11/22/63

11/22/63

Stephen King

Genre: Historical Fiction

Summary (from Goodreads): Life can turn on a dime—or stumble into the extraordinary, as it does for Jake Epping, a high school English teacher in Lisbon Falls, Maine. While grading essays by his GED students, Jake reads a gruesome, enthralling piece penned by janitor Harry Dunning: fifty years ago, Harry somehow survived his father’s sledgehammer slaughter of his entire family. Jake is blown away...but an even more bizarre secret comes to light when Jake’s friend Al, owner of the local diner, enlists Jake to take over the mission that has become his obsession—to prevent the Kennedy assassination. How? By stepping through a portal in the diner’s storeroom, and into the era of Ike and Elvis, of big American cars, sock hops, and cigarette smoke... Finding himself in warmhearted Jodie, Texas, Jake begins a new life. But all turns in the road lead to a troubled loner named Lee Harvey Oswald. The course of history is about to be rewritten...and become heart-stoppingly suspenseful.

Review:  I loved this historical fiction novel by Stephen King!  He has this amazing ability to take a hypothetical question (in this case, what would happen if someone could go back in time to try to stop the JFK assassination?) and turn it into a fascinating and impossible to put down story.  Sure, there are a few creepy references to something devilish, and a few disturbingly gory descriptions of violence, but overall this was the unbelievable story of an ordinary man trying to live an ordinary life while trying to do something quite extraordinary.  I didn't know too many of the details around the assassination, so it was interesting and educational to learn more about Lee Harvey Oswald's life and King's take on the conspiracy theories surrounding JFK's assassination.

Rating: 5 stars

Armada

Armada

Ernest Cline

Genre: Science Fiction

Summary (from Goodreads):Zack Lightman has spent his life dreaming. Dreaming that the real world could be a little more like the countless science-fiction books, movies, and videogames he’s spent his life consuming. Dreaming that one day, some fantastic, world-altering event will shatter the monotony of his humdrum existence and whisk him off on some grand space-faring adventure.

But hey, there’s nothing wrong with a little escapism, right? After all, Zack tells himself, he knows the difference between fantasy and reality. He knows that here in the real world, aimless teenage gamers with anger issues don’t get chosen to save the universe.

And then he sees the flying saucer.

Even stranger, the alien ship he’s staring at is straight out of the videogame he plays every night, a hugely popular online flight simulator called Armada—in which gamers just happen to be protecting the earth from alien invaders.

No, Zack hasn’t lost his mind. As impossible as it seems, what he’s seeing is all too real. And his skills—as well as those of millions of gamers across the world—are going to be needed to save the earth from what’s about to befall it.

It’s Zack’s chance, at last, to play the hero. But even through the terror and exhilaration, he can’t help thinking back to all those science-fiction stories he grew up with, and wondering: Doesn’t something about this scenario seem a little…familiar?

At once gleefully embracing and brilliantly subverting science-fiction conventions as only Ernest Cline could, Armada is a rollicking, surprising thriller, a classic coming of age adventure, and an alien invasion tale like nothing you’ve ever read before—one whose every page is infused with the pop-culture savvy that has helped make Ready Player One a phenomenon.

Review:  I LOVED Cline's first novel, Ready Player One, and this book didn't live up to the high expectations I had for it.  It was still a fun quick read with an entertaining and fast-moving plot, but the depth of character was lacking, and the 1980s references were needlessly overdone.  And while Cline acknowledges that he borrowed ideas from all kinds of 1980s books and movies (and references them in the book as background knowledge that the main character shows off continuously), the ideas seemed a bit too borrowed.  I think the book would have benefited from being longer and more involved; it felt like it was written and published quickly to take advantage of the popularity of Ready Player One.

Rating: 3 stars

Ender's Game

Ender's Game

Orson Scott Card

Genre: Science Fiction

Summary (from Goodreads): The war with the Buggers has been raging for a hundred years, and the quest for the perfect general has been underway for almost as long. Enter Andrew "Ender" Wiggin, the result of decades of genetic experimentation.

Is Ender the general Earth so desperately needs? The only way to find out is to throw him into ever-harsher training at Battle School, to chip away and find the diamond inside, or destroy him utterly. Ender Wiggin is six years old when his training begins. He will grow up fast.

But Ender is not the only result of the experiment. His two older siblings, Peter and Valentine, are every bit as unusual as he is, but in very different ways. Among the three of them lie the abilities to remake a world. If, that is, the world survives.

Review:  The problem with this book is that it has a very specific target audience, and I am not it.  Ben read it as a smart young teenage boy and loved it; I read it as a smart middle-aged woman, and appreciated the groundbreaking (for 1977/1985) aspects of video game warfare, but despaired over the treatment of poor, sweet little Ender.  I was also offended that only one girl made it to Battle School, and (spoiler alert), she's the only one who cracked up at the end.  I get that this book was written in the early 1980s, but the ratio of girls to boys (1 to about 300) seemed completely unfair.  It was an interesting story, and I became invested in the character of Ender, and was happy to see how he made great progress even given the intentional stressors in this life.  But the bullying and subsequent violence was really hard to read about.

Rating: 4 stars

Seveneves

Seveneves

Neal Stephenson

Genre: Science Fiction, Dystopian Fiction

Summary (from Goodreads): An exciting and thought-provoking science fiction epic—a grand story of annihilation and survival spanning five thousand years.

What would happen if the world were ending?

A catastrophic event renders the earth a ticking time bomb. In a feverish race against the inevitable, nations around the globe band together to devise an ambitious plan to ensure the survival of humanity far beyond our atmosphere, in outer space.

But the complexities and unpredictability of human nature coupled with unforeseen challenges and dangers threaten the intrepid pioneers, until only a handful of survivors remain . . .

Five thousand years later, their progeny—seven distinct races now three billion strong—embark on yet another audacious journey into the unknown . . . to an alien world utterly transformed by cataclysm and time: Earth.
 
Review:  The premise of this book was fascinating - what would happen if the people of the world found out that it was going to be destroyed in two years?  The majority of the story focuses on how engineers jury-rig the International Space Station to be able to support enough people to continue the human race.  While this section was well-written, interesting, compelling and somewhat plausible, I thought there was too much focus on technical space engineering, and not enough on the emotions of the main characters.  This section ended too abruptly for me, just at a time when I was getting really interested in how the remaining survivors would manage to survive longer.  The last quarter of the book skips ahead 5000 years, and giving a glimpse into how humanity has managed to survive, and how they attempt to return to Earth.  I would have preferred more information, more emotion from the characters, and more believability.  And again, the ending was too abrupt.

Rating: 3.5 stars

Station Eleven

Station Eleven

Emily St. John Mandel

Genre: Fiction, Science Fiction

Summary (from Goodreads): An audacious, darkly glittering novel set in the eerie days of civilization's collapse, Station Eleven tells the spellbinding story of a Hollywood star, his would-be savior, and a nomadic group of actors roaming the scattered outposts of the Great Lakes region, risking everything for art and humanity.

One snowy night Arthur Leander, a famous actor, has a heart attack onstage during a production of "King Lear." Jeevan Chaudhary, a paparazzo-turned-EMT, is in the audience and leaps to his aid. A child actress named Kirsten Raymonde watches in horror as Jeevan performs CPR, pumping Arthur's chest as the curtain drops, but Arthur is dead. That same night, as Jeevan walks home from the theater, a terrible flu begins to spread. Hospitals are flooded and Jeevan and his brother barricade themselves inside an apartment, watching out the window as cars clog the highways, gunshots ring out, and life disintegrates around them.

Fifteen years later, Kirsten is an actress with the Traveling Symphony. Together, this small troupe moves between the settlements of an altered world, performing Shakespeare and music for scattered communities of survivors. Written on their caravan, and tattooed on Kirsten's arm is a line from "Star Trek: " "Because survival is insufficient." But when they arrive in St. Deborah by the Water, they encounter a violent prophet who digs graves for anyone who dares to leave.

Spanning decades, moving back and forth in time, and vividly depicting life before and after the pandemic, this suspenseful, elegiac novel is rife with beauty. As Arthur falls in and out of love, as Jeevan watches the newscasters say their final good-byes, and as Kirsten finds herself caught in the crosshairs of the prophet, we see the strange twists of fate that connect them all. A novel of art, memory, and ambition, "Station Eleven" tells a story about the relationships that sustain us, the ephemeral nature of fame, and the beauty of the world as we know it.
 
Review: I went into this book expecting it to be similar to Stephen King's The Stand, and it really wasn't.  That may have affected my rating a little.

This book follows the popular trend of shifting narrators and jumping back and forth in time, but I found the way it was handled a little distracting.  The summary indicates that it follows the story of Arthur Leander, moving through his past life and catching up with the present.  However, it seemed to follow his first wife, Miranda, even more than it followed Arthur, so that added yet another narrator to the story.  I think for me to enjoy a book written in this way, it has to be done perfectly, and this seemed a little disorganized.

Now, with that out of the way, I really enjoyed quite a lot about this book.  While I wanted to know more about life during and immediately following the pandemic, I was fascinated by descriptions of life 20 year after the pandemic is over.  The characters were vividly drawn, and the story was alternately beautifully moving and terrifyingly horrible.

Rating: 4 stars

The Martian

The Martian

Andy Weir

Genre: Science Fiction

Summary (from Goodreads):  Apollo 13 meets Cast Away in this grippingly detailed, brilliantly ingenious man-vs-nature survival thriller, set on the surface of Mars.

Six days ago, astronaut Mark Watney became one of the first men to walk on the surface of Mars. Now, he's sure he'll be the first man to die there.

It started with the dust storm that holed his suit and nearly killed him, and that forced his crew to leave him behind, sure he was already dead. Now he's stranded millions of miles from the nearest human being, with no way to even signal Earth that he's alive--and even if he could get word out, his food would be gone years before a rescue mission could arrive. Chances are, though, he won't have time to starve to death. The damaged machinery, unforgiving environment, or plain-old "human error" are much more likely to get him first.

But Mark isn't ready to give up yet. Drawing on his ingenuity, his engineering skills--and a relentless, dogged refusal to quit--he steadfastly confronts one seemingly insurmountable obstacle after the next. But will his resourcefulness be enough to overcome the impossible odds against him?

Review:  As I was reading this book, I forgot that it was fictional!  It seemed like an accounting of an event that actually happened, which appealed to me much more than science fiction that's too out there. Mark Watney is a resourceful engineer who gets stranded on Mars and has to figure out how to survive until a rescue mission can be launched.  He's obviously a clever guy, but it's his slightly snarky attitude towards the whole adventure that really made me love him.  The scientific details around space, engineering and chemistry were way over my head, but they seemed like they could be realistic.  The book is fast-paced, dramatic and completely believable; all-in-all, a really fun read. 

This is the first book I've reviewed that Ben has read, and he enjoyed it, too.  Becky, I was going to tell you to recommend this book to Brian, but I see from Goodreads that he's already read it.

Rating: 4.5 stars

Island 731

Island 731

Jeremy Robinson

Genre: Thriller, Science Fiction

Summary (from Goodreads):  The high adventure of James Rollins meets the gripping suspense of Matthew Reilly in Jeremy Robinson's explosive new thriller

Mark Hawkins, former park ranger and expert tracker, is out of his element, working on board the Magellan, a research vessel studying the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. But his work is interrupted when, surrounded by thirty miles of refuse,  the ship and its high tech systems are plagued by a series of strange malfunctions and the crew is battered by a raging storm.

When the storm fades and the sun rises, the beaten crew awakens to find themselves anchored in the protective cove of a tropical island...and no one knows how they got there. Even worse, the ship has been sabotaged, two crewman are dead and a third is missing. Hawkins spots signs of the missing man on shore and leads a small team to bring him back. But they quickly discover evidence of a brutal history left behind by the Island’s former occupants: Unit 731, Japan’s ruthless World War II human experimentation program. Mass graves and military fortifications dot the island, along with a decades old laboratory housing the remains of hideous experiments.

As crew members start to disappear, Hawkins realizes that they are not alone. In fact, they were brought to this strange and horrible island. The crew is taken one-by-one and while Hawkins fights to save his friends, he learns the horrible truth: Island 731 was never decommissioned and the person taking his crewmates may not be a person at all—not anymore.

Review: I was drawn to this book because of the comparison to James Rollins and Matthew Reilly, authors whose books I usually enjoy reading.  This book, however, was a little over the top for me.  I got caught up in the drama of the search for the missing crew members, but once it turned into a human and animal experimentation science fiction story, I found it too unbelievable and disturbingly gory to enjoy.  The main character was both incredibly skilled and supremely lucky, and the non-stop action was too much to take.

Rating: 2 stars