by the magician with the pen and paper. And so it was, on the August long weekend, that I found myself neglecting my poor husband in order to find out who the killer was. And it was so satisfying. I don’t regret it. He’s a grown up. He can feed himself and usually manages to dress himself.

Though I did take a three hour air conditioning and darkness break (where they were showing Cowboys & Aliens), I wasn’t thinking about the entertainment the air conditioning company was providing. I was trying to figure out who the hell was responsible. I thought it was the religious zealot, and I was so wrong. So very wrong.

Oh, the dialog! So good. The foreshadowy poem! Lovely and creepy! I kept flipping back to it, to try and figure out how the next person was going to be offed! It was wonderful! And it was so satisfying that these people, who didn’t technically kill anyone, were getting what they really deserved!

There’s a reason this is the best selling mystery book ever. I’m so glad I read it, and I’m also very glad I didn’t get a copy of this book with the original title. This one is better.

I’m going to go watch that episode of Doctor Who with Agatha Christie and the killer space bee (seriously, folks… Killer. Space. Bee).