[!@#$%!]

im no scholar of any kind, but-- hey, congrats on the graduation one way or another. heinlein is ok, old skool but entertaining, and had some interesting ideas; margaret atwood & ursula leguin put me to sleep a bit, don delillo ive only read white noise (twice, voluntarily) so i'd put my money there, if i had to guess; rant is one of the palahniuk books i havent read, but he's uneven-- haunted was a piece of shit while lullaby or choke for example were pretty cool-- he's no genius, he's derivative, yet often very entertaining.

my suggestion would be go to your local b&n, get yourself a nice pile, a cup of coffee, and browse through the motherfuckres, and see how you like/dislike the language & so you choose what you wanna buy.

in other words what im saying is that telling you what to read is sorta like telling you who to fuck-- sure you can try a suggestion but theres no guarantee it will be to your taste. hm this came out a weird metaphor. bordello of books! anyway, whatever happens, enjoy.

Originally Posted by pbradley

Yes, well, I'll be taking a Philosophy and Science Fiction class coming September (yes !@#$!, I did graduate... or walked... just making up credits for some early pre-"declaration of major" mistakes) and I just got the list of reading material.

• Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake (Anchor) 376 pp.
• Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward (Applewood) 220 pp.
• Octavia Butler, Dawn (Aspect) 256 pp.
• Don Delillo, Cosmopolis (Picador) 224 pp.
• William Gibson, Neuromancer (Ace) 288 pp.
• William Gibson, Pattern Recognition (Berkley) 348 pp.
• Robert Heinlein, Orphans in the Sky (Mass Market) 224 pp.
• Michel Houellebecq, The Elementary Particles (Vintage) 272 pp.
• Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go (Vintage) 324 pp.
• Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossessed (Perennial) 400 pp.
• Chuck Palahniuk, Rant (Anchor) 320 pp.
• Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time (Mass Market) 384 pp.
• Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars (Spectra) 592 pp.
• Alex Shakar, The Savage Girl (Harper Perennial) 288 pp.

I'm on ebay right now buying a number of them for summer reading since we'll be going over them quickly when class begins. I already queued Looking Backward (first book we'll be covering in class so that is required), Red Mars and The Dispossessed (the longest, therefore should read them now), as well as Neuromancer and Pattern Recognition (because, as we know, their influence on the Yoof). But the question remains, are there any particularly exceptional titles among these that I should also purchase for this preliminary reading?