two small reviews

 Foundation and Empire / Isaac Asimov

   Somehow, despite being a sci-fi advocate and having a desire to read a great deal of "classic" science fiction, I had never read anything by Isaac Asimov until a friend of mine said "I will not let you suggest any books to me until you read Foundation" so of course I read it and of course I loved it and of course it took me ages to acquire and read the second one, Foundation and Empire, which I also love. Run-on sentence, wow.

   The Foundation series centers around, surprise surprise, The Foundation. It was put in place by Hari Seldon, a master of psychohistory (which is not history gone crazy, but rather a study of history boiled down to, essentially, pure mathematics which allowed Hari Seldon to predict the future of society at large (already awesome, I know)) so that instead of being 30,000 years of barbarism after the fall of the Galactic Empire, there would be a mere 1,000, as long as The Foundation successfully navigated its way around each so-called Seldon Crisis. Foundation and Empire contains the fourth and fifth Seldon Crisis, and it is very good.

The Remains of the Day / Kazuo Ishiguro 

   I read someone's review and they said that The Remains of the Day is an "anti-haiku", and I don't know if there is a better way to put it. This book unfolds perfectly and slowly, and I am at a loss about how to convey how truly lovely and truly heart-wrenching it is. It is a book full of moments. It's poignant.

   I don't know how or why I hadn't read anything by Ishiguro until this year. He is quickly becoming a favorite.

Never Let Me Go / Kazuo Ishiguro

   While I haven't yet seen the new Spiderman movies, I can attest to Andrew Garfield's acting skills due to the viewing of Never Let Me Go and Boy A. Both those movies are worth your time, and both are adaptions from books. When I saw that Never Let Me Go / Kazuo Ishiguro was on the 1001 Book You Must Read Before You Die list, it put me over the edge and I finally got around to reading it.

   Cue tears of remorse over never reading anything by Ishiguro before.

   So: Kathy is writing a memoir of sorts, recounting her time at school with Ruth and Tommy, and what happened to them after they left Hailsham. Kathy is in her late 20's and works as a Carer, and is anticipating becoming a Donor and eventually completing. We learn quickly that Tommy and Ruth have both completed by the time Kathy is writing, and as a result she is largely friendless and alone. The book is slow, somber, and has an underlying foreboding.

   I spent the first half of the book trying to decide just how unreliable of a narrator Kathy is, and I never really arrived at a conclusion. And isn't that how first-person perspective books should be? Fun fact: a person is never 100% unbiased. It's a revelation, I know. I kept wondering if things were as significant for the other characters as they were for Kathy, or if Ruth really meant that in that way, or if Kathy thought something was clearly communicated when it wasn't. All this questioning of Kathy reminded me of situations in my own life where events have been interpreted and remembered very differently by different people, and can I just say: kudos to you, Kazuo Ishiguro.

   Time to get a copy of The Remains of the Day. Maybe I should start going through the Man Booker winners.