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One day I was wandering around The Strand, and saw some of J.G. Ballard's books out on display on a table. I was drawn to the street art style of the stencils, and the rainbow colored gradient of squares. I'd been curious about reading Ballard's novels anyway--weird, dark surreal science fiction. All that and the $6 price were enough to convince me to buy the book.
Then I read it. And while it's kind of hard for me to admit this, I think it might be a little too weird for my tastes. A man steals a plane and crashes it in the Thames river, is underwater for ten minutes, then emerges apparently unscathed. He is now seemingly trapped in the small London suburb of Shepperton, which is rapidly transforming into a jungle, with palm trees sprouting, marmosets showing up, etc. Whether the man has died and risen as a kind of messiah, or is about to die and has some kind of pre-death vision that seems to last weeks but is only a few seconds, is deliberately ambiguous.
Really, the book is kind of boring. It starts out with an interesting enough premise, but peters out pretty quickly. Plants grow out of nowhere, strange animals show up, and there's a little too much semen being shot all over the place (no kidding) by the narrator, who is naked even though nobody else knows it. This is essentially the plot for the rest of the book.
Kurt Vonnegut's first novel, Player Piano is also one of the first Vonnegut novels that I read. It is a dystopian novel that takes place in a near-future society that has eliminated the need for human workers through near-total mechanization. The upper class are the engineers and managers who keep things running, while the lower class, whose skills have been rendered useless, drink away their days with a sense of purposelessness. But a rebellion is stirring up.I read quite a lot of this type of book--the dystopian science fiction novel, that is--when I was in high school, counting the likes of 1984, Fahrenheit 451, and Brave New World* among my favorites. I don't know what the appeal was, but I'm certainly not alone--a recent New Yorker article discusses the recent trend of dystopian novels for young adults. I guess it's the ideal genre for angsty teens.*Speaking of which, in a 1973 Playboy interview Vonnegut says that in writing Player Piano he "cheerfully ripped off the plot of Brave New World whose plot had been cheerfully ripped off from Yevgeny Zamyatin's We." (The latter of which I have not read.)
After Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (and who doesn't start with that one), this is the first novel by Philip K. Dick that I read. I think I picked it at random because I liked the title. The book takes place in an alternate, dystopian 1988 (the future at the time of writing), in which a pop star loses his identity overnight: his friends and lovers don't remember him and no one has ever heard of his music or TV show. It is as if he's never existed. The world has become a police state after the "Second Civil War," and everyone must carry ID cards or be sent into a forced labor camp.
This is one of Dick's better novels, though not my favorite that I've read (that would probably be Ubik). I've gotta say though, I really wish they'd repackage his entire line. They could do so much better.
I had been curious about this book after Viking did a big push for it during Comic Con, so when I found a copy at work, I was pretty excited. It's kind of a mix of Harry Potter (not that I've read any of those books, but I imagine that in setting much of the book at a college for magicians it must bear at least some similarity to that series) and the Chronicles of Narnia, but with sex, drugs, despair, and a whole lot of f-words. I've read some criticisms claiming that the purpose of reading a fantasy novel is to escape from all the negative aspects of real life (despair, for one), and thus this book cannot really be considered a fantasy novel. However, for someone who doesn't really delve too deeply into the genre, if it's got magicians, magical worlds, talking animals, and centaurs (and this book has all four), then it's pretty safe to say that it's a fantasy novel. The real life troubles and heartaches only serve to make it all the more compelling. So take that, nerds.
I love the map of Fillory (the stand-in for Narnia) printed on the endpapers. It's one of the reasons the book actually made it to my shelf. As for the read itself, it wasn't a bad one (I loved the first couple of Narnia books when I was a kid, so that might be part of the appeal), but not particularly exceptional. I'll read the sequel though, should one ever be published.
After the movie The Minority Report came out, Pantheon published it as a standalone book. But since it's a short story, they packaged it as this oblong-shaped book with huge text to stretch it out into 112 pages. And like a sucker, I bought it.
It's a great story, of course, but I probably should have just bought the collection. Silly, silly me, falling for their merchandising schemes. 
The endpapers look kind of cool, with these weird binary code-like characters--which, if you look carefully, is actually the copyright information.
Like many of his works, Kurt Vonnegut's second novel The Sirens of Titan features elements of science fiction. The richest, luckiest man on Earth embarks on a journey that takes him from Earth to Mars to Mercury, back to Earth, and finally to Saturn's moon, Titan, where he again meets the man ostensibly responsible for the turn of events that have befallen him. The aliens from the planet Tralfamador, which appears in many of Vonnegut's later works, particularly Slaughterhouse-5, play a role as well. 
But the novel is not a typical science fiction novel--in fact, despite the aliens and interplanetary travel, it's not really science fiction at all, but rather pure satire, using those plot elements as more of a means to freely tell the story without any worldly hindrances.
A collection of short stories by the legendary horror writer H.P. Lovecraft, showcasing his development as a writer from his early works to the classics, such as "Herbert West, Reanimator" (the basis for the movie Reanimator) and the title story, which was recently made into a great silent film by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society. As the back cover copy says: "Credited with inventing the modern horror tradition, H.P. Lovecraft remade the genre in the early twentieth century, discarding ghosts and witches and instead envisaging mankind at the mercy of a chaotic and malevolent universe."
I bought this Penguin UK edition of this PKD novel at the great Glass Eye Books in Florence, MA--while a little more mainstream than some of Dick's brain-melters (this is the only way I can describe what happened to me while reading Ubik, and I assure you I was sober), it's still paranoid enough to feel like classic Philip K. Dick (which it is).
Interestingly enough, it seems that the man pictured on the back is not Philip K. Dick, but fellow science fiction writer Ted White, whose picture Dick sent to the publisher as a joke.
One day I was wandering around The Strand, and saw some of J.G. Ballard's books out on display on a table. I was drawn to the street art style of the stencils, and the rainbow colored gradient of squares. I'd been curious about reading Ballard's novels anyway--weird, dark surreal science fiction. All that and the $6 price were enough to convince me to buy the book.
