Galileo’s Dream, by Kim Stanley Robinson, is a story inside of a biography inside of a science fiction novel. There are times where you never really know exactly when you are or why, but the view is only slightly less amazing than the conversations. For me, the real story takes place in 17th century Italy, following Galileo Galilei from Padua to Venice to Florence to Rome. Read more about A Glimpse of Galileo
The Tyranny of Merit, subtitled Can We Find the Common Good? was something of a disappointment to me. The writer, Michael J. Sandel, a philosophy professor at Harvard, put one of his classes on ethics online; I watched the entirety of it and enjoyed it very much, so was predisposed to like this little book. Read more about A Couple More Books
In his preface to 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed, Eric H. Read more about Back to the Future
Having just finished nearly all of the John Le Carré novels, I thought I would turn to something just as dystopian (Le Carré's are not in that genre, even though sometimes they feel that way) but more fun. The future inundation of the planet sounded like a good time. Read more about Reading the Summer Away
A Fairy Tale
Barbara Stoner Read more about Tricky Dick and the Dragon Lady
You might not buy the thesis of Dominion: How the Christion Revolution Remade the World, by Tom Holland (A galloping tour of Christianity’s influence across the last 2,000 years, NYT Read more about Dominion
“Oh, dammit all to …” Adriana Mercer wished she had a typewriter instead of a laptop. Deleting wasn’t nearly good enough for the romantic tripe she had just spent a tortuous hour composing. She wanted to rip it out of the machine, crush it into a spiky ball, and toss it on top of the heap in the circular file, just as she had imagined countless other authors doing with countless other first drafts of their work.
Adriana Mercer wanted to be a writer. Read more about A Walk in the Park
A Fairy Tale
Once upon a time, a wicked crack dealer lived in a dingy motel room on a bad stretch of road in the lower part of town. His name was Raymond, but everyone who knew him, or knew of him, called him Rayban. His was a dark soul.
Every night he sat at his window looking down on the street below keeping a close eye on his boys. Young and hungry, they lounged in the driveways of no-tell motels or hung out at the Jack-in-the-Box waiting for customers, glancing up now and then seeking the approval of the dark face in the window. Read more about Saturday Night in the Big City
A Fairy Tale
It had been as hot and humid as only Iowa could be on that awful July day. Tom and Dick had taken the twins, Harry and Lucy, to the pond where the older boys had rigged a tire swing from an old cottonwood tree and took turns swinging out over the pond, dropping in, and swimming back while the younger ones played in the muddy shallows.
Tom had just started swimming back when he heard his brother, Dick, holler, “No, no! Harry! Turn around. It’s too deep there.” Read more about The Corn
A Fairy Tale
Once upon a time there were three princesses named Jennifer, Colleen and Alison. Read more about The Three Princesses