Book Nerd’s Comments (group member since Dec 20, 2018)

Book Nerd’s comments from the Never too Late to Read Classics group.

I should read this in June.

Okay, have fun.

I finioshed this the other day. I thought it was great. These books will really make kids think about authority and thinking for themselves. The ending was really abrupt and I'm not entirely sure what happened.
(view spoiler)[So I'm assuming they destroyed the federation ships just because they weren't destroyed themselves. He just said "the war is over." and that was the end of the book. I need to take another look at it. (hide spoiler)]

Don is a citizen of the Interplanetary Federation - yet no single planet can claim him as its own. His mother was born on Venus and his father on Earth, and Don himself was born on a spaceship in trajectory between planets. And he fights for the rights of this curious citizenship in very curious ways. Heinlein reveals in a dashing fast-moving style what can happen when politics - on an interplanetary scale - disregard the liberty of the individual. In the end, only the remarkable scientist-dragons of a rebellious Mars can resolve the conflict within a man who cannot live without the society that he knows is killing him.

Yeah, the first half was okay but nothing that interesting. There seems to be a lot of traveling in LeGuin's books.

Welcome Val and Mannat.
I'm a big fan of Dostoyevsky too.

City of Illusions by Ursula K. Le Guin

156 pages

Group Total: 137,954

This gets pretty good in the second half. In some ways it reminds me of the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy.

The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin

195 pages

Group Total: 134,610

Not sure how I feel about the ending.
(view spoiler)[I know it's not the point of the story but I would have liked some more details.
I assume Bobbiebot cut Joanna's throat at the end but we don't know. Obviously the men were afraid to do it themselves.
I'd like to know about how Walter was recruited and what actually goes on at the men's club. (hide spoiler)]

That's true. I would have finished but I've been mostly just reading it a work. I'll finish it tonight.

I thought the parts where she's starting to do more housework and worrying that she's turning into one of them were funny. I'm pretty sure everybody knows the basic story by now but when the book was new I guess the readers were wondering too.

I'm liking it so far. It's very seventies. I think the seventies were a really good time for horror.

Lindenblatt wrote: "Ah, I thought we were going to read them in the order of publication, but I see I had misread this. Anyway, I should be getting to this sometime later this month."
Hm, yeah...I don't know why I did that. Well the author said reading order isn't important with the Hannish books.

For Joanna, her husband, Walter, and their children, the move to beautiful Stepford seems almost too good to be true. It is. For behind the town's idyllic facade lies a terrible secret—a secret so shattering that no one who encounters it will ever be the same.

At once a masterpiece of psychological suspense and a savage commentary on a media-driven society that values the pursuit of youth and beauty at all costs, The Stepford Wives is a novel so frightening in its final implications that the title itself has earned a place in the American lexicon.

He was a fully grown man, alone in dense forest, with no trail to show where he had come from and no memory to tell who — or what — he was.
His eyes were not the eyes of a human.
The forest people took him in and raised him almost as a child, teaching him to speak, training him in forest lore, giving him all the knowledge they had. But they could not solve the riddle of his past, and at last he had to set out on a perilous quest to Es Toch, the City of the Shining, the Liars of Earth, the Enemy of Mankind.
There he would find his true self ... and a universe of danger.

I still haven't read The Dispossessed. I'll get to it all eventually.

And yeah, The Earthsea Cycle is great. I notice the first trilogy are all over fifty years old. I wouldn't mind rereading next year if people are interested.

Great job Mix.
This all makes me want to read it again.

Audrey wrote: "I'm currently reading The Princess and the Goblin. It's so good thus far! It's giving Alice in Wonderland and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader feels."
That was a group read a couple of years ago. I enjoyed it.

Kathy wrote: "I finished The Brothers Karamazov. At times, I wanted to abandon the book. It was just too long and detailed. (My problem, I know). There were many parts I enjoyed - mostly the part..."
Congratulations. The Brothers Karamazov is definitely worth it.

Yeah, there were sad parts.

(view spoiler)[Heinlein really likes extinct alien civilizations. Or at least he knows boys will. (hide spoiler)]