Books
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WARNING SPOILERS FOR BOTH MIRROR IN THE SKY AND KAZUO ISHIGURO’S NEVER LET ME GO! I didn’t need Aditi Khorana’s Mirror in the Sky to be the familiar science fiction story with alien Doppelganger cyborgs speaking pages from a high school Physics textbooks. The doses of physics she provided helped clarify the existence of the
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It was hard to read Hideyuki Kikuchi’s Vampire Hunter D: Dark Road Part 1 and 2 without scrambled images from the hero’s 1980s anime popping up in my head. Doris with the giant saucer-shaped, anime-eyes and ample cleavage, hunting dinosaurs at midnight in a little skirt and a laser rifle. Speaking quickly when she encounters
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WARNING POSSIBLE SPOILERS! Otsuichi’s short story collection, Zoo, starts from the perspective of a killer and ends with the perspective of a survivor. Many of the English language Goodreads reviews of Zoo mention the effectiveness of Otsuichi’s bare-bones, minimalistic writing style and his knack of turning ordinary life matters like divorce and sibling rivalry into
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The Book of Phoenix by Nnedi Okorafor WARNING POSSIBLE SPOILERS! I think the problem is I read the prequel immediately after reading the first book, Who Fears Death? While it is an interesting book that could have potentially explored the ethics of scientific/medical research and discovery, it doesn’t. The question posed but never discussed. The
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Lagoon by Nnedi Okorafor This is the third Nnedi Okorafor book I’ve read. The second didn’t really count because it was a prequel to the first. I kept thinking that this is what War of the Worlds would look like if it happened in modern Nigeria instead of 1950’s SoCal. Nnedi constantly reminds you that
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Aleksandar Hemon’s book of essays, The Book of My Lives reminded me that when I moved back home after failing to make it on my own after college, Yugoslavians were leaving their homes to escape what The Atlantic called “horrific acts of ethnic cleansing” in a “long, complex, and ugly” war. Hemon’s book documents his search for a new
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An 80s song for an 80s story. There are two very enigmatic men in Lyddie’s life: Phelps, her botanist husband, who has been missing for several months, and Axel, a self-absorbed East German artist she met several years ago when she studied architecture in Germany. Four years ago Lyddie left Berlin choosing Phelps over Axel.
Vincent Young 