Octavia Butler's Lilith's Brood

“Lilith’s Brood contains three novels: Dawn, Adulthood Rites, and Imago. This trilogy tells the story of humanity after they’ve almost be all destroyed in a nuclear war and the development of a partial human, partial alien species. 

A small group of survivors are rescued by a more powerful race called the Oankali.  The Oankali travel through space in weird organic ships, trading genetic information with some of the people they meet.  Having found the human species in this state, they decide to trade with them. The Oankali spend centuries healing the dying Earth and it is there when they merge with the few humans left, creating a new hybrid! 

Despite the generic choice of the cover, this novel is actually not a romantic novel, though it does refer to sex and sexual related things often.  A lot of the story is about the coming together of relationships. This is typically in terms of the bigger societal structure and the emotional (as well as chemical as we later find out) relationship bonds. 

Dawn, tells the story of Lilith Lyapo, a human who is awakened by the Oankali, after the war that destroyed human civilization.  The Oankali wants Lilith to teach the other humans and somehow tell them that their only way of surviving is by interbreeding. 

Lilith has to find a way of coping with not being wanted and the inner problem of betraying self - a peaceful coexistence doesn’t seem to come easy. The aliens understand the biology of humanity, but can’t really understand their psychology. 

Really a history book - races not understanding one another due to their cultural and genetic differences! 

Adulthood Rites follows the story of Akin, Lilith’s hybrid Oankali-Human son.  He’s the only male hybrid born to a human woman.  He finds himself lost in between the two worlds and although very intelligent, finds it hard to be part of one or the other. A new perspective on the situations and maybe the most objective one of all three.

Imago, tells the story of Akin’s child Jodahs, the first hybrid Human-Oankali ooloi. This makes Jodahs a pure Oankali, giving us a new perspective on the situation.

Lilith’s Brood beautifully talks about a very complex social situation that we have seen over and over again every time a nation takes over and moves into the land of another nation, i.e Britain and India, US and Iraq/Afghanistan and so on.  I loved the development of the Oankali aliens and how the misunderstandings and differences between the two species created the conflicts of the story. 

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

Snow Crash has a beautiful opening that shows a high-tech armored driver and car. Hiro is a man with a mission who with high-tech toys and samurai swords and working for the Mafia, doing one of the few things that the US still does better than any other country in the world - high-speed pizza delivery. Hilarious and clever. The first chapter of the book had a nice fast paste to it.

The setup works really well too. It introduces the reader to Hiro Protagonist ( so basically “Hero”!!), the skateboard courier Y.T., and some of the major players and political structure of Stephenson's future Los Angeles. Even better, it effectively introduces Stephenson's off-beat world, in which things like Mafia-owned pizza chains and franchised private countries guarded by dogs with nuclear power packs not only prompt an amazed chuckle, they start to make a bizarre amount of sense. So this is crazy! Because its so true and logical. Another way to look at it is: Big companies have the money. They own the food industry as well as the technology industry. Due to war and poor economy companies have taken over governments. Due to lack of resources  companies became few but big. Close future of our world!? Interesting idea for a movie possibly.  

Snow Crash  is a cyberpunk humor, and it certainly works as that. Stephenson's characters approach an insane world with a sarcastic attitude, filled with confidence of what they know to be right. Stephenson also goes further by filling out the corners and edges with bits of trivia and extrapolation, resulting in a highly improbable world that feels, while reading, like a living, breathing place just a few exaggerations away from our own. Beautiful. 

The plot of Snow Crash  isn't quite as believable - someone has developed an information virus that affects people, not just computers, and the resulting fast-paced detective work and running fight scenes involve religion, archeology, and ancient Sumerian myth. It’s unbelievably simple but it works so well together! This is the book that made Stephenson's reputation as a sci-fi writer, and it's still one of the best books he's written.

"Warbreaker" by Brandon Sanderson

Warbreaker is about a land ruled by a faceless God King and focuses on the woman (Siri) who is sent to be his wife. That core of the plot feeds several subplots – Vivenna, the sister of the God King’s wife (Siri) trying to save her; a brewing war between nations; the machinations of the Gods who live amongst men and just who and what the God King really is.

Siri’s sister, Vievenna, not long after Siri is sent to be the God King’s wife, follows her in order to save her sister from the dire fate. As the story progresses, Sanderson shows an engaging parallel story of how Vivenna and Siri learn about the two disparate sides of life in Hallendren.

Men and Gods live together in this world. Men return as Gods or One of the most important elements of being a “Returned” is being unaware of how their previous life ended and what kind of life it was. Naturally, Lightsong, one of the one who have returned, is nagged by this fact, and continually seeks information about who he was and how it might affect his role as a god.

Gods amongst men is just one magical aspect of the novel. People’s hair changes color giving away their moods, and the essence of thaumaturgical power is BioChromatic breath, which is collected, shared and given to others in order to manipulate magic. 

A rogue swordsman named Vasher, is a man tortured by past deeds with a talking sword that seeks battle by his side. Sanderson applies humor to the master and weapon in Warbreaker, which allows for Sanderson’s voice and style to imprint its own image and character.

The characters and the world itself have a great "not everything is what it seems" feel to it. Sanderson does a great job of revealing these layers in terms of pacing them out to the reader. In many ways, the story initially has a faery-tale feel to it, with a royal daughter’s marriage binding two kingdoms. What unfolds from that simple premise is well-wrought and intelligent.

Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys

Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys is definitely entertaining. Though the book incorporates bits of romantic comedy, crime drama, and horror, this is a love-buddy comedy in which the protagonist's antagonist is ‘so close to him’ that he is actually literary his brother - yet again simple great storytelling. 

"Fat Charlie" Nancy, our protagonist, is embarrassed by his father, we discover he’s not a good guy, and after he dies Charlie discovers that he also has a brother, who in all possibilities is the exact opposite to Charlie. 

Our protagonist is introduced into a world where magic is real. The humor comes from topics that include Fat Charlie's nebbishy qualities as well as the mismatch between him and his brother.

Anansi Boys also draws on the structure of Shakespearean comedy-perhaps unsurprisingly, given that Gaiman's Sandman comic could be interpreted as a decade-long homage to A Midsummer Night's Dream. 

I think that Anansi Boys is like an extended film treatment, where the depth at which you can go with, with a novel, has not been reached here.

"Interview with the Vampire", Anne Rice

Very interesting story! wow. A totally different story to all other Vampire stories I've read. This is the story of a vampire who having realized his current state of being, goes on a search to find who he is and maybe to some extend to find more way to realize his won wrong doing. We are in a room face to face with the Louis as he tells us how he ended up here. The state of the vampire here can be the metaphor for many human characteristics, i.e drug abusers, etc.

Rice tells the story with a method that is simple enough in nature, but she writes in such a way that the reader can’t easily see into her mechanism. Using the tool of 'flash-backs' she stops Louis’s story and returns to present day when ever story requires, as well as giving certain info at certain points of the story and and extending a particular scene to create tension - simple good storytelling. 

"Monster Island" by David Wellington

Several months have passed since Zombies have take over NY and humans are fighting a losing battle. Dekalb leaves Africa on a ship going to New York in pursuit of AID medicine in order to exchange it for his daughter back in Africa. And off course his encounters with the Zombies, and survivors, lead him to a journey. But when they meet Gary, a zombie who says he's in control of his zombie characteristics, referred to as “homo-mortis”, their journey takes a different path. 

The action is constant and Wellington makes his zombies more threatening than before by simply investigating more into the “why” and the “how” zombies operate. 

Wellington does a unique job of creating a post-zombie world, emphasizing the point that Third World and war-torn countries are most likely to be the most resilient against it. The combination of current world issues, African kidnapping, poverty, AIDS and so on, together with the characteristics that the genre of Zombie brings, gives this work it's unique touch. Wellington also decides to tell some of the story not from the POV of Dekalb - which in my opinion works really well as the audience feels they are getting a less subjective story, and thus becomes more believable. 

Unlike what many zombie movies/books need, The Monster is actually pretty fast paste. Dekalb, someone in hunt of the savior treasure for his daughter is, by definition, liked by his audience.  

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

Master Piece Frankenstein follows the story of all and any one of us - the one who ends up making mistakes so big that it physically and, more importantly, mentally takes over them.

The nature of a mistake is off 'wrong-doing' - exactly what Evil/Monster's character is purely founded on. Told by a women in the 1800s(!!), it is written so beautifully, taking into account the golden yet very basic elements of storytelling, which are all really the study of Human Psychology, that to this date, it resonates with all ages. It is such work, Frankenstein, that once again proves to all storytellers, that the art of storytelling, both of 'entertainment' and of 'Literal/conceptual and Academic' orientation, can be fused and flourished into a simple but most importantly primal story. (Primal to humans)

The Role of the Female, Sex, Monstrosity, human nature, the nature of life and such life issues are of concern to Shelley in my opinion.