All the Birds in the Sky Charlie Jane Anders Tor Books Release Date: January 26, 2016 ISBN 978-0-7653-7994-8 A young girl who talks to birds; a young boy who builds a two second time machine in his room. Two hideously awful middle school experiences. A member of the Nameless Order […]
What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions Randall Munroe Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Release Date: September 2, 2014 ISBN 978-0-544-27299-6 The best thing about a book like What If? is that you don’t have to read it front to back – unless you want to. You can peck at […]
You want scary for Halloween? I’ll give you scary. Not blood and guts scary, not monsters or zombies or axe murderers scary, but a book that will get under your skin and make you wonder about things you used to take for granted. Imagine a world where your mundane life […]
Alif the Unseen G. Willow Wilson Grove Press Publication Date: June 19, 2012 ISBN: 978-0-8021-2020-5 I love fantasy literature awards: the Nebulas, the Hugos, the World Fantasy Awards. Their nominations are stellar recommendations for fantastic novels that might have otherwise flown under my radar. When such a list of nominees […]
The Cloud Matt Richtel First Edition: January 29, 2013 HarperCollins Publishers ISBN 978-0-06-225668-3 —♦— In Matt Richtel’s new novel, The Cloud, Nathaniel Idle is not your typical hardass investigative reporter with a steely jaw and even flintier eye. Yes, he is an investigative reporter and has won some accolades exposing […]
On this day, December 3, in 1857, Joseph Conrad was born in Berdichev, Imperial Russia (modern
Ukraine, then a part of Poland). While he settled in England and wrote in English, he always considered himself a Pole. Heart of Darkness, one of the most famous of his 20 novels (which explores colonialism and the attitudes regarding what constitutes a barbarian versus civilized society) is considered one of the best English novels of the 20th century, as is his novel Lord Jim, which chronicles a crew’s abandonment of its disabled ship. Conrad died in England in 1924 at age 66.