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Mark Z.Bookseller at Lake Forest ParkMark heals the computers at Third Place Books whenever they are ill. He enjoys settling down to an evening of baseball viewing, reading the latest William Gibson novel or a randomly selected novel by Philip K. Dick, and eating a large vegetarian pizza with extra cheese and jalapenos. |
Awesome coming-of-age novel set in the '80s, chock-full of wonderful deference that will have you nodding and smiling (or loading up Wikipedia). Fourteen-year-old Billy, a budding computer programmer, and his friends try to acquire copies of the new Playboy Magazine featuring Vanna White, but Billy meets Mary Zelinsky, a like-minded teen, and things will never be the same.
A vast stretch of the American South has experienced some kind of apocalpyse in the indeterminate future, but no one - not even the government - seems to know exactly what happened. A department known as the Southern Reach is charged with discovering Area X's secrets, but each group they send across the border becomes highly unreliable, sometimes dead, and usually insane. Descend into the madness of Jeff Vandermeer's unforgetable Southern Reach trilogy. All three books are/were released in 2014.
An atypical time travel story that lovingly embraces paradox in which the protagonist, a fictional version of the author, searches for his long lost father while consulting a copy of the very book you are reading. A great read for breaking up the doldrums of more traditional fare.
William Smith. The name probably doesn't ring a bell, but Smith is the father of modern geology. Follow Smith from cradle to the grave and all across 19th Century England as he gathers data for his map of the stratification of the earth. Engrossing!
Cline exquisitely captures the popular culture zeitgeist of the 1980's (or, at least, of my 1980's) in this fast paced, futuristic (yes, it is set in the future) romp through old-school video games and movies. The creator of the world's most popular virtual reality system (which contains a galaxy of its own worlds) has died, but he has left a series of riddles behind that, once solved, will give the victorious person ownership of the creator's company (think Microsoft+Apple+Nintendo). The story follows a select few of the riddle-solvers as they compete in the virtual world and risk their lives in the real world. The stakes are high, billions of dollars are in play, and it all may come down to who can recreate, from memory, the most scenes from Back to the Future.
