Enders Game, by Orson Scott Card

Posted on May 2, 2012 by

This was a book that I read first a long time ago and decided to pick up again for the Kindle after it came back at the top of some Goodreads recommendations.  I have to say that whereas a lot of books from my childhood lose their intensity and color as I have grown to expect more from what I consume, this one holds up very well.  The character of Ender, while very young through much of the book, thinks as an adult and is therefore easily relatable.  Not that I could compare to the character of Ender, but having been though many advanced classes and having been tested to failure on more than one occasion, I sympathized with his feelings of emotional separation and ones analytical objectivity as a contributing factor to that isolation.  I would say that this is a “must read” for anyone the least bit interested in Science Fiction and unlike before, when I stopped after this book, I plan on reading my way through the entire collection of stories in Enders universe.  The twist ending is significant and plays so well into the emotional underpinnings developed for the second book that even though this book is so starkly different than Speaker for the Dead, that they fit almost perfectly together.  One suggestion I have would be to make sure that you get the novelized edition that was written later on so that you have a better segue into the second book and although I usually skip these, the forwards by Card are very interesting.

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Pictures from Hurricane Irene – Flooding in Manayunk

Posted on April 18, 2012 by

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People I Would Like to Meet/Know.

Posted on April 18, 2012 by

Elon Musk – I don’t know everything about this guy, but I have a feeling that I could happily work for him for the rest of my life.  I’d love to meet him someday.  His push on space exploration and sustainable energy reminds me of all the things that excited me as a child and reminds me of the motivation that I used to have to change the world.

Jeff Bezos – I’d like to spend a year working with Mr. Bezos.  I think of Amazon as one of the most disruptive companies in the internet age and I feel like I could learn a lot from an opportunity like that.  And, I would love to have the opportunity to see what goes on behind the scenes.

Trey Rattcliff – One of my favorite photographers and internet personalities.  I think it would be great to travel with him for awhile and learn how he takes the pictures he does.

Ray Mears – A social anthropologist and survivalist; he produced an amazing series of documentaries on both topics.  He also seems like a really cool guy.

Warren Buffet – If I was going to learn about making money from anybody, it would be this guy.  He also seems like a really interesting character, I’ll read his biography some day.

Steve Jobs – Would have been on this list because I want to learn more about how he manages people and views his company.  I don’t think I would try to emulate either, but it would be interesting and educational.

Brian David Johnson – I once heard Intel’s futurist give a TED talk and ever since then, I felt like I would love his job.  I’m sure it’s not easy, but having influence of how the future of computing is going to evolve 20, 30, 40 years from now is something most of us could only work on through science fiction.

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World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, by Max Brooks

Posted on April 18, 2012 by

Returning to the supernatural for a book that has also been on my “to read” list for some time, I picked up World War Z on my Kindle.  I’ll say that while I enjoyed Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, World War Z is on a whole other plane of writing.  It is well constructed and while jumping from story to story can be a bit jarring, it leaves you wanting more.  It’s about the people in much the same way that Walking Dead is; with the zombies being a catalyst or a mcguffin for forcing these individuals, and frankly the entire world, into a fight for the survival of the species.  Even though each individual story is relatively short, Brooks does a remarkably good job of making you relate to the characters.  This does require a bit of a “streamlining” of cultural differences between characters, however, I felt it was an acceptable tradeoff for a more cohesive collection.  My only real complaint is that at the end of the book, dialog comes in such short bursts that, while interesting, it hardly deserves its own section and this made the book feel like it was petering out to me, rather than wrapping up.  Still, this only affected a very small percentage of the book and you do get good closure out of it in the end.  I don’t think that it’s much of a spoiler, considering that it’s an “oral history”, to tell you that the living win. The journey to that point is worth reading about.

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1984, by George Orwell (audiobook)

Posted on April 18, 2012 by

How I made it through life to this point without reading this book, I’ll never know.  It sat on my bookshelf for at least a decade.  After reading it, I say, forget Shakespeare (it was never meant to be read anyway!), this should be the type of reading that is required in schools.  I tend to be pretty lenient in rating books, but 1984 redefined for me what a “good” book is.  It wasn’t that it just played off of my whole fascination with dystopian societies or the parallels, albeit extremely warped, with our current societal challenges, but that it did so while constantly forcing you to think about the world in the book and how it relates to what we see in our government and society at large.  The reading from the rebels book was fascinating and I understand why 1984 is so widely referenced in cautioning against government control.  Now when I hear people talk about the graphic nature of the hunger games, I just tell them to read this book if they want to see something truly horrific.  Not just because of the torture, but because of what happened to humanity as a whole.  Though I guess there’s always hope in the huddled masses at the base of their society.

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Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, by Jane Ausaten and Seth Grahame-Smith (audiobook)

Posted on April 18, 2012 by

After finishing the biography of Abraham Lincoln posted previously, I remembered another work of Seth’s that I had heard about on the New York Times Best Seller List.  Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is a hybrid work of Jane Austen’s famous Pride and Prejudice and Seth Grahame-Smith’s propensity for inserting the supernatural into familiar tales.   This grabbed my attention because, unlike what I was originally expecting, this was not simply written in the language used by Austen, or set in her world, but rather was a reworking of the original manuscript.  He left whole sections of the book unchanged, while in other sections, the Bennet daughters are battling Zombies and even at one point, Ninjas.

Apparently I was listening to the revised edition which had more zombies than the original, and I would have actually preferred more Austen and fewer zombies (and I don’t really understand why Ninja’s were necessary), but it was fun to see such a familiar story twisted and pulled into something entirely different without sacrificing the underlying social context.  I have read that this will also be made into a movie and I think that depending on who they choose to direct it could be another great comedic horror film along the lines of Shaun of the Dead.

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Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, by Seth Grahame-Smith (audiobook)

Posted on April 18, 2012 by

After seeing a list of this summer’s most tantalizing movies on Wired, I decided that Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter was on my “must see” list and as such I resolved to read the book first.   However, last month got very busy and with a lot of time in the car to look forward to, I borrowed the audiobook from the Library, via Overdrive.

I was not disappointed. Now, keep in mind that I was not expecting the greatest novel ever written; I wanted something fun.  Not only was the story of Abraham Lincoln’s journey toward becoming one of the greatest vampire hunters in history a wonderful and exciting twist on a president we all know, but the story was remarkably consistent with historical facts.  Within my limited knowledge of the civil war, dates and locations of battles were accurate and it was simply the pretext behind the war and the involvement of vampires in many battles that changed.

I don’t expect this book to win many awards, and I’d only recommend it to fans of this sort of fiction, but it definitely stoked my interest in the movie.   I can’t wait to see an ax wielding Lincoln taking on the vampires of the south this summer.  And it’s ripe for a sequel.

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