Category: Books

A fascinating extraterrestrial contact story that explores some deliciously thought-provoking scientific subjects and also offers insight into China’s history and culture.

A novel about a detached man who empathizes more with movies than his own life, which I thought I could relate to, but while I appreciated the characters, the novel failed to grip me from the beginning to the end.

A novel concept that never really develops into an interesting story. It’s fascinating to think that aliens are using a certain dude’s house as a way station to pass through and hang around, but none of them are particularly compelling and nothing that ensues in the plot is particularly interesting.

A thought provoking and morbidly comedic adventure through one disillusioned man’s attempt to expose the corruption of antiquated religion and establish his own church.

The true horror in this book is working in customer service. The boogeyman that appear later are kind of forgettable, but the social commentary made this book for me.

The book that destroyed the Soviet Union. The scariest part about communism was how it was well intentioned and most atrocities were caused by people who thought they were doing everything in the name of good.

…Except for Stalin, if you thought Hitler was bad, you should learn about this guy.

A thoroughly immersing and enlightening account of a single relatively poor family’s life in 1930s New York.

An ingenious mystery novel that feels fresh even after over a hundred years since its publication.

An interesting look at the culture of poor farmers in early 20th century rural America.

It really hit me how culture has such a profound effect on our lives that I sometimes find more things in common with fictional space aliens than characters based on real people.

You can grab the audiobook or kindle on amazon.

An interesting hard sci-fi story about using tachyons to communicate through time.

It reads almost like a fantasy novel at times, but The Last Kingdom is a very interesting depiction of the conflicts between English and the Danes in 9th century AD.

You can grab an audiobook or kindle on amazon.

I don’t know if it’s me having consumed too much zombie media in the recent years, but everything in Apocalypse of the Dead felt so generic I almost felt I was watching a new season of Walking Dead.

It’s a competent book, but I feel we’ve squeezed all the potential there was out of zombies a long time ago already, and all stories pertaining to them are starting to feel the same.

While not exactly on par with Anton Chekhov, Nikolai Gogol is too one of the masters of Russian short story that satirically conveys the timeless woes of man.

You can grab an audiobook from audible or even listen to some of the stories on youtube.

It may be inspired by unusually high level scientific concepts and quote works like Dante’s Inferno, but the core of A Wrinkle in Time it’s still a young adult book and shares most of the weaknesses prevalent in the genre, namely an overly simplistic cliche plot and unrealistic, hard-to-take-seriously characters.

You can grab an audiobook or kindle off amazon.

A collection of many semi-autobiographical short stories that reveal the horrors of the Vietnam War.

You can grab the audiobook from audible frontiers.

A sarcastic representation of American materialistic values in early 20th century, and the vacuousness of such life. Kind of reminded me of American Psycho minus the murders.

You can grab the paperback or audiobook here.

A fascinating read in the same vein as Stranger in the Strange Land that explores the idea of a Neanderthal from an advanced civilization visiting Earth from a parallel dimension.

You can grab a kindle version or an audiobook here.

A fascinating study of unwitting corruption of the clergy in the 19th century England, as well as the human condition of finding oneself trapped in such a situation despite striving to lead a pious life for all your mortal existence.

You can get the kindle version or audiobook here.

While they hardly ever offer anything particularly novel, John Saul’s books are always good to pick up when you’re looking for a light and relatively entertaining read.

I got it as an audiobook from audible and the narrator did a really good job at bringing the story to life.

All this thriller novel has is its interesting, exotic setting of Thailand, but it takes forever to get anywhere and the pay-off is not even that memorable. That said, I ended up really enjoying the stuff that the book taught me on traveling.