Summer Reading Book Reviews

   You want content?  You want content?  You can't handle content!  Anyway, here's some more boring stuff for you to read, wherein I review the books I read in capsule form.   Some capsules may be longer than others depending on what I have to say.   Capsules are arranged from most recent books finished back.

The Guns of the South by Harry Turtledove

   Enjoyment of this one requires winking at its initial premise - a group of white supremacist South Africans from 2014 travel back in time with AK-47s to help the South win the Civil War, thus, they think, preserving slavery and the white dominance which has disappeared in their time.  If your approach to time travel at all is, "How patently ridiculous," don't bother, but if you can get past that you end up with an interesting, well-researched book.  It's up to you whether you think Turtledove's conclusion is logical, but that's what speculative fiction is for in the first place, right?

Time Machines edited by Bill Adler, Jr.

   The book runs a bit hot and cold.  For one thing, it's subtitled, "The best time travel stories ever written," and yet not all of the stories inside it really concern time travel, apparently (from reviews I've read) a common problem in anthologies of the genre.  For example, Edgar Allan Poe's "Three Sundays in a Week" has more to do with simple physics, while Rudyard Kipling's "Wireless," regardless of the lead-in, doesn't show obvious time-travel aspects at all.  The oldest two stories are in fact the blandest as far as it goes, and more recent stories get more interesting, such as "Time Travelers Never Die."  Ray Bradbury has a decent entry in here as well, and Harry Turtledove an interesting what-if story up his alley, though it's alternate history, not time travel.  An interesting collection of stories, but not always worth it if you're getting it for the concept, as I was.

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Life, the Universe, and Everything, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, and Mostly Harmless, by Douglas Adams

   By and large the books continue in the precedent set by the original Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.  They never get any funnier, really, but they don't get significantly less funny, and the maneuverings of the characters are interesting.  The ideas Adams pumps into the books often manage to get more and more clever, and as he references events that happened earlier, you get sort of a "Ahh... cooool" feeling.  However...
    I wish I had stopped reading after So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish.  Mostly Harmless, while clever in its own way and much more definitively an ending, is massively, horrifyingly depressing.  If you're going to read these, avoid that one.  If I could forget I'd read it, I would.  The ending to So Long is, while maybe not as clever, more fun and certainly way more upbeat.  I hated Mostly Harmless for pretty much the entire length - it's kind of sad to think that the ending, despite being really depressing, is the best part.

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

   Rarely have I read a more straightforwardly narrative book.  Okay, it's set in a place you probably haven't read a book about before, but that doesn't make it interesting.  Furthermore, the main character never changes.  He's the same guy throughout the entire novel.  I suppose the point is that his society is changing around him - because it is - but we don't get to any changes until more than halfway through, which is more exposition than necessary for a pretty weak "payoff" (and I use that term in about the loosest sense possible).  I guess maybe he changes a bit right at the end, but we're not given substantial reasons for why he does.  The last few sentences are actually pretty cool, but they seem really out of place given what's preceded them - they belong in a better book.

Time Out of Joint by Philip K. Dick

    When the novel starts, you've already read the jacket and so wonder where this is supposed to be going.  Then you find out.  Like Minority Report, Dick can go a bit heavy on the sci-fi angle to odd effect, but unlike it, that doesn't ruin Time Out of Joint.  Even having a decent idea of where it's going, Dick keeps you just off-balance enough to make the second half, particularly the last 50 pages or so, pretty surprising, or at least surprising enough to sustain your interest.  The end moral is interesting - did some Army guys beat Dick up once or something? - but at least it's not creepy like Minority Report's.

Minority Report by Philip K. Dick

   The concept is interesting, but it's executed a bit strangely.  Don't think that this story (it's really more a "short story" than a novel, topping out at 100 pages even in the strange way it's bound) is the same as the movie, because aside from the basic concepts - a) precrime, and b) Anderton's name coming out as the next killer - it bears no resemblance whatsoever.   Not that this is a bad thing.  Dick's world isn't even clearly recognizable as the future, if it's even supposed to be.  The idea is that Anderton is really being set up by the military, who figure that when he doesn't commit the murder, precrime will be exposed as fallible and they can take over.  Anti-military sentiment may have been big game in Dick's time, but it's pretty weightless now.  Furthermore, Spielberg's movie ends up coming out against precrime, whereas Dick's Anderton ends up accepting a transfer into outer space after proving that precrime works by committing the crime after all.  There are other differences too, like names and roles, but that "entire plot" thing is pretty separate.  Now, the fact that it's different from the movie doesn't make it inherently bad - but the fact that it reads like it was written by a high school freshman does.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

    If there's one feeling I have about this book, it's that I should have read it a long time ago.  There are few things I like more than the humor of the English (the dry wit, anyway), and this book is definitely full of it.  Cleverer and richer than any other sci-fi I've read, it left me anxious to read the other four books in the series.  If I had a complaint, it would be that the humor displayed early on drops off substantially after Arthur and Ford end up on the Heart of Gold.  It's still there, of course, just not as prevalent or laugh-out-loud.  But this is a small problem in a book that was a great way to start the summer reading by encouraging me to keep going.  If you haven't read it, you should.