Mr. Burke's Reading List

Unidentified Funny Objects, Volume 1 , by Alex Shvartsman, ed (2012) (Not a review, just some notes to help me remember the things I've read. But written this way because it's the Internet, and some people will stumble across this page.) Okay, maybe this is a little bit of a review because I'm not really going to make notes about the stories. UFO is an annual humore anthology. Number 8 was "Kickstarter-ed" earlier this year. I participated (and submitted a story unsuccessfully) and as an add-on, I bought Volumes 1, 2 and 3. The first volume contains nearly 30 stories of fantasy, sci-fi, and "real life" (in a somewhat warped way). The stories are not necessarily UFO or alien in nature. That's just a cool title. The humor ranged from mildly amusing to irreverently hysterical to what the hell did I just read? There were a couple I couldn't remember by the time I finished them -- particularly if I was reading them at bedtime and th...

Fantastic Voyage , by Isaac Asimov (1966) (Not a review, just some notes to help me remember the things I've read. But written this way because it's the Internet, and some people will stumble across this page.) Note: the book is a novelization of a science-fiction film directed by Richard Fleischer and written by Harry Kleiner, based on a story by Otto Klement and Jerome Bixby. The novel was printed first, but Asimov didn't create the story behind it. He just made some "smart writing" out of it. As the pandemic was just gearing up and teachers were required to report to school, even as the children were not, I found myself in an Englsih/Language Arts classroom. The teacher had left some books "to be taken". Yes, they were meant for kids, but I left all the ones that kids would read. I don't believe that Fantastic Voyage would have been taken by anyone other than an adult of similar age to my own. A hardcover book, it still has the la...