Throughout my adventures reading non-fiction and milking Wikipedia for all its worth over the past few years, I've gained familiarity with what seems to be a popular technique of persuasion known as "though experimentation." Typically, a philosopher or scientist would use a thought experiment to set up hypothetical, often impossible, circumstances and set an imaginary event into motion, ultimately leading to a conclusion that's as difficult to swallow as it is to deny. Historically, thought experiments have sought to debase common sense, cast doubt on our understanding of the universe, negate religious truths, and even test the limits of logic, among other things. They have been an integral part of scientific and philosophical revolutions, from antiquity to present day.

One thought experiment in particular kicked off this new obsession of mine, Mary's Room, as described in V.S. Ramachandran's incredible book Phantoms in the Brain. Suppose a girl, Mary, is raised in a room in which all things are deprived of color. Fortunately, she has all possible information about color available to her - what it is, its physics, what it does to the brain, where it appears, how it is used, the emotions it evokes, etc. She also has a black and white television connected to a camera she controls in the outside world, so she can look at anything she chooses, albeit in gray scale. The question is, once she learns all there is to know about color from within this room, will she learn anything new about color the moment she steps out of the room for the first time? This thought experiment is meant to rhetorically lend credence to the reality of qualia, or incommunicable mental experiences that stand apart from their physical catalysts. Simple but mind-blowing, at least from a philosophy of mind perspective. At least from my perspective, that is.

Another thought experiment I knew from a while back, but never by name until now, is Zeno's Paradox. There are many variants, but it can be as simple as follows: Suppose you want to walk 10 feet away. First, you must walk half of the way there, 5 feet. Then, you must walk half of what remains, 2.5 feet. Then 1.25 feet, then 0.625 feet, etc. If you continue to walk half of what distance remains, you will never get there. And yet, you have no choice but to walk half of what distance remains, over and over again, ad infinitum. How can you possibly get there? What is to be taken away from this thought experiment? Well, that's really up to you. Contemplating the ridiculous notion of infinity is certainly a good place to start. That's precisely what the random stranger at the coffee shop who borrowed this book from me took away from Zeno's Paradox.

After noticing this pattern of challenging books first describing a thought experiment before introducing a mind altering preposition, it was only a matter of time before I found myself on Amazon searching for books covering thought experiments exclusively, and Wittgenstein's Beetle looked to be the best option of the bunch. It turned out to have a much more conversational tone than I was hoping. But it made the book a quick read, perfect for reading between M&M McFlurry runs during my 18-hour layover at the LAX airport, a memory I will truly take to my grave. It is also written in a kind of hokey "A is for..." "B is for..." way, but there admittedly was probably no better way to organize the random selection of thought experiments comprising the text.

Topics covered in the book include such things as Olbers' Paradox, which asks why the entire sky is not uniformly bright as the sun 24 hours a day; the Time Traveling Twins, whose time-warped age discrepancy motivates one twin to travel back in time into a very Back to the Future paradox; an experiment that asks what would happen if a tribesman traveled to the edge of the universe and threw a spear, and whether this would prove anything we didn't already know; Galileo's demonstration that Aristotle's understanding of gravity was an irreconcilable contradiction; the case of the cannibal whose entire body is made of the Catholic flesh he consumed, and what this means for the Catholics; and whether or not an object can have multiple simultaneous spacial locations and in fact still be one object. Some of the thought experiments are not as puzzling as they had once been, but in some ways, these are the most exciting of all. The fact that these thought experiments were at one time challenging, but seem trivial now, means these were the ones that made history and successfully changed mankind's perspective of the world.

Overall, a worthwhile book that seems rather sparse at times, and choppy all of the time, but intellectually stimulating all the same. Nonetheless, my hunger for thought experiments has not yet been satiated.

For the sake of honesty, allow me to admit that I was not terribly interested in Nikola Tesla until I saw the movie The Prestige. I had known a few things about Mr. Tesla, including the fact that we essentially owe our entire electrical infrastructure to the early inventions of this man. I also knew that he received and continues to receive very little credit for any of the projects in which he was involved, or worse yet, solely responsible for creating. Most of us have heard of Tesla coils, but many of us have probably never thought about the term long enough to deduce that is was named after a person, Nikola Tesla. This book was originally published in 1944, shortly after Tesla's death, written by a friend and publicist of Tesla himself, John O'Neil. It is a biography, and as such, fails to delve deeply into the details of Tesla's hundreds of inventions and patents.

Tesla's life was quite peculiar in that it was basically just an endless string of inventions and discoveries from his early twenties till his death in his eighties. That was basically it, at least according to this book. But if one takes a look at Tesla's list of patents, it's easy to see how little time was left for anything else in his life. Few hobbies outside of work, absolutely no romantic relationships, and to make matters even more ridiculous, no time to profit from his own inventions. Despite creating technologies that made the world as we know it possible, technologies that have no doubt earned others hundreds of billions of dollars over the years, Tesla didn't even have enough money to fund his own laboratory experiments during the last three decades of his life. Despite being intelligent to the point where he must have seemed like he came from another world entirely, he was hopelessly idealistic. He believed if he made sufficient effort to lead a healthy life, he would no doubt live to be 150. Well, that's what the author says. The author also said that Tesla routinely, throughout his entire life, slept for only two hours per night. Tesla was also 90 feet tall and could crush mountains with his feet. (The author didn't say that - I did.) Some of this biography is most certainly the stuff of legends.

In any case, Tesla did not live nearly as long as he had hoped he would. He thought he had a lot more time to deliver his discoveries to the world, always taking what time he needed, always putting off the chore of money making. In addition to having an extensive education in electrical engineering, Tesla also had a vast memory capacity and intensely vivid imagination. He rarely wrote down notes, never created blue prints, but always had hundreds of inventions piling up in his mind ready to build the moment the present project was finished. There was no trial and error and, seemingly, never any conscious effort to invent anything. A crew of machinists and laboratory workers, including Tesla himself, couldn't keep up with Nikola Tesla's mind.

So what exactly did he invent? His initial big invention was the first practical implementation of an alternating current power system. Despite the book attempting to explain his polyphase alternating current system over the course of three paragraphs, I'd be lying if I said I understood it. What is clear, however, is that this system allowed electricity to be distributed hundreds of miles away from its power source. Prior to Tesla's invention, power could only be distributed roughly one mile from its source. Meaning, if you didn't have a power plant in your back yard, you were out of luck. This invention paved the way to one of his subsequent inventions, the Niagara Falls hydroelectric dam. Then a string of random inventions: fluorescent lamps, radio, radio controlled devices, Tesla coils, wireless power transmission to and from anywhere on the Earth (Really? Really, apparently.), a "death ray," and any number of other things straight out of science fiction. But it gets a bit strange, here. Tesla never spoke of specific inventions until after he had verified that they worked, but since he rarely kept notes of his verified successes, he took countless inventions to the grave. The notes that remained were confiscated by the FBI during wartime.

Whereas Thomas Edison secured an endless string of patents by freely borrowing/stealing others' ideas (including from Tesla himself... Tesla had worked briefly for Thomas Edison), Nikola Tesla was a self-made man. He refused to be influenced by others, employing others only for manual labor, not involving himself in the scientific community, not involving himself in any community really. He invented things very nearly out of thin air, with scrap metal and his mind. He was also very eccentric and obsessive compulsive. No surprises here. He seems to have that in common with many of history's most prominent figures. How clever of them to use his persona in The Prestige. His real presentations must have seemed almost as magical as his fictitious persona.

I enjoyed this book, but, although I truly believe Nikola Tesla was many times larger than life, I doubt he was as unbelievable as the author depicts him. The author also injected a little too much of himself into the story near the end, both in terms of content and bias. In particular, the last page of this book felt a little too Christian for my tastes.

Despite living in Alaska, a state "with strong Libertarian tendencies" (to quote Wikipedia), I was never well acquainted with the Libertarian philosophy until I read this book out of curiosity. Sure, Ron Paul ran as a Republican for the 2008 election, but he's more of a Libertarian who merely wanted to have his message heard. At the time this book was written, he seems to have had no delusions that he would actually win the Republican nomination, or anything else for that matter. He just wants to return the United States to prosperity, and he believes this can be achieved by an uncompromising adherence to the Constitution. If this sounds a tad naive or simple-minded, overly simplistic, unoriginal, or unrealistic, you might do well to read this book.

The Founding Fathers were human, yes, and as such, they had human failings (chief among them, slavery). But they also had perspective, dedication, humility, and a unique sort of masochistic bent compelling them to grant civil rights that powerful, totalitarian, short-sighted tyrants would have every reason to despise. What did they not have? Television, movies, video games: overly convenient means to live in a perpetual fantasy world. Well, I guess they had fiction novels and card games, and also religion to some extent. Maybe here is the wrong place to reflect on the two hundred year cultural gap.

The United States Constitution is proof that it takes at most two centuries for something truly profound and revolutionary to become boring. It probably takes significantly less time. Dr. Paul points out that Big Government feeds off of our boredom no less than our confusion. With the Federal Reserve, they have the best of both worlds -- nothing, it seems, could be more confusing and more boring to America at large than the gradual manipulations of the "The Fed." With so much at stake, how can we afford to be complacent? Confusion is a symptom for which knowledge is the cure, and it's never too late to start educating yourself.

There is nothing in the Constitution that grants the Federal Government authority to initiate preemptive wars or impose trade embargoes or economic sanctions. Is there any reason the United States should have troops stationed indefinitely in over 150 countries? Are we really preserving the peace in Iraq, or merely producing more terrorists? How much safer and economically robust would we be if we brought them home?

What right does the Federal Government have to spy on us or convict us for things we do to our own bodies (there's a very revealing analysis of marijuana legislation somewhere around page 100). Things are starting to sound pretty liberal here, are they not? I hear that's what Libertarianism is all about: socially liberal but fiscally conservative. Do what you want, but don't waste everyone else's money in the process. Above all else, don't put any faith in the government to do anything efficiently. Have more faith in yourself to give back to society. Ron Paul leaves a great deal of power to the states to decide issues for themselves. Unless clearly granted to the Federal Government in the Constitution, all legislation belongs at the state level.

Advancing the ends of fiscal conservation, he suggests that a good place to start might be slashing the Federal Government's budget by 40%. But before dismissing this as fanaticism, that this would change life as we know it, Paul is quick to point out that to imagine living in such a world, one only needs to rewind time back to 1997. Some of that is surely due to inflation, but whose fault is that? (Read Chapter 6 for an excellent explanation of what causes inflation, the boom and bust economy, and why neither of these things are natural economic phenomenon.)

Ron Paul also illustrates that many of the activities the Federal Government has taken under its wing receive far more donations from private citizens. In 2006, for example, the Government requested $121 million dollars for the National Endowment for the Arts, whereas it received $2.5 billion from private donations. The point is not the amount of money in particular, but that private citizens have the sense to contribute to what they support and enjoy. Why take their money and decide what they want done with it behind closed doors? Why pool their money and force them to support everything, even things they might stand against?

Overall, this is a very eye opening book, providing much needed context for issues that really matter, and also laying down a roadmap for a return to our country's fundamental roots. It also shows just how "inside the box" our two-party system has become, and most of all, how empowering it would be as a nation to break out of that box and start stripping away a century's worth of bloat.

To Steven Vogel, the natural history of muscle consists of molecular biology, energy, nutrition, domestication of animals, weapons, and a flare of cannibalism near the end. Not a bad selection of topics, but fairly arbitrary in presentation. A more fitting title for the book would have been "Selected Topics in Muscle."

I'm not a biologist. I struggle to find interest in molecular biology (and kinetic physics), so it was a miracle that I picked this book up to begin with, despite my taking two months to finish it. Prime Mover is kind of boring. It has no flow. Worse yet, it is packed with order-of-magnitude guestimations written as prose. There are, at most, one or two equations in this book. Equations written as equations, at least. If popular science books didn't have an aversion to mathematical formulas, an awful lot of words and tedium could be saved.

So, this book starts out by speaking briefly about how our muscles work: calcium driven chemical reactions, myosin ratcheting along actin fibers, sarcomeres working in series to amplify speed, etc. It then proceeds into a discussion of the natural limits of human muscle based on the body's ability to carry and store oxygen, one's ability to find the optimal trade-off of force vs. speed, and even small details like the elasticity of tendons and their capacity to conserve energy. It often feels like the author understood it as his mission to cram as much information about muscle as possible into a fixed-size book, and then commenced to do so by writing down anything that happened to flow through his mind at any given time. It's disorganized and not very fun.

Most interesting is the material covering weaponry, which considers everything from rocks, swords and battle-axes, short bows, long bows, cross bows, trebuchets and ballistas, battering rams, cannons and rockets. Wait a minute? Yes, cannons and rockets. A book about the natural history of muscle expends a number of pages to analyze the advantages of rockets over cannons. No great offense, until you realize that even a mere handful of pages is more attention than any other topic in the book received amidst its constant springing from one insignificant detail to the other.

It also suggests that human muscle tastes like pork, only sweeter. Something to do with humans being more aerobic creatures, like horses or whales. And I believe the author, too. I know I'm not the only one who chews on my lip when the dentist shoots me up with Novacaine.

By "Lost Christianities," the title of this book refers to the diverse forms of Christianity prevalent in the first four centuries of the Common Era. The commonsensical understanding of early Christianity is that it must have started with a single message, delivered by Jesus, which gradually branched off in many directions over time as each church added their own twists and interpretations to the fundamentals. This, however, could not be further from the truth. Christianity was far more diverse during the centuries immediately following the (alleged) life of Jesus than it is today. Some of what was called Christianity back then is nearly unrecognizable today.

The author uses four loose categories to place what he classifies the four major camps of Christianity. There was the proto-orthodox, which was basically a crude and hole-ridden version of Christianity as we know it today. There was Ebionite Christianity, members of which fervently adhered to the strict laws of the Jewish covenant, including kosher rules, circumcision, no work on the Sabbath, etc. There was Marcionite Christianity, members of which vehemently opposed Judaism, maintaining that Jesus came to Earth not as a human but as some sort of spiritual hologram to save us from the evil creator of this world. And then there was Gnostic Christianity, which itself was tremendously diverse, sharing much in common with Marcionite Christianity but with sophisticated metaphysical theories concerning the birth of the universe and the true nature of humans.

This book is mostly about the battles waged between the competing factions of Christianity, or, more to the point, the mudslinging of the so-called proto-orthodox. As the author points out, as far as religions go, Christianity was unusually invested in sacred scripture. This, no doubt, owes to its Jewish roots. Thus, the battle to determine what Christian beliefs were "correct" was fought through written critiques of the circulating literature, personal attacks on the authors of these critiques, questions of historical accuracy, book burning, forgeries, alterations to texts, and so on. In Christianity, salvation was achieved not merely through faith, but through correct faith, putting eternal significance on the struggle to iron out the details. Consequently, in a world where most other religions freely borrowed from one another, orthodox Christianity became a religion of intolerance -- intolerant to pagan influences from the outside, intolerant to heretics (e.g., Ebionites, Marcionites, Gnostics) on the inside.

Similar to how many of us view the Church of Scientology and Mormonism today, the Roman empire was generally very skeptical of new religions. This, argues the author, is why proto-orthodox Christianity felt compelled to attach their new scripture to ancient Jewish scripture: to anchor their new religion in antiquity. Those who viewed Jesus as strictly the messianic fulfillment of Jewish prophecy were the Ebionites. The counter-intuitive approach of the proto-orthodox was to instead adopt Jewish scripture for the purpose of leveraging its age, then carefully choose new literature to override the undesirable aspects of Judaism (circumcision, kosher rules) to mold Christianity for widespread adoption. This was achieved principally through the inclusion of Paul's epistles into the sacred canon, making it clear that the Jewish laws were no longer of importance, perhaps even damaging to proper faith.

Texts were subjected to several criteria for inclusion in the New Testament, but it should come as no surprise, all things considered, that the primary criterion was whether the text supported the ends of the victorious proto-orthodox faction. Did the text stress a formal church hierarchy? Did the text allow for personal revelation? Was Jesus human or God or both, and what does that mean? Basically, did the text deviate or allow for future deviations from authority? If so, it might be one of the texts we are only now discovering buried in caves sixteen centuries later.

A good book, but like so many other books I've read, plagued by repetition.

Let's not beat around the bush. There's nothing about the cover of this book that should make you want to read it. Quite the contrary. The foremost reason 20-somethings have no interest in investing is because economic analysts, mutual fund managers, and their ilk all insist on brandishing themselves on the covers of books and magazines as if to take their stab at being a rock star. No. This simply won't do. I did not enjoy being seen with this book.

Using the knowledge of stock measurements and the distinction between growth and value stocks I gained from reading The Neatest Little Guide to Stock Market Investing (review below), I picked up One Up On Wall Street hoping to learn more about how to apply fundamental research with sound investment strategies. To be sure, I still plan to invest about 80% of my extra money in highly diversified mutual funds. My recent interest in stock investing is mostly just a hobby, one that surely increases my odds over such shenanigans as the "Rat Races" at the Tanana Valley Fair.

Peter Lynch was the manager of Fidelity's Magellan Mutual Fund from 1977 to 1990, during which the fund averaged an unreal 29% annual return. Were these years merely a lucky time to be invested in the stock market? It was a good time, perhaps, but not without its own minor catastrophes, including October 19, 1987, also known as Black Monday, the single greatest one-day decline in stock market history. If it wasn't the time period, was it just Peter Lynch himself who accidentally picked winning stocks during his reign over Magellan? Partly, as he admits. But by careful research and contemplation, he ensured that the odds were always in his favor.

What first impressed me about this book was its "Introduction to the Millennium Edition." One Up On Wall Street was originally published in 1989. The edition I read was published in 2000, on the brink of the collapse of the "dot.com bubble." Remember, the stock market was already crashing before 9/11. In Lynch's introduction to this edition, he speculates that something terrible is about to happen to tech stocks. After finishing his book, I now know that it didn't exactly take a prophet to predict this. A new generation of punks (essentially) were investing in their own ignorance, bloating market prices to unreasonable proportions with nothing real to support them. As Lynch states in this book, it's like Wile E. Coyote running off a cliff -- he continues to float over thin air for a while, defying the natural world, until he finally looks down. In 2000, investors looked down.

The two largely accepted categories of stock are value and growth. Value stocks are usually HUGE companies that pay big dividends, bought at a hopefully discounted price. Growth stocks are smaller companies growing at breakneck speeds, that will hopefully become HUGE companies. Lynch, however, thinks about stocks in terms of his own six categories: slow growers, stalwarts, fast growers, cyclicals, turnarounds, and asset plays. Not to say you need to be an expert in these six categories. As long as you know how to classify a stock, you can stick with just a couple of his categories and be successful.

Lynch tells us to invest in what we know, but in the same breath, he basically says to avoid tech stocks. Well, drat. Like the author of the last stock book I read, Lynch tells us to pay strict attention to earnings and debt reports, otherwise you're playing the stock market like keno. But he also emphasizes that if you're investing in a "fast grower," make sure it actually has room to grow. How much market share does the company have compared to its competitors? If it's a McDonald's or Microsoft, it has already taken over the world. The rapid expansion phase is over, which means it might have become much riskier to invest in the company, and the chances of making a tenfold profit on your original investment are slim.

Stocks prices almost always follow the earnings of the company. If the company's earnings go up, the stock price should follow suit eventually, but various psychological factors may prevent this from happening. And of course, the unpredictable short term movements of stock prices may scare you out of a stock unless you've thought your strategy out beforehand and firmly believe in it. However, you must also make sure the stock isn't overpriced to begin with compared to both its industry and the market as a whole. How do you know if it's overpriced? This is subjective and counter-intuitive. It varies widely depending on which of the six categories of stock you are considering.

The truth of the matter is that if you were actually interested in these things, you'd read this book, not just my review of it. So I'll stop right here. Overall, One Up On Wall Street almost feels like listening to an eccentric uncle talking about stocks over a campfire. It's informal, thus thankfully not pretentious, and full of good advice and general rules of thumb that only a person speaking on his/her own behalf could ever get away with in a publication. It also gets kudos for finally explaining to me how in the hell stock options work (and why to stay away from them).

Why depend on Robin Cook for cheap medical thrills when you can read the real thing? The Lobotomist is a biography of Walter Freeman, the infamous doctor from the mid-20th century who introduced psychosurgery to America and invented his own psychosurgical procedures, all lumped together under the common term "lobotomy." He personally performed roughly 2,500 lobotomies during his career, and he was a huge promotional force for the procedure. Approximately 80,000 lobotomies were performed world-wide during his lifetime, 40,000 of which took place in the United States.

While the bulk of the book covers his involvement in psychosurgery, it is a full biography beginning with his childhood, ending with his death. It lends support to my theory that the protagonist of any work, whether good or evil, will always rob you of your sympathy. There is no doubt in my mind that some part of Walter Freeman always had the welfare of his patients in mind throughout his entire horrific legacy. However, his need to help people was vastly overshadowed by his ambition. He was so certain that he would leave his mark on the world as the man who cured the "incurable" on a massive scale, but he seemed to believe this to the extent that he could do no wrong, all the while igniting a firestorm of controversy from his peers and the scientific community.

To be fair, there were very few alternatives. Hundreds of thousands of patients populated psychiatric hospitals and insane asylums with virtually no prospects. Moreover, patients were flooding into these institutions at ever-increasing rates, but in retrospect, this was likely due to the more liberal diagnoses of mental illness during an era when psychiatry was "in," following Sigmund Freud's immediate influence. There were a handful of experimental treatments in widespread practice in mental institutions, the most popular of which were the "shock" therapies. These included: insulin shock therapy, which left patients in a coma on the brink of death for days at a time; Metrazol shock therapy, which reduced patients to a primal, uncontrollable state of pure terror; and electro-shock therapy, which forced patients into violent bone-breaking convulsions. Even though these procedures were largely ineffective, they were the preferred treatments for mental illness until psychosurgery came to town.

Freeman believed the benefits of lobotomy were twofold. He could not only treat, but perhaps cure, thousands of patients, and in doing so, relieve the overcrowding of mental institutions. Inspired by the highly experimental but promising procedure known as leucotomy practiced and documented by the Portuguese neurologist Egas Moniz, Freeman first duplicated, then experimented with various modifications to, Moniz's form of psychosurgery. The intent was to inflict targeted damage to fibers between the prefrontal cortex and the thalamus, then and now understood to be a key component in the emotional center of the brain. But drilling holes through skulls wouldn't cut it. With scarcely a trained neurosurgeon to be found in any of the massive state-run mental institutions, Freeman knew that any treatment to have mass adoption would need to be simple, cheap, and capable of being performed by the general physician.

A careful examination of obscure, experimental neuroscience literature of his day unveiled just what Freeman needed, a sort of out-patient entrance into the brain: through the thin layer of bone separating the upper reaches of the eye socket from the brain. Following some practice with an ice pick, a hammer, and several cadavers, "transorbital lobotomy" was born. The mystery shrouding the workings of the human brain ensured that no neuroscientist could conclusively debunk the merits of such a crude procedure, and a procedure thus crude invalidated the need for the precise movements of a neurosurgeon's hand. Transorbital lobotomy could be performed by anyone able to endure the grisly scene, and it proved safer than drilling into people's skulls from above.

As one might gather from the fact that we no longer hear about lobotomies today, they were not quite a miracle cure. Although Walter Freeman never purported them to be miraculous, his reports certainly skewed the data any way he could to cast lobotomy in a favorable light while simultaneously downplaying the risks (including a 3% mortality rate resulting directly from the procedure). Furthermore, Freeman often appealed to mass media as opposed to the scientific community. Never a fan of sterile studies or rigid procedures, he chose to advance his career outside of what he perceived as the slow pace of science. Instead, he whipped up a media frenzy until he had impressionable patients lining up at the doors of his private practice. He fought for lobotomy until the very end, even when safer, less intrusive pharmaceutical treatments became available. To me, the theme of this book seemed to be that ambition alone is not a virtue. Ambition, without the respect, patience, or humility to go with it, can do a great deal of harm.

I liked this book a lot, but I'm not too sure I'm sold on the idea of biographies yet. I prefer books about concepts. This book dabbles in brain anatomy and medical ethics from time to time, but mostly it is about Freeman following up on his patients, attending medical conferences, and taking summer trips in his RV. Pretty repetitive, but his life is his life. I enjoyed the author's writing style.

Novels are a selective experience. I could go on and on about how Philip K. Dick was a visionary and that the police state he warned of is becoming a reality. Truth be told, you could probably glean that theme from every science fiction book in existence. And, never have people wanted to hear it more than now. But there's a lot going on in Flow My Tears. Luckily for me, I know for a fact that you are never going to read it. So I will now throw caution to the winds and spoil the whole thing just for you.

A particularly disturbing element of this book is its reminder of the moral ambiguity of utilitarianism. The policeman from the title has already been demoted for unpopular decisions of the past, but still walks a thin line to help people. He exploits the law-enforcement bureaucracy to save those who have been victimized, en masse, from forced labor camps and certain death. When something goes wrong, afraid that the media will unveil the skeletons in his closet, he pins an accidental death on an innocent man to deflect unwanted attention. He does this knowing that his secrets, if disclosed, will lead to his removal from a position where he can save thousands.

However, those of you familiar with Philip K. Dick know that it can't possibly end there. How right you are! What begins life as the crux of the book, but gradually dwindles at the advent of moral paradox, is the story of a television celebrity who wakes up one morning only to find that he does not exist. His television show no longer exists, his music records are nowhere to be found, no database in the world has any record of his birth, and nobody knows who he is.

For some time, he considers the possibility that he's lived a substantial part of his life hallucinating his fame while strung out on a bed for years at a time, under the influence of some fantastic drug, under the control of some malevolent force. He has just awakened from that spell and realized all is not what it had been. But that theory soon dissolves as the police learn that the man, in reality, is indeed a famous TV host, but for two days he, the police agency, and the world around them had been absorbed into the hallucination of the policeman's sister as she self-destructed on the newest experimental drug, KR-3, which makes alternate realities tangible and was being secretly tested on labor camp inmates.

I hope you will forgive me for not reading the three sentence description on the back of the book before reading the book itself. It gets three Doom guys. One for morality and two for metaphysics.

Here we are, a book about feelings and emotions, straight off of the enormous romance shelf at Value Village. Wait, no. This is just another neuroscience book, and a disturbing one at that. Also, given that the entire book aims to explain the biological underpinnings of consciousness and self, it is tightly intertwined with philosophy. Thankfully, the author is quite aware of this and never hesitates to sprinkle references here and there.

Two thirds of The Feeling of What Happens can be described as an elaborate hypothesis. The concluding third is evidence to support the hypothesis. The hypothesis? That our sense of self (i.e., the ineffable, conscious, first-person perspective of all perceptions) comes to be known through an elaborate circular feedback mechanism in our bodies.

As you have probably heard before, much of our behavior happens beneath consciousness. Emotions occur without our willing them to happen. They also submit our bodies to a plethora of changes, from slouching or being alert to altering the pH balance of our blood and constricting the smooth muscle fibers in our veins. Emotions consist of both low- and high-level homeostatic changes to our organism, meant to prepare the organism for the situation it has encountered (the so-called "fight or flight" response). Even in an organism incapable of consciousness, emotions will provide an evolutionary advantage.

Consciousness, claims Damasio, is what happens when an organism can not only unconsciously induce emotions, but also observe them as they happen and map the causal relationship between inducer object and the state of the organism. To that end, humans and other mammals capable of what Damasio labels "core consciousness" possess a snapshot of the current state of their organism, mapping signals from the musculoskeletal frame, the viscera (internal organs), and the internal milieu (compounds found in the bloodstream), in the dorsal half of the brain stem. Core consciousness is generated when the organism simultaneously perceives both an external object and the homeostatic effect that object had on the perceiving organism. This is a clever mechanism that moment by moment, from each moment to the next, answers an unasked question. E.g., "Who is seeing that bird?", "This text is being read, but who is reading it?", "I heard a loud sound, but what am I?" In this way, core consciousness depends on a never-ending process of perception. If there is nothing left to be perceived, consciousness is suspended.

Fortunately, the processed object need not be external. It probably started out that way evolutionarily, but internal states of the organism can stand in place of external objects. Memories, for example. And, according to Damasio's hypothesis, expansive memory capacity lends way to extended consciousness, a type of consciousness that seems available in only an elite minority of mammals. Extended consciousness is merely a vast collection of previously transcribed pulses of core consciousness, ready to be replayed at a moment's notice. Another evolutionarily late development is that of working memory, which allows several snapshots of core consciousness, past and present, to inhabit the mind concurrently. Working memory permits a conscious being to compare the present "core self" with the established "autobiographical self." This, in turn, leads to things like personality, planning, morals, and high reason.

There is a lot of evidence to support the conclusion that the brain stem plays a pivotal role in consciousness, and most of it is quite disturbing. Observations of coma, persistent vegetative state, akinetic mutisms, absence automatisms, locked-in syndrome, spinal cord injuries, Alzheimer's disease, sleep, EEG scans aplenty, transient global amnesia, anosognosia, and brutal animal research conducted during the early 20th century bring a wealth of evidence to the table.

The only problem I had with the book was that at times it seemed like the author never defined his audience. Anecdotal stories and philosophical discussions are mixed in with terms like "trigeminal nerve," "basal forebrain," and "parabrachial nucleus," rarely explaining what we already know about these parts of the human anatomy. The book almost feels like a bizarre speculative chapter of a college text book. Not that that's bad, necessarily. It just makes me read 3x slower.

Not without an overwhelming sense of pretentiousness, I did what I had, years ago, promised myself to do: I read some pure, unadulterated philosophy. Long have I enjoyed books and movies with a philosophical slant. Now was the time to stop fucking around. Using a Barnes & Noble gift card I had earned after laboriously sitting through six hours of college graduation purgatory, I bought the highest-rated Nietzsche volume on Amazon. Even when I shop at Barnes & Noble, I use Amazon. According to Amazon reviewers and also the clerk at Barnes & Noble, Walter Kaufmann's translations do Nietzsche the most justice. Although this volume contains several Nietzsche books across many dense, thin pages, I have decided to review each book separately, which is why the cover you see to the left is not actually what I held in my hands. I just like pictures.

The Birth of Tragedy documents one man's overwhelming obsession with the ancient Greek arts. The fundamental theme, repeated again and again, is that the highest form of art is achieved through a perpetual and balanced conflict between the Apollonian and Dionysian forms of art. Apollonian art is beautiful and logical, calm, constructed from the concepts of man, modelled after this world. Dionysian art is primordial, chaotic, a constant flux of creation and destruction, intoxicated pleasures and pain, bubbling up from a transcendental world underlying our own. Apollonian art is sculpture, paintings, poems. Dionysian art is music.

Nietzsche argues that the birth of tragic myth was an inevitable development of the Dionysian force. Born of the sorrowful hymns to Dionysus, unintelligible hymns whose sole power lay in the music itself, not the lyrics, playwrights began affixing the Apollonian arts to create the purest form of tragedy. Ancient hymns were overlain with poems, theater, and morals, concepts intelligible to men. The reason this worked so well, Nietzsche argues, is that all of these supplementary Apollonian arts were inspired by, or directly derived from, the powerful, incomprehensible, root of all creation: Dionysus and his music.

All Apollonian arts are mere imitations of phenomena. Poems, theater, and morals are all modelled after the perceptions of men. They are modelled after nature, which itself is just a reflection of the primordial ooze of Dionysus. A flawed copy of a flawed copy. Music, on the other hand, is a phenomenon of its own, not merely a copy of a phenomenon. Thus, music, radiating directly from Dionysus, is closer to reality than any of the Apollonian arts, giving it a unique position among the arts. One of Nietzsche's points is that music seems to bring out the true essence of things, to give everything deeper meaning. Within his framework, this is because we witness the action of a tragedy, the imitation of a phenomenon, at the same time we hear the music that inspired it, the phenomenon-in-itself. Thus, we experience two layers of reality simultaneously, serving as a sort of portal descending into the abyss of Dionysus.

Buried in the deepest core of humanity, we all long to return to Dionysus, where individual barriers are broken and we merge into ultimate reality. We become one as the intoxication of music and wine bring us closer to one another, closer to the primordial essence of being. We are attracted to both the pleasure and pain of the underworld as they mirror our transient worldly pleasures amidst the hopeless pain of existence. Apollo merely casts illusions to tell us our pain is pleasure. However, in tragedy, Apollo is a necessary evil that keeps us anchored in our everyday reality while Dionysus tries to consume us.

Nietzsche suggests that true tragedy reached its zenith in the tragic myths of Aeschylus, began wavering with the career of Sophocles, and was dead by the time of Euripides, as Socrates tore the Greeks away from their gods and tragic myths, replacing them with logic, science, and dialectic debate. Euripides abused the stage by replacing gods with men, tragedies with comedies, using music as an imitative afterthought to supplement the Apollonian arts rather than as the root of their inspiration. Music became an imitation of an imitation of a phenomenon, thrice removed from reality, as it tried to paint the scene with tones.

That's how it was then, and that's how it is now. Ours is a society enslaved to the insatiable need for worldly knowledge, knowledge that will never bring us one step closer to reality. Its purpose is only to provide an optimistic, satisfying distraction from the unnerving emptiness of existence. And this is precisely why I enjoy reading.

I loved Dune. I even liked Dune Messiah quite a bit. Then I read Children of Dune and God Emperor of Dune and, although they were good for what they were (but what were they?), I decided the reason I, like so many others, liked the original Dune so much more is that it introduced us to a brand new universe. I believe this to be the reason so many sequels are dismissed as substandard. A series can only start from scratch once. Each successive book/movie in the series just piles on top of the foundation. The reader/viewer will never feel half as disoriented as they once were, and it just so happens I like to be disoriented in my leisure time.

So, what's a Frank Herbert fan to do if he has lost interest in the Dune series? Well, as it turns out, Frank Herbert actually wrote non-Dune books. It's just that nobody reads them. I found The Dosadi Experiment as I was cleaning off my bookshelf. I must have bought it from a used bookstore many years ago, as it was beaten the hell up and had been printed in 1977. I dove in.

Apparently, even when Frank Herbert was not writing Dune novels, he was in truth still writing about Dune. This novel is about an oppressed, nearly uninhabitable planet that serves as a catalyst for political conflict. Hmmmmm. Furthermore, it is about a resilient, deprived population fighting against all odds to overthrow the powers that be. Yes, this should sound at least slightly familiar.

However, The Dosadi Experiment differs from the Dune universe by introducing a strange pseudo-metaphysical element to the mix. The entire planet of Dosadi is encased within an impenetrable shell supplied under contract by one of many mysterious godlike beings known as Calebans. The only way in and out of the planet is via jumpdoors (i.e., teleporters). By and large, the people of Dosadi have no concept of the universe outside of their planet except for the few who have awakened to the impossibilities of Dosadi. How can they thwart an enemy they have never seen and whom can only be inferred to exist? Unfortunately, that part is never fully explained, and is merely attributed to the gifts of the characters themselves.

As a side note, a sizable chunk of this book is about law. Future alien law. Law turned upside down. No doubt, Frank Herbert was fascinated by law. Me, not so much. These parts bored me. They made me wonder why I can't share the same fascination as Mr. Herbert. But if I did, I suppose I'd still be reading the Dune series. To each his own. At least it adds depth to the story.

From time to time, inquisitive people feel the urge to understand the ununderstanderable. Uninquisitive people are content playing Xbox 360 for whole weekends at a time. This being the case, I was subject to a disproportionate degree of flak from any and all who saw me reading this book. Strange that, given the books I like to read, a book about the stock market seemed to elicit the most outward expressions of disappointment thus far.

Nonetheless, any student who made it through high school economics class, kicking and screaming or not, should most certainly be aware of the allure of compound interest. Allegedly, and oft-cited by my comrade ThunderChunk, Albert Einstein once stated "the most powerful force in the universe is compound interest." But we didn't need Einstein to tell us that. Playing around with a compound interest calculator for five minutes would convince any reasonable person that David Blaine sprinkles his street magic dust over all sound, long-term investments. A $10,000 investment earning 10% interest per year, compounded daily for 30 years, yields $200,773. But if exponential growth seems too good to be true, just take a moment to consider its effect on population growth. We're basically doomed, so you might as well pick up a quick buck or two during your time on Earth.

But is a 10% average annual interest rate for 30 years a reasonable expectation or a pipe dream? With smart investment strategies, it is actually quite reasonable, and history suggests it leaves plenty of room for improvement. If you had invested in the 30 companies that comprised the Dow Jones Industrial Average in December 31st, 1971 (and kept it synchronous with the index from each year to the next), which is a perfectly brainless strategy, you would have averaged 8.4% interest per year during those 30 years. Using one of the automated strategies presented in the book, known as the "Dow 1," and part of a set of strategies known as the "Dow Dividend Strategies," you would have averaged 15.1% interest per year. A $10,000 investment earning 15.1% interest per year, compounded daily for 30 years, yields $926,717, which is in stark contrast to the $200,773 earned via 10% interest. Small percentages make a world of difference over the long-term. And the more time you have to work with the better, so quit collecting DVDs and start investing now.

Kelly describes ways to squeeze every last percent out of your returns while keeping your risk moderate. What does this entail? Well, the most basic strategies, including the Dow Dividend Strategies, take about 30 minutes of your time per year. However, based on some articles published after this book, it sounds like these strategies have already become too popular and may not be as likely to repeat history because of their popularity. You can invest in the ProFunds Ultra Dow 30 (UDPIX) mutual fund, which uses leverage to "double the dow," hoping to mitigate its high risk while achieving huge gains by investing long-term. Or, you can get your hands dirty, sifting through individual stocks to find prospective winners with hard data on your side. This is what the book is all about, as the author has a separate book for mutual fund investing.

The Neatest Little Guide To Stock Market Investing covers the nuts and bolts of stock data, so you can finally base your buy and sell decisions on more than just the seemingly random fluctuations of stock price to the tune of general market trends. Cryptic stuff like P/E, P/S, P/B, beta, yield, volume, profit margin, current ratio, quick ratio, ROE, and cash flow fill this book, along with studies that show which of these measures carry more weight than others, what has worked in the past, and the kinds of numbers to look for depending on your investment style. Most importantly, the book teaches how to identify stocks as either value or growth investments. If you don't know this distinction, or if you try to treat a single stock as both value and growth, you are very likely to shoot yourself in the foot and have no idea what happened or why.

As a nice bit of reassurance, one chapter samples the investment strategies of six "master investors," including Warren Buffett, Benjamin Graham, Philip Fisher, etc. This chapter is maddening, as each master seems to denounce and debunk what the other five masters have to say, and yet they have all managed to flourish. Once again, this has everything to do with value vs. growth investing. However, the author shows that the few points the masters agree on happen to coincide perfectly with the findings of stock data analysis studies. I'm afraid the most peace of mind comes from knowing that, unless you are Warren Buffett, a computer program will outperform us bottom-feeders in virtually every case. But if I write the program, I have risen above.

A Little Matter of Genocide is a book for those who like to think, as well as those who like to search for answers. Although there may be a few answers within the essays that comprise this book, rest assured, most questions are ultimately left unanswered, even when the author purports to have the answers. Ward Churchill writes as if he were perpetually breathing fire at his keyboard, but he pulls it off with the use of scathing adjectives wedged between lucid logic, along with absurdly numerous footnotes and citations.

In the Introduction, Churchill explains why he has seemingly lost all restraint when it comes to the amount of citations, stating, among other reasons, "I want those who read this book to be able to interrogate what I've said, to challenge it, and consequently to build on it." Heeding this advice, I made it a point to research those claims I found particularly shocking, especially when they concerned things I had never heard about. While I often caught him citing legitimate facts in what could only be interpreted as intentionally hyperbolic language, the factual bases of his claims were usually quite disturbing. Certainly disturbing enough to warrant his anger.

To give one example, I found it strange that neither I nor my parents had ever heard of Operation Chariot before I read this book, having lived my entire life in Alaska, where there ought to be some sort of residual outrage amongst the general, or at least native, populace. In the end, the author's tendency toward exaggeration often undermines his own arguments, but at the same time, I appreciate his exposition of the 100s of shameful historical events that go unmentioned in canonical history classes, regardless of how distorted they may be represented in the text.

While this book consists of a loose collection of essays, they form a coherent theme revealed in the subtitle, "Holocaust and Denial in the Americas, 1492 to the Present". Taken together, the essays present a solid case that many, if not most, policies directed toward Native Americans on behalf of European settlers met, and continue to meet, the criteria of genocide. However, this is not limited to the instances of wanton slaughter perpetrated during the days of the "wild west." Genocide, as Churchill makes abundantly clear, cannot be equated with mass murder. In its original formulation, genocidal policies include compulsory sterilization, forced relocation, involuntary assimilation, or otherwise, within the context of Native North America, "killing the Indian but saving the man."

Nevertheless, America certainly has some blood on its hands. The essay that forms the bulk of the book, "Nits Make Lice," is an exhaustive account of unethical, unfair, and brutal deeds committed by the white colonists from 1492 up until the late 19th century. Nearly every battle follows the same formula: the colonists make peace treaties with Native American tribes to pacify them, destroy them once they've let their guard down, and then enslave or eradicate all of their noncombatants. There is also mention of how the smallpox epidemic seems to have exploded at the most opportune moments, in parallel with written correspondence between generals proposing smallpox-infected blankets offered as peace gifts to the Indians. And perhaps most interesting is the analysis of the origins of scalping, a practice that quickly grew out of control as English, Dutch, and French colonists offered per-scalp bounties to settlers and allied Indians alike to exterminate their mutual enemies.

The author exposes many cases and motives that explain how the definition of the term 'genocide' has devolved, since Raphael Lemkin coined the term in 1943, into something so restrictive as to apply exclusively to the Jewish Holocaust. He speaks of the politics of genocide, of nations turning blind eyes to each others' genocides to feign innocence, meanwhile placing the Holocaust on a pedestal where it stands in inscrutable, incomparable singularity. Critics who dare compare similar atrocities to the Jewish Holocaust run the risk of belittling it, of being labelled anti-Semites or outright Holocaust deniers. Churchill's point is that if we are to ever truly understand the nature and common factors leading up to genocide - if we have any hope to prevent it in the future - we need to stop pretending it has only happened once, throughout all of history or even recent memory.

Pick a non-fiction book at random, something you know very little about, and read it from cover to cover. It's healthy. I highly recommend it, even if there are a few misses mixed in with the hits. If the focal point fails to stimulate your interest, at least the context the book provides will expose you to a number of other topics of potential interest. That said, heroin is pretty interesting in its own right. But any comprehensive discussion of a drug must also include its domestic and global history, sociological issues, health considerations, crime, politics, and money. This is Heroin covers all of these aspects of heroin. Poorly, for the most part.

Most of this book is dry. Insanely dry. The first fifth of the book covers drugs in pop culture. It is horrible, listing every film, memoir, or song about heroin the author could muster, with no purpose at all. Scattered throughout the book are tens of pages of random statistics. Statistics that have no bearing on the discussion at hand, and worse yet, often with no counterpart statistics with which to compare them. "A 1998 survey in the Lao PDR revealed that more than 60,000 people were consuming opium." Great! What am I supposed to do with this information? I could start by heading to Wikipedia to look up the population of the Lao PDR, so that 60,000 becomes more than some arbitrary number the author threw into the book to fill up space. I could read through nine more pages of this crap to finally get to the little 1/4 page table that breaks everything down into percentages, making me wonder why it was necessary to trudge through the fluff beforehand. This book is a 200-page footnote.

To be fair, there are some good parts. However, they all come in the form of massive, multi-page sections quoted from heroin memoirs. Near the end, there are also some of the best arguments I've heard both for and against the legalization of drugs. But, once again, these are quotes and interviews. Nothing the author, himself, wrote is interesting, and it's unfortunate that he wrote 80% of the text in this book. His prose reminds me of the crap I churned out in my 9th grade Intro to Composition class, and just like 9th grade, it leaves me sad and wanting to play Final Fantasy VII.

Fuck this book.

An Anthropologist on Mars is one of my favorite books, so it came as no surprise I also enjoyed The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, Oliver Sacks' defining work. In fact, in many ways, they are sort of the same book. AAOM consists of seven case studies of patients with a range of neurological disorders, while TMWMHWFAH consists of 24 case studies. TMWMHWFAH should be over three times as good then, right? Kind of.

This book is not long. Each of the 24 stories has just enough time to describe the condition, how it disrupts day-to-day life, and how the patient has learned to cope or compensate. Then it's on to the next chapter. In AAOM, the stories were still fairly short, but long enough for me to start feeling a sort of attachment to the patients, making it all the more heartbreaking when things didn't go their way.

The benefit of this is that TMWMHWFAH covers far more ground from a clinical perspective, illuminating the ill, often incomprehensible, effects of conditions such as prosopagnosia (face blindness), total anterograde amnesia, loss of proprioception (the sense of your own body in space), loss of sense of balance, phantom limbs, hemispatial neglect (the loss of the concept of 'left'), aphasia (inability to comprehend words), Tourette syndrome, neurosyphilis, temporal lobe epilepsy, auditory hallucinations, migraine hallucinations, brain tumors, autism, autistic savants, and several other puzzling conditions for which I can't remember if Oliver Sacks even had a name to describe. All around incredible and often disturbing.

The penultimate story, "The Twins," is the most thought-provoking of them all. It details Sacks' experiences with two autistic twins who seem to be mathematical savants. Give them a date within 40,000 years before or after today's date, and they each can tell you the day of the week this date lands on, moments later, after bizarre eye movements, appearing as if they are visually searching for the answer. When left alone, they exchange prime numbers between one another, back and forth, in sequence, up to at least seven digits, with a mutual and highly-evident spiritual appreciation. However, given a simple two-digit addition problem, they are utterly incapable of performing the calculation. Likewise with subtraction, multiplication and division. What the hell is going on? Sacks theorizes across many pages with some of the most mind-blowing thoughts I've ever encountered, but ultimately concedes that he's just as confounded as the rest of us.

This was the next book in line to demonstrate my developing apathy towards fiction. It is not a bad novel as far as novels go. However, realizing that, by itself, did not make me enjoy what I was reading. I just wanted it to be over with so I could get on with some of the cooler books in my stack. It's hard to write a fair review, but I will attempt just that.

I got Anansi Boys for Christmas. I had already heard great things about Neil Gaiman from message boarders with similar tastes as my own, so this seemed like a sound gift, and certainly worth reading. It's a spinoff from one of Neil Gaiman's earlier novels, American Gods, but I checked to make sure I didn't need to read American Gods first. Anansi Boys does indeed seem to be completely self-contained.

It's about a timid white-collar cubicle worker, Fat Charlie, whose world is turned upside down soon after his father dies. It turns out (and this is not a spoiler btw... it's on the back cover of the book) that his father was a god, and that he was not an only child. He has a brother, Spider, who is the complete opposite of him. Spider likes to party, he gets all the ladies, and the world is his playground. He also has the ability to play with people's minds, sway their opinions, and convince them of impossible things, including, but not limited to, that he is actually Fat Charlie. And so on and so on. Brotherly bonding, coming to terms with things, and the realization that, by being his awkward self, Fat Charlie has the real power. Big surprise. The Mighty Ducks always won the big game at the end of the movie. Always.

I liked the imagery of African mythology, but at the same time it reminded me of lots of illustrated books that were read to my class in first grade. Not that that's a bad thing, I guess, but not my cup of tea. Also, the characters seemed too black and white, cut and dry, too predictable. But I guess they needed to be to fit the classic underdog plot. There are some good lessons to be learned from this novel, however, mostly relating to confidence.

This review requires a bit of background. Several years ago, my dad gave me a book, The Case For Christ by Lee Strobel (reviewed below), because he was concerned over my disbelief of Christianity. I've always had trouble with the elements of Christianity that seem supernatural, and had no desire to involve myself in a religion based around a man physically rising from the dead. This has been my situation for as long as I can remember. Also, even though I attended church, Sunday school, and church youth groups against my will up until my mid-teen years, I never paid attention to them, and so I was largely ignorant of all things Bible. As should be plainly obvious, I wanted to like The Jesus Puzzle. But the book didn't make it difficult.

With little or no knowledge of the Bible, The Case For Christ can be quite reassuring or extremely frustrating depending on what side of the fence you're on. For a topic of this nature, I found it highly suspicious that The Case For Christ had an answer to every 'skeptical' question that was raised. It was not until I read The Jesus Puzzle and took a college course on the Bible that I figured out why. The Case For Christ gives you just enough information to lead you down a very narrow path that blinds you from the big picture. In particular, it virtually ignores the New Testament epistles, letters written by apostles preaching the Christ soon after he died, which make up about half of the New Testament. Why would this be? Because, as corroborated by the pastor who taught my college Bible course, and as opposed to the gospels, the early epistles have little, if anything, to say about Jesus the man.

This is where The Jesus Puzzle starts. And let me tell you, this book is absurdly dense with information. Whereas The Case For Christ filled pages with dialogue between Strobel and his carefully chosen Christian scholars, along with the personal thoughts and objections of Strobel himself as if to mirror what the reader should be thinking, The Jesus Puzzle is absolutely filled to the brim with the history, philosophy, and theology of the ancient world at large as well as quotes and verses from ancient documents, canonical and not, and contemporary New Testament studies. Even the page margins are small! But this review is quickly turning into a The Case For Christ vs. The Jesus Puzzle Pay-Per-View special, so lets move on.

One of the fundamental points Doherty postulates is that, even before Jesus' alleged death, people both inside and outside of Palestine were already worshipping the Christ. The catch being that the Christ was not Jesus. In fact, within these religious circles, the Christ was never believed to be a living, breathing person. This notion is well documented, not only in the mystery cults of Mithras, Osiris, Dionysus, and Attis (each of whom were born in myth on December 25th, the winter solstice, and share many other similarities with Jesus), but in the earliest surviving record of Christianity itself, the New Testament epistles. Doherty suggests that such trends evolved naturally from Middle Platonism, a widespread development of Plato's 4th-century BCE philosophy centered around a perfect, timeless World of the Forms that interfaces with the material world through the Logos (or 'Word'; see John 1:1). The syncretistic milieu of the era allowed jaded worshipers to revitalize their existing religion by fusing it with Platonic philosophy. In Christianity's case, the skeleton of Platonism was fleshed out with elements of Judaism, allowing Jewish cults to reinterpret mainstream scripture, inspired by the 'Holy Spirit' and the expectation of personal revelation, through a popular Jewish process known as midrash. All of this culminated in what Doherty labels the 'Jerusalem Tradition', characterized by a mythical son of God being sacrificed and resurrected from the dead to establish the divine model (or Form, referring back to Plato's philosophy) for eternal life, as demonstrated by Paul's beliefs.

The other side of the Christianity coin is what Doherty labels the "Galilean Tradition', characterized by the words and earthly deeds of an incarnated Jesus, as demonstrated by the theoretical document known as Q (for the German word Quelle, or 'source'). Q can be more or less reconstructed by taking the elements common to the gospels of Matthew, Luke and the non-canonical gospel of Thomas, a widely-accepted solution to the 'synoptic problem' among Christian scholars. From Q, Doherty extrapolates that members of the Galilean Tradition believed in a living preacher who performed miracles and embodied the values cherished by the community. This preacher was not believed to have undergone a sacrificial death or resurrection, but did speak of an end-time where the Son of Man would come to Earth and judge humanity. This belief system was a response to the horrible conditions suffered by the lower class, wherein they convinced themselves that the "meek shall inherit the earth," but until then, they can all live better by caring for one another ("love thy enemy", etc.). Doherty posits that members of this community created Jesus as an idealized, fictional, pseudo-historical founder figure to set an example and inspire the community, to give a sense of authority to their ethics, similar to Lao-Tzu or William Tell, because the core of Q appears to be words of wisdom with no identifiable source. Further syncretism and the apparent advantages of having a larger-than-life, historical founder figure at the inception of a religion ensured that the idea of an incarnated Jesus spread quickly among the Jerusalem Tradition, giving birth to the gospels and forming the prototype of Christianity as we know it today.

This is a lot to take in, of course, and difficult to simply accept. However, Doherty backs up his claims with large passages from the Bible, Old Testament and New. Or, if you don't trust him, it is sufficient to merely keep his theory in mind any time you hear anything Bible related. It explains away many of the oddities and contradictions Christians have learned to accept or ignore, examples of which have already been described (Paul's silence on Jesus the man; the Bible alternating between calling Jesus the 'Son of God' and the 'Son of Man'). It explains why so many verses of the Bible seem painfully ambiguous. For those of us who never did accept that a man could rise from the dead, it explains why Christianity spread so fast: people all across Rome were already practicing something akin to Christianity - something that could even be called Christianity, similar to Paul - before the time Jesus allegedly lived and died. Moreover, these worshipers were more than willing to absorb aspects of new religions into their own. Doherty's theory also explains the wide diversity of early Christian expression, which took several centuries and aggressive politics to become unified.

The strangest part about this book is that, in a way, I found its descriptions of early Christianity inspiring. Downtrodden and helpless, these people were backed into a corner, and rather than lashing out, they altered their own reality and began perceiving their condition in a positive light. To me, early Christian expressions seem like such creative, unsuspecting, outside-the-box solutions to unbearable circumstances. Christianity could use more of these qualities today.

Hello! Here is another Philip K. Dick novel! I had already decided long ago that I would read every Philip K. Dick novel before my time on Earth was through, but I moved this novel to the front of the queue so I'd have it read before the movie came out. I hate reading source books after I see a movie because I can't get the celebrities out of my head. I finished with a few months to spare. Anyway, A Scanner Darkly is strange, of course. In fact, why am I even writing this review when you're going to know the basic plot three months from now anyway. Hmmph. It's about drugs, neurological damage, aphids, exploitation, farms, altered perception, social trends, group confusion, and despair. Underline despair. There is a whole lot of stuff going on in this book. Several different themes, and at least two rollercoaster tracks of twists and turns that have nothing to do with each other. It's as if two or more chaotic novels have been slapped together and intertwined, making it difficult to figure out what you're supposed to be focusing on. This makes it nearly impossible to guess what's coming next since you have no idea how anything in the book relates to each other. There are also some extremely funny parts in the book, some of which appear to be present just because they can be, such as the legend of the 90-foot man made of hash who drips fire and fights with Eskimos. And then, nearing completion, lots and lots of despair, uneasiness, and confusion, with minimal resolution to the story. In short, I felt like shit when I finished this book, and not only because of the raging cold I had at the time. However, there's no doubt in my mind that I was supposed to feel like shit when I finished the novel, and the ending Author's Note attested to that suspicion. How do you rate such a novel? Well, you can give it three Doom Guys, at least until it all clicks. Indeed, three Doom Guys it shall be! There's gonna be a lotta depressed people walking out of movie theaters come July.

This book sets out to explain all of the various ways in which the Bush administration is lying to us about 9/11. It covers events and developments before, during, and after 9/11. There is no lack of books like this, and they keep coming out faster than you can count them, but through my adventures across many 9/11 websites, I found that this book was referenced the most. Plus, it had a 4.5/5 star rating on Amazon.com, no small task for such a seemingly inflammatory book. Anyway, there are these widespread "conspiracy theories" about 9/11 circulating through the Internet and literature alike. They sound nutty, to be sure. But if you try to read with an open mind, well, at least after -I- read the book with an open mind, it seemed scary how much more sense some of these conspiracy theories make than the official account, even with another part of my mind perpetually dismissing them as crazy. The problem is the moment you start going into specifics you sound bat-shit insane. However, since every word I type on this website is designed to make me look like a nutjob, I figure I have some sort of get out of jail free card when it comes to these things.

So, here are some of the 9/11 conspiracy theories: the WTC Twin Towers, as well as the long-forgotten Building 7, collapsed due to controlled demolition rather than fires destroying the structural integrity of steel; the Pentagon was hit by a small military aircraft (possibly a guided missile) rather than a Boeing 757; Flight 93 was shot down by US military aircraft rather than crashing on account of a passenger/hijacker scuffle; Osama bin Laden was deliberately allowed to escape from Afghanistan; etc. Actually, the theories dealing with the four airplanes form the centerpiece of this book, everything else can be considered evidence as to how/why the government is lying to us. As you may have noticed, some of these theories sound more insane than others, and in the book, some of the theories are better supported than others. They need not be taken together.

David Ray Griffin does not try to provide any conclusive unified scenario, but rather wishes to illuminate all of the flaws in the official account so that we may reach our own conclusions (or even better, do additional research and stay tuned for future developments). All ten of the chapters stand on their own legs, and each chapter is broken into stand-alone pieces, so the book does not degenerate into a far-fetched strand of wild claims that depend on each other. I think the biggest piece of evidence showing that people like Griffin are on the right track is that The 9/11 Commission Report, which was supposed to answer exactly the types of questions raised in this book, does not appear to address any of them. Also, some of the most revealing evidence contained in The New Pearl Harbor comes from mainstream news sources such as Time, Newsweek, Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, ABC News, etc. and even from contradictions made by members of the Bush administration itself. The only reason this book didn't get five Doom Guys is because at times it feels like it could have been better organized. It is still a must-read. And here's a good place to start researching: watch the videos of WTC7 collapsing (here's one), go read some stuff on wtc7.net, and explain what the hell happened, as well as why you haven't seen the videos on television before.

Before this, the only book I had read about prison was the very short, large-print book about Alcatraz (or more accurately, the boyhood of a man who spent time in Alcatraz, plus a handful of pages about Alcatraz itself). Anywho, one day I woke up and, while eating my breakfast banana, I thought to myself "Well fuck. I want to read a book about prison!" So I headed to the Amazon and found this book almost immediately. The reviews seemed positive, and for some reason most of these reviewers were saying the book was hilarious, so that piqued my interest.

Indeed it is hilarious! This is a (mostly?) true memoir of a middle-aged, middle-class, cubicle-slave of a man who landed himself in prison, convicted of voluntary manslaughter, after an act of self-defense that went a little too far. He spent time in prison from 1998 to 2002, so this is pretty recent for a prison book. Anyway, this memoir is weird and funny. Through his descriptive, witty language and heavy use of unflattering and absurd metaphors, he manages to make prison sound almost like a cartoon. The characters are as vibrant as in a well-written work of fiction, and they come alive in a drab, repetitive, mostly-uneventful environment. At times it seemed to me like he might have been enjoying himself in prison.

The first 2/3 of the book are about his prison experience, whereas the last 1/3 is all about how he landed there (and is just as good as the prison stuff). You get to read all about prison gangs and corruption. Lerner gets to deal with his huge skinhead cell-mate Kansas, one of the prison 'shot callers' and member of the white supremacist gang 'Nazi Low Riders'. To me, Kansas seems like the type of fellow that was born to live in prison. He is the kind of person that could never survive on the outside, but thrives effortlessly in prison. I found it strange that so many white inmates with swastikas tattooed on their necks, chests, and arms could be perfectly civil and friendly with members of their rival race gangs. It almost seems like their racism itself is only skin deep. Being that Lerner basically wrote about his prison experience as it came to him, this book can seem a bit slow at times. This is forgivable. Actually, it should be expected. Also, he is very knowledgeable about a lot of things. He doesn't hesitate to make references to things 95% of his readers won't understand. He was even making philosophical references as I was learning them throughout this semester in my philosophy class. In short, the book is witty, vibrant, intelligent, and ridiculous. Not at all what I expected to find, but it was a pleasant surprise.

Interesting thing, this book. It is actually two extremely short novels (or novellas) in one. Their covers are on opposite sides of the book, upside-down from one another. So when you finish the first novella, you go flippity floop and there's a brand new book staring you in the eye. I bought this mainly for the Carlton Mellick III part of it, but was equally excited to check out a new underground author, Simon Logan. The Steel Breakfast Era is about some guy who wakes up in a bathroom full of blood and corpses infested with "tik-worms", worms that eat and mutate flesh into little metal civilizations. Upon realizing his feet are infested, this dude saws them off and replaces them with plastic doll heads. Somewhere along the way, he finds out how to build himself a woman out of pieces of other people in hopes of dying with her, and he eventually runs into a gang of people made out of furniture and aquariums and such. Either I have changed since I read Satan Burger and Electric Jesus Corpse or Carlton Mellick III hasn't changed nearly enough. I feel like everything I read by him is a rehash of the same idea, with brand new stream of consciousness absurdity... which, I realize now, is nothing the world, or the internet in particular, is lacking. This novella is illustrated with tattoos though. Interesting idea, and many of the tattoos are actually quite cool looking. Floppity flip to The Decadent Return of the Hi-Fi Queen and Her Embryonic Reptile Infection, a work by Simon Logan, father of "industrial fiction" (sounds cool doesn't it?). Truth be told, I didn't like this story too much either, though it seemed like a strange concept. The Hi-Fi Queen comes back to life and, along with her sidekick The Digital Cripple, plots her revenge against the rival gang that did her in. These gangs fight for marketing, with the ultimate goal of pushing through the static of pirate broadcasts and making it onto/into TV. Sound fun? Not really? Yeah, you're right...

My dad had been wanting me to read this book for about four years. I gave it a shot a long time ago, but grew disinterested after about 30 pages. I was raised in a Christian family but somehow stopped believing that people could rise from the dead the same time I stopped believing in Santa Claus. Eight years of Sunday school didn't set me straight because I never pay attention in any school, much less the ungraded Sunday variety. In this book, the author supposedly wrote from the stance of a skeptic. Well, of course the biggest problem with this is that by the time he wrote the book, he had already converted. I figure this must explain why every single criticism or objection he raised during his interviews with Christian scholars was resolved into a neat little Jesus bow (... cross-bow?). Every once in a while, Strobel challenges the readers to look into the facts ourselves but cautions us not to get caught up on issues that cannot be resolved. It's a complete mystery why none of these issues are mentioned in a book written from a skeptic's perspective. The only unresolved issue throughout all 271 pages is how God, an infinite being, can be made finite through Jesus and still claim to be God.

Each of the 13 interviews follows a strange pattern. Strobel gets really up in the scholar's face for several pages (at least, it's written that way), then starts posing questions as back-handed agreements and sometimes even puts words in the scholar's mouth... as if all his time spent researching atheist arguments in preparation for an interview also served the purpose of weeding out issues without a resolution. Each argument is made by stacking assumptions on top of one another. Granted, each assumption seems reasonable on its own, but once seven or eight assumptions were strung together to reach a conclusion, I couldn't help but think of all the small things that could invalidate the argument. What happens when you multiply 80% by itself 7 times? That's what I was thinking about whenever I encountered one of these long strings of assumptions. Also, Strobel and the interviewees all seem to presume that people living 2000 years ago were fundamentally less intelligent than us, that if the early Christians created their religion through deception, they wouldn't employ the same tactics that we've all learned (e.g. if you humble yourself through your own lies, people will be more willing to believe them).

My favorite part of the book is that Strobel tries to prove Jesus performed miracles independently of the idea that he was the son of God. Between these two chapters, the readers are left in a kind of limbo where we're to decide whether Jesus was a sorcerer or the son of God. The book even mentions an ancient source that claims some dude living in the 2nd century could also perform many of the same miracles as Jesus. To this, the scholar replies with something along these lines: "There's very little evidence to back up the claims of this ancient document, but even if this account were true, it would only succeed in proving this man was a sorcerer, not the unique son of God." At this point in the book, I stopped reading and stared at the ceiling for about 8 minutes in a "What the fuck just happened?" sort of gaze. And the Christian psychologist interviewee states that Jesus showed no signs of being mentally unstable but proceeds to claim, several pages later and in the same chapter, that contemporary psychologists are warming up to the idea of demonic possession being responsible for many of our illnesses. Nevertheless, this book succeeded in fleshing out a huge puzzle that I wish to find the answer to. This means I'm going to have to buy one of the one-sided books for the other side of the issue. Lee Strobel is like the Michael Moore of Christianity.

This is the second book in the ten-book Chronicles of Amber series. Let me tell you, Roger Zelazny knows a thing or two about writing epics. Bizarre, layered epics with strange, flawed characters. Somehow, everything I read by Zelazny comes out more vivid than anything I've ever read from any other author, and I cannot for the life of me put my finger on how he does it. Anyway, this book starts out with a sort of miniature story within a story that lasts something like 40 pages. This part is kind of slow, but does a great job at re-introducing the reader to the main character / narrator, Corwin, as well as reminding us what happened to him at the end of the first novel. There is a huge link between this mini-story and the main story, that link being a weird Satanic curse that has befallen the land and all Shadow worlds (unique and imperfect instances of the world, spawned from the perfect world of Amber; Zelazny must have been a fan of Plato). Corwin teams up with his former right-hand-man whom he exiled from a now-defiled Shadow world to kill off the Satanic curse, a growing black circle that consumes and warps whatever it touches before spawning various dark creatures with wings and horns and hooves. Meanwhile, Corwin tries his best to conceal the fact that this curse was his doing, something he created in a moment of passion long ago. Amidst all of this, Corwin finds time to purchase automatic weapons and specialized ammo (with a gun powder substitute of his own discovery, since gun powder does not ignite in Amber, thus rendering it a realm of sword-play), intent on killing one of his brothers. More chaos ensues when he discovers that his curse has formed a road stretching from the outer reaches of Shadow (where "the mind itself is twisted and turned toward madness") to Amber's doorstep, and waves of beasts strike in increasingly powerful attacks to get inside. The whole story is filled with twists and turns, and it ends in a very dark and disturbing fashion like something I'd expect out of Doom II (if it had a story).

As I was reading Phantoms in the Brain by V.S. Ramachandran a year ago, I couldn't help but notice he made frequent references to the works of a neurologist named Oliver Sacks. After doing a bit of research, it seemed to me that Oliver Sacks is a man whom all contemporary neurologists look up to for his sympathetic approach to case studies. He likes to get to know his patients, not just their conditions, by spending lots of time with them and trying to see the world through their eyes. The seven stories in this book are true stories of seven patients, their neurological disorders and their background. Each story starts out by laying down the fundamental humanity of his patients before introducing their disorders. The stories in this book include the following: a 65-year-old abstract painter who becomes completely color blind after an automobile accident (and can no longer imagine or conceive of colors); a young man who joins a cult and is blinded and lobotomized by a tumor while his fellow cult members misinterpret his behavior as meditation and achieving higher consciousness; a surgeon with Tourette syndrome who shouts out random names and words, throws things across the kitchen against his will, and lunges and touches people with his fingers and toes as if possessed; a man blinded since infancy who regains sight but does not understand how to see; a man who experiences vivid three-dimensional hallucinations of his desecrated home-town in accurate detail down to the cracks in particular bricks based on 30-year-old memories; an autistic child prodigy who draws life-like drawings of buildings, city-scapes, and destruction sites; and an autistic professor who uses her autism to understand animals and design more humane slaughterhouse facilities. But make no mistake, this book isn't limited to just these patients. For each condition Sacks introduces, he gives extended background information, references and quotes from old and new neuroscience literature alike, and comparisons to similar patients he's encountered. I especially enjoyed his brief history of color theory and his brief history of the lobotomy (look up "ice pick lobotomy" if you want to read something disturbing). The icing on the cake was that as I was in the middle of this book, I noticed a poster hanging on the wall at work stating that Oliver Sacks would be giving a lecture at my university in six days. I went to this lecture and sat in the front row! And just as I suspected, this guy is just plain awesome.

The Integral Trees is a story about trees shaped like integral signs. You think I'm kidding, but I'm not. I borrowed this book from my friend and co-worker RJ to get a taste for hard sci-fi. Either I don't like hard sci-fi or I've had a falling-out with most fiction altogether. This book isn't bad, I just began to realize as I was reading it that it wasn't for me, much as that polished turd of a Star Wars book was also not for me. Plus, I tend to dislike any sci-fi books that have anything to do with plants. Obviously, if I have my dreams set on the future, I don't want plants bringing me down. By 2063 the only plant left to speak of will be the four-horned pollution shrub sprouting from corner of town where the dark snow is dumped and forgotten. Anyway, this book is about tribes of people living in the tufts of integral trees. There are diagrams aplently and all the physics have been ironed out. Once you turn past the diagrams and start reading, however, you will get the distinct impression that you've just begun an adventure novel. But make no mistake, Larry Niven throws out physics terminology here and there for the hard sci-fi flare of it. After completing this novel, it was painfully clear that I am not a fan of the hard sci-fi. I prefer my sci-fi soft as a cushion and more psychological in nature (Philip K. Dick!). Otherwise, I've felt like reading non-fiction almost exclusively lately.

My mom gave me this book after stopping by San Franciso on the way back from a cruise. She bought it from, and had it signed by, the author, Darwin E. Coon, a former inmate of Alcatraz. So inside the front cover it says "Hey UltraMuffin! You're next! Love, Darwin." This book is very short and has big words (as in small words, printed with large letters). Furthermore, it's written very matter-of-factly... this guy is no poet. But it still has a certain charm of its own. It's basically just a short autobiography from a man that's been in and out of prison for most of his life because robbing banks never sounded like a bad idea to him, regardless of how many times he'd been caught in the past. For a book titled "Alcratraz" it spends an awful lot of time talking about his childhood and the various prisons he inhabited before ultimately landing in Alcatraz. There's really only about 70 pages dedicated to Alcatraz, but everything he writes about other prisons is equally fascinating. So, though it may not be the best account of Alcatraz, it's short enough that it never seems dull, and you get to experience the world of prison through the eyes of a man who was never destined to be an author.

After finishing that Star Wars book, I found myself on a quest to find a book as far away from Star Wars as possible. Ignoring all of the parallels between Nazis and storm troopers, I decided on this book. Actually, I got this book for Christmas along with eight other books and after seeing how huge and bulky it was, I realized if I didn't read it before the new-book smell wore off, I probably never would. This book is huge. Yeah, it's only 504 pages (excluding the end notes), but it's tall, it's wide, and each page is dense with moderately-sized text... but the real kicker is the vocabulary. It's not as crazy as a Lovecraft novel, mind you, but this was something of a crash-course in academic literature for me. A dictionary showed me the way. Anyway, this book explores the question of what allowed Nazi doctors to do the horrible things they did... not just the bizarre and torturous experiments, but their whole involvement in the organization, bureaucracy, efficiency, and psychological numbing of the Holocaust. Apparently Nazi doctors designed nearly every facet of the Holocaust. The book explains how most of these doctors were ordinary people like you or me, but how an extraordinary atmosphere completely reworked their sense of morality. Obviously, there's too much in this book to summarize in a paragraph, so I'll pick out some interesting things.

Of the many topics covered in this book, it speaks of the psychological problems (nervous breakdowns and such) Nazis faced after shooting masses of Jews at point-blank range. Constructing gas chambers not only removed the burden of witnessing murder, it allowed Nazi doctors to focus on more technical issues like efficiency, providing an escape into which they could forget about the big picture. Likewise, bureaucracy is an underlying theme in all that happened. Before the death camps, when Nazis were killing deformed and mentally challenged individuals, every task was handled by a different person. Nazis used superficial paperwork to expand the bureaucracy to the extent that no single person felt responsible for anything that was happening. This way, a doctor giving a phenol injection could feel as though he were doing grunt work, knowing that higher authorities had already decided the victim's fate, while the "higher authorities" didn't realize they had authority.

The book also talks about how Nazi doctors, with few exceptions, absolutely hated being in Auschwitz but did everything in their power to try and accept the situation to make it more tolerable for themselves. This resulted in a process the author calls "doubling" where a Nazi doctor could possess two completely opposing sets of moral principles that he was able to switch between depending on the environment. Overall, this book presents some very important lessons about human nature but is often bogged down by repetition (repeating the same ideas in different contexts) and overly "sophisticated" prose (for example, repeating the same sentence twice but using bigger words the second time just to show off and make it sound cooler).

I learned a lesson with this book, a painful lesson that will surely stick with me for some time. The lesson, in its most general form, is to stay the hell away from books based on movie franchises, maybe even franchises altogether. Here's what happened: I was sitting here in my room trying to pick the next book to read out of a pile of highly intriguing books of many flavors. Torn between a Carlton Mellick III novel and a book about MIT students conquering Las Vegas, I lost focus and my eyes fell upon this Star Wars book that's been sitting on my shelf since I was 11, which I had never read before (back then I bought books just for the hell of it, I don't know why). Okay, so this story is not 100% true, I had actually bought the second book in this trilogy when I was 11 and just recently noticed it and bought the first book in the series so I could start the journey. As time progressed, after buying the first book in the trilogy (a year ago), I became less and less interested. So, I decided I'd just get it out of the way, I might enjoy it after all, despite the blandness of the cover. That was the biggest mistake I've made in a while. I've never had any experience with books of this nature before and now I think I know why they have a less-than-stellar reputation. Movie-franchise books are created by dull pseudo-authors jacking two-dimensional characters out of movies and trying to work them into an uneventful story that is not authorized to alter the franchise universe, but is given the green light to be gloriously substandard paper-fodder. Oh yes, you get to read what's going on in the minds of these characters, but surprise! What's going on in their minds is exactly what you'd assume was going on in their minds just by looking at them... that is to say, each galactic star-battle in the Star Wars universe is permeated with thoughts of pachinko and last night's episode of Frasier. In turn, this forces any new characters to be equally flat as not to throw off the balance and take attention away from the heroes. So, all the characters are dull, but that doesn't mean crap if it's got a good story.

This book is 404 pages long (perfect opportunity for geek humor there, but I won't take the bait); on page 263 I realized I need something to think about while I'm reading a book or else my stomach gets bored and I'm forced to go to the kitchen and destroy my digestive system with things that go puff and crunch. Sadly, I started reading this book thinking there could be something truly amazing and thought-provoking waiting for me inside. This is known as one of the best Star Wars novels, after all. Well, nope, this was 404 pages of uninteresting bullshit happening on far-away planets and in space... all leading up to the climax. The climax was a space battle. And I've decided that text-descriptions of space battles are about the driest things literature can offer. Oh yeah, and see that powerful looking guy on the cover with beams shooting out of his fingers? He doesn't do a damn thing the whole book, and he's spread out over the cover like he's hot shit or something. Do you know how many of these Star Wars novels exist? Take a guess... Ready? Eighty-six, at the moment. I just searched for a list of them and there are 86 Star Wars novels so far. Holy Jesus. I just had a hallucination of someone trying to stuff a lobster into a glove-compartment. I'm not sure what that means... The New Jedi Order series, which is 19 books long, came out in its entirety over a span of four years. I think the Force needs to be sedated. What tears me up inside is that I will probably read the second book in this series five years from now when I lose focus again, and that brings an (unhappy) tear to my eye.

I fear that it has happened again, another Philip K. Dick book has gone over my head. Not as far as Man in the High Castle though, thankfully. I picked up on at least a couple messages in the book, but there was quite a bit of other stuff that was too bizarre to be meaningless. Anyway, this is the book that Blade Runner was based on. I have not seen Blade Runner yet, wanted to wait until I read this book first. Among other strange, strange things, this book is primarily about a bounty hunter who hunts down androids trying (and succeeding) to pass as humans and live human lives. The bounty hunter tests his list of suspects with some type of psychological test and measures the body's instinctive reactions. As you can imagine, this story draws many parallels with slavery and racism. Human empathy also plays a large role in the book, both in how androids are caught and whether empathy has any worth. And then, as always with PKD, there's some very strange religious undertones, questioning if a belief or experience needs to be authentic to be real. Like Valis, Electric Sheep challenges the reality of self rather than the reality of an environment, and it's sprinkled with conflicts here and there. Nevertheless, there was a whole assloaf (that meant to say assload but the typo made it funnier) of stuff here I simply did not get... which is a bit frustrating, but also means it will be subconsciously nagging at my brain until I'm forced to re-read it in ten or twenty years. I never managed to get that weird Man in the High Castle goo out of my head, it creeps up on me at the strangest moments. Somehow I have a feeling Blade Runner isn't going to explain (or even passively mention) these strange parts of the story. I'm up shit's creek without a paddle. Again! I wouldn't have it any other way! But I'm still going to give it three Doom Guys until I understand it more. Go Team Muffin!

Some time ago, back in 1998, I saw this made-for-HBO movie on TV a couple times called Always Outnumbered (starring Laurence Fishburne!). I can't say for sure, but this movie might have changed my whole perspective on life, or at least contributed to some strange phase from which remnants still remain. I recommend renting this movie (if you can find it); I will soon be buying the DVD. I decided to buy and read the book mainly because there's a sequel book that I wish to read, but I knew it would probably be a good idea to read the first book if I plan on reading the second, rather than rely on the movie being a faithful adaptation (it did a pretty good job but only covered about half of the book). Anyway, this book/movie is almost pure drama. It's about an ex-convict, Socrates, who spent 27 years in prison for rape and murder and, after being released, struggles to do right and to make sense of life. The setting is the ghetto, almost all the characters are black, and most of them hate or dislike white people. When I read more than 30 pages at a time I started to hate white people too, mysteriously. Always Outnumbered is very deep, with all sorts of crude philosophy that you have to try to piece together on your own. Socrates is one of my favorite characters in anything ever.

In my opinion, this book has no reason to exist. It's part of a series of books where authors write about their home towns. With Chuck Palahniuk's name on the cover, I thought I was going to get a very twisted account of the happenings in Portland, Oregon (a place in which I had no prior interest). Well, I did get that, but not much of it. Only about 15% of this book is what I thought it would be. There's some interesting stuff here and there, but most of this book is dry as the Sahara. It's a travel guide! Seriously, that's the meat and potatoes of it! I guess that's ultimately what it was meant to be, but I was hoping for lots of messed up stories instead of page after page of landmarks to visit. The weirdest parts are these "postcards" sandwiched between chapters that describe a particular year in Chuck's life. He writes each postcard as if he were still living in their respective year. So here we have a book about Portland, Oregon that we could almost let Grandma read, but then between chapters there are stories of Chuck gnawing on fur coats while tripping out on acid, throwing a jar of embalmed tonsils into shrubbery, SantaCon, an annual event where 100s of people come from other states and countries to get drunk and rampage around town dressed up as Santa for 72 hours, and meeting a homosexual ship captain with HIV who named his last two white blood cells "Huey and Dewey". Chuck should have just made an entire book of these "postcards", that's probably what his Stranger Than Fiction book is like though.

I probably should have reviewed this book before the last few books, but there's a reason I've put it off. Even though this was one of the most engaging books I've read, there is a hazy fog (possibly ice fog) where my memories of it should be. Lotsa stuff happens in Foundation. Also, if I remember correctly, it has moments where it jumps ahead 1000s of years at a time. Maybe it was 100s, I forget. Anywho, it is much faster paced than I would have thought. The time jumps are kind of strange because right when you're getting to know the characters, Asimov flushes them down the toilet and introduces some new characters. I'm not complaining, it actually works quite well! I read "I, Robot" in 8th grade, I don't remember much of that so I'll go ahead and say this was my first Asimov book. Asimov is one of those cliche science fiction authors, but he really knew what he was doing! Once I started this book, I don't remember ever consciously picking it up to read it some more, it just kind of read itself in a couple weeks. (That means it's good!)

One summer, while I was up all night and bored off my ass in a fabricated pseudo-cabin at Denali National Park with only my unconnected thoughts to keep me company, I decided the moment I got back home I would once against delve into the world of science literature by searching Amazon.com for books about the human brain. You may recall that I've read The Elegant Universe, which is the only other science book I've read by my own will. Let me tell you, I think Ima be lookin' around the science section more frequently! This book is amazing! It's a book written on the field of neuroscience. I knew nothing of this, really, until the artificial intelligence class I took last semester. In this class, our semester projects revolved around the use of 'neural networks'. Brains are off the hook and complex as hell! I wanted to see someone try to explain how they work, and this Ramachandran did a damn good job. Admittedly, this book is mostly speculation, but is far from baseless. Ramachandran backs up everything he proposes with tests and examples. Actually, it kind of works the other way. He studies patients with weird/rare conditions, tries to come up with neurological explanations, and then concocts simple experiments to test his theories. Phantoms in the Brain retraces his steps chronologically, keeping the reader in suspense while they try to figure out what the bloody hell is going on. In this way, the book reminds me of a Philip K. Dick novel. This is cool, because Phantoms in the Brain actually touches on several things that might explain what was wrong with Philip K. Dick's brain to induce such behavior (deeply religious experiences, being contacted by God via a pinkish ray of light, writing in grotesquely excessive proportions, and obsessions with abstract, theological and philosophical issues). There is never a dull moment here.

Basically, the whole flow of the book is just introducing patient after patient with some ostensibly unexplainable disorder, analyzing the different parts of the brain and how they interact, trying to identify the part of their brain that might be different in some way from an ordinary brain, devising ways to test this suspect portion of the brain, carrying out experiments, then speculating on the implications of the results. And believe me, some of these conditions/disorders are pure strange. The book starts out by studying patients with phantom limbs, limbs that the patient can feel and move after they have been amputated. From what is learned from these patients, Ramachandran tries to address seemingly unrelated conditions such as people who hallucinate in their trauma-inflicted blind spots, people who have no concept of the direction of left and cannot acknowledge the left side of their body, blind people who can perform actions that require sight, women (and men) who display all physical signs of being pregnant even though they are not, a woman who died laughing, a man who thinks his parents are imposters, and a lot more! It gets very philosophical near the end, which was the perfect way to end such a book. I like the part where Ramachandran suggests that everything we see is actually a hallucination. When I got to that part it felt like someone cut a hole in my skull and started pouring sawdust on my brain.

Sometimes you just feel like reading something that no one else has ever read before. I couldn't be certain that Satan Burger was underground enough, so I figured it was time to play the Electric Jesus Corpse card. This book was pretty good, but I bet it would have been better if I actually knew stuff about the bible (after about eight pre-teen years of Sunday school, you'd think I'd know something; but I also spent a year in chemistry and know what I learned? That Paper Mate brand ball-point pens are shit and that my right arm often turns purple during any class following a gym period full of warball). This is kind of dangerous, now the only memories I have associated with these hitherto unheard of "twelve apostles" are those memories assimilated from the other holy book, Electric Jesus Corpse. The book that's only available through a press whose website is hosted on AngelFire. A whole crapload of stuff happened in this book. For a book of this type, which is just page after page of absurdity, kind of creating a coherent story... and kind of not, 380 pages might have been a little overkill. Since the plot just bounces from one whacked out place to another, it's fair to say that this book moves pretty quickly. It makes me wonder if you could produce something similar by feeding methamphetamine to a child with A.D.D.

This book bears a striking resemblance to Satan Burger. Since EJC came before Satan Burger, and given that EJC is a bit more crude than Satan Burger, it seems to me like Satan Burger must have been sort of a revision of some concepts in EJC. I don't know yet because I've only read these two books by CM3 and don't know if this is just his style. The meat and potatoes of EJC is this holy war brewing between The Head Honcho of the Universe and four groups that have formed an alliance to overthrow him. These groups are the Christians, who follow Jesus Christ, a man who dresses in a disco suit and carries the magic bottle of vodka, the Zealots, the Baptists and the Bush Faggots. No one is really sure what the significance of this war is though, because there are fortics (zombies) sweeping the country destroying the entire Western part of the world. Judas, the last of the Krellians, tries to fulfil his desperate plight to destroy the fortics. There are also around 20 other main characters, two of which have the same name, so it starts to get confusing. But... get confusing? What am I talking about? How can a book GET confusing when the first two pages introduce a tiny elephant living in the roots of a 'tamata' tree and is trying to paint a bunny to resist masturbating? I think my favorite part is when Carlton Mellick III lets Judas off because he has no use for him in the current chapter so Judas goes home to bitch to his wife about being a character in such a shitty book.

Nine Princes in Amber is the first book in a ten-book fantasy series called the Chronicles of Amber. You get to buy them in this huge-ass single book the size of a small Chevy. I never thought I would be interested in such a thing, it being fantasy and all, but Lord of Light gave me faith that Zelazny knew what he was doing. Indeed he did! This is a great story! It grabbed my attention from the get go; it seemed a little unusual to introduce the book's main character, a wizard, by showing him awaking from a coma with amnesia in a hospital bed in New York. This was an ingenious technique because the main character is just as confused as the reader, and we learn who this guy is at the same time he does. The author piles on all sorts of unusual back story and then there's plenty of action. Roger Zelazny was an incredible writer as well. Just his use of language, his subtle/sly humor, and occasional goofiness are enough to keep me reading. I'm so glad I gave this book/series a chance and look forward to reading the other nine books. Oh, and also the book written by Philip K. Dick and Roger Zelazny together, Irae. I heard it wasn't so great but it must be interesting to say the least.

Whoa, this book is something else. It contains a ~110 page story (At the Mountains of Madness) as well as a few short stories. Truth be told, I still have a short story and a half to go. Let me explain. H.P. Lovecraft is a very popular author within certain cliques of people, the other cliques have probably never heard of him. He's a horror author, but unlike any other. His stories are so thick with description and huge obscure words that I didn't know what the fuck he was talking about half the time. This may sound similar to my gripe against William Gibson, but Lovecraft is something else. Even though his stories border on unreadable, I have much respect for this man. He is such a good writer, you won't even understand him. It's a paradox, but it's true. He uses a seemingly infinite vocabulary; I managed to find four of five words I had never heard of before on every page. At the Mountains of Madness is a long story or "novella" about a research expedition to Antarctica. Reading about Antarctica is great because it glorifies living in Alaska in a way, shining intrigue on the most depressing circumstances. Yeah, so even though At the Mountains of Madness is ~110 pages, it took me like six weeks to read it because I re-read every page over and over trying to figure out what this dude was saying. After finishing the main story, I was too exhausted to read the short stories. I've been recovering for years. UPDATE: I finally finished the last two short stories in this book, making a point not to get hung up on words I didn't understand. Lovecraft's writing is a lot more enjoyable when you read it this way!

Now here's a weird book to find in the mix, a self-help book! I was recommended this book by a person who goes by the name of Maxine in IRC. There are two prerequisites for enjoying this book. First, you have to be able to admit that there are things in this universe of ours that you are afraid of. This was easy for me, seeing as how I'm afraid of nearly everything. Second, if you're cynical about the concept of self-help books, this will not do you any good. However, in this case there's nothing to be gained by being cynical, other than preserving that "I have it all figured out already" male cliche that I have come to hate (assuming you are male). This book was a lot more simplistic than I was expecting it to be; it's almost silly, actually. But, as the author explains, taking things too seriously is one of the things that causes fear. Sounds about right to me. Like the movie Fight Club? If you are particularly savvy you might have realized Fight Club is a self-help movie disguised as testosterone (well, the first half of it at least), among other demented things (which I eat up like pudding). Anyway, yes, I think this book helped me out a bit.

First off, I think this book has the coolest cover of any book I've ever read so far. It's just a dead bird, no title, no author, just a dead yellow bird on a white plane. Lullaby is one of Palahniuk's newer novels, and it shows (slightly). What sets this one apart is that he uses some supernatural elements. There's this poem or song or something that kills people when they hear it. Coooool. But then, the narrator is the same variety of narrator we know and love from all of Chuck's other books. Lullaby has an interesting premise, and the story is fun for a while, but I got a little bored of it by the end. Still, I highly recommend this book over Invisible Monsters, that eat cheese on the toilet till you die of heart failure book.

Most people tend to like Survivor the most out of all of Chuck Palahniuk's books, and I suppose I am no exception, although I think I like Choke about equally. Survivor is the first Palahniuk book I read, so that might bias my opinion because I believe the first Palahniuk book you read is an experience to remember. And then you read more of his books and realize they're all quite similar in style and if you're like me, you get a little tired of it. Survivor is a good starting point, though! Good balance of dark humor and just humor humor, and a lot of weird situations that end up being very funny. Survivor is the best display of what Chuck Palahniuk has been getting at with all his other books, out of the ones I've read anyway.

Okay, out of all four William Gibson books I've read, I liked this one the most. Why? Because when I read this one, it actually fed me words that enabled me to paint a mental picture. In Virtual Light, Gibson writes as if he wants to be understood this time. I'm pretty sure Virtual Light was written after the Sprawl Trilogy (it's part of its own trilogy... the Virtual Light trilogy I think), so maybe Gibson finally said "Fuck it, I think I'll write in English this time". But really, the reason it is much easier to understand is because it's not a cyberpunk novel at all. Sure, it's marketed as one, even the cover looks cyberpunkish, and Gibson is the father of cyberpunk, but this is really a suspense novel. Other than these crazy glasses that are being carried around throughout the book (which could have just as easily been a laptop or even a briefcase), the story is straight out of the mystical present. The setting is a tad futuristic in that "the world has continued to fall apart" kinda way, maybe 2015ish, but if we're differentiating plot from setting, the plot is from 1820 and some folks are chasing after someone with a bag of money with a dollar symbol on it.

This is the third book in the Sprawl Trilogy but actually it seems more like a direct sequel to both Neuromancer and Count Zero at the same time. The writing style is more similar to Count Zero, not as all over the place as Neuromancer. It also uses the same parallel-story technique as Count Zero, but this time switching between four different characters. I got pretty sick of this technique by this time. Once you're finally starting to decipher what the hell is happening in any given scene, the chapter ends and you are thrown into a completely different scene with one of the other characters, stuck in a perpetual struggle to put words together as if the book were some sinister puzzle. Sure, this sounds all stylish and intellectual, but you try reading these books and see if you can keep from punching them out of boredom and/or indifference.

Count Zero is kind of a loose sequel to Neuromancer. It is the second book in what some call the Sprawl Trilogy, of which Neuromancer is the first. Really, it has nothing to do with Neuromancer other than the setting and the technology. It only makes two brief, obscure references to the characters in Neuromancer, in fact. I thought Count Zero was just slightly better than Neuromancer, just for the fact that Gibson settled down a little with his God-forskan writing style. Still, the novel was not very fun to read. The ending, in particular, has to be the most disappointing ending in all of literature. 90% of the book is spent switching between three different characters with their own stories. The last 10% is spent watching them all sit around together shooting the shit after 200+ pages of buildup in what could have conceivably been one of the more intense endings I've ever read.

Hardcore internet fanatics and hackish type people like to talk about Neuromancer and reference it any opportunity they get, so of course, it was like a dream come true when I found it a the local shitty bookstore (with a selection the size of failure). For a book written in the early '80s, this one has some cool concepts. Unfortunately, all these concepts have been beaten to death by now and weren't even used in interesting ways in Neuromancer to begin with. Also, the way William Gibson writes is very frustrating. He likes to mix Japanese words with words he made up so you never have any clue what the fuck is going on... and you know what? Fuck you William Gibson, and your cult following.

Here we are, another Dune book. It's a real shame that I read the original Dune while I was in high school, because for the rest of time I'm going to associate Dune with my high school years, driving me to read endless mediocre Dune books just to try and live in the Dune universe again. That and Frank Herbert's writing style is just addicting in a way. He could describe a turd for 34 pages and I'd read it in one sitting. Since this is the last Dune book I've read so far, I can't tell for sure, but I think this book starts a new pseudo-trilogy in the six-book original series. I think this because God Emperor of Dune is set like 3000 years after Children of Dune, and a lot has changed (believe me!). Still, this novel is all about philisophical musings and has the least amount of action thus far in the series. Same old Dune-sequel type stuff.

With Children of Dune, we're back to the longer books. Here we have a whole lot of plotting, a whole lot of thinking, and a whole lot of nothing. The whole time I was reading this book, I was asking myself why I was reading it. If you go to Amazon.com and look at the reviews for the newer Dune books written by Brian Herbert (Frank's son) and Kevin Anderson, you'll see tons of horrible reviews from people who loved the old series. Now, I haven't read the newer series of books, but I don't understand how anyone can love the Dune series, other than the first book. Don't get me wrong, when I think back on Children of Dune, I remember all sorts of deep philosophical musings and powerful introspectives, but if you asked me what actually happened in the book, I'd say "Well fuck, I don't know..." and then I'd stare off into space for three minutes and summarize the actual events that took place in about six sentences. It's like the whole book is building up to something big that never happens.

Okay, this is where the Dune series starts to change, at book two. If you don't realize the Dune series takes a turn with Dune Messiah, you surely will with Children of Dune. It's hard to put my finger on why these books aren't as good, but I'm pretty sure it can't be nostalgia factor alone (I read Dune two years before reading this). There's still a bit of action in this book. For the Dune series, I define 'action' as something actually happening, rather than people talking all day and thinking all night. The best part about Dune Messiah is that it's by far the shortest of the sequels. Herbert made some stuff happen, he didn't stretch it out, all is relatively good. You know, I've always been more fond of books and movies that introduce a world, rather than continue it. That's probably what the problem is here. I don't know. Something makes Dune Messiah feel cheap. The rest of the sequels, on the other hand, do not feel cheap (they feel rather expensive, in fact)... but that doesn't make them a joy to read. I think Dune was the only Dune book to strike the perfect balance between action, politics, and philosophy. The fact that it was the first book in the series gives it bonus points.

Dune is very interesting! Something sets Dune apart from all the other science fiction books I've read, and I think it's just the depth of it all. Herbert really fleshed out his world in this book. Everything seems to have a whole history and mythology behind it. There's plenty of large-scale, intergalactic politics to read about (which I didn't think I'd enjoy, but I did!), but not at the expense of character development. I felt like I got a real sense of who these characters were while reading Dune. There's a lot of philosophy and plenty of action in Dune. Make sure to savor the action; as the series progresses you'll be seeing less and less of it, unfortunately. I read Dune for my advanced composition class in high school. We chose our books from a list at the beginning of the semester, and I waited till the last week before starting the book. Let me tell you, this is one hell of a book to read in a week. Makes you feel like you've living on Arrakis. When I think back on my junior year of high school, I remember living in Dune and Tribes. I must have been a space cadet.

Satan Burger is pure weird. You can think of it as some sort of demented fantasy novel if you'd like, but not in a typical fantasy world. This book takes place in the weirdest, most fucked up, and utterly nonsensical world you will ever read about! That's what Carlton Mellick III does, he writes weird stuff that apparently flows from his mind like a fountain. Take everything weird I've ever said on my site, elaborate on it, put in some memorable characters and a plot (a really weird one at that) and that's the sorta thing CM3 writes. This is really a joy to read, especially if you have the right sense of humor for it. Satan Burger takes all kinds of weird turns, so I'll just focus on the title. Satan opens up a deep fried burger restaurant because a trans-dimensional vagina is stealing people's souls to bring weird creatures into the city. God closes Heaven, so now when people die they don't actually die, but turn into something similar to a zombie. Thus, the Grim Reaper gets fired and has to live with being unemployed. Satan and Jesus are trying to work together to stick it to God. One of the zombie characters' penis comes alive and turns into a snake type creature. I don't wanna spoil anything. On almost every page, there's something so weird it might make you laugh out loud.

Valis is a VERY odd book, for many reasons. First of all, it's so weird it's just incredible. Satan Burger is the weirdest book I've read as far as pure nonsense goes, this book is weird on a whole nother level. It's jam-packed full of philosophy. Real, highbrow type philosophy, I think. Not that I know anything about philosophy, but Valis has so many quotes from philosophical works that you can tell this was a very important subject to Philip K. Dick. It had to be, since the main character(s) in this book are based off of PKD himself, in all his bizarre, schizophrenic glory. Yes, the main character in Valis is a person named Horselover Fat who is actually a dissociative personality of the narrator. Horselover Fat is contacted by what he perceives as a pinkish ray of light (but is actually outside the range of color, in the infrared range) which transfers information to him at an incredible speed, including the fact that his son will die if he doesn't have surgery immediately. This sends Horselover Fat on a weird philosophical journey to figure out what the hell that pinkish ray of light was and where it came from. Valis is full of subtle humor targetted at the main character(s), which is bizarre because PKD was effectivly making fun of himself and his mental condition. Valis is part of a trilogy, the last three books he wrote before he died, which also includes The Divine Invasion and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. The fact that this book (as well as every other PKD book) was ever marketed towards pre-teens and adolescents just blows my mind. I want to find someone who read this book when they were 12 and see how they're holding up.

Three Stigmata is a bit slower paced that Ubik, and not so hectic as to force you to throw Listerine in your eyes and thrust your head into a wood chipper to ease the confusion. It has a personality of its own though. I liked it because a lot of it takes place on Mars. Mars, as envisioned by Philip K. Dick, is the most dreary place a person can live. He refers to Mars in lots of his books, and you'll remember Mars played a big part in the movie Total Recall, which was based on PKD's short story We Can Remember It for You Wholesale. I like reading about people suffering on Mars because it reminds me of Fairbanks, Alaska. The main focus of this book is drugs that the colonies on Mars use to escape from the bleakness of it all. A new drug comes out of nowhere that's supposedly better than its predecessor. At this point in the book, things start getting pretty goddamn weird. Once again, I find it difficult to think of things to say without spoiling anything. But Three Stigmata is another play on reality, which is what has made PKD famous.

This is the first Philip K. Dick book I read, and it's awesome! This will really give you a taste of what Philip K. Dick is all about. I usually take my time reading books, but I read this one in four days. Not by choice, just because I wanted to know what the fuck was going on. Philip K. Dick books are cool in that they don't try to confuse you with big/fake words and weird settings that don't make sense (a la Neuromancer), they just have mind bending concepts which the plot is built upon like a puzzle. You spend the whole time reading this book not knowing which world is reality and which is not. I don't want to spoil anything so I'm not even gonna talk about this book anymore. I suggest drinking tons of coffee and keeping your reading room at about 100 degrees like I did when I was reading Ubik. It makes it really intense and your brain will want to blast out the side of your head. Most people would recommend reading Neuromancer to fans of The Matrix, I say read Philip K. Dick!

Here we have another strange Chuck Palahniuk book. Unfortunately, this is strange in a far less fun way. Invisible Monsters is... well Jesus, I don't even know. It's weird and told through the perspective of a woman who for one reason or another can't speak (I'll leave that one for you to discover). It has a fashion model sorta theme about it, and often has you wondering how and/or why a man wrote this novel. Invisible Monsters also has the darkest humor out of the handful of Chuck Palahniuk books I've read. So dark, in fact, that it's almost impossible to detect sometimes. Go sit on a toilet and read this book if you've given up on life. It's a downer.

Back to another high Doom Guy rating. Hmmm. Maybe I'll go back later and shuffle my book reviews around so I don't look like a total assclown. This book, plain and simple, is like the movie Hackers if it were based on true events. True events, meaning the crash of AT&T's long-distance network in 1990. I love this book. I love the wussy-ass teenage culture of the '80s (and apparently early '90s as well), I love old technology and I love reading/hearing/watching things about hackers. So this book was like a trump card, it couldn't lose. I also love the fonts used in the book. Hey, stop laughing! Don't judge me!

Okay, I had to put this book in here quickly to prove that I CAN give a book a bad score. This was the third Philip K. Dick book I've read, I loved the first two... but what is this? This is his Hugo Award winning novel, and it's one of the least entertaining books I've ever read. Notice, I said least entertaining. Perhaps it's a great book that went completely over my head (actually, I'm 100% certain that's exactly what happened, so you can just consider this review venting), but it can't possibly be entertaining! Oh well. Well, this is one of his few non-sci-fi books, unless you consider alternate history science fiction. He has an interesting vision of the world in which the Axis powers won WWII, but he doesn't really do anything with it (with the possible exception of confusing the hell out of everyone at the end). Hmph. Still, I respect PKD for expressing himself in these very cryptic ways that are nearly impossible for anyone else to understand. I reserve the right to change this book's score if I ever understand it more!

I'm going to go ahead and give this book five Doom Guys, but it really might be more deserving of four and a half. Even though I loved this book, I found myself only able to read a little bit at a time because I would get a little on the bored side. This book is just full of sex and humor. Take the movie Fight Club, make the narrator a sex addict, and make everything else about sex and that's sort of what we're talking about here. There's some really funny stuff in this book, even if the plot is a bit lacking. Potentially very offensive. I wouldn't have it any other way!

Lord of Light is some type of strange epic in an unusual setting with surprisingly identifiable characters. Basically, everything in this book is "out there" except for the characters, who seem like very ordinary (albeit interesting) people in extraordinary circumstances. It's a fantasyish book, but the fantasy elements are made possible by machines and technology, so it kind of has hints of science fiction as well. The main character is this laid back fellow who used to be a god and is trying to start a war with Heaven or at least stir stuff up. The way Zelazny writes is reminiscent of the Bible in a way, so it's not always obvious when he throws some toilet humor in there for shits and giggles. There seems to be enough story in this book to span a short series, but here it is, all packed into a single novel!

The Elegant Universe will make you start feeling like a genius (or slightly retarded) if you take the time to try and digest it. It explains, as simply as possible, the concepts behind special and general relativity, quantum mechanics, the big bang, black holes, hidden dimensions, string theory and also touches on the possibility of multiple universes near the end of the book as a final kick in the head. This book will make your mind sizzle like bacon. Trust me. But it's also great! It had me believing I could walk through solid matter if I just tried hard enough, but that was just creative interpretation on my part. I bet I could make wine out of gold though.