book review

The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis My rating: 5 of 5 stars When it comes to titles, “The Great Divorce” leaves much to be desired. Before I first read it (which was something like 18 years ago now), I always pictured it as being some long, densely-written tome that discussed . . . I don’t know. Some abstract thought thing that would put me to sleep after about three lines. Yes, it’s by CS Lewis, but come on. “The Great Divorce”? It practically screams “Don’t read me!” right from the cover. But I was forced to read the book as

Back in 1994, Neal Stephenson and J. Frederick George (writing jointly under the pseudonym Stephen Bury) wrote a political thriller based on a sci-fi “what if” scenario. What if there was a technology that let people know exactly what other people thought about things? What they were scared of. What they longed for. What they liked and disliked. What if a that technology were then placed in the hands of a political consultant who knew what to do with it and didn’t mind getting his hands dirty, so to speak. What if he could then tailor his candidate’s message on

Starsight by Brandon Sanderson My rating: 5 of 5 stars I absolutely adored the first book of Brandon Sanderson’s new Cytonic Series, Skyward. If I could have given it an 11/10, I would have. It became my go-to recommendation for anyone looking for something good to read, regardless of what genre they preferred. It was just that good. So naturally I was excited (and a tad apprehensive) when the sequel was released. Usually, you’d figure I’d just be excited, but when a book is that good, I begin to worry I’ll be let down by the followup. It’s true that

1632 by Eric Flint My rating: 3 of 5 stars The premise of 1632 is fantastic. Take a 15 mile radius chunk of present-day West Virginia, complete with all its inhabitants, stores, infrastructure, and everything, and transport it back to 1632, right in the middle of the Thirty Years War, smack dab of the thick of things in Thüringen. Then wait and see what happens. How will the present-day Americans respond? What will the people from 1632 think of them? In practice, it doesn’t play out quite to the level of that initial premise. Don’t get me wrong: I had