Posts

Showing posts from March, 2009

A Young Geek's Fancy Turns to…Science Fiction?

Image
[originally published May 2005] With all due respect to Alfred, Lord Tennyson, spring is the best time to plan your summer reading (besides, this magazine isn't the place to explore the racier topics in his poem Locksley Hall ). If you go to the beach in August without a couple of good, fat, books already researched and acquired, you risk spending your precious time in expensive resort bookstores, browsing among stacks of trashy titles, embarrassing yourself with plaintive requests to friends or relatives for books, or, even worse, reducing yourself to working your way through a stack of moldering Archie comics. Your reading time is too precious to waste—don't become a poster geek for the Wasted Summer Reading Foundation! A good summer book must meet several exacting requirements. It must be entertaining without being taxing — we're on vacation here, so War and Peace won't do. The book should be long, preferably very long — the number of hours we have at the beach is s