Some quick thoughts on the most recent books I’ve read.

Dune by Frank Herbert

Come on, I had to give Dune a read with how popular it’s gotten lately thanks to the movie adaptations.

I really enjoyed my time with it! It’s set in a pretty interesting universe, and reading the book helped me understand a couple parts in the first movie that went by quickly.

The one thing that brings it slightly down for me is the writing style. It creates amazing imagery at times but at other times I felt it occasionally came at the cost of clarity.

Overall though, it was a fun read and I’m glad I gave it go. I’m even more excited now to see the second movie since I’ve still only seen the first.

Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky

I found out about Roadside Picnic when I learned that it was the inspiration behind a game I like called Into the Radius. Really there’s an entire subgenre of games that are inspired by this book though. I believe the Stalker games were the first and most notable.

Anyway, Roadside Picnic is a very interesting read. Again, I really found the setting interesting. It takes place in the years following a first contact event with aliens, except… there wasn’t really any contact. The aliens were sort of just here and gone, leaving a bunch of their junk behind and creating strange anomalies in the nearby areas. Researchers go into the zone regularly to study it and its artifacts, but they’re not the only ones with an interest in it. The zone is also really popular with scavengers interested in smuggling artifacts out to sell on the black market.

One thing I liked is that you really get a good taste of everything going on inside and outside the zone. Each chapter explores a slightly different aspect of the zone and how it affects the lives of regular nearby people. There were several points where I was somewhere on the line between being creeped out and wanting to chuckle, just with the way the characters were adapting to the zone’s bizarre effects and turning it into something more or less normal. I love that kind of vibe.

We Are Legion (We Are Bob) by Dennis E. Taylor

It was close, but of the three, this book was my favorite. It’s just a fun and easy read and is really easy to recommend if that’s your thing.

We Are Legion (We Are Bob) is the first book in the Bobiverse series. It follows Bob who takes out a rather unique life insurance policy using the money he just earned selling his software company. Shortly after, he’s involved in a fatal car accident but reawakens 100 years later as an artificial intelligence thanks to the policy he took out. He learns he’ll be manning one of several competing space probes on a mission to colonize the stars.

Like I said, it’s turned out to be a fun and enjoyable series. I’ve actually just completed the second book with plans to start the third soon!

I’m thinking I’ll do more of these kinds of posts every so often once I’ve got enough books to talk about. In the meantime, you can follow me on my BookWyrm account at jp@bookrastinating.com if that sort of thing interests you.

— JP