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Knowing in the briefest details the publication history Bulgakov faced in the Soviet Union, it is tempting to think his Maxudov having authored a Master and Margarita, with a curious little Behemoth his only company. The reception of his work in the small literary circle brings him to suicide, but it is that cat that takes the fall first, and then a Mephistopheles arrives in the share of the editor Rudolphi.

Even with secondhand nerdy thrills of re-enacting Monty Python and the Holy Grail entirely as a first-person VR simulation, the book seem intent on ravelling up loose ends as quickly as possible. Last bit of advice from the mastermind Halliday is how real life offers more than what can be programmed, but for generations raised on Star Wars and video games, maybe kissing the girl is all that remains.

A curiously unfamiliar author pens a searing, satirical attack on one of the founding fathers of modern theatre, and the Stanislavskian Method no less, I wonder how it is that I never heard about this book before finding it tucked away on a bookstore shelf. Terry Gilliam apologetically explains why he has never made it into a movie, Bulgakov being too enjoyable as novels for even one of his visually stunning flights.

Suzuki sets out to explain what Zen is and how it leads to an understanding of Japan, and yet in much of his opening chapters he is determined to prove it is not anything, not even nihilistic, and come mostly from Chinese monks who seem a bit to slap-happy when it comes to answering questions from disciples. If inner experience is the source of Zen’s knowledge, what matters a few bruised cheeks on inquiring students?

The great and influential Og manifests himself into the story, hinting at how trivial the Egg hunt will turn out to be. He assembles the final four High Fivers at his Rivendell-like Oregon home. Perhaps the most intriguing part of the novel is the revelation of Aech’s identity, open for technology-enabled social justice commentary, yet simply brushed away in the next chapter as Wade continues to refer to Aech as him.

Heisenberg goes back to a familiar well to tell the story of quantum physics: Newton, Einstein, double-slits, etc., but the difference firstly is that he is speaking of peers pouring into the well all the new knowledge. Secondly, Werner draws deeper from this well, relating to the Ancient Greek atomists like Democritus and Plato whose long chains of logic got to someplace similar, yet unimperical, as modern sciences.

The emptying of the Fuller house - whose patriarch and matriarch haven’t been heard from in a while - begins to affect the secondary characters. First to go is Elliot, back to his messed-up life in D.C., and then the Seeds bounce off to San Francisco for some hoormungering there. It even seems like Cass is one personal tragedy away from pulling out of Yumi’s life. All of it gets to the reason why Yumi ran away: love!

I must have the wrong end of the stick, knowing how my students prefer to have a book that tells them what to do, step-by-step, if they are teaching a classroom with English Language Learners in it. Much like my fascination with Bogart and Landau’s Viewpoints Book and the drama games I did as a child get labelled and new purpose endowed, I should have an open mind. It still seems like tricking kids to learn.

The strangest long-con of the book so far, not just Wade-as-Bryan-as-Sam Lowery from Brazil (along with the nom de guerre Mr. Tuttle) within the dim-witted IOI corporation, but also the stunt pulled on the readers, who may have felt something close to sympathy for the indentured narrator. Instead, every trick goes his way and turns out Art3mis is now his girlfriend in Canada! What’s next, Aech is his father?

The otaku fever-dream is given some virtual gravitas, I suppose, by showing the consequences of pursuing the egg against impossible odds when just one red-shirt High Five gunter dies, without a Willy Wonkaish lesson singing out his errors but Wade gets gifted another item of narrative convenience and on his way to storming the Castle of Aaargh as level two draws to a close and more of the same will happen next level.

A surprisingly difficult book to get my hands on, neither my university library had this volume, nor bookstore, nor secondhand shop had a copy to purchase. Dozens of different version of Caucasian Chalk Circle on shelves, but nothing for the other American plays. Finally took the plunge and bought an eBook version. Makes sense in the end, as I will playing around digitally with his Duchess of Malfi.

A challenging read from a heretofore unfamiliar author, made all the more maddening with allegorical names for his characters so unlike anything I might have seen or heard before: every now and then I would have a fix on the relationship between two lovers only to have one address the other as sister or uncle. The same confusion over stabby villains and upstanding Spartans. A few more reads needed to tell who is who.

As if the families didn’t have enough problems with Lloyd and Momoko’s physical and mental health, Yumi now has to deal with Elliot wandering in from the past. There is a flashback to elaborate on how badly things got last time she and Cass got together with him, and yet the stage is set for history to repeat itself. Yumi’s kids sense something troubling is about to happen, and Cass is struck another biological blow.

At least the pace is starting to pick up with the High Five gunters turning the ava-backs on each other and allowing the hive mind led by Sorrento to pick up the pieces and change the scoreboard. For a contest with so few rules, you would think sulky players like Wade wouldn’t get so upset by their cheating. If the egg was not found by a greedy Sixer, all the money will just go to someone as socially hopeless as him.

With a certain amount of wonder and confusion, Dr. Jung shares his thoughts on D. T. Suzuki’s contribution to the West, mainly by reflecting upon how challenging it will be for readers to adopt the Zen Buddhist’s concept of satori when little of Eurasia’s finest philosophies and religions have prepared them to understand how all in nothing works. It feels as if I am out of the waters not waters Restlessness.

Level two of the story spins off heartbreak, showing Wade’s virtual fling with Art3mis. Normally I am all for a well-told tale of love, even won over by Brand’s love-transcending-time-and-space speech from Interstellar, provided that the emotions are clear. It falls apart with Wade as the confirmed virgin doesn’t feel anything and bitterly resorts to virtual sex with a sorry stimulation of haptic sensations.

I really want to make good use of this teaching resource seeing as how it is required reading from Chapter 4 onwards, yet I am finding it more of a struggle even once I get past the USA-centric perspective. Perhaps it is due to the dense yet flighty rattling off of essential strategies. Yet I lost it when Reiss shows a Venn diagram of the three branches of government with no indication of what the overlap areas mean!

The novel takes a left turn for the sinister side of OASIS as Sorrento ups the ante and makes Wade's narrative a little less vanilla. Calling up the cojones of some of the better Bond villains, he barely breaks a sweat (perhaps due to his avatar's programming) when the IOI temporarily replaces him in one of the few scenes of Parzival's wit. Sorrento will fall, of course, but I rather read more of his upperhandedness.

The last big name in quantum physics that I will be able to read at least until my dissertation is done, is the one most familiar to non-specialists like me (and perhaps Breaking Bad aficionados, unlike me). One thing Heisenberg has going for him, in addition to the Nobel Prize and brevity of his book, is his father's background in philosophy lending to his belief, outlined in the introduction, in realities.

Did Dickens ever have off-months, a case of writer's-block where he couldn't think of a way to tell his story? It probably happened from time to time, and the results must have looked like this instalment: lots of crazy things happen to a bunch of characters, yet is barely connected to parts of the narrative that came before. Esther patiently waits for events to unfold but the plot does not seem to be going anywhere.

The intrepid biographer wants to capture the greatness of Julius Caesar in financial terms yet only hears mundane accounts from three former associates of the colossus. Before his rise in the political realm, he was all business and that meant being a player in the slave trade. Even the famous run-in with the polite pirates gets retold as a power play to crush a rival firm from Asia Minor, writ down later as pirates.

A working-man's Galileo, more concerned with mariners at sea or the tradespeople at the market, it seems, than the orbit of planets or fixed position of the sun. Each scene argues an insightful discourse on scientific progress against a rigid class system supported by the Church, yet Brecht doesn't go for the obvious, perhaps apocryphal moments like his "but it still moves" announcement after recanting his discovery.

For all the eighties referencing, Cline clinches upon two of the most obvious movie tropes: the chosen one, who like Parzival magically possesses all the skills to succeed in an impossible task, then there's the trophy girl, Art3mis, who appears to be his equal but may very well become a helpless damsel-in-distress any moment now. What a spin the story could have taken if some random Sixer or Morrow was the narrator.

The Fuller family settles in for a long winter's rest with the Seeds of Resistance setting up operations in the driveway. It is good to see Y and Geek taking responsibility for the ailing elders, allowing more time to Yumi to sneak away for a cigarette and catching-up up with the chainsmoking teenager she left behind. A few more packs will be clutched in angst when spring springs as E. Rhodes returns to Power County.

Still very much on a side-scrolling rail, the narrative of Parzival and the Copper Key gets to a crossing the threshold stage: the idea pops into his head during Latin class, he locates the dungeon and Jousts his way to an inevitable victory (savvy readers would've known the key was his from the Prologue). But his 1980's influences strangely seem a progenitor of every YouTube pop culture listicle since 2012.

Reiss takes all the learning strategies from her career as a TESOL instructor and presents them as a lengthy list of content delivery in four key areas of high school education. I suspect that all of it leads up to getting Ahmed or Consuela to pass their SATs (which has become less and less of a priority in the political climate of the United States). Nevertheless my class of LLEDers will adapt to Canadian standards.

I couldn't get my hands on Volume 7 with an adaptation of Duchess of Malfi, so reading his two more successful plays. The introduction to Galileo recounts the socio-political falling out between countries and collaborators; Mother Courage becomes an antiwar classic interrupted by the Second World War as the exiled author shuffled from one country to another, all summed up in his chronology.

I am still registering the shock I had upon finding this sort of new translation on the shelf in my library, as if Brecht presciently knew my Virtual Renaissance research was to include Julius Caesar as well as his own adaptation of the Duchess of Malfi. Of course, I might have read somewhere that this present book was a thing but that's doubtful since now most of world is errupting into neofascism.

Hmm... Hmmm... I should be really excited by this book, being that it recreates so much of my childhood, raises it to a worldwide obsession, and then wraps it up with a virtual reality bow. The author does good setting up the near-apocalyptic reality Wade belongs to, and then touches upon the educational and gamer-made OASIS spaces such as Ludus and the Star Wars galaxy (not so far away anymore). and yet....