Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the best-selling novel of the 19th century. Written in 1852, it energized the anti-slavery movement and contributed to the start of the Civil War. It was translated into all major languages and made a worldwide impact. Today, it’s better known for its stereotypical depictions of black people. (There’s also an off-hand anti-Semitic remark and Haitians are called effeminate.) So while it was undoubtedly progressive for its day, it doesn’t entirely hold up now.

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Come Join Us by the Fire has released Season 2 just in time for Halloween. It’s available for free on the Google Play Books app. There’s a bit less stories than the first season, but with 27 horror stories, there’s still hours of spooky entertainment. Since the first season contained a lot of flash fiction, and season 2 only has a couple five minutes pieces, they’re probably about the same length.

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When you first crack open The Three-Body Problem, there’s a list of characters at the front of the book, implying that it will be a difficult read and you’re going to need to refer back to the list in order to keep track of everybody. However, once I dived in, I discovered that the list of characters wasn’t necessary. We mainly shift between two point-of-view characters, so it isn’t difficult to keep track of who’s who. Also, some of the characters listed barely appear in the book at all, so I don’t know why the list is there at all. Continue reading →

“Sloth was literal death for us, while for them, it was the whole ambition of their lives.”

Hiram is born into slavery in Virginia. Although he’s far more educated and capable than his bumbling white half-brother Maynard, Hiram is tasked with being his brother’s servant. When the book begins, both of them are about to be drowned in a river before we go into a flashback. Continue reading →

One guy in Russia suddenly goes crazy. He first attacks his friend, then he kills himself. A few more people engage in similar behavior. By the time there’s about 300 unexplained suicides worldwide, society shuts down. This didn’t ring true to me. As I write this, over half a million people have died from Covid-19, yet there’s still a sizable chunk of the population who refuse to wear masks. Why would everybody panic after just 300 deaths worldwide? We humans generally don’t take things seriously until it’s too late. Continue reading →

“If they could bring back paperwork, Mark Spitz thought, they could certainly reanimate prejudice, parking tickets, and reruns. There were plenty of things in the world that deserved to stay dead, yet they walked.”

Zone One is a literary novel and as such is more focused on poetic language than action. The prose is filled with metaphors, similes, foreshadowing, personification, thesaurus words, and pages of description. So even though it’s a zombie book, it’s one your English teacher will be proud of you for reading. Continue reading →