Book # 51 - The Trial by Franz Kafka

Interesting thing about The Trial... Franz Kafka never wanted you to read it. He never even finished it. Before he died, Kafka asked a friend to burn all of his unpublished materials. But instead his friend read it and decided to publish it anyway. So I need to thank his friend for not letting The Trial be destroyed.

The story is about a man Joseph K that is arrested and placed on trial. What he's on trial for he can never find out though. Most of the book is Joseph going to different people to get advice on his trial and to find out what he is actually accused of. The book has a very dreamlike quality to it, or more accurately nightmarish. Characters show up out of nowhere and not everything makes logical sense. I guess it actually is the definition of Kafkaesque. The whole book has a very paranoid and anxious tone to it and Joseph gets nowhere in finding out anything the whole time despite people talking to him about the case.

Very weird and memorable. I'll have to see the film now. A+ - Highly recommended

Sci-fi Book # 15- The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury

Do you ever think that you've read a book or seen a movie before and then when you decide to revisit it none of it seems familiar and you come to the conclusion that you probably hadn't read that book or seen that movie before? Memory is a funny thing... So that was my experience with The Martian Chronicles. I know for sure I had the book as a teenager but maybe I never actually read it, but who knows... that was twenty years ago.

The Martian Chronicles is a series of science fiction short stories that chronicles a couple of decades in which mankind visits and then leaves Mars. At first I didn't really know what to think of the first couple stories. They obviously don't coincide with the reality of Mars and are either a bit cheesy or have a pulpy sci-fi feel to them. But then I began to see that while the stories tell a larger story, each one should be taken as their own entity and aren't really concerned with the other stories.

Basically Mars is populated by Martians that aren't that different from us (except for maybe some psychic powers). Mankind arrives and most the Martians are killed off by chicken pox. Mars is quickly populated by humans (the environment of Mars poses almost no problems), but when war breaks out on Earth everyone returns home. Mars is then left deserted and ruined.

Most of the stories seem to be parables of some sort. One is about censorship and is an homage to Poe, another is about racism and yet another seems to be about America's history of killing a native people. As a whole the book is strange and seems to be a bunch of different things. I loved that it isn't straightforward and is so unpredictable. Oh yeah, there's also a story about a man and a Martian ghost... I don't know what it was really about but I thought it was beautifully told. It gets an A.

Book # 50 Harry Potter (Book 6 of 7) - Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J.K. Rowling

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is my least favorite Harry Potter book... That being said, I still really enjoyed it. The reason that it is my least favorite is that for the first 3/4 of the book there isn't much going on. This is the only book in which no one is really after Harry Potter and for the most part he has a pretty normal school year. The biggest plot points are that Harry finds a really useful used textbook and he is suspects that Malfoy is up to no good. There is also a bunch of time spent on Quidditch, Ron's new girlfriend and socialization with the new Potions professor. Fortunately the ending of the book is one of the best in the series and perfectly sets up the final book. This one gets an A-.

The Martian by Andy Weir

Despite having a ton of books to read already, I'm always on the lookout for new books. One of those new books is The Martian by Andy Weir. The story is simple -  an astronaut accidentally gets left behind on Mars and has to survive until NASA can figure out a way to rescue him. From the very beginning it looks like everything is stacked against the astronaut... and pretty much everything is. But he's a resourceful guy and is able to solve almost everything Mars throws at him. A few parts of the book are a bit technical, but overall the story really moved along and there are some exciting parts. It is kind of like Castaway on Mars. Hopefully the movie version will be just as fun. I'll give it an A-.

Mystery Book # 1 The Complete Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (Book 3 of 9)

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is the first collection of short stories that feature Sherlock Holmes. Most of the stories are pretty similar in that they involve someone coming to Sherlock with some weird story or problem and Sherlock does some investigating and quickly solves it. The mysteries involve missing people, stolen items, murders, etc. I like Doyle's style and each of the stories was pretty interesting though none really stuck out as being better than any of the others. I also liked that the it was easy to read a complete story in a really short amount of time. I'll give this collection an A.