Douglas Adams— The Ultimate Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy

I read this book without any idea what I was getting myself into, and I was really surprised how great this was. The whole thing seemed very british to me. Growing up I remember watching The monty python movies with my family and this book’s humor definitely brought me back to that. The randomness and existentialist over the top humor is great. I loved zaphod beeblebrox his character was hilarious. It was great how stupid he was and gave himself a lobotomy and yet he was the president of the universe. The improbability drive was another favorite aspect of this book. The sort of dark irony of everything and it’s futileness is great and the character that reflects this the best is the super intelligent robot servant who is extremely depressed. It seems that everything in this book is off the wall but has a very reasonable and unfortunate explanation. Another example is the part of the book where it goes off on a tangent to explain how a group of people built a super computer to calculated the meaning of life only to hear that the answer is 42. Something like that is completely random but it’s that sort of answer that could be completely valid to a question so vague and contrived. This book was an amazing read.

Neal Stephenson—Snow Crash

Snow Crash interested me because I heard plenty about it from my friends. “it’s insane, but also really believable” is how it was described. The book takes place in a hypothetical future like the cyberpunk genre kind of implies but this book seemed to have a specific alternate theory for what the economy and government of the future would be like.. Hiro is a hacker and master sword fighter, but compared to the rest of this novel that combination of skill sets doesn’t seem so unfitting. Snow Crash is a pseudo-narcotic in the book that Hiro encounters, and its interesting to think of how drugs of the future will change and affect culture and society. To think how much an impact the introduction of drugs in the 60’s had on culture. I really enjoyed how the book examines the details of snow crash and how it affects the human mind as well as the “meta-verse”
It’s a very interesting concept. Unfortunately I didn’t get to finish Snow Crash but I will definitely come back to it because it has so many interesting a specific theories about the future that seem “insane but also really believable” just the way my friends described.

Neil Gaiman’s American gods

I remember reading some of my brother’s sandman comics and really enjoying them when I was in middle school. Being so young though my short attention span prevented me from perusing the author and reading his other work. I just went on to reading some other comic book or got sucked into some sprawling in-depth story based video game which were kind of the “video game style” of the 90’s play station games. But nonetheless Neil Gaiman’s name had been imprinted in my mind along with his work.
American Gods interested me right off because I knew it dealt with mythology and I always sort of had interest in mythology, and this book fuses the characters with mythology in interesting ways. They actually are the supposed gods from the myths but they’re in very different circumstances. It’s interesting to examine how these gods act in a modern setting, I found it believable. The introduction of shadow in prison was interesting, you learn a lot about his character just by his action in prison and then he learns his wife is dead, so he sort of becomes this clean slate character not really having anything to go back to. Shadow is a great character and same with Mr. Wednesday. I thought it was interesting at the end when shadow accuses Odin of Mr. Wednesdays actions but he explains that although it was him he cant be responsible for Mr. Wednesday’s actions. I’ve read lots a lot of fantasy books like Harry Potter, or Terry Pratchet books, but this book was refreshing because it was definitely a more mature modern fantasy novel.