Calculating Human Oxymorons
I finished a book last night, Robert J. Sawyer’s Calculating God. It’s going in my “one of my favorite books” list, here is the jacket blurb:
An alien shuttle lands outside Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum. A six-legged being emerges, who says, in perfect English, “Take me to a paleontologist.”
It seems that Earth, and the alien’s home planet, and the home planet of another alien species traveling on the alien mothership, all experienced the same five cataclysmic events at the same times in their prehistory (one was the asteroid impact that on Earth wiped out the dinosaurs). Both alien races believe this proves the existence of God: God has obviously been playing with the evolution of life on each of these planets.
I feel a little bad about considering it one of my favorite books, not because of the quality of the novel, which was obviously amazing, but because I realized that I just have too many favorites of everything. Books, movies, music, friends, food, etc etc. But doesn’t everybody? right?
Favorite means “preferred over all others”, so it’s kind of dumb to have more than one I think. I’m not advocating that people should actually go out and only have one favorite, but I guess I’m advocating using a word other than ‘favorite’.
My favorite books list, in alphabetical order (ones that come to mind as of this writing):
- Calculating God - Robert J. Sawyer
- The Call of the Wild - Jack London
- The Catcher in the Rye - J. D. Salinger
- The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
- Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire - J. K. Rowling
- Mars Trilogy (Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars) - Kim Stanley Robinson
- Neverwhere - Neil Gaiman
I think I’m leaving some out…apologies books, I truly feel bad. I start Charles de Lint’s The Onion Girl tonight. Hopefully I’ll finish this one sooner than this last one, I haven’t been reading as much as I have wanted to since I moved down to Virginia. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince comes out July 16th 2005, looking forward to that one.
Leave a Reply