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Originally Posted by montsnmags
I have no idea why I have never read any of John Brunner's work. For as long as I can remember I've picked his books up off the bookstore shelves, looked at the back, and though to myself "Oh, yeah, definitely have to read this", and then just never got around to it.
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I knew John slightly, and liked the man as well as respecting the work. Things of his I'd recommend offhand include _Stand On Zanzibar_, The Jagged Orbit_, _The Sheep Look Up_, _The Shockwave Rider_, and _The Squares of the City_.
TJO, SOZ, TSLU, and TSR were all produced during the same period. Brunner borrowed the form John Dos Passos used in the USA Trilogy as the appropriate vehice for telling those stories, and reading them led me to Dos Passos. The Sqaures of the City is an earlier work and an exercise in formalism, with a structure based in a master's chess game.
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I've hit the Great Books/Harvard Classics binge lately, and I've got to remind myself that if it becomes a task then it loses any point for me.
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One of the lovely things about electronic books is the number of classics available in free electronic editions from PG and the like. I have a fair number on my PDA for reading when a moment is available. They are far more approachable when they are things I am reading for fun, rather than because someone is trying to cram them down my throat in the name of education.
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So, I'm starting to interject that reading with my first love, SF, and particularly some of the stuff I missed in my youth while reading the "new release" stuff.
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I've read most of the classic stuff, but I'm gradually going back and filling in gaps of stuff I missed back when and have entered the public domain. It
is a bit sobering when I start to see works by people I
knew reach that status.
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Dennis