I am not the first person to talk about this book, and I know damned well that I won’t be the last. That aside, I have little choice but to talk about The Last Lec­ture. I meant to talk about the orig­i­nal online ver­sion when I first saw it the day Randy Pausch died. I know it’s some­what of a morbid coin­ci­dence, but it’s true and I can’t tell you how heart-​broken I was when I found out this tidbit of information.

When I saw the actual lec­ture, I was at work. Though I told myself I would let it play in the back­ground as I worked, that idea was quickly thrown out and I watched the 76 minute video with­out pause. Actu­ally there was one pause when I went to the wash­room. You get the idea.

When I found out he had a book, the only reason I didn’t buy it was because my girl­friend wanted it. So I got it for her and bor­rowed it when she was finished.

I finally read it. It took me far too long, but I finally found time to sit down and read 1984. What is there to say about this book? It set the bar for every totalitarian-​themed novel, T.V. show, movie and video game that was to come. You know what else? After read­ing the book itself, I can actu­ally say that 1984 does it better than any movie ever could.

1984 paints a future (well alright, past tech­ni­cally) where there is no law, and yet every­one fears to break it. A land so poor, yet con­stantly boast­ing it’s over-​manufacturing. A world so con­trolled, that the past lit­er­ally changes to suit the need of the ruling class. It depicts such a cul­tural and soci­etal waste­land that noth­ing else really quite compares.

1984 is terrifying.

I don’t know what it is with me and read­ing books about mentally-​challenged, slow, or oth­er­wise afflicted people. It’s not like I’ve got a fetish or any­thing; I think maybe I’ve got Under­dog Syn­drome. In any case Lot­tery, by Patri­cia Wood, isn’t about a mentally-​challenged person; Lot­tery is about Perry L. Cran­dall. He’s not retarded; he’s got an IQ of 76, and 76 is higher than 75 - The IQ bar for ‘reatrded’.

As an aside, I have noticed some­thing about myself: If a book writes about some­one dying that is in any way dear to the pro­tag­o­nist, I will tear up. I can’t help it. The effect is almost imme­di­ate, and the Man in me shakes his head in dis­gust. This hap­pens more often than it really should, and Lot­tery did it to me as well. I won’t divulge any more about it, because I’m not really in the habit of spoil­ing books.

I picked up Flow­ers for Alger­non almost on a whim. My friend told me about it when I picked it up in a book store. Curios­ity got the better of me, and 10 dol­lars later I had what I con­sider a great piece of lit­er­a­ture added to my col­lec­tion. I con­sumed the book with a hunger I haven’t had from many books. It almost hurt me to put it down for any amount of time, and I found that when I did sit down to read it, I’d end up get­ting through about a 3rd of it in one sit­ting. These are the signs of a great story.

I recently got around to read­ing The Curi­ous Inci­dent of the Dog in the Night-​time. I remem­ber pick­ing up the book a long time ago and only putting it back because I didn’t have the money to pur­chase it right then and there.

The next time I find the book, it’s a best seller across the world, and Mark Haddon has already writ­ten another novel. I could have been there in the begin­ning! Ah well, I picked it up, and once I started read­ing, I found it hard to put down.

I read Gods Behav­ing Badly in three days.

The only reason it wasn’t read in one is because I have to work during the day. Truly a fun book to read, Marie Phillips does a fan­tas­tic job of detail­ing the lives of the Greek Pan­theon. Granted it’s a humor­ous view and takes light of the fact that the Gods are losing their powers are slowly slip­ping away, but it’s a hell of a humor­ous view.

Another Doctor Who adven­ture comes and goes, and I’m once again left won­der­ing how this got to print. Sting of the Zygons wasn’t a bad story by any means, but the new novels just aren’t doing it for me. With the orig­i­nal Doctor Who book series, the authors were writ­ing sto­ries that were so epic that they simply couldn’t be done on screen at the time. Sto­ries so fan­tas­tic that imag­i­na­tion is a require­ment in order to read them. This is a qual­ity that I find lack­ing within all of the new novels that I have read thus far, with excep­tions being made for The Last Dodo, Stone Rose, and The Clock­wise Man.