Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Bibliophile

I love books. This is my current pile.

Replay by Ken Grimwood (1944-2003) won the World Fantasy Award and is the one I'm actually 'reading' right now. It is awesome! *
Truth and Beauty by Ann Patchett
Disgrace by JM Coetzee
The Kite Runner by Khalid Hosseini
The God Theory by Bernard Haisch
A Year of Pleasures by Elizabeth Berg


* Here's the blurb on Replay:

Jeff Winston was forty-three and trapped in a tepid marriage and a dead-end job, waiting for that time when he could be truly happy, when he died. And then he woke up and he was eighteen, with all his memories of the next twenty-five years intact. He could live his life again, avoiding the mistakes, making money from his knowledge of the future, seeking happiness. Until he dies at forty-three and wakes up back in college again.


It's a very good story and explores a lot of questions about predestination, our roles in life, the choices we make, and the society we live in.

Quote from the book during Jeff's first return to 1963:

"The future: hideous plagues, a revolution in sexual attitudes achieved and then reversed, triumph and tragedy in space, city streets haunted by null-eyed punks in leather and chains an spiked pink hair, death-beams in orbit around the polluted, choking earth ... Christ, Jeff thought with a shudder, from this viewpoint his world sounded like the most nightmarish of science fiction. In many ways, the reality he'd grown used to had more in common with movies like Blade Runner than it did with the sunny naivete of early 1963. "

1 comment:

R.J. Keller said...

BOOKS!!!!

You were right. The Kite Runner was amazing.