Magnificent Desolation by Buzz Aldrin

I’ve read other memoirs by the Apollo astronauts who went to the Moon, most of whom wrote about their tremendous efforts to become space jocks and their stories always peaked with their lunar adventures.  Buzz Aldrin second autobiographical book starts with the Apollo 11 landing and quickly wraps that adventure up, because his book is [...]

The Gods of Vampires

Every vampire has a god, and since the advent of the novel, those gods have been writers.  Before the printing press, storytellers were the creators of vampires, and word of mouth published endless variations of vampires that spawned unique species of monsters in each culture and country.  Superstition and the love of the story kept [...]

Dracula by Bram Stoker

Dracula by Bram Stoker amazed me by how thoroughly Christian it portrays it’s 19th century worldview.  Published in 1897, this late Victorian novel doesn’t proselytize, but accepts Christianity like the rising of the Son.  Dracula is about a creature of the darkness invading the world of the light.  More than that, Dracula is about a [...]

The Time Machine by H. G. Wells

The Time Machine is the big bang origin of the science fiction universe.  I’ve read The Time Machine a couple times before in my life, but I never noticed that it was the origin of all science fiction, but then I haven’t spent the last decade rereading the classics of science fiction before either.  On [...]

Heinlein’s 13th Scribner’s Novel

There are legions of Robert A. Heinlein fans out there that grew up reading the 12 canonical Heinlein young adult novels published by Charles Scribner’s Sons in the 1940s and 1950s, that if we were ever given three magical wishes would use our first wish to get the 13th novel.  Many science fiction writers have [...]

Books Read 2008

2008 was a year of reading about the world and looking back at classic science fiction.  18 of the 45 books I read this year were SF.  11 were non-fiction.  12 books were ones I had read before – for some reason I listened to many SF classics that I first read back in the [...]

Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke

Childhood’s End holds up extremely well in the 55 years since the book first appeared in 1953.  I just finished listening to the new Audible Frontiers audio book edition from Audible.com, and I was surprised in several ways.  First, I was surprised that a science fiction book from 1950s worked so well as a whole.  [...]

Red Planet by Robert A. Heinlein

Red Planet was the first Robert A. Heinlein novel I discovered back in 1964, and with the first reading of that book turned into a life-long fan of Heinlein’s work.  From 1964 through 1966 I read Heinlein’s backlog of books, some several times, so after a four year dry spell of no new books I [...]

Spin by Robert Charles Wilson

Spin by Robert Charles Wilson is an old fashion novel of super-science that won the Hugo award in 2006.  It reminds me of War of the Worlds, but not because the stories are alike, but because of their sense of wonder impact.  I really do not want to say anything about what happens in the [...]

The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton

I started reading Edith Wharton this summer with Ethan Frome.  Then I read her Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Age of Innocence.  And now, I’ve finished The House of Mirth, which I’ve decided is one of my all time favorite books.  I’ve elevated Wharton into that crowd of writers that I love to study because [...]