Category: Reading
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Recommended Reading: After Alice by Gregory Maguire
I just read Gregory Maguire’s new book, After Alice, a retelling of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Alice wasn’t the only one who fell down the rabbit hole; her friend Ada, passingly mentioned in the original Alice in Wonderland, followed her down and had her own set of adventures, while on that same day, Charles Darwin visited Alice’s father…
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Recommended Reading: The People in the Trees
The People in the Trees by Hanya Yanagihara is a dark book that really sticks with you. On an expedition to a remote island in the South Pacific, a scientist discovers that the native people have significantly increased their lifespans by eating a rare turtle, but their immortality comes at the price of severe mental degeneration. After…
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Recommended Reading: Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights
Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Days is a new magical realism novel by Salman Rushdie. In the twelfth century, a female jinn (a jinnia) called Dunia fell in love with a philosopher and bore many children, whose descendants were part-jinn, part-human. A thousand years later, the slits between earth and the world of the jinn reopened, sparking…
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Recommended Reading: What Makes This Book So Great
What Makes This Book So Great is a compendium of blog posts about Jo Walton’s rereads of books, not necessarily all science fiction and fantasy. These are blog posts originally published on Tor.com, so they are short, breezy, and quick to read. Walton is such a prodigious reader, averaging a book or more a day (I wonder…
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Recommended Reading: Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer
Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer is everything I liked about Lost, but much better executed. An expedition of four unnamed female scientists ventures into the mysterious Area X, and bad things happen. Area X, like the island in Lost, is a weird, unsettling, indefinable place where disquieting things happen that cannot be explained. Those who venture into it are irrevocably…
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Recommended Reading: A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki
I absolutely loved A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki. A writer living on a remote island off the coast of British Columbia finds a package washed ashore from Japan containing a diary and becomes obsessed with finding out what happened to the teenage girl who wrote it. This novel has all the elements I enjoy,…
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A survey of classic science fiction, with notes about diversity in sci-fi…
At some point, I set out to read a representative sample of all the “great” writers of science fiction, so I could feel reasonably well-educated in the genre. If you haven’t read a lot of science fiction, I recommend this exercise. It provides a grounding so you can learn where the well-worn tropes originated and appreciate…
Shannon Turlington 