Mothership

I just finished reading a great science fiction book: Mothership by Tony Chandler.

I really liked this book. I was looking one day for a good e-book I could load into my IPAQ and found this one on fictionwise.com. It was stated to be more of an teen novel and not really that great (according to some reviews on amazon.com). However, I liked the premise and the sample chapter that I read, so I bought the book.

Now I don't recall if I looked at the page count when I started the book or not, but for an e-book then is a fairly large book for me. It was over 2000 pages on the small screen of my IPAQ and even over 400 pages on my PC's screen. This is larger than any other e-book I have read.

It turned out to be a great simple read. No real deep thoughts or strange plot twists. A really simple plot (some have written it is too simplistic) that I found captivating. While others mentioned the transparency of the characters (no real depth) I found the characters enchanting and could empathize with their plight early on. I was caught up in the story and needed to finish it.

I would recommend this book. Don't expect too much, just enjoy the story.

Enjoy.

Listening Library

I seem to be hooked.

Awhile ago I started checking out audio books from the library. You know those books on tape (or CD) or various stories. I seem to be hooked on them now. I have enjoyed listening to them during the short (15min) commute I have to work and when I need to wait for my daughter after her play practice in the evening.

It seems that my children and I have different tastes in stories :-) While we have all enjoyed the Harry Potter series and for the most part have also enjoyed tapes of the older original Hardy Boys mysteries, they don't like my taste in Science Fiction. I have a penchant for hard science fiction (science fiction with plausible precursers) with my favorite probably being stories related to time travel. Being an engineer I guess this is only normal (I love to consider the possibilities and probabilities of such fanciful devices).

Lately I have been listening to Carl Sagan's Contact. While you can definitely read his irreverence in the store line (I have read that the character Ellen follows his beliefs very closely), I still appreciate the science and the questions raised in the story. I have read the book earlier and love the movie adaptation (enough said), but the tapes are a bit hard to follow. The book has a number of vignettes and montages, along inclusions of related quotes at the start of each chapter, that make it difficult to follow if you are not listening carefully (or have already read the story). My kids just say its 'wierd' and hard to follow.

Chalk another one up to Dad's strange ideas.

Enjoy!