Do you like books? I like books.

This past semester I took a class on science fiction. Though I already had an interest in the genre, I was a little weary of having to read 5 novels and a packet full of short stories over what ends up being a period of a little over three months. For someone who purports to like books, I read slow. PAINFULLY slow. This class was kind of a sink or swim situation for me. Either I wasn't going to be able to keep up with the reading or I had to get faster (What was that? Try starting the assignments earlier than the weekend they're due? What a ridiculous idea!).

Long story short, I got faster, often reading entire books in a couple of days, something I never would have thought myself capable of this time last year. Not only were the books themselves great (Childhood's End, The Handmaid's Tale, Ender's Game, Fahrenheit 451, and Frankenstein), but now that leisurely making my way through a book takes only a week or so as opposed to months I've started reading a bunch of things I've been meaning to get to, and am slowly amassing quite a large list of books that I'd like to tackle. These include:

- 1984, George Orwell
- Time and Again, Jack Finney
- The Illustrated Man, Ray Bradbury
- Something Wicked This Way Comes, Ray Bradbury
- Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein
- A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
- The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
- Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson
- The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Michael Chabon
- Fever Pitch, Nick Hornby
- Me Talk Pretty One Day, David Sedaris

I'll be posting my progress up here as I make my way through these.

I just finished Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles, which was a really fun, fast read. He rotates through different sets of characters with each 'chapter', but yet still manages to retain a certain momentum throughout so that it really does feel like a chronicling of Humankind's relationship with Mars, rather than a compilation of loosely connected short stories (which I was under the impression it was since a number of the sections in this book were published in magazines as stand-alone stories).


If anyone is still reading at this point, I'm hoping that you're up for some participation in the comments section: What are some of your favorite books?