Topic: Books

[Giff me dat fill-em!]

Isaac Asimov - Foundation

This is one of the best books ever, psychohistory is in many ways the forerunner of Fuzzy Logic.

There is a time table problem - according to the first story, there will pass 1000 years between the 1st empire and the second, but all the stories start the count since the foundation of the foundation.

[Dog Hambone]

I loved "The Da Vinci Code". It was a terrific murder mystery as well as a fascinating look at alternative Christian doctrines, & it was nearly impossible to set down once you started reading. My nitpick is that everything that happened occurred over the course of one night & the following day. It seems like there is at least a week's worth of activity going on in that book. If this was explained somewhere in the book, I missed it completely.

[moe-jo]

Lord of the Flies is such a wonderful story.  It has many themes, all of which are true.  My favorite chapter is Chapter 11 in which Ralph, Piggy, and Samneric (Sam and Eric; they are twins but they do everything together, so the boys refer to them as one person) confront Jack, Roger, Robert and the rest of the savages.  Ralph and Jack get into a fight, Piggy dies holding the conch, and makes some pretty good points.

It has many symbols as well:  Piggy's glasses = Piggy's logic (glasses are seen as the extra lens to see things clearly and logically), the conch = power, Jack and the hunters = the beast contained in all of us that sometimes we can't see.

All in all, just an excellent, excellent book.