I know, I know, I haven’t been posting. It’s summer, so there’s no school (and therefore no Tales From the Classroom), and I’ve been watching the politics of the nation with that same sort of fascination as someone viewing a train wreck. For the most part, anyone who has read very many of my previous politics posts will already know what I think about the current debacle in Washington, so there’s very little point in me inflicting my views on others. My cousin has been pestering me off and on to go back to posting book reviews of the stuff I read, so I should probably do some of that.
On going back and looking through my old posts, I realized that the last time I did a book post was nearly five years ago. I’ve read close to 350 books since then, and probably only remember bits and pieces of a lot of them. Still, I think it’s time to go back to at least some of them — if nothing else, I can pick out the really good ones from longer ago. So, without further ado:
Something Wicked This Way Comes
– Ray Bradbury
This is a classic sci-fi / horror story from Ray Bradbury, who is better known for writing the (also excellent) Fahrenheit 451. There’s less of a sci-fi element to this one, and more of a horror theme.
The Exorcist
– William Peter Blatty
There’s virtually no way you DON’T know about this story, even if you didn’t know it was originally a book before it was made into the movie
. Definitely creepy.
The Great Influenza: The story of the deadliest pandemic in history
– John M. Barry
This is a particularly good book about the influenza of 1918 that devastated the world, and yet remains largely unknown today. (What, you didn’t know that there was a disease so bad within the past hundred years that they had to dig mass graves in Philadelphia?) The book also goes into detail about the men who fought the disease.
To the Vanishing Point
– Alan Dean Foster
I really know nothing about this author, but this book was a really enjoyable read. It’s also a fantasy/horror type book. (Odd how many of those are popping up in my highlights list.)
Demian
, Steppenwolf
, Narcissus and Goldmund
, and Siddhartha
– Hermann Hesse
These are all great psychological novels. Hesse is particularly good at placing his characters in a variety of historic periods and having them convey an individual developing a philosophical ideal in a psychologically realistic way – something that other great writers (like Ayn Rand) can’t quite master; usually it comes across as a tinny-sounding stereotype of a person. Hesse manages to make it convincing.
Well, it is starting to storm here, so I’ll wrap this post up for now – it looks like there will be more posts coming along, assuming I remember to make myself write them.