Chapter One: The Beginning

“Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.” -Groucho Marx

Once upon a time, there was a man named Gabriel. He loved to read and, what’s more, he loved to talk about what he had read. But he found that there were not a lot of people around him who liked to do the same. Those that did had generally not read the books he had. So he sat and he thought and he thought and he thought. And one day he decided to start a blog so that even if he couldn’t talk to people in his own life, he could talk to people online.

That’s what this is. My way of discussing the books I read–both fiction and non-fiction–with other people who like to read. Feel free to leave comments about what I’m reading (as long as you don’t give away the ending before I’ve gotten there), as well as to leave suggestions.

My goal for the first year of this blog is to read 1-2 books a week. As a grad student with two jobs, that may prove more difficult than I’m anticipating but I’ll at least try to keep up the pace. The idea as of now is to have a monthly theme, but that may prove too limiting and is subject to change in the future.

For this month, the theme is dystopian/post-apocalyptic novels, which is strangely one of my favorite types of literature. When I looked online for a list of books of a dystopian nature, I realized that there weren’t a lot of them left that I hadn’t read. So I opted to add post-apocalyptic books into the mix as well. Since I’ve already missed the first week of the month, here’s the three novels that I’ll be looking at for the next few weeks:

   

• A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter J. Miller
• Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
• Bend Sinister by Vladimir Nabokov

-Gabe