My god. I was the insanely lucky recipient of three fantastic books this blessed day. If you check the title of this blog, you’ll see that I dare call it "The Reviewer’s Nook;" so technically, it goes to follow that I love it when people give me books. Any books at all. Seriously.

Here are the books that I got today:

1. Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day. Thomas Pynchon was a master American fictionist, and I am very very glad to announce that I am now a proud owner of two of his novels.

2. Jean-Dominique Bauby’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. This book was written by a stroke victim who could  only turn his head by ninety degrees and blink his left eye.

3. Jim Butcher’s Grave Peril. The third book in the Dresden Files.

If only I didn’t have so many books waiting to be read, I’d get started on one of these right away. As it is, I have around . . . five? Six? books queued.

Sigh.

Has anybody here ever heard of a series called The Dresden Files? I heard from a friend that it was this awesome set of books that mixed hard-boiled detective stories with magic. And from the looks and sound of it (I did some Wikipedia research), the magic is so awesome, it’s nearly scientific. Rather, it’s so scientific that it’s awesome. Except that that wouldn’t have sounded as cool as the former.

Anyway. Science meets magic meets mystery stories. I love science, and when magic isn’t too steeped in high fantasy, it becomes one of the few things that can entrance me. And I started out this trip into the deep end of literature and reading with Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys mystery novels, so I’d be lying if I said I didn’t care for mystery stories one bit.

So please. If anybody can point me to which books I should read in the series (aside from the first book, since that pretty much introduces the entire idea of The Dresden Files), please do share your thoughts with me. I’d love to know which books to read and which books to avoid.

There are no words that can describe just how much of a fan I am of Kurt Vonnegut. I’ve read several of his books, including Slaughterhouse Five, Bluebeard, and Mother Night. I’ve enjoyed each and every one of those books, Vonnegut is what I’d call a master of the post-modern, filling his books with hilarious stories that don’t always make sense, but seem to connect to each other so bloody well.

But the thing with Timequake is that it’s premise is just so awesome, it could literally stop planets from moving.

The premise is actually pretty simple. During the year 1991, the world decided to stop caring, thus causing a quake in the flow of time, dooming reality to repeat itself every ten years. Thus, for the next ten years, people would go about in their activities in a normal manner, but come 2001, exactly ten years later, everybody would go back to what they were doing back in 1991 - and this would continue in an indefinite loop.

The very thought of it just sends shivers up and down my spine. Vonnegut is a bleepin’ genius.

Once I’m done with the book, I’ll make sure to post a review of it up here. I’m sure that it’ll be a very, very good review, unlike the one I just finished for Rushdie’s newer works. Timequake was published way back in 1997, and Vonnegut, unfortunately, passed away last year.