Best Books Read 08
Discover the best books read in 08 with our curated list of top reads. Find your next favorite book with our expert recommendations and reviews.
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Childhood's End
by Arthur C. Clarke
The inspiration for the Syfy miniseries. Childhoodâs End is one of the defining legacies of Arthur C. Clarke, the author of 2001: A Space Odyssey and many other groundbreaking works. Since its publication in 1953, this prescient novel about first contact gone wrong has come to be regarded not only as a science fiction classic but as a literary thriller of the highest order. Spaceships have suddenly appeared in the skies above every city on the planet. Inside is an intellectually, technologically, and militarily superior alien race known as the Overlords. At first, their demands seem benevolent: unify Earth, eliminate poverty, end war. But at what cost? To those who resist, itâs clear that the Overlords have an agenda of their own. Has their arrival marked the end of humankind . . . or the beginning? Praise for Childhoodâs End âA first-rate tour de force.ââThe New York Times âFrighteningly logical, believable, and grimly prophetic . . . Clarke is a master.ââLos Angeles Times âThere has been nothing like it for years; partly for the actual invention, but partly because here we meet a modern author who understands that there may be things that have a higher claim on humanity than its own âsurvival.â ââC. S. Lewis âAs a science fiction writer, Clarke has all the essentials.ââJeremy Bernstein, The New Yorker
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Masterpieces
by Orson Scott Card
A collection of the best science fiction short stories of the 20th century as selected and evaluated by critically-acclaimed author Orson Scott Card. Featuring stories from the genre's greatest authors: Isaac Asimov ⢠Arthur C. Clarke ⢠Robert A. Heinlein ⢠Ursula K. Le Guin ⢠Ray Bradbury ⢠Frederik Pohl ⢠Harlan Ellison ⢠George Alec Effinger ⢠Brian W. Aldiss ⢠William Gibson & Michael Swanwick ⢠Theodore Sturgeon ⢠Larry Niven ⢠Robert Silverberg ⢠Harry Turtledove ⢠James Blish ⢠George R. R. Martin ⢠James Patrick Kelly ⢠Karen Joy Fowler ⢠Lloyd Biggle, Jr. ⢠Terry Bisson ⢠Poul Anderson ⢠John Kessel ⢠R.A. Lafferty ⢠C.J. Cherryh ⢠Lisa Goldstein ⢠Edmond Hamilton In much of the science fiction of the past, the twenty-first century existed only in the writersâ imaginations. Now that itâs here, itâs time to take a look back at the last one hundred years in science fiction through the works of the most celebrated and acclaimed authors of the centuryâto see where weâve been and just how far weâve come. Along with a critical essay by Orson Scott Card reassessing science fiction in the twentieth century, Masterpieces includes short fiction by writers who have forged a permanent place for science fiction in the popular culture of today...and tomorrow. It offers a glimpse of the greatest works that mixed science with fiction in trying to figure out humanityâs place in the universe. Featuring bold, brave, and breathtaking stories, this definitive collection will stand the test of time in both this century and those to come.
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Choke
by Chuck Palahniuk
Victor Mancini's a medical school dropout with a problem. He needs to pay for elder care for his mother, who's got Alzheimer's. So he comes up with the perfect scam: pretending to choke in upscale restaurants and getting âsavedâ by fellow diners who, feeling responsible for Victor's life, offer him financial support.Meanwhile, he cruises sexual addiction recovery workshops and spends his days working at Colonial Dunsboro, where his stoner colleagues are sentenced to the stocks for any deviation from the colonial lifestyle. Oh, yeah, and he's desperate to find the truth of his paternity, which his addled mother suggests may be divine.
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Martian Time-slip
by Philip K. Dick
Although Manfred Steiner is doomed to death and exiled to Mars as a human defective, Arnie Knott discovers that the young boy can be manipulated and his strange powers controlled so that he can travel in the future.
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Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim
by David Sedaris
David Sedaris plays in the snow with his sisters. He goes on vacation with his family. He gets a job selling drinks. He attends his brother's wedding. He mops his sister's floor. He gives directions to a lost traveler. He eats a hamburger. He has his blood sugar tested. It all sounds so normal, doesn't it? In his newest collection of essays, David Sedaris lifts the corner of ordinary life, revealing the absurdity teeming below its surface. His world is alive with obscure desires and hidden motives -- a world where forgiveness is automatic and an argument can be the highest form of love. Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim is another unforgettable collection from one of the wittiest and most original writers at work today.
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Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick
by Philip K. Dick
Philip K. Dick was a master of science fiction, but he was also a writer whose work transcended genre to examine the nature of reality and what it means to be human. A writer of great complexity and subtle humor, his work belongs on the shelf of great twentieth-century literature, next to Kafka and Vonnegut. Collected here are twenty-one of Dick's most dazzling and resonant stories, which span his entire career and show a world-class writer working at the peak of his powers. In "The Days of Perky Pat," people spend their time playing with dolls who manage to live an idyllic life no longer available to the Earth's real inhabitants. "Adjustment Team" looks at the fate of a man who by mistake has stepped out of his own time. In "Autofac," one community must battle benign machines to take back control of their lives. And in "I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon," we follow the story of one man whose very reality may be nothing more than a nightmare. The collection also includes such classic stories as "The Minority Report," the basis for the Steven Spielberg movie, and "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale," the basis for the film Total Recall. Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick is a magnificent distillation of one of American literature's most searching imaginations.
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The Diamond Age
by Neal Stephenson
Vividly imagined, stunningly prophetic, and epic in scope, The Diamond Age is a major novel from one of the most visionary writers of our time Decades into our future, a stoneâs throw from the ancient city of Shanghai, a brilliant nanotechnologist named John Percival Hackworth has just broken the rigorous moral code of his tribe, the powerful neo-Victorians. He's made an illicit copy of a state-of-the-art interactive device called A Young Ladys Illustrated Primer Commissioned by an eccentric duke for his grandchild, stolen for Hackworth's own daughter, the Primerâs purpose is to educate and raise a girl capable of thinking for herself. It performs its function superbly. Unfortunately for Hackworth, his smuggled copy has fallen into the wrong hands. Young Nell and her brother Harv are thetesâmembers of the poor, tribeless class. Neglected by their mother, Harv looks after Nell. When he and his gang waylay a certain neo-VictorianâJohn Percival Hackworthâin the seamy streets of their neighborhood, Harv brings Nell something special: the Primer. Following the discovery of his crime, Hackworth begins an odyssey of his own. Expelled from the neo-Victorian paradise, squeezed by agents of Protocol Enforcement on one side and a Mandarin underworld crime lord on the other, he searches for an elusive figure known as the Alchemist. His quest and Nellâs will ultimately lead them to another seeker whose fate is bound up with the Primerâa woman who holds the key to a vast, subversive information network that is destined to decode and reprogram the future of humanity.
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Gun, with Occasional Music
by Jonathan Lethem
In a bizarre, noirish world shared by people and intelligent animals, Conrad Metcalf, a human private detective, finds one of his cases has drawn him into a conflict between gangsters and the Inquisitor's office. Reprint. 15,000 first printing.
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Under the Banner of Heaven
by Jon Krakauer
NATIONAL BESTSELLER ⢠From the author of Into the Wild and Into Thin Air, this extraordinary work of investigative journalism takes readers inside Americaâs isolated Mormon Fundamentalist communities. ⢠Now an acclaimed FX limited series streaming on HULU. âFantastic.... Right up there with In Cold Blood and The Executionerâs Song.â âSan Francisco Chronicle Defying both civil authorities and the Mormon establishment in Salt Lake City, the renegade leaders of these Taliban-like theocracies are zealots who answer only to God; some 40,000 people still practice polygamy in these communities. At the core of Krakauerâs book are brothers Ron and Dan Lafferty, who insist they received a commandment from God to kill a blameless woman and her baby girl. Beginning with a meticulously researched account of this appalling double murder, Krakauer constructs a multi-layered, bone-chilling narrative of messianic delusion, polygamy, savage violence, and unyielding faith. Along the way he uncovers a shadowy offshoot of Americaâs fastest growing religion, and raises provocative questions about the nature of religious belief.
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Timequake
by Kurt Vonnegut
A New York Times Notable Book from the acclaimed author of Slaughterhouse-Five, Breakfast of Champions, and Cat's Cradle. At 2:27pm on February 13th of the year 2001, the Universe suffered a crisis in self-confidence. Should it go on expanding indefinitely? What was the point? There's been a timequake. And everyoneâeven youâmust live the decade between February 17, 1991 and February 17, 2001 over again. The trick is that we all have to do exactly the same things as we did the first timeâminute by minute, hour by hour, year by year, betting on the wrong horse again, marrying the wrong person again. Why? You'll have to ask the old science fiction writer, Kilgore Trout. This was all his idea.
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When You Are Engulfed in Flames
by David Sedaris
A collection of essays celebrates the foibles of the author's everyday life in France and America, from an attempt to make coffee with water from a flower vase to a drug purchase in a North Carolina mobile home.