The A Book A Month project is still going strong, and yesterday - roughly halfway through May - I finished my June book, “Nineteen Eighty-Four” by George Orwell. It was a particularly tough nut to crack, something I vaguely remember I also felt when I read the book for the first time, many years ago. The book is 297 densely packed pages, and you really have to pay attention the entire time since skipping a line or two might result in you missing an important piece of the plot. “Nineteen Eighty-Four is a great novel, but it’s not for everyone.

Anyway. The time has come to choose the next few books to read in the coming months:

• “11/22/63” by Stephen King: After my 28 days with George Orwell’s classic, I need something that is easy on the old noodle. This Stephen King novel is about time travel, which can be really, really complicated (see: Primer), but my experience with King is that he manages to dumb things down sufficiently to make the most complex topics easy to understand. He writes, after all, for the masses. My only hesitation about “11/22/63” is its length: It’s 849 pages, which is, frankly, a lot more pages than I’d usually plow through in a month. But I’ll take my chances.
• “Neuromancer” by William Gibson. Neuromancer is one of the books that defined the cyberpunk genre. It has inspired movies, TV series, other books, computer games, role playing games and countless other works of entertainment. It’s also a book I’ve read before, and that I struggled a bit with. Here’s to hoping I’ll understand more of it on the second third read.
• “Robogenesis” by Daniel H. Wilson. I finished Wilson’s “Robocalypse” in April, and that was a great read. I should get a review written, and I’ve got a lot of notes and a rough draft saved, but it’s not quite there yet. Robogenesis has been described as “superior [to Robocalypse] in every way”, so count me in, Daniel!
• “Children of Dune” by Frank Herbert. Since we’ve already established that “there is no such thing as too much Dune”, I’m continuing down the rabbit hole with Frank Herbert’s great space opera. Like “Dune Messiah”, the second book in the series, “Children of Dune” only received a lukewarm reception from the critics, but personally I enjoyed “Dune Messiah”, so I’m taking my chances with “Children of Dune” as well.