At the Library

Now that I have this thing called free time I've been frequenting the library to borrow books to read for fun. The Cornell library has a massive selection of books, but unless I want to end up with La Chasse des canards or Harvest of grief: grasshopper plagues and public assistance in Minnesota, it’s really hard to browse. Even with the Library of Congress Classification System categories, looking at call numbers starting with PR – a fraction of a floor of one library – only narrows things down to the entirety of English literature.

So I've been going with the call numbers for random book recommendations in hand and this summer I've read a mix of science fiction, young adult fiction, and more “classic” novels.

I first read Arthur C. Clarke when I picked up Rendezvous With Rama at a library book sale a couple years ago. Over spring break, I finished the Rama series and this summer I've started on the Odyssey books. Thusfar I've read 2001: A Space Odyssey and 2010: Odyssey Two. There are definite similarities in the two series – space travel and alien life being a couple of the themes that have made an appearance in all of Clarke’s books I've read so far. One kind of cool thing is that Clarke wrote about using Jupiter’s gravity to accelerate a spaceship deeper into space in a kind of slingshot maneuver, which is exactly what the Voyager probes did, before Voyager 1 or 2 launched. [I read a book about the Voyager probes last summer, and while it wasn't terrible, I was hoping for more about how the probe was designed and run and things that happened on its journey and the author focused more on exploration in general.]

My first library trip this summer, I went in looking for 2001 and was wandering the shelves in the English literature section when I found Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s works. I decided not to pick up any Sherlock Holmes at the moment and instead went with The Lost World, in which a newspaper reporter, an academic, an adventurer-type, and an overbearing professor explore a remote mesa in South America, where, the professor claims, there are dinosaurs. I found part of the ending a bit anticlimactic but overall the story was interesting, with plenty of action in the second half of the book.

Moving on from dinosaurs to pirates, I borrowed a young adult book titled Pirate Cinema by Cody Doctorow as a quick read. The pirates in this book do not sail the seven seas, but instead illegally download things from the internet and stay in abandoned buildings. It was a less dense read than some of the other books I've been going through, and the storyline is rather relevant to today’s technology-filled world. The general feel of the book reminded me of The Thief Lord with laptops.

Finally, to round out my selection of two dystopian novels, two novels based in England, and . . . aliens, I read Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. This book considers a world where people are raised from birth to have a particular intelligence, social class, and job. They cannot imagine being happy doing anything other than what they have been conditioned to do and if they ever start becoming unhappy, there’s a pill that can fix that. Brave New World is one of those books that’s on lists of “100 books everyone should read” and that comes up periodically on Jeopardy! and trivia quizzes, so I figured I should actually read it. I enjoyed it, but I wouldn't want to live in the world Brave New World describes. So far I've liked everything I've borrowed from the Cornell library system and haven’t had to suffer through dutifully enjoy titles such as Feed and The Life Before Us that have been past summer reading assignments. I’m currently working on Donna Tartt’s The Secret History with the first two of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels still to come. If anyone has any book recommendations, feel free to leave them in the comments.