While I would hardly call myself particularly well read, I do enjoy reading a great deal. My tastes are somewhat varied, including science fiction, historical works, humourous fiction, and biographies. I also enjoy some technical stuff and I occasionally feed my head with brain candy from Stephen King, Tom Clancy, and Michael Crichton. Below you'll find some of my favourite books and authors, and maybe some of yours. If you know of anything I might be interested in, please let me know; the library in Aurora is small but reasonably well stocked...
The Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood
I was first introduced to the works of this highly acclaimed Canadian author about seven years ago at the Eden Mills Writers Festival. She was reading from her new novel, The Robber Bride, under a large tent in a field behind an old grain mill. I was lying back in the grass, listening to her voice bring her characters to life. Her writing seemed simple and honest, with wonderful characters just basic enough to be real people you might know in everyday life, but just quirky enough to be interesting. The story revolves around the lives of three women who become close friends - brought together by the actions of a fourth.
The ruthless Zenia has manipulated all the three women, Roz, Charis, and Tony, at various points in their lives - starting back in the sixties, during college. Over the decades since, she has managed to gain their trust, tear their lives apart, and effectively steal the men that mean the most to them.
So Zenia's death comes as a relief to the trio, or at least what they perceive as her death - after all they attended her funeral. But, as the story begins, Roz, Charis, and Tony have gathered together at the trendy downtown restaurant they frequent, when in walks the woman of their nightmares, ostensibly back from the grave…
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? - Phillip K. Dick
My tastes in science fiction are fairly limited. I don't enjoy reading books based on television shows (i.e. Star Trek), or movies - although that pretty much goes for any genre. Many sci-fi writers tend to write stories that take place in what they perceive our world will be in several decades, the usual post-apocalyptic world gone bad. Philip K. Dick manages to avoid a lot of the cliches that come with this sort of theme; the good guys vs. the bad guys, the struggle of the survivors, that sort of thing. In this book we find that there is no easy way to define good and evil, right and wrong - much the same as it is in the real world today.
This book was written back in the late sixties and still outshines anything written to date. The story revolves around a man named Rick Deckard, a cop belonging to a special arm of the police force charged with the difficult task of monitoring illegal replicants. You see, in this brave new world, all of the really dirty and dangerous tasks have been relegated to cybernetic organisms - machines that look and act like real people. Sometimes these replicants get it in their heads that they'd like to live a little more freely and end up escaping to hide amongst the population of humans; Rick and his fellow officers must hunt down and kill these illegals. Except they don't call it killing, they call it retiring.
If this all sounds familiar, it's probably because this story made its way to film in the early eighties in a movie titled "Blade Runner", starring Harrison Ford. Now, I know what I said earlier about books and films but in this case, the movie came out long afterward and really, the two are very dissimilar. In fact, without having ever read the book, you'd probably miss out on many small visual details that show up in the film but are never explained.
Along the way the book delves into some deeper questions about what constitutes a life, and who should have the right to refute the freedom that all living beings deserve. You find it almost laughable to read about people feeding replicant animals, and having them tended to by technicians who drive up in vans marked as veterinary clinic vehicles. But you come to realize that they're just trying to hold onto the last shreds of a world that has all but been lost. Real animals are so very rare and expensive that most can only manage a robotic stand-in. The scary thing is, when you think about the rate at which species are currently becoming extinct, it's not that far fetched to imagine a time when all we may see of the animals we take for granted today are "Disneyworld like" automatons.
Walden Two - B.F. Skinner
I've had many discussions with friends about how one would define a better world. Most say that less stress, more time, better use of that time, and generally a more simplistic life would suit them just fine. Well, back in 1948, "Walden Two" was published, a story outlining a fictional utopia set in the United States - a sort of communal town where the inhabitants live by their own rules, eschewing the morays of the society they've left behind.
The whole thing comes off as a bit of a scientific experiment; a study on human nature. It's largely witnessed through the eyes of a professor - one of his old colleagues has actually created the very cooperative about which they'd spoken many years prior. He's been invited to observe the community at work, and is introduced to a society of which many only dream is possible. Like many dreams, reality works its way in and presents some interesting issues.