My favorite author is Kurt Vonnegut.  I plan on rereading all his books.  I just completed Player Piano (1952), a look at a possible future for America.  A story of man versus machine.  Class struggle.  Engineers and managers versus the Reeks and Wrecks.  One of the engineers in the story, one who has an awakening, says this to a football player:  "If you are good," he said, "and if you are thoughtful, a fractured pelvis on the gridiron will pain you less than a life of engineering and management.  In that life, believe me, the thoughtful, the sensitive, those who can recognize the ridiculous, die a thousand deaths."

I like mysteries, especially the Sherlock Holmes stories, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

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June 2005
A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin (1968)
After reading Dispossessed, I became a fan of Le Guin and decided to read some of her other books.  Before I could do that, Sci-Fi channel presented a miniseries based on her Earthsea books.  The miniseries was okay; a little too Hollywoodish for me, but I had heard that many fans of the books were less than impressed with the miniseries.  So am reading the Earthsea cycle.  A Wizard of Earthsea is the first, and it was good.  Science fiction/fantasy.  Le Guin's writing is very picturesque, and her story is a good one--a boy who realizes that he has special powers and, with much help, develops into a Mage/sorcerer

February 2004:  Balzak and the Little Chinese Seamstress .  Beth recommended that one to me.  In China, before the Cultural Revolution, a couple of Chinese teenagers are sent to be "reeducated".

January 2004:  The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. Le Guin, published in 1974.  Still very timely--anarchy and political philosophy/

January 2004: It took months, but I finally finished The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke (2000). (Arthur C. Clarke, as in 2001: A Space Odyssey.)   All 966 pages.  This book includes about a hundred science fiction stories--the shortest 31 words, the longest more than 18,000.  (Most of them are short.)  These stories were originally published beginning in 1937, right through 1999.  What a wonderful storyteller.  I hesitated calling these science fiction stories, because he certainly has the ability to see the future.

2003:  Studs Terkel's Will the Circle be Unbroken, his interviews with people from all walks of life--about death and dying, and living.

Other books I've read recently and would recommend to anyone who tries to understand the world they live in:

    Stephen Jay Gould's Rock of Ages  (1999) -- about the mutually different functions of science and religion
    Peter Singer's Writings on an Ethical Life (2000)
    Octavia E. Butler's Parable of the Sower (1993) - a fictional, science fiction tale of a woman with hyperempathy
    Monica Ali's Brick Lane - a young woman, born in Bangladesh, is married off to an Englishman and struggles for her independence in London.

While reading Writings on an Ethical Life, I was amazed to discover how some things so entrenched in today's society were actually unethical.  For example, when an athlete engages in behavior intended to deceive the umpire or referee, that athlete is being dishonest and unethical.  But it is very common in sports, from the recreational level to the professional.  For example, a baseball or softball player might indicate to the umpire that he or she caught a ball on the fly, for an out, when in reality the player caught the ball on the bounce, which would not be an out.  The player's conduct is intentionally deceitful, and it is unethical.  And it is NOT justified by saying that everyone does it!

(Okay, so that last comment should go on my editorial page, but I don't have one yet.)

2003: Ralph Nader's Crashing the Party.  I voted for him in 2000.  Ralph and I agree on at least one thing:  Corporate greed is rampant and it is has overrun our political system.  (I shouldn't say anything more about that here; I remember that old saying that politics and religion shouldn't be discussed in polite company.   I'll have to get that editorial page up.)

Reading can be enlightening, exciting, and sometimes just plain fun.