utenzi

I read a book by Joe Haldeman over the weekend. The title is Old Twentieth referring to the 20th Century. Haldeman writes science fiction and he's most well known for the excellent book The Forever War which was his highly fictionalized reflection on the war in Vietnam and his part in it. He won the Huge and Nebula awards for that novel. The two most prestigious awards in the SF genre. This book isn't bad, but I'm glad I picked it up from a remainders table. For $7 it's fine, but I'd not say it's worth the list price of $24.95. In a limited way it reminds me of The Expected One , a book by Kathleen McGowan that I read last week. In both these books there's a thread running through them that is supposed to be the "extra material" but ends up being more interesting than the main plot. In McGowan's book it's the excerpts from Mary Magdalene's diary, in Old Twentieth it's the summaries of different years of the 20th century and some ...

The Expected One is by Kathleen McGowan. I'd heard about it from Nancy on her blog Crazed Mom . I posted a pre-review of sorts last week when I'd read the first 80 pages and didn't like it at all. However while I still hold to those criticisms I think the book is quite interesting and for some people it'd be a great book to read. I'm very glad I read it and might well buy the sequels that are sure to follow. While many of the standard writing devices don't work well in McGowan's hands, her novel is a very interesting one. Working in soil already tilled by Brown's wildly popular and poorly written book, The DaVinci Code, McGowan makes a much more interesting case for historical oversight. In this book McGowan hypothesizes that Mary Magdalene was the wife of Jesus, which is pretty safe territory these days, but also says that Mary was first the wife of John the Baptist before he lost his head in politics. I'm agnostic so I only know the ins and outs ...