The Gone-Away World

hey you should read The Gone-Away World

Is good?

Is good.

K

The above conversation, from last February was the first time I had heard of The Gone-Away World.  I put it on my personal backlog until May when I saw it hanging out in the window of a used bookstore I had never been in.  When I finally got around to reading it, I wished I had gotten to it sooner.

I would say that the book has three distinct phases.  The first phase is the first chapter which alone is about 5% of the book.  It throws you into the deep end of a post apocalyptic world and hurls a large number of characters and concepts at the reader.  It can be overwhelming but it is worth soldiering on because the second phase, almost two thirds of the book takes place before the first chapter.  The author takes that time to explain how the world of today managed to change to the world shown in the first chapter and gradually introduce the readers to the same characters and concepts that they were barraged with before.  The final phase, comprising the rest of the book takes the readers from the first chapter to the thrilling (and a little silly) conclusion.  Along the way there are some serious twists that would be disastrous to spoil so I will say no more.

The characters are all excellent and have enough detail to show they are unique characters with their own lives and aspirations but not so much that you lose track of the importance of the narrator.  Many authors will throw world building details into their novels, but this book does world building through its characters.


The book manages to take itself just seriously enough that it can get away with absurd things without being absurd itself.  It manages to wrap its silliness in a cloak of plausibility in a way I have seen few other things do.  It reminds me of Vonnegut's books in a way.

Overall, I would give this book a 97%.

Godel, Escher, Bach

I read Godel, Escher, Bach  at the recommendation of one of my friends.  It is quite the massive tome and so it was with some trepidation that I picked it out of my stack of books-to-read.  I am not sure I have read a longer non-fiction book in my life.  Certainly not one that wasn't about history.  But then, that isn't fair to GEB (as it is commonly abbreviated), it is about history, and math, and biology, and computer science, and linguistics, and neurology.  And those are just the subjects that it talks about for a chapter or more; it touches on many more topics briefly throughout its sojourns through the world's knowledge in its quest to reach its thesis.

What is its thesis, you might ask?  Well, there are a lot of sub-theses.  Each chapter could be a research paper in and of itself.  There is a lot of talk about how self-referential systems (like humans) have many interesting qualities and potential problems. However, what the book is building towards is that true AI, an actual intelligence that is as intelligent as a human, will have to work very similarly to how the human brain works.

Every chapter starts with a dialogue between the tortoise and Achilles; the pair made famous by Zeno's paradox.  The discussions are generally the introductions to the ideas in the following chapter and it makes it so there are easier to read breaks between the relatively dense discussions of whatever the chapters discuss.

The title referring to three seeming unrelated people is just the beginning of the vast majority of topics this book covers.  All three of them are related to various chapter theses and their fundamental differences and similarities also underlie the whole work.  The amount of work that goes into even one chapter of this book is simply impressive.  I'm sure the more times you read this book, the more you could get out of it.

Overall, I would give this book a 91%.

Cibola Burn

Bloggers note: I am deferring my other graphic novel post for a little while but I promise I will come back to it.  I liked Lucifer too much to not write about it.

Warning: While this post contains only minor spoilers for Cibola Burn, it does have more major spoilers for Leviathan Wakes, Caliban's War, and Abaddon's Gate,  the previous books in the series, simply by virtue of discussing the plot at all.

Right before I started reading The Expanse series they announced that instead of being a three book series, they are making it six books.  In between book three (Abbadon's Gate which I reviewed earlier) and this one, they announced that they are making a tv show on Syfy.  The show has no release date yet beyond "2015" but news is gradually coming out.  Regardless of how well the show does, shortly before this book came out the writers announced that their contract had been extended to 9 books.  I think it is safe to say that the series is taking off.

Cibola Burn starts off a little while after the third book leaves off and has some general sci-fi settling an alien planet cliches along with some space western cliches but it blends them well and still has some originality and pushes the overarching plot of the series in an exciting direction.  As with the other books in the series, the authors manage to weave another genre in with sci-fi.  This time it is clear from early on that the genre is Western and there a lot of plot points that could come directly from a spaghetti western but infused with scifi trappings.

I was privileged enough to get the chance to hear them talk when they were on their book tour (Side note: in case you were confused by my use of plural pronoun, James S. A. Corey is a pseudonym for Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck) and they said that the book was inspired by a game a role playing game that they were playing that was a fusion of Traveller and d20 modern (I was hoped it was inspired by Diaspora, my space RPG of choice) and overall they were very charming and interesting (but then again, I have yet to meet an author whose books I like that I don't like as a person as well).

I think this might be better than the series the other books in the series.  It manages to have political intrigue, space combat, and classic western frontier style plottings all blended together.  It also repeatedly shows the authors careful tracking of how the events in their story affect their setting as a whole and the political balances within it.

Overall, I would give this book a 96%.

The Sandman

Blogger's note: While I normally write only on the full length prose books that I read, I am taking an exception to write about comic series in this post and the next one then we will back to regularly scheduled programming (until I read another thing that isn't a full length book that I really like).

The Sandman is considered by a lot of people to be the best comic series of all time.  I am not sure that I am willing to endorse it that heavily (Y: The Last Man and Lucifer beat it in my mind) but it is certainly good and contains some awesome concepts.  The series ran for 75 issues from 1989 to 1996 and spawned numerous spin offs including a miniseries, Overture, which is still running today.  I got a collection of short stories set in the universe which piqued my interest and, after ruminating on it for a while, I splurged and bought a nice two volume hard cover collection.

This picture can't really do them justice but each of these books is more than 1000 full color pages of comics.  I have never had a comic book this large before and when you don't have to stop for issue breaks it really helps get the feeling that is one contiguous story... or that would be the case if it was one contiguous story. 

The series is about the seven "Endless," Dream (the titular main character), Destiny, Desire, Despair, Destruction, Delirium, and Death (the last two were my favorites), who are slightly less than gods and represent the concepts that they are named after.  The series is a collection of short stories that range from one to twelve issues long involving Dream and other Endless but a lot of the time some normal person will be a main character and it is about how the Endless interact with them.

Most of the stories tie together into later stories in the series and as such they build the world in a subtle and gradual way, which is nice.  I just feel like they didn't do enough with the concept and the characters (which I guess just shows why spinoffs are still going).  Several of the Endless, especially Death and Delirium, really resonated with me and I wish I could have seen more of those characters and with a quick google search you can see that Death resonated with a lot more people than just me.

Death is a vaguely gothic looking girl who is almost always smiling.  She doesn't smile sadistically but in a friendly, companionable way.  I can't describe why I like her better than one of the characters from the series does: "It would be really neat if Death was somebody and not just nothing, or pain, or blackness.  And it would be really good if Death could be be somebody like [her].  Somebody funny, and friendly, and nice,  And maybe just a tiny bit crazy."  So often Death is intimidating, it is refreshing and nice to have a kind Death for once.

Overall, I would give this series a 94%.

P.S.: If this post makes you curious about the series, I recommend you pick up Sandman: Endless Nights.  That is what I started on and if you like that you will like the rest of the series.

P.P.S.: While some people disagree with me, I am of the impression that the last issue of the series is out of place and takes away some of the impact from the end.  If you are reading the series I recommend that you read issue #75 in between issues 56 and 57 and end the series on 74.  While there are some aspects of 75 that make it a suitable ending, there are a lot more that are not.

Idoru

My only other experience with William Gibson was his most famous book, Neuromancer.  I enjoyed it but I read it directly after Snow Crash which was my introduction to Neal Stephenson, one of my favorite authors.  Following that, even a great book would feel a little lackluster.

I had heard interesting things about Idoru so I picked it up when I saw it for sale at my local bookstore.  Considering my last experience with William Gibson, this book is surprisingly similar to Snow Crash (though still very different).  It was written in 1996 so while it was speculative, it was close enough to the present to get a lot of things right.

The book is set in the near future and the plot is about a celebrity who decides to marry a digital being (the idoru of the title).  The various people this affects, from his fan club to his entourage get caught up in a lot of intrigue and it is an interesting commentary on celebrity culture and some discussion of the future of the internet and fame and romance.

I think the part of the book that I will remember the best is the concept of nodal points.  It is the concept that giant mass of data people generate move in certain patterns around certain points that make it possible to predict large things that are not part of the data.  Now this less exciting with machine learning like when Target advertising determined a teen was pregnant before she told her parents but the concept of a human being able to know what to look for and be able to intuit things like that is interesting. The author says that he based it off of his own ability so it is, seemingly, possible.

At the time I was reading it, I didn’t realize it was part of a trilogy (and the middle book no less!) I really didn’t feel that it was missing in backstory or conclusions, which are both valid concerns for the middle book of a trilogy so I am happy to say that this one can stand alone, though I would have preferred to read it in its proper place. 

Overall, I would give this book an 87%.

You Can Date When You're Forty

My first exposure to Dave Barry was my father reading me his columns out of the paper.  The style of humor in the columns would have us both in hysterics and I have been a fan ever since.  My dad had a couple Dave Barry books, which I devoured as I aged and I loved his year in review columns.  His just shy of absurdist sense of humor tickles my funny bone in just the right places.  When I saw he was doing a book reading and signing where I live, I jumped at the chance to see him.

At the reading he did some stand up comedy (some particularly biting bits about Miami) as well as reading from his book.  Afterwards at the signing, he showed himself to be a very nice man, not at all brusque like some authors are at signings, he seemed like he genuinely wanted to be there and talk with his fans, young and old.

The book contains a collection of stories that had me laughing all the way through.  While the title and subtitle imply that it is about parenting, there are a lot of other topics contained within the book  Some examples include Israel, Bieber, and air travel.  The format is just a collection of longer than normal Dave Barry articles which have a vague thematic direction towards parenting.  The book is not that long but it is chocked full of laughs.  This would be a great choice to pull down on your eReader of choice to read on vacation.

The part that I will probably remember the most about this book is that I was reading the chapter about Israel at the same time that one of my friends was visiting Israel and Dave Barry and my friend did a lot of the same things (his version of events was funnier than hers).

Overall, I would give this book a 90%.

Sweet Thursday

I received a John Steinbeck collection as a Christmas gift a few years ago and I enjoyed it, having never read anything by him before.  It had most of the popular Steinbeck stories such as "Of Mice and Men" and "Tortilla Flat" (though it is missing "The Grapes of Wrath").  It ends with the longer story "Cannery Row" which is about the interweaving lives of large cast of characters in Monterey, California. When I was writing about the collection on here, I was doing a little research on the stories and saw that "Cannery Row" had a sequel called Sweet Thursday.  I picked up a while ago and finally got around to reading it.

Sweet Thursday picks up a while after "Cannery Row" and has only a few characters that overlap however, the primary protagonists of the previous story, Doc and Mack return and again the main characters.  The book focuses mostly on the personal journey of Doc and how he is trying to rouse himself out of a depression and his friends actions to help him.  As you may be able to guess if you have read "Cannery Row" this leads to a lot of entertaining antics.

This is a sequel but it is set far enough off that it could be its own story.  If you read it that way the characters might lose a little depth but would still be fine.  I think that "Cannery Row" is a better overall story though so I would recommend starting with that regardless.  Like its predecessor, Sweet Thursday also manages to end with some semblance of a happy ending which is pretty rare in Steinbeck.

I think the part of this book that I will remember the most is Fauna, the woman who runs the local brothel.  She genuinely cares for her charges and really wants them to be happy.  She really sort of makes the book complete, if a tad manipulative.

Overall, I would give this book an 87%.

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

The first (and only before this) Murakami book I read was 1Q84.  It was not a great book.  It had a lot of unresolved questions at the end and yet also spent a lot of time on things that didn't really matter.  It was a good 400 page book hiding in the midst of 1100 pages.  Then someone recommended Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World to me.  The title sounded interesting and I thought that I could give Murakami one more go.  Boy, am I glad I did.

The book has the unique trait of being almost two books in one.  The odd chapters are in "Hard-Boiled Wonderland" and the even numbered chapters are at "The End of the World."  It is not even clear at first how the two stories are related or even if they are at all.  But the two stories are different even in tone so it really feels like you could be reading two different books.

I read that Hard-Boiled Wonderland was slightly inspired by Raymond Chandler and I can definitely see that.  I am a fan of that style of fiction (though I have read more Dashiell Hammett and The Thin Man is great) but this takes it and mixes it with a sort of semi-futuristic experience. Also, unlike those stories, it isn't as much about detective work as it just is sort of the tone of the story is similar to those types of books.

The End of The World, on the other hand, is a subdued, slightly fantastical story.  It has several interesting concepts but there is a lot of symbolism that ties into the other story which really is probably the most interesting part.

This book has a lot of the problems that 1Q84 had: seemingly random pointless details and plot threads that don't go anywhere but this book handles it a lot better.  Possibly because it didn't have 1000 pages to get my hopes up that some of them were going places.  In this book they were slight defects, in 1Q84 they were borderline deal breakers.

I think that the part of this book that will stay with me the longest after I have read it is its discussion of consciousness and the unconscious mind and how they interact.  At the end of the book there are some great points to think on (that I would not dare to spoil here).  Suffice to say, I quite liked this book.

Overall, I would give this book a 96%.

The Man in the High Castle

After reading and enjoying Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, I knew I wanted to read more Phillip K. Dick.  I read that The Man in the High Castle was an interesting alternate history story and, without seeing anything else about it, decided to pick it up.  It turns out to be an alternate history where the Axis wins World War II and divides up America between Germany and Japan.

The book follows several characters around as they try to live in this world.  They are related but the storylines do not really intersect to come to a climax, it is more like we just see several people's stories that flesh out the world.  The story focuses generally on people trying to continue to live with their American ideals even a world where those are belittled and unvalued.

The racism in this book is so intense that it actually bothered me to read.  The way that the culture treated basically every non-Aryan, non-Japanese person caused me a moderate amount of stress while reading.  The fact that people could be that horrible to one another, and these people weren't even the villians of the story, just casual people off the street, is amazing and not in a positive way.  History was rough, but this clearly shows it could have been rougher.

Almost every character in this book consults the I Ching which I am not exceedingly familiar with but my understanding is that it is a fortune telling device like tarot cards.  The way that the people tend to read whatever they want into it seems like a minor critique of fortune tellers while at the same time showing how much America has changed from the one of the real world 60's.

I think the part that will stick with me the longest is a quote towards the end of this book: “We do not have the ideal world, such as we would like, where morality is easy because cognition is easy. Where one can do right with no effort because he can detect the obvious.”  The quote has an interesting sentiment and I like the concept that doing good is hard but it is worth doing anyway.

Overall, I would give this book a 92%.

Katabasis & Siege Perilous

At the end of the first three Mongoliad books, the main plot has been resolved but there are a few and fertile ground for imagining what happens next to the  surviving characters (spoilers: some people die).  The following two books, for the most part, answer those questions though not always satisfactorily.  Also, I was partially through the fourth book when I realized that they had lost Neal Stephenson and Greg Bear as authors and the fifth book is only by one author (E. D. deBirmingham) and not even a collaboration like the other four.

 
Katabasis, the fourth book, wraps up the story of the shield brethren (yes, there are shield brethren in the 5th book but they are not the focus).  There are definitely some great battles and fight scenes, which was what originally drew me into the first Mongoliad book, this one seems somewhat lacking in the epic scope of the first three.  Also, it was primary about infighting between various factions of the western world and it made all the efforts of the previous books to force the mongols back seem a little pointless (however, I am sure that they did meticulous historical research and this resembles what happened in the period).

At the end of the big battle one of the characters gives a speech that I won't post here because it contains minor spoilers but it is a good speech and concludes with the line "Let us live my friends, and by living keep alive our hope for a world made better by our presence in it."  I particularly liked that line.

Siege Perilous provides (more of) a conclusion to the Rome plot lines in books 2 and 3 which were basically ignored in Katabasis.  The story is based on the siege of the Cathars in France but, as always, our protagonists make an appearance.  Once again, there was some good combat but most of it was seen from the viewpoints of people not directly involved.  However, from a historical perspective this one felt more interesting than the other, perhaps because I knew a little about the siege before I read the book.  Probably the most annoying part of the story was the end where they resolve one plot point by saying, almost literally, "That is a story for someone else."

Both of these trend towards a more fantastical story than the historical fiction that originally interested me.  I have it difficult to believe that there were various magic elements permeating history it breaks my suspension of disbelief every time an, generally subtle, implication of magic occurs.  They are definitely a continuation in the spirit of the first three books but I don't think that they really needed a direct continuation.

Overall, I would give these two together an 82%.

The Princess Bride

I am, as you may have guessed from the books I read, a big fan of The Princess Bride the movie.  The blend of romance and action and witticisms are highly entertaining.  I could fill an entire blog post with things I love from that movie.  I think my first introduction to it was at a Star Wars convention where Nick Gillard, the choreographer for all the lightsaber fights in the prequels (whatever you say about the prequels, it is hard to complain about the lightsaber fights), said that the fight between the man in black and Inigo Montoya was his favorite fight in cinema.  I filed this factoid away and, when I finally saw the movie, did enjoy the fight and the rest of the film.

However, this is not review of the movie, this is a review of the book, which came before the movie.  Unlike many movie adaptations of novels, the author actually worked on the screenplay of the movie as well.  This gives the novel and the movie the same tone even if the content is not identical.  The novel is perhaps even funnier than the movie, there are some great parts in the introduction of Buttercup that had me chuckling out loud.

You will notice that on the cover of the novel it says "S. Morgenstern's Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure".  For reasons unknown to me, Goldman has decided to write the novel as if he was abridging someone else's work.  This allows him to insert funny interjections into his own writing and "skip over" sections.  It makes for some entertaining parts even if it is a confusing tack to take.  

But he takes it further than that, in the introductions, he talks about travelling to Florin as if it is a real place and he discusses conversations with the owners of the Morgenstern estate over imaginary legal issues with abridging the book.  Stephen King (with all his ties to Florin) even makes a cameo.  However, the real overarching story of the introductions and forewords is Goldman's relationship with his own family and, due to the way the introductions are ordered with newest first, it is like peeling back layers of onion to see how he got to where he is today.  I don't know how much of the story in the introductions is real (Wikipedia tells me that very little of it is) but it is certainly an interesting story.

My one major complaint in this book is the portrayal of Buttercup, she is shown as pretty much helpless for much of the movie, relying on the men in her life to rescue her and save her from all of the perils.  I know that this is a cliche of this type of story but this takes it a step to far where, when the reader sees something from Buttercup's point of view, it is pointed out that she is bad at math and so cannot give the reader an accurate count of something.  That was irksome.

In short, this book is a somewhat unique literary construct and very enjoyable.  Anyone who like light-hearted fantasy should probably give it a read (and if you liked the movie, you should definitely read it).

Overall, I would give this book a 95%.

To Be or Not To Be

Following my last post about Hyperbole and a Half coincidentally this next post is also an "internet book".  Ryan North writes one of my favorite webcomics, the creatively named "Dinosaur Comics".  If you have never read them I must recommend that you give them a try.  Ryan North decided to start a kickstarter funded, choose-your-own-adventure book based on the story of Hamlet.  The project blew up and broke multiple kickstarter records.  Due to the level of funding the book was able to get artwork for every ending from webcomic artists as well as a prequel story and several other additional features.

This book clocks in at 700 pages, so if you don't like it, it makes quite the doorstop.  However, I enjoyed this book immensely.  The book is lighthearted and witty but at the same time has great respect for the original work.

Also, this is the first book that I have review here that I haven't finished, if finished means having read every page.  I have reached an end multiple, multiple times but I still haven't hit every single possible page or even every single ending.  Some of the endings I have reached were the original ending (of course), one where ghost Hamlet and his ghost dad lead a ghost army to fight ghost aliens, and one where Hamlet and Ophelia invent thermometers and live happily ever after.  These are just a few of the many endings that book has to offer.

The book also allows you to play as Hamlet, Ophelia, and Hamlet's father and each of these stories has its own set of endings and experiences and sometimes switches back and forth between them.  In certain read throughs, you can play as Claudius reading a choose-your-own-adventure book.  It is very entertaining.  It is clear that the better that you know the source material the more enjoyable the book is.  However, the book starts at a high level of enjoyment even without any knowledge of the source material.

I think my favorite part of the book is a particular part where Hamlet fights pirates and all of the choices in that section are choosing between the witticisms Hamlet uses in the fight.  While it is a little graphic, that section alone is worth pages and pages of giggles.

Overall, I would give this book a 94%.

Hyperbole and a Half

Hyperbole and a Half was a Christmas gift.  I had never heard of Allie Brosh or her blog (also called Hyperbole and a Half) and I have to say the cover made me slightly worried.  The combination of the subtitle ("unfortunate situations, flawed coping mechanisms, mayhem, and other things that happened") combined with the childish style of art on the cover left concerned that this could be a very unfunny book.  I was completely and utterly wrong.

See, this could be a little troubling with no context, right?

This book had me laughing incredibly hard at multiple points.  The book is formatted as a collection of her blog posts as well as some original stories (which seems to be par for the course for internet writers).  The best chapter is probably the first, where she finds a letter to her present self from her 10 year old self.  I was laughing so much my gut hurt all the way through that chapter and there are many other chapters that are nearly as funny.

There are, however, some serious chapters in the book as well.  Some of them are covered under a veil of comedy like those about her lack of motivation and the rules that she imagines the world lives by. These are humorous but still have the capacity to make the reader think.

Then there are the chapters on depression and her self-identity .  These four chapters comprise a significant fraction of the book, two of them are placed in the middle and two at the very end.  They take issues that are serious and personal and explain what it is like to experience them in a way that still has just enough jocularity to make it not scary or self-pitying.  In fact, while I loved the funny parts, I think the primary thing that I will take away from this book is the exploration of depression.  It was a fascinating read and will probably come to mind when I think of depression for years.

I really liked this book, both at its serious points and its funny points.  I have added the corresponding blog to my RSS reader and I hope that is updated frequently as her art and writing style is highly entertaining.

Overall, I would give this book a 94%.

The City and The City

The City and The City is a truly fantastic book, it certainly deserved all the awards that it received (Locus and Hugo among others).  It artfully blends detective tropes with a unique (at least among my readings) fantastical concept.  I won't go too far into it because part of the fun of the book is discovering this as you read but the basic premise is that two cities occupy the same geographic space but have different laws, language, people, etc and to go between them without certain permissions is called "breach" and strictly punished.

Whenever I read a fantasy book that doesn't have blatant use of magic, my brain always tries to see if there was some other explanation for the magic.  For example, A Game of Thrones passes this test until the last chapter (perhaps "passes the test" provides the wrong impression.  There are many fantasy books I love a great deal that do not pass).  This book, however, passes completely.  All of the magic is completely explainable while at the same time refraining from ever explicitly saying that it isn't magic.  I think the thing that I will remember the most from this book is how perfectly balanced the central idea is between a rational explanation and a fantastic one.

The protagonist is a detective (as you might expect from a mystery story) and it is told entirely from his point of view.  The way the book is structured all of the reveals, both the gradual ones about the world as a whole and the sudden ones about the resolution of the mystery, are excellent. The author says that he views this book as the last chapter in the story of its protagonist and that he would consider writing his earlier adventures.  If he writes them, I will read them.

Overall, I would give this book a 97%.

Space Chronicles

My first experience with Neil deGrasse Tyson was watching him talk about his book, Death by Black Hole, on Jon Stewart's Daily Show.  I was enamored with the concept, rushed out, bought the book, and enjoyed it immensely.  A few years later, I happened to be watching the Daily Show and again saw Tyson.  This time he was promoting a new book, Space Chronicles.  I put that on my to-get list but as a collection of his former works didn't sound as interesting as his answering of space questions like Death by Black Hole.  When I finally got it, I was right, however the book still has some interesting points.

The primary problem with the book is that, since it is a collection of his other works, he makes the same points over and over again.  Even someone who supports the space program, as I do, found the repetitiveness of some of the points exceedingly wearying.  This book would probably have more enjoyable read over the span of several months rather than a week so that the repetition would be less obvious.

However, despite this problem, the articles are all quite interesting individually.  Tyson's ability to take complicated interstellar concepts and render them easy to understand by the layperson remains undiminished over the years making it an easy and yet educational read.  The book is also interspersed with tweets from him; some of which are funny, all of which are informative.

Some of the parts I found most interesting were when he talked about the political climate during the space race (and contrasting it with today's).  I was a big fan of space race history when I was younger, I knew all about von Braun and Aldrin and Shepard and all the rest, and reading about it as an adult was a fun return to nostalgia.

I think the thing that I will remember the longest from this book is something that Tyson only makes allusions to, however the allusions he made were enough to convince me to look it up myself.  It was the story of Robert Wilson and what he said when asked about how the particle accelerator that was planned in Batavia, Illinois would contribute to national defense.  He said "In that sense, this new knowledge has all to do with honor and country but it has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to help make it worth defending." (http://history.fnal.gov/testimony.html).  I love this sentiment.

Overall, I would give this book an 87%.

Joyland

Stephen King is one of those authors that I would read any of his books. They are, while not particularly dense, certainly entertaining. Joyland is no exception. While it was not a serious or science fiction-y as the last Stephen King book I read (11/22/63), it was still a fun, vacation style read.

The book takes place at an amusement park and, in traditional Stephen King fashion there is a certain amount of the supernatural. Though I thought that the supernatural bits were unnecessary and the story would have been better and perhaps even scarier without them.

I found the main character pretty likable with his mixed bag of failures and successes but really the most enjoyable part of the book was simply the setting. It is clear that the author put in a lot of time researching carnivals and amusement parks for the writing of this book. Just like 11/22/63, the research clearly shows in the attention to detail of the carnie lifestyle. Parts of the book don’t even feel like a Stephen King story; they could have been in some sort of carnival novel.

I think one of the main things that I will take away from this book is how adaptable a writer King is. He has put out a huge number of books but the last couple of his that I have read show a huge amount of effort and care put into them. The fact that one of the bestselling authors of all time does this shows how much he cares about writing as a craft.

Overall, I would give this story an 82%.

The Atrocity Exhibition

The Atrocity Exhibition initially attracted my attention because of its shape.  The copy I have is shaped like a thick magazine but with a more rigid cover.  What was something that looked like this doing in the science fiction section?  My curiosity piqued, I resolved to give it a try.

The book is setup like a collection of short stories.  Most of them follow around a single person whose name changes every story which implies some sort of breakdown or identity crisis.  The order of the stories does not seem to a matter a great deal, though perhaps you can feel the rationality fade from one story to the next. The edition that I have had some wonderfully bleak photographs that really helped set the mood.

Tacked onto the end are a few more stories that don't follow the same plot or characters (some of which are the "four additional stories" advertised on the cover).  One of them is on the appeal of Ronald Reagan in a... unique way.  An interesting one is "The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race" which is exactly what the title implies it is.  It assigns everyone involved roles and has many puns.  Three are excerpts from medical text books but edited so that the patient is a celebrity (Mae West, Queen Elizabeth, and Princess Margaret).  The last story in the collection is about World War III.

I think that this last story is by far the best in the book.  It is about how celebrities and the endless barrage of the 24 hour news can distract from what is actually important in the world.  The premise is that World War III has already happened but only one man of the general public actually remembers it because everyone else is so distracted by the unimportant things that the news inflates to its importance.  Of all the stories in the book, it is perhaps the most poignant despite being set in a cold war timeline where Reagan is on his third term.  The news has only become more about what kind of headlines will grab viewership rather than what is important.

The main plot of the book is almost entirely symbolism and allegory.  One could almost see it as a postwar, compressed Gravity's Rainbow.  However, in this, the allegory is more direct.  The characters literally call out names like Ralph Nader and others but since the book was written in the 60's I am sure that there a lot of references that were pertinent at the time that are now borderline unintelligible. I worry that 50 years from now some of my favorites will be equally difficult to comprehend.

Overall, I would give this book a 76%.