Mr. Burke's Reading List

The Giving Plague , by David Brin, 1987 I don't usually review short stories, but I downloaded this for free onto my iPad and read it with my Kindle app in the same way that I read a lot of books. And since I re-launching my reading list blog, it doesn't hurt to start a little smaller. First off, if I hadn't read the afterword, I wouldn't have realized that this story was written over 25 years ago. It hasn't dated. What makes that notable is the fact that it was written at the height of the AIDS epidemic, when the public was finally aware of what the disease was and what it was capable of doing. It's not an "AIDS story", but you can see how a plague of that kind influenced it. (Another way of putting that: if it had been written a few years later, it might have been inspired by, say, the ebola virus.) The story is narrated by a biologist who makes a discovery about a new virus spreading through the population with an unusual property: it makes peopl...

I've been away from the blog, but not away from reading. Granted, I still don't read as much as I'd like, but mostly because I don't allow myself the time. Moreover, there are too many things sucking time away -- most of them online, but some just on TV. I will NOT write reviews for the things I've read over the past four years, except for the things I've read more recently. This may tend to get boring, seeing that I'm reading the next book in a popular series, followed by the one after that, but I'd rather write about something from recent memory. I've noticed that people have stumbled across entries for specific books through online searches. I looked at those entries, and some of them are pretty sad. They date from the time after I wrote little reviews in my little notebook but before I stopped keeping track of the books. After a while, the details fade. Now, you may think that with good books, the details shouldn't fade that much, but if...