Tag Archives: books

Cloud Atlas is a novel perhaps unlike any other. In essence, British author David Mitchell links six novellas together in one fashion or another and, thus, seeks to form a whole. The novel starts with the diary of an American traveling on a schooner in the South Pacific in the …

John Kelly’s The Great Mortality is one of those works that proves history can be a wonderful read and not merely a dry recounting of events and dates. The Great Mortality is subtitled “An Intimate History of the Black Death.” Intimate accurately describes how Kelly tells the story. In Kelly’s …

Looking for a beach read. I found Bite, one in a series of anthologies of short stories about vampires.

Time travel, dystopias, robots, other planets, aliens. All these archetypes of science fiction — along with cigarette-smoking monkeys — make their appearance in one fashion or another in Foop!, the debut novel by Chris Genoa. Foop! is a comedic and at times scatological look at where the Earth may be …

Alternative Press, the independent, Cleveland-based music and youth-culture magazine, is celebrating its 20th anniversary this summer with an exclusive, all-star party at the House of Blues in Hollywood. The heartiest of congrats are in order – it’s a remarkable achievement, although the location of the party brings to mind the …

Escaping difficult family circumstances, Joseph Quitman Johnson enlisted in the US army at the age of fourteen and was stationed with the 31st Infantry in the Philippines in April 1941. After Pearl Harbor, his coming-of-age adventure turned into a nightmare of combat and suffering. Johnson survived shelling and hand-to-hand combat, …

Charlie Stross is nominated for a 2005 Hugo Award for best novel. The weekend the nominees were announced I happened to pick up The Atrocity Archives. It must be nothing like his Hugo-nominated novel, Iron Sunrise (Blogcritics review here), which is a sequel to Singularity Sky, a SF space opera …

Good ol’ Dev Degraw, the Governor’s son. He is the ne’er-do-well meandering through a disintegrating life in Wonderdog, a comedic novel by Inman Majors. Dev is the 33-year-old son of the long-time governor of Alabama, who faces a re-election campaign this year. Try as he might, Dev can’t escape that …

Arthur C. Clarke is one of the authors responsible for turning me into a science fiction fan. During the early 1970s, I read Childhood’s End and the incomparable Hugo Award-winning Rendezvous with Rama and one or two collected works. The enjoyment of those books not only led to more of …

About a third of the way through this book, I was still thinking: I just don’t get it. What I didn’t get is the praise for the book and the fact it won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for fiction. I must still admit that I sometimes think I just don’t …