The Grand IllusionBecause of a great deal of personal chaos in my life — such as remodeling our kitchen and dining room — and the substantial additional effort it took to research, calculate, write and deliver Solar Express, I haven’t done as much personal reading as I usually do. One of the books that did stand out, not so much for its content as its presentation, was actually a non-fiction book entitledThe Island of Knowledge, by Marcelo Gleiser. The book’s subtitle (“The Limits of Science and the Search for Meaning”) is as good a summary as any. I also enjoyed, as much as a guilty pleasure as anything, the latest Alex Benedict novel, Coming Home, as well as an older book, The Crown Jewels, by Walter John Williams. I also read a quite a few fantasies by new authors, with none of which did I find worth mentioning.
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I believe that anyone who cannot enjoy McDevitt’s Benedict/Kolpath ‘find the MacGuffin’ books probably also doesn’t like ice cream or apple pie and it’s also a good indicator of their likely membership in Al Queda. In all seriousness, I felt like “Coming Home” was a return to form for McDevitt after a few recent books that felt undercooked.
I recently read Alastair Reynold’s “Blue Remembered Earth” and its sequel “On the Steel Breeze.” These are engaging ‘hard’ scifi books. BRE is an interplanetary treasure hunt / space mystery set in the relatively near future and unlike Reynold’s other galaxy-spanning books, is confined to our solar system. I found them hard to put down, and am thankful that the concluding (?) book is coming out early next year.
Thank you for posting the “Coming Home” novel!Alex Benedict/Kolpath Novels and the others by McDevitt are also among the favorites in my home library and all have been read often since publication date. All are worth reading for content and careful and proper use of the English language. They are a bit slow to begin but after a few pages they lock you in, and I have lost a lot of sleep every time I got a new one…