BOOKS

COMING SOON?: A friend of these pages is compiling an immense list of recommended sci-fi and fantasy titles.  When it's done (and assuming he'll let me, and he'd better, since I contributed to it), we'll post it here.

COMING SOON: We'll see if I can coerce our own Racer X or Fat Irish to contribute a review of Jules Verne's classic Mysterious Island, since they've both just read it.  Maybe I'll reread 20,000 Leagues and we'll do a feature...

Rook's Recently Read 

Stranger in a Strange Land (by Robert Heinlein)

Time Enough for Love (by Robert Heinlein)

I had never actually read Stranger, so when I stumbled across it in the "for sale" section of the library, I had to pick it up.  Good thing, too - Heinlein's most famous book was indeed quite a read.  You probably know what it's about - a human, raised by martians, returning to Earth (chaos ensues, naturally).  But Heinlein uses this plotline as a means to voice his views on marriage, sexuality, the legal system, and so much more.  The characters are well-crafted and engaging, and as a whole the book is a lot of fun.  Some Heinlein fansites actually don't recommend Stranger as a neophyte's introduction to the Master's works, and I can understand that warning: Stranger is slow-starting, and a little dense in parts.  Of course, the edition that I read is the "new" one with all the edited bits put back in, so that may have something to do with it.  Nevertheless, a good book.

Time Enough for Love was even better!  The story of Lazarus Long, the oldest man in the galaxy (and a follow up to Heinlein's novella Methuselah's Children), Time Enough is considered one of Heinlein's best, and rightly so.  It mixes solid characterization with intriguing maneuvers of plot, tales which could be short stories on their own told in flashback, periodic aphorisms, and great humor.  The time-travel aspects reminded me greatly of Heinlein's All You Zombies (short story), which I hadn't read in years - but in Time Enough for Love, the points which were essentially nifty gimmicks in Zombies are crafted into really moving developments.  The worst part, of course, is that now I've found out that there are more books about Lazarus Long.  So now I have to go back and read Methuselah's Children, and then go out and grab The Cat Who Walks Through Walls and a couple of others.

Stranger in a Strange Land: * * * * 

Time Enough for Love: * * * * * 

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Last modified: November 14, 2000