Books read January 2015

17.54, Thursday 29 Jan 2015

By date finished…

Nineteen Eighty-Four is so much more horribly prescient than I remembered. History lives only in the present; feels like Wikipedia, like electronic records of all kinds? How Orwell put his finger on that I don’t know. And man, the paranoia. We swim through paranoia, it’s our ocean, we can’t see it.

Caroti’s book on generation ships is half a history of the eras of science fiction, and half what generation ships meant in those eras. (Generation ships are starships where people live and die before it reaches its destination hundreds of years later.)

The Book of Strange New Things. Beautiful sentences. Meanings delicately poised. A Christian missionary, a man and wife, estrangement. And to discover this is Faber’s final novel and he wrote it while his wife Eva was dying – heartbreaking.