"Dance, Dance, Dance" by Haruki Murakami

This book is Murakami's 6th novel and it should be kind of a sequel of 'Wild Sheep Chase', but not exactly.  The unnamed narrator (Baku- I in Japanese) spent 4 years doing mostly nothing since he came back from Sapporo, Hokaido and the Dolphin Hotel, however he keeps feeling drawn back to it, and hears the girl who dissappeared there crying for him. Baku goes to Sapporo again, but the old Dolphin hotel is gone. There is a shiny-looking monstrosity instead.  However the SheepMan is still there and so is a cute receptionist (Yumiyoshi is her name we learn at the end, how fascinating that many characters in Murakami's books have no  names or symbolic names) which has also seen the dark 16th floor and 'is connected' in the SheepMan's switchboard (we learn later).
Baku goes back to Tokyo with an angst-filled teenager of 13 who is also psychic, in a way.  Baku is lost in the world of his superstar actor-friend, the superstar parents of Yuki (famous writer and photographer, the writers name an anagram of Haruki Murakami).  He becomes a baby sitter for the little Yuki and takes her to Hawaii with generous monetary help from her parents, who cannot be bothered, it seems with full-time parenting. In all that, the connections to the world of the SheepMan do not weaken, whether it is through a Thai hooker or a vision of Kiki that leads Baku to an apartment with six skeletons.
Back in Tokyo, and away from the police who gave Baku hell for a few days before because of the murder of a high-class call-girl Mai, his actor-friend turns out to have murdered Kiki, or maybe not? Maybe Kiki just disappeared from this world as if she never existed here.  However dream and reality melds for Baku, as in most Murakami novels, and maybe that is how it should be.  We all live in personal realities which are just individual reflections and bastardizations of the objective reality, which cannot be objectively perceived anyway, thanks to our human senses.  Thus is everything is subjective why not push that subjectivity into directions which makes sense only to us and make only us happy instead of buying into the current consensus reality being pushed down our throats from every possible direction.
At the end, as all Murakami's books, this one is also about losing something, getting lost yourself, and then finding everything, after one passes through a myriad of trials and soul-searchings, some in the outside world and some in the inside one.

"Emotional Intelligence" by Daniel Goleman

The entire book could probably be summarized in a few paragraphs, and I am being generous there.  The problem with all these self-help books, even in the ruse of psychology textbooks-wannabes is that they all state the obvious: "don't get upset", "be more balanced", "don't feel bad", "take action" and similar blah, blah, which is obvious to any thinking person, but the problem is that we can't get ourselves to do what we know needs to be done because of emotional holdbacks.  Of course the bully shouldn't bully the other children but work on his own emotional and family issues.  But how to do it? What exactly to do? Step by step.  The only thing that most self-help books seem to imply is that we all need to get a therapist.  Which should be just fine if one can afford it, or have one's insurance pay for it, but most people out there cannot. Then you need good friends.  Or a supportive and understanding family.  Sure.  But what if you can't get any of those or you don't have them readily available?

The book postulates that there is such a thing as emotional intelligence and that it is different from the regular, IQ intelligence.  Then goes on to beat around the bush and quote stories and case studies from author's practice and his own life (how NOT tacky) where the principles of the so-called emotional intelligence are demonstrated and proved-by-anecdote. Overall a tedious reading, as most of these books are, and not much new knowledge to be obtained than what would one get by reading an average Wikipedia page on the issue.

"A Farewell to Arms" by Ernest Hemingway

A second read of this classic.  I saw the movie too, but I didn't like it too much; too stiff and dry, which is definitely not the book, if you understand it right.  The first time I read it, it was in translation, and translation never does justice to the real thing.  That's one of the reasons I am trying to learn as many languages as possible. Hemingway's English is a special language.  It is simple, creeps up on you without you even noticing and grips you and won't let go, like that little animal from Jack London's stories.  The language is simple, the words are simple, but it is in that simplicity that the most horrifying events and the deepest emotions, loss, love, in-love, out-of-love are described with more emotional effect than the most pompous 19th century prose.

Hemingway started out as a journalist, so his style started in journalistic factualism and brevity.  He also fought in WWI, and in the the Italian Army, so the character in the book is largely himself, though, of course, poetic license allows for plenty of 'what could have happened' scenarios.  The story is of an American volunteer in the Italian Army, driver of an ambulance and also a low-rank officer.  He sees and talks about the real war.  Not the patriotic BS that the masses are being fed in the cities, but the pointless, senseless killing and apathy and absence of any morale or will to fight, except among the dumb and the idiots and the ones profiteering from it.  The only respite from the constant killing and attempts to escape the front on the smart ones part are the whorehouses, and the big event there is when the girls get changed.

Our hero drinks hard, talks hard and records even harder conversations of his fellow men, half of which despise him, especially the higher-up officers, and the other half are trying to get something from him.  Just like real life.  It is the realism of the novel that is most striking. It happens during WWI, but it could be any conflict, anywhere, anytime, from the Romans to Libya, human nature doesn't change.  Homo homini lupus est.  And it has to be that way, otherwise we wouldn't have evolved.  And nowhere that is more evident than during time of war.  There is a love story, of course, though it doesn't get fully developed until the end of the book, and it is better that way, as the infantile English nurse with her constant gibberish gets on one's nerves, and, no matter how awful it sounds, there is a smidgen of a relief when she doesn't survive the childbirth.  The character goes back to his hotel, his wife and child dead. That is the last sentence of the novel.

The real pleasure in the novel is the language.  The language flows and is natural and is interesting in ways and places one would not expect to have interest, especially for the reader in the second decade of the 21st century - not enough sex or graphic description of violence and suffering.  Everything is understated and explained in regular, everyday language, which only makes it more authentic and genuine.  One has a feeling that is actually there and knows that the author has been there.

"Choke" by Chuck Palahniuk

This is the second book I read by Palahniuk, after I was amazed by Fight Club, both the book and the movie, so I looked for more of his work.  This book is quite more specific and disturbing than Fight Club, but follows more or less the same topics, as all Palahniuk's books are.  The main character is a sex addict who is also a son of a single mother who spent her entire life in jail for different acts of social terrorism and kidnapping.  Palahniuk describes the sex addiction working groups and the people who come there in great detail, but with superfluous gory details which actually detract from the strength of the book.  I prefer Murakami's subtle and metaphorical description of the greatest evils and deeds.  Palahniuk actually succeeds in making even mundane actions, like flossing of teeth, into disgusting gore-fests, complete with description of rotten chunks of food and bleeding gums.
Victor Mancini, the main character, chokes on food in restaurants and has people save him; people who become his life-long sponsors because he gave them the pleasure and meaning of saving another person's life.  He also works as an actor in a pioneer fortress nearby and describes the drug use and debauchery that goes on there.  Eventually his mother dies and the doctor that was going to save her turns to be just another patient.   Victor is arrested and his diaries of step 4 in SA are discovered, so all his dirtiest deeds are being read aloud in the police station.  He tries to choke to die, but is saved again by the policemen.  It becomes a metaphore for his entire life: choking, but unable to die.

"Norwegian Wood" by Haruki Murakami

This is, hands down, one of the most beautiful love stories ever written, in the history of humanity, rivaling Romeo  and Juliet.  The fantastic elements from other Murakami books are almost completely absent.  Murakami said he wanted to write an "ordinary" story.  It propelled him to a superstar in his native Japan upon publication and much to his surprise.  A movie was made in 2010 with Kiko Daniel as Midori but a 39-year old actress was cast as Naoko? That makes no sense, though I haven't seen the movie yet.  And I don't think I want to see it by myself.  It would be too much to bear.  The book ends sadly and happily, as most Murakami's books, but it is a tear-jerker, make no mistake.
The book depicts several years in the life of Toru Watanabe, an 18 year old student in Tokyo, who becomes almost 21 by the end of the book.  The story contrasts the beautiful but so fragile, physically and emotionally, Naoko, and the vivacious, honest, down-to-earth and full of life Midori, the other love interest of Toru.  Watanabe is a witness of the student protests in 1969 in Tokyo, as the book happens '69-'71.  Toru is torn between Naoko, who is in mental assylum and the former girlfriend of his best friend Kizuke who killed himself at age 17, and Midori, his fellow student from drama class, who has been forced to grow up ahead of her years because of family disasters.
The emotional life of Toru is depicted with such honesty, emotion and depth, one cannot help but feel it deeply and identify with the character who seem to take a very philosophical view to all the terrible things he has to go through and all the decisions life forces him to make.  Toru Watanabe is very alike a young Toru Okada from the Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.  Toru's college friend is Kasagawa, who is very smart and learned, studying diplomacy, but has very little scruples left.  Kasagawa brings Toru around Tokyo to hunt girls for one night stands, and Toru is initially excited but after 7-8 times, he gives up, feeling the loneliness only growing.  he breaks all connections with Kasagawa when, several years after the book events, he is completely unemotional towards the suicide of his college girlfriend, who went through so much for him, and whom Toru was secretly liking.
An amazing, honest, human, real book, about real people and real emotions. No pretense, no attitude, no high-brow, just emotions and people, the way they really are.

"Wild Sheep Chase" by Haruki Murakami

On the heels of the 'Wind-Up Bird Chronicle' which, although starting slow, by the last few chapters it became my new top-favorite book, the "Wild Sheep Chase' is more organized, more 'ordinary' if that can be said about any Murakami's work, and definitely more accessible, although not as rewarding at the end.  It is the third tome in the "The Rat Trilogy" and although "Dance, Dance, Dance" continues with the same characters, the plot is completely different.

Again, the book starts somewhere in the middle of the story, and then each chapter jumps around the past and future to slowly start forming the background story.  The book start with the unnamed narrator being left by his wife of 4 years who had had an affair with his friend for the last year.  Almost all the characters in the book are unnamed or referred by labels and nick names.  The narrator is a partner in a small advertising agency in Tokyo, however all hell breaks loose when he publishes a picture of sheep that his friend "The Rat" sends him from Hokaido.  He is contacted by a powerful right-wing political figure and set on a wild sheep chase, from which his life will be forever changed.

The narrator meets his new girlfriend few months after his divorce.  She is a call-girls, a translator, an ear-model and also somewhat psychic, at least when relating to narrator's sheep chase.  Like most female characters in Murakami's books, she is quirky, says strange things, lives life by strange principles and dissapears from the narrator's life unceremoniously before the end of the book, explained in only a couple of sentences.  The narration is split between Tokyo and remote parts of Hokaido.  At the end it ends in anti-climax, nothing really happens or gets resolved.  The narrator goes back to his old life, the politician dies, the Rat dies (in a very weird, post-modern way), and everything goes on as if the sheep-chase never happened.

"Pigs Have Wings" by P.G. Wodehouse

  Recommended by many as a great intro to Wodehouse's work, this book is a classic example of English humor.  Although Jeeves, Wodehouse's most famous creation, does not figure in the book, we have a close surrogate in the buttler Beech, but even more in the figure of Galahad Gully Treepwood , the brother of Lord Elmsworth, the pig-breeder and competitor of Baron Parslow.  The plot is quite silly: two lesser British nobles are vying for the prize of the fattest pig, and when a few resourceful buttlers, siblings and servants get involved, along with a few romantic subplots, it becomes a chaos of miscommunication and misplanning.

  The book uses lots of names in the beginning and it is somewhat difficult to follow all these British antiquated names, but by the middle of the book, one gets used to them. There is plenty of humor, but it is the British kind, tongue-in-cheek and dead-pan being ever-present. Overall an interesting book and a good introduction to Wodehouse's works, but a book about Jeeves would be a better way to get to know his opus.

"Foundation and Earth" by Isaac Asimov

  This is the last book of the foundation series, timeline-wise, although not the last one written, as Asimov wrote two prequels after this volume, which tie the Foundation series even more tightly into the Robot series, to the level that Hari Seldon's wife was a robot.  It is basically a continuation of the same story from the previous book,  where the exiled counsellor, Golan Trevize, is trying to figure out if he made the right decision when he gave his nod to Gaia and eventually to Galaxia (in the previous volume "Foundation's Edge"), and withdrew it from both the Foundation and the Second Foundation, leaving their leaders furious.  Trevize now embarks on galaxy-wide search for Earth, the mythical 'origin' planet of the entire human race, now populating the entire galaxy.  He finds that every reference to Earth is carefully deleted from any and all record keeping systems of the known universe, but then he discovers the "Spacer" worlds and coordinates for three of them.

  In this way Asimov ties the Foundation series with his Robot series, which is in a much closer future alternate universe, and originally was unconnected.  He further completes that tie when in the last chapter of the book reveals that the secretive 'man in the shadow' was no one else but Daneel Olivaw, the most famous protagonist of Asimov's 'Robot' stories.   On the three Spacer world they visit, the crew is always exposed to danger which is usually only escaped by the 'deus-ex-machinae' device of 'Bliss' the representative of Gaia on the ship, who is also accidentally a very sexy woman, in a physical relationship with the third crew member J. Pelorath, a mythologist.

  The book is less of a character-based novel than a barely-disguised scientific discourse in futurism of the highest sort, about the future of the entire human race, and it shows in cold logic that this is the only viable way of long-term (and long-term here meaning millions, even billions of years) survival for the entire race and life in general, in a case where the human race is the only sentient race in the galaxy, even in the universe, though the other galaxies are irrelevant in Asimov's fiction.  At moments the book reads very slow, as the flow is adulterated by huge tracts of non-sequitur monologues, and there is not much of the character drama for which the atmosphere of the original Foundation Trilogy was famous.  Both this and the previous volume won awards, don't get me wrong, but this might have been more like tribute to Asimov's universe, than to the readability of the tomes at hand. Ultimately, a great conclusion and tie-in with Asimov's other series, but definitely not for the beginner in Asimov's universe. 

"The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (ねじまき鳥クロニクル Nejimaki-dori Kuronikuru?)" by Haruki Murakami.

If I died yesterday, I would not have been richer for the shattering experience (in a good way!) that is the reading of "Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" by Mr. Murakami! Well, I am dramatizing, of course, as it took me almost three weeks to finish the audio book (with AMAZING voice acting by a SINGLE person, exactly the way I prefer it. It is an audio book, not radio-drama), but this book is becoming my new favorite book and that hasn't happened  since "Cien Anos de Soledad" replaced Tolkien about  10 years ago, and Tolkien replaced "Against the Fall of Night" about 7 years before that.

This book is a masterpiece of modern literature, seamlessly fusing all previous genres, and jumping and combining genres in a seemingly unintelligible jumble, just to let the reader realize, in an emotion catharsis, that all that is really not important anyway, and art is somewhere beyond all that, beyond form, right into the middle of the "thing in itself" to paraphrase Kant.  Without respect of linearity, whether of time or place, Mr. Murakami still weaves an irresistible web of characters and events that seem so real, one could almost swear one already knows them.  Starting with such seemingly trivial passages like several pages on cooking noodles and making coffee, the life of the main protagonist, Toru Okada, an educated, intelligent, but lacking ambition, man in his 30s, becomes more and more weird with every passing page culminating in, well, do we dare say it, well, Mr. Okada saved the World in a way.

Mr. Okada's wife Kumiko dissapears, and the entire book is mainly concerned with Mr. Okada trying to find her and get her back.  His brother-in-law Noboru Wataya is a powerful politician, who seems to have suddenly catapulted in power, but who hides a terrible dark family secret which threatens the very existence of his sister, Kumiko, just like driving their youngest sister into a suicide years ago.  Throw in there clairvoyant characters named after Mediterranean islands, Malta and Creta Kano; fashion designers who "fit" something evil out of people and are named Nutmeg and Cinnamon Asakawa, mother and son, and finally the diabolical Mr. Ishikawa, a disturbing charicature of a man, queerly resembling a familiar from the medieval magical grimoires.  Finally, the entire thread is held by an underaged teenage girl Mai Kasahara who through letters and personal visits, helps make sense of Mr.Wind-Up Bird's world, as she calls Mr. Okada.

This book is a masterpiece of world literature and true world heritage, the heritage of the entire human race.  It is a privilege to enjoy Mr. Murakami's book and I wish that pleasure upon many people to come!

"Xenocide" by Orson Scott Card

This is the third book in the "Ender Tetralogy", which was the original envisioning of the series (which got much expanded afterwards and pretty much turned into a franchise).  The original envisioning was a trilogy actually, "Xenocide" and the following book "Children of the Mind" supposing to be one volume, but it became too lengthy for one book, so it got split into two.  "Xenocide" is the only Ender Tetralogy book where the story doesn't end naturally on the last page, but actually ends in mid-action.  "Xenocide" is a very ambitious book, almost like a space opera of the likes of Dan Simmons or Ron Hubbard.  There are multiple settings (on two planets) stories, plots, twists, etc.

The Starway Congress fleet is advancing towards Lusitania with the MDD device on-board, while Ender is trying to get the piggies (pecaninos) and the hive queen off the planet before Jane is turned off for the most part.  A genetically enhanced, but OCD_controlled humans on the planet called Path are much more intelligent than normal humans, and are used by Congress to advance their aims.  Path is populated by Chinese, and lives in a very traditional, patriarchal, class society.  Meanwhile on Lusitania, human scientists are trying to develop a form of the Descolada which will give Pecaninos their life processes, but will not be aggressive and harmless to humans.  They call this new virus the "Recolada" but it only gets created during the first faster-than-light experimental trip.

Eventually Jane with the help of Ender, Grego and some insights from the Hive Queen finds a way how to travel faster than light and pretty much instantenously to anywhere in the universe. However, as a consequence of the first trip, Peter and Valentine, as they were in Ender's mind were created in flesh and blood.  The book ends with Peter bringing a virus that will cure the people of Path of their OCD.  The solution to all plots is in the next and final book of the "Ender Tetralogy" - "Children of the Mind".

"Goodbye, Columbus : And Five Short Stories" by Philip Roth

Roth's freshman work, published when he was only 26.  Roth has guaranteed his place in American literature, despite the claims that he is just a Hemingway imitator.  The stories in this book, of which the title story is almost a novella, are concerned with the everyday lives of Jewish-Americans and how does being Jewish color the American experience without detracting from it, but quite on the contrary, adding and enriching it.  The stories are wonderfully vibrant, full of real life and dialogue, and Roth manages to make the mundane details relevant and enticing.  The title story is about a working class Jewish boy who falls in love with a girl from a rich Jewish family.  Although initially their relationship is going well, eventually the differences in their class and world-views will lead to inevitable break-up, however it is the process of story telling which is so amazing in Roth, as he manages to convey the warmth, charm and authenticity of real life and real people, with all their mannerisms, shortcomings and occasional nastiness.

The second story, "The conversion of the Jews" is a powerful reflection on the Jewish identity and its place in the Christian-dominated North-America.  Another masterful description of Jewish Sunday school, the proverbial Good Rabbi and the smothering Jewish mother.  The third story "Defender of the Faith" about wartime observance of Jewish tradition and the conflict in the Jewish Corporal between following his secular job and giving due respect to his ancestral religion and compatriots.  "Epstein" is probably my favorite story in the book: humorous, everyday, and yet deep and reflecting the deepest human urges and motivations.  "You Can't tell a man by the song he sings" talks about Roth's high school experience in Newark, NJ, and an encounter with a bully who turns into a friend and then into a bully again.  The final story "Eli, the Fanatic" follows a common story in Roth's writing about coming to terms with being jewish and all the baggage it comes with, and yet trying to 'fit in' and be like everybody else in the environment.  Eli, a respected lawyer in a largely gentile, upper-class, suburb, is given the task to 'discipline' the newly settles Jewish orphanage, with kids orphaned from the Holocaust, and make them less conspicuous and intrusive to the wealthy suburbanites.

It is a hearth-warming book, full of human warmth and hope, a gem in modern literature.

"Speaker for the Dead" by Orson Scott Card

This book was written before "Ender's Game" and the previous book was supposed to be just introduction to "Speaker for the Dead" while in reality ended up being more famous. The book is set 3000 years after the event in "Ender's Game". Humanity has settled the 100 worlds that the Buggers left behind and Ender's name is universally reviled as the Xenocider. Andrew Wiggin, traveling under his real name and as Speaker for the Dead, learns about Lusitania, the only planet where a new intelligent race was discovered, the Pecaninos, or the "piggies".

Since this planet has not been known during the Buggers, it is an enigma to the settlers, Brazilian Catholic community, who isolate themselves from the rest of the planet by the means of pain-inducing fence. Ender arrives on the planet after 22 years of space travel, as he has been called to speak the death of one of the Xenologists (Xanador in Portuguese) who was killed by the piggies. Ender brings the dormant Hive Queen as well, who chooses this planet as the future settlement site for the Buggers.

Eventually Ender brings all three communities together, even though provoking a harsh reaction from the other 100 worlds who see the piggies as a threat. It turns out piggies are half-animal/half-plant and they developed that way to adapt to the virus introduced on their planet which destroyed almost all species that couldn't switch to the plant/animal dichotomy. At the end of the book, the Hive Queen awakes and drinks water and eats while laying her first legs and enjoying being free.

"Ender's Game" by Orson Scott Card

One of the seminal books of science fiction and on everybody's top 10 list, this book captivates with the strength of characters described as well as by the fullness of the universe and the story within which it is set, painting the timeless human characteristics and dilemmas with a new brush. Card is a Mormon, and has done missionary works for the Church of the Latter Day Saints in Brazil, however the book is all but devoid of Mormon symbolism, which is uncharacteristic for Mormon writers, though Card lives in North Carolina. The book is a first volume in a series, as all modern authors try to exploit their creations by writing a series of books, recycling the same characters. However, the first volume in the series was initially written, per Card, only as a scene setting for his actual novel, "Speaker for the Dead" which became the second book in the series, with Ender as the main protagonist.

The story is about a 6 year old boy, Andrew or better known as Ender, a name he chose for himself, who is the product of eugenics, as are his older sister Valentine and oldest brother, Peter, a sadistic boy, who is perpetually envious at Ender, and only when Ender is removed from Earth, does he develop into an arguably positive character. Ender is a part of a military program, from the IF, the International Forces, military of the united earth (more or less), created to fight the insectoid alien race "The Buggers", who attacked Earth and the Solar System twice in the last 70 years. The Earthlings are not waiting for a third attack, the Buggers having multiple star systems at their disposal for resources, while the humans barely have explored the inner Solar System.

The most promising kids are collected from the entire planet and sent into a low-orbit staton where they play "The Game" in the Battle Room in zero gravity. Ender makes friends and enemies here, but comes on top at the end, not thanking to any help from the administration, who advance him rapidly only to put him in a more difficult position. After graduating Battle School, Ender is sent to Command School, which trains the future highest strategic commanders of the IF. Ender has shown better than any student in the history of both schools, but at the Command School he is isolated from the rest of the kids and only given access to a "Simulator" which simulates real space battles, which Ender commands, but does personally pilot any of the crafts. Eventually, Ender graduates from Command School and his graduation day is the brightest day for humanity, which turns into the saddest day for Ender some time after, when he discovers the truth about their enemy, which was not supposed to be an enemy at all.

Very refreshingly, Ender wins his final battle with about 50 pages of the book left. The real twist is in the last 20 pages, which set the scene for the next volume, "Speaker for the Dead". An amazing book that anyone should read, whether sci-fi fan or not!

"On the Road" by Jack Kerouac

The manifesto of the Beat Generation, "On the Road" by the French Canadian Jack Kerouac is one amazing book. If you haven't read anything from the modern/post-modern genre, this would probably be a good book to start with. It describes four trips across the USA and Mexico taken by "Salvatore", the main protagonist, a surrogate for the author himself who based the book solely on his own personal experience and the voluminous notebooks which he always carried with him. Sal lives in NYC and his "life on the road" starts when Dean Moriarty enters his life. Dean is what would become the typical Anti-Hero of the age. He drinks, he smokes, he takes any drug he could get his hands on, he is unfaithful to his friends and lover, never kept a steady job and is in a constant flux.

Sal and Dean go to San Francisco, stopping at Denver, both of which cities would become their common starting and ending points. Eventually all trips finish back in NYC, where Sal lives permanently and Dean sometimes. Sal says that when spring arrives in NYC he gets the urge to go somewhere, and when Dean is around, there is always somewhere to go, even if it is nowhere. The second trip goes along the Midwest and includes driving a rich-man's car through the entire country up to Chicago. The third and fourth trips go all the way to Mexico city and many cities in Mexico, where Sal describes the bordellos, the hookers, the life of the people, the atmosphere, etc.

However, the main idea of the book is that true art is like Jazz, whether it is music or the written word. It is living, evolving, unclean, unfinished but always touching and beautiful. Kerouac stated that he tried to write his books as Jazz music is written, spontaneous, with lots of improvisation, and for the most part it works great, however some parts read like a very cursory travel reportage. Although I am not the greatest fan of this writing style, this cult-status book definitely deserves a reading and is refreshing and original.

"Stranger in a Strange Land' by Robert E. Heinlein

A revolutionary book in 1962 when it was published (written through the previous 12 years) today Heinlein's masterpiece strikes as timid and naive. The 'free love' part doesn't come until the final third of the book, and even then it is not terribly provocative. Further more, to rise the ire of the modern readers, the work is written in the spirit of the 1950s, where black people were seen as inferior, women even more (Heinlein writes 9 out of 10 women who get raped had part of the blame), and there are direct references to homosexuality being an illness and unnatural. This makes this book just as difficult to read as are the Asimov's books from the 50s with all his 'atomics' and similar retro sci-fi.

The book is about Valentine Michael Smith, a 20 year old man who was raised on Mars by Martians who do not resemble us but have intelligence and a civilization. Smith was conceived on the ship of the first manned expedition to Mars (all of whom who died on landing). The second manned mission to Mars, after the "Lyle" drive was discovered, and World War 3 finished, brought back smith, who had no idea of the life on earth or humans, but possessed some abilities which, although seen as normal on Mars, would seem supernatural on Earth. Smith was also an owner of the planet Mars, and much other industry, through odd legal loopholes.

Eventually Smith gets out of the hospital, makes peace with the General Secretary of the UN and the World Government, and with the help of an aging intellectual, Jubal Harshaw, an investigative reporter, Ben Caxton, and a sexy nurse Gillian Broadmore, he sets on discovering the world, encountering and experiencing religion, especially in the powerful new sect, the "Fosterites", in whose churches whoring, drinking, gambling and general debauchery was encouraged. He tries to become a stage magician, but his magic is real, and he hasn't realized the secret of laughter yet, which comes to him later, understanding it to be a device for keeping pain at bay.

Smith organizes his own church, called "Church of All Worlds" where Martian language and telepathy are practiced. He builds a temple where his brethren practice nudism, communal living, free sex, paranormal abilities, etc. However, the Fosterites see him as threat and the masses are scared by the new religion and Messiah, so his temple gets burned (everyone teleports safely out) and then, after a long conversation with Jubal Harshaw, the patron saint of the new religion, Smith goes out in the crowd surrounding his hotel trying to pass his message to them, who promptly kill him and tear him to pieces, which he allows, and thus comes to an end all Messiahs come to.

It seems like Heinlein wanted to find his own religion and spirituality, and although was fully aware of the scientific truth which invalidates most of the major religions, he still created Smith, who's his 'Space Age Jesus' preserving the tenets of Christianity in which Heinlein was brought up and which he couldn't get himself to give up, but also mixing it with plenty of science and fiction to create the perfect religion for the modern times (at least the 60s) and embracing the full potential of the human beings. It is hinted at the end of the book that the Martian "Old Ones" (spirits of dead Martians who do all the science and research and governing on Mars) intend to destroy Earth because the humans are 'sick' and Smiths church with its curriculum is the only chance for the humanity to save itself from the faith of the fifth planet which the Martians destroyed eons ago, in which place there is now an asteroid belt (Faeton).

"Conan the Warrior" by Robert E. Howard

Sometimes called the 'Volume 7' of the Conan collected stories (as Howard only wrote short stories), this book contains three interesting Conan stories from his later years (later 30s, early 40s).

The first story 'Red Nails' is quite good, some say among the best Conan stories written by Howard. It includes Valeria, the pirate, as well. It has to do with a forgotten city in the middle of nowhere with two warring tribes inside engaged in genocidal war. Conan and Valeria help one side, only to destroy all at the end.

The second story, "Jewels of Gwahlur" is more difficult to follow, but it is about stealing of the most valuable jewels in the world, which Conan achieves splendidly eventually, and to his own benefit mostly. The third story "Beyond the Black River" has to deal with Conan fighting the Picts, which in reality is another name for the Ancient Scots or Celts, but in Howard's story they are tropical savages with terrible cults.

A very entertaining book with three remarkable Conan stories (sometimes this volume is numbered 7 in the Conan collected stories), a recommended reading for every Conan fan or a casual reader looking for good adventure.