Last Month's Readings

Over the past month, I’ve been continuing my reading of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, just finishing the fourth book, Foundation’s Edge and starting the fifth book, Foundation and Earth. These two books, written decades after the original trilogy, are much longer and are closely connected with each other in terms of plot and characters. There are further Foundation novels written later, of which I have Prelude to Foundation and Forward the Foundation. So, I’m going to be busy for a while longer with this interesting series! As far as I know, no one ever adapted the Foundation series to the screen, but it would be a worthwhile undertaking.

Besides Asimov’s famous series, I finished Stephen King’s short story collection Night Shift. Like any other collection, I like some stories more than others. If you have time to read just a few of them, I would recommend The Ledge, Gray Matter, Quitters, Inc., and Sometimes They Come Back (which was made into a movie). Jerusalem’s Lot is similar to his novel Salem’s Lot, but takes place at a different time. Children of the Corn was made into a movie, but the two versions diverge greatly from each other at times with regard to the characters and the plot. Another story, Battleground, was presented on the miniseries Nightmares and Dreamscapes (based mainly on stories from the book with that title) shown on cable network TNT a few months ago. Overall, I enjoyed Night Shift. I also read The Tommyknockers and The Shining, both made into movies that I have yet to see. I read somewhere that Stephen King wasn’t altogether happy with the movie version of The Shining, though. I just began reading his short crime novel The Colorado Kid. One other Stephen King note: look for the movie 1408 to come out soon. It’s based on the story with the same title from the book Everything’s Eventual. I thought 1408 was the best one in the book!

Aside from reading a lot of Asimov and King, I finished Robert Ludlum’s first novel The Scarlatti Inheritance. It wasn’t quite as good as I had hoped it would be, but I think one of the reasons for that was that the novel contained a lot about the world of high finance, something about which I am relatively ignorant. But I plan to keep on reading more of his work.

I’ve got to pick another short story collection to read. Maybe I’ll pick out a “year’s best science fiction” book off my shelf and resume tackling some of the old classic sci-fi short stories!