30 More Days Book Challenge: Day 8

If you're one of the tens of people who like our little blog here, be sure to check out our newly created Facebook page (Liz and Gianna's Adventures in Book Land).  We're posting book-related morsels as we find them.  We've also created a Twitter account for the added challenge of reducing substantive commentary down to a pithy 140 characters.  Our Twitter handle is @AdvInBookLand.  Gianna's CB handle is Undergarment Varmint LaMorte.  I'm not sure why.  She can explain it to you.

On to the book challenge.

Day 8: Favorite Science Fiction Book

That's right boys and girls, we're diving head first into genre fiction.  One of my bookseller pals at BookPeople once convinced me to read this space opera book that included a runaway train and the hero having, uh, relations with a "woman" who was covered in blue fur.  I don't remember the title.  I do remember wondering if it's bestiality if the "woman" is covered in blue fur.

Gianna:

I haven’t read a lot of science fiction, and outside of Penthouse Letters VII, I haven’t read any fantasy. However, I have read what is widely considered the finest mass-market novel about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence published in 1995 (how is that for narrowing the field?). That’s right bibliophiles…Carl Sagan’s Contact. Try not to think about the movie. I mean, personally I’ve seen it, like, five times but it's Jodie Foster trying to sell a sexual attraction to Matthew McConaughey. I mean, if you can NOT watch that…well...I don’t know...I guess you and I really don’t have that much to talk about. [I've seen Contact so many times that I scream "Okay to go!" every time I'm locked inside a pod about to be dropped into the center of a gyroscope just on principle.  Don't you?] Anyway, I loved the novel Contact (which is only a novel, by the way, because Sagan couldn’t get the film off the ground).  It was really refreshing to read such a smart book about aliens coming to take me away. [Aliens aren't the only things poking at Gianna.] This book, by the way…real math-y, which I normally try to avoid. If I look on the back of a book and it mentions binary numbers or pi (not the good kind) or quite frankly addition…I am going to look the other way.

It's called 'chemistry' for
a reason. It looks like
she's desperate to flee.

I read this book over 15 years ago so I am tempted to give it another go. I mean you guys know that we aren’t alone right? Also if anyone wants to watch Contact….call me.

Liz:

Okay, I admit that I suggested this topic in the wider scope of suggesting favorite mysteries and chick lit and other categories of fiction, but I didn't really consider the fact that I really don't read science fiction books.  I have never read: Philip K Dick, Ursula K LeGuin, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, George Orwell, Aldus Huxley, or Arthur C. Clarke.  I've never read Neal Stephenson, China Mieville, Vernor Vinge, Frank Herbert, or Stanislaw Lem.  I could write about Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, but considering the recent political climate, it's less fictional and more "harbinger of Michele Bachmann to come."  Atwood also has a couple of books about apocalyptic environmental change, Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood, but since it hasn't rained in Texas in about 1,000 years, again Atwood proves too prescient for comfort. 

So let's go with another favorite near-future possibility: organ harvesting!  Nothing warms my heart like the thought of removing my stone cold little rock and replacing it with an actual warm heart.  Thankfully, Man Booker Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro gets me.  He wrote a terrific book about special children growing up at a boarding school for exceptional children.  It's a love story--no, really!--and a philosophical exploration of humanity broken down into usable parts.  I think my twin has already claimed dibs on my cirrhosis-free liver, actually.  Oh, wait, the title?  It's Never Let Me Go.  You should read it.  And your book group should read it.  And we should all thank our lucky stars that we're not covered in blue fur.