Reading Suggestion While Stuck at Home...

I used to read a lot. I think in the 4th grade I read 145 books that year. Only person who read more was a girl. I kept this reading up for several decades till life seemed to get busy and the internet came along so I only had time for things read quickly online or in magazine articles. Over the past year I have picked up the pace for books.

I do the Amazon Kindle thing, reading the free books offered on Prime. A forgotton password and a possibily imagined conflict/persecution by the powers that be have locked me out of that avenue and that may be just as well. It's forced me to return to the many shelves of books we have collected up over the years. 

This week I picked up a John Brummer novel Children of the Thunder. It had a book mark from a used book store tucked inside and I don't think I have read it. These are the works of his I own that I could lay my hands on and I think there are others around.   

Brunner who died in 1995 was a Englishman and probably best described as a sci fi writer but I like to call his work speculative fiction since it often takes place in the near future not too many years after it was written. Wiki gives him credit for predicting computer worms and virus, online encyclopedias, genetic engineering, same sex marriages, pot legalization and Viagra. All these old books describe a world not too much unlike the one we live in now. In Children of the Thunder there is a paragraph, just thrown in, where the characters are rushing across town but are delayed by a passing protest of the pro dog vs. the anti dog people incited by the discovery of rabies in a certain area of the country. There is no more detail than this but it sets a feel for the society of the novel and for current events in our times.

Brunner, being an English man received criticism for being too Americian in his writings but these books have many references to English life that will not be read through or apparent to the average American as a book you might pull from the New York Times Best Seller List.

Two of my favorites, not pictured here but probably in the house somewhere are The Sheep Look Up and Stand on Zanzibar. I think in the last scene in The Sheep Look UP characters stand on the shore of the British Isles and say "What's that smell?" Some one replies, "It's America, burning."