Mr. Burke's Reading List

The Anomaly by Michael Rutger (2018) (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.) One of the quickest reads in quite a while. I was trying to finish before an online book club meeting that a colleague was organizing, but I just wasn't able to get there in time. It started a little slow for me but picked up quickly. I spent a few hours Friday and Saturday finishing off about half the book. Not a usual thing for me. I also nearly dropped my iPad reading the same page at bedtime. This, unfortunately, is usual for me, and why I really should read on my phone more often. The story is basically what if The X-Files was actually a bunch of You-Tubers with their own show and a handful of conspiracy viewers. There's probably a better analogy, but the closest I thought of was "Ghost Hunters", which I don't watch, and I couldn...

The Man From the Other Side by Uri Orlev (1989) (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.) The cover text reads, "He found himself in a world he never knew existed," and the illustration is a confrontation of three people in a water-filled tunnel. (It's a sewer.) This is not a book that I might normally have picked up, but I'm glad I did. And I'm glad I finally got around to reading it. (My TBR piles are terrible.) This a the third book I picked up from a high school library shelf that was "Books for Free, Please Take." It was okay with the librarian if I took a couple. The Man From the Other Side was mixed in with fantasy and science-fiction books, so you can imagine that the cover and the blurb put a different kind of story in my mind. Still, it was a fascinating read. Briefly, the author met a man ...

ANALOG PLUS 50: Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, Jan 1971 This is something that I wanted to start doing a year ago. I even downloaded a couple of issues during the summer, but I didn't get around to reading them. PDF files take up a lot of room, so I usually read them on my PC. Why 50 years ago? There are a couple reasons that come to mind. First, I had a discussion online a couple years back saying that they could find good science-fiction stories for anthology shows on streaming platforms if they just went back to these old magazines. Yes, some are dated, and the ones with bad Science can be skipped over. Yes, some may not hold up to today's sensibilities, but, again, some of these might be rewritten with better characers and dialogue. I'm thinking about the main story ideas, not a wholesale adaptation. Funnily enough, the title of the editorial by John W. Campbell is "The Baby in the Bath Water". That's pretty much the main idea of the p...