In a small, cold room with only a single overhead light, the Tables have turned for Agent Palmer. His ongoing series of interrogations have run so long that he now finds himself in the hot seat. This time he’ll be answering the questions. This time he’ll be the one sweating.
What happens when you mix fairies, tall tales, and the stuff of fantasy with baseball? The answer is Summerland by Michael Chabon, a fantastical mix of fantasy in prose spiced with the great American pastime of baseball.
There’s something to be said for telling your story in your own words. In 2006, Steve Wozniak reached that point at age 55.
In his own words, he wrote, “I think it’s time to set the record straight. So much of the information out there about me is wrong. I’ve come to hate books about Apple and it’s history so much because of that. For instance, there are stories that I dropped out of college (I didn’t) or that I was thrown out of the University of Colorado (I wasn’t), that Steve and I were high school classmates (we were several years apart in school) and that Steve and I engineered those first computers together (I did them alone).”
American Gods feels like required reading at least for a certain subsection of the culture, mainly geek culture. But it offers something for everyone and much like a requirement for high school or college graduation, everyone should have picked this up at some point along the way.
With Armada, Ernest Cline is back to his old tricks: creating a story in the universe of his own creation where the geekdoms and pop culture of our current reality coexist.