Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
Books come in all shapes and sizes, and more often than not they grow proportionally to how much their authors have to say and share with the world. There are, however, outliers such as Richard Bach‘s Jonathan Livingston Seagull, where an immense world of ideas is communicated through a very short and concise story.
Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
The unregulated growth of our species and its industrial potential has led to a problem which can no longer be ignored, if we intend to survive as the civilization we theoretically ought to be. This problem is well known to us all as climate change, and in his novel The City Where We Once Lived, Eric Barnes takes the time to imagine a world suffering the consequences of the present threats to our planet.
Estimated reading time: 7 minutes
War is something mankind has unfortunately known since ancient times, and probably even earlier if we count our ancestors who were too primitive to lead records. With thousands of years of hindsight and historical knowledge we’ve paradoxically only grown worse, capable of dishing out death on unprecedented scales. Throughout all those epochs, one idea seemed to unite all wars: their utter absurdity. This is the core of Joseph Heller‘s unforgettable classic, Catch-22.
Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
Many are the authors who try and find their place in the legal thriller genre, a domain demanding a lot of concrete knowledge and rock-hard facts. It seems, as a rule, the authors who come up with novels truly worth reading time and time again are the ones with some personal experience in the matter, something James Chandler puts to extensive use in his debut novel, Misjudged.
Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
The alarmingly growing rate of technological development has invariably popularized fiction which touches on the topic of the dark alleyways it could lead humanity down. The cyberpunk genre, most notably, has spread through all facets of the modern entertainment industry, but it can trace its roots all the way back to 1984, when William Gibson published Neuromancer, the first entry in the Sprawl Trilogy.
Estimated reading time: 7 minutes
As far as our most current research on the topic of time travel has taken us, it seems visiting the past is something bound to remain off-limits for the foreseeable future. However, the dream is very much alive, and so are the ideas swirling around it in the vast realms of literature. In her award-winning novel titled Doomsday Book, Connie Willis looks at it as a potentially invaluable learning tool.
Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
The reality of war is something nigh-impossible to understand for those of us who have never experienced it, and this goes double for the Second World War, the largest human conflict in history (so far). Nevertheless, authors like Irwin Shaw do their best to relay their experiences and observations to us, as he did in his timeless modern classic, The Young Lions.
Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
What I’m about to say is more a reflection of what I gather is general opinion rather than my own, but it seems to me Chuck Palahniuk had fallen out of favour with many of his long-time readers in recent years, at least when compared to his status two decades ago. Recently, he published Adjustment Day, and if nothing else, it felt to me like a welcome return to his roots and the form we know him in.
Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
For something which was born only one hundred and thirty years ago (approximately), cinema has all too rapidly become a staple of human culture no matter where you travel to. The realm of movies has evolved unspeakably since its inception, and today we’ve long forgotten the mystifying beauty and allure of the cinematic underground, depicted rather vividly in Flicker by Theodore Roszak.
Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
The art of espionage is something many people have tried to study and understand out of interest, but only few have ever seen what truly lays beyond the curtain of subterfuge. John le Carre is one of those people, and he also had the great fortune (from our perspective, at least) of being a talented writer, and A Small Town in Germany is perhaps one of his lesser-known works deserving of the spotlight.
Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
The Second World War might not have lasted an objectively long time, but the countless secrets it gave birth to are still being dug through by historians, many of them destined to remain hidden forever. Back in his day, Captain Basil Liddell Hart made a monumental effort to dig up as much truth as he could, and he put it on paper in his historical book titled The German Generals Talk.