I actually finished this a couple of days ago, but this server was acting up and I couldn't get it posted. Try, try again. I really didn't exactly take the month of June off, no tropical beaches or rustic cabins in the mountains far, far from the madding internet, just summer school. Just summer school - right. Once I get the last "bit" (a 20 page research paper) done, I'll total up the pages I read during the month of June - the total is truly staggering.
This book was my "just a few pages to keep my sanity" reading. I hadn't reread it in years. It is still as magical as it was when I was a kid and read the individual stories in my dad's back issues of Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine. They were mostly printed during the fifties, back in the days when Isaac Asimov was writing snarky footnotes to the "kindly editor" which were printed with responses to the "gentle reader" and every couple of issues had an extremely shaggy dog story featuring the inimitable Ferdinand Feghoot (I believe Asimov was the perpetrator of these as well).
The first of "the people " stories I read was "Gilead," the second in the chronology. Every time I reread it I was in tears for Peter and Bethie. In actual fact, I think the stories stood so well on their own that I would have preferred to see them presented as simply a collection rather than this loose novelization, a la I, Robot. Of course, I do know that short story collections by lesser known (NOT lesser) writers do not sell well. At least, like the Asimov, they didn't mess with the stories at all, just constructed a multi-windowed frame to contain them.
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