Thursday, May 14, 2009

Sci-fi lists part two

Yay, I actually posted soon after the first one! Good for me.
So, here are a bunch of other science fiction books that I've read recently:

1. Fahrenheit 451 (By Ray Bradbury)
This one is more of a "social sci-fi" book than the other ones, and because of that I didn't love it, but it was good. I think the stuff about censorship and the pretty clueless society was very important. Did the people even know about the war going on? I don't remember. I listened to the audio book, and I can't remember who narrated but I thought his reading style really fit Bradbury's writing style.

2. The Giver (By Lois Lowry)
This was a book I'd been planning to read for ages, and I finally did because of my book club. It's another dystopian book (weird...my spell check doesn't have the word "dystopia" for some reason), although this one is more anti-utopian than anything else. It's kind of creepy and the writing style is uniquely vague...although sometimes I did want the author to elaborate on things more, especially the ending.

3. 2001: A Space Odyssey (By Arthur C. Clarke)
Because of this book I learned how to spell "odyssey"...yay! As with Fahrenheit, I listened to it on audio book. I haven't seen the movie yet, but I just might because of the book. I actually wasn't too impressed with it...I thought it was a bit boring, even the whole "HAL" thing (not because the events were boring, but because of the writing style)...at first. Then I got to the ending. I stayed up really late listening to the ending, and after that I lay awake in bed thinking, "WOAH...that was...WOAH". I don't really think I'll be reading the sequel, mainly because I loved the open-ended conclusion, and I don't want that to be spoiled. Unless the sequel is really, really good...(?)

4. Sphereland (By Dionys Burger)
This book was written in Dutch (or something like that), and I was reading the translation, but I can't remember who the translator was. Anyway, this isn't so much science fiction as "math fiction". It's a sequel to "Flatland" (by Edwin A. Abbot), a book about shapes living in a two-dimensional world. "Sphereland" further explores that concept, with some new ideas about curved space and other cool things like that.

There are still lots of books sci-fi books I want to read...right now I want to focus on various classic authors like Orwell and Asimov. Maybe I'll blog about that, too! Oh, and more Larry Niven, of course. Wish me luck!

1 comment:

Val said...

I remember "Fahrenheit" was quite powerful. It's in the same venue as "1984" by Orwell. I bet you'll like the Orwell too.