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Three days after finishing this book I realized that it was probably the greatest book I'd ever read. It's that good. Gene Wolfe is probably the greatest living writer of the English language. This book is the first of three in a series that continues his long running science-fantasy saga that meditates on identity, spirituality and human value. A masterpiece from a master.

Part 2 of Goldman's impromptu screenwriting class. If anything it surpasses the original Adventures in the Screen Trade.

Screenplays have an interesting quality, all their own. This book of the screenplay for Star Wars: Episode I, was released before the completed film hit theatres, and contains material that was cut from the film, as well as some of the production storyboards. This script is no better or worse than that of the original Star Wars film (a critical reading of Star Wars: Episode 4 reveals unwieldy dialog, corny characterization, and absurd leaps of logic, which are thankfully overpowered by the film's obvious enthusiasm) which begs the question: Just what happened?

This book is so invested in heartache that it can be painful to read. For those who love or need sympathy for the heartache of life, it's great, but for those who don't need that cathartic, vicarious sadness, it can be quite draining.

Gene Wolfe's subtle mastery is shown here in abundance, as he weaves together three tales to show a complex history of human involvement on an alien world. But at its heart, like much of Wolfe's work, Fifth Head of Cerberus is a profoundly moral tale that places the ethical burden on the reader by keeping his fictional world firmly in shades of gray. Wolfe's intelligence and masterful craft make this book a joyful read.

In the graphic novel Orion, Shirow Masamune engages an interesting proposition: Can a comprehensible story be told where the majority of the dialogue is a mix of psychobabble and mysticism? The answer is highly dependent on the reader understanding the obsessive Shirow's source material. Shirow's story is based on the Shinto myth of Susano'o, the god of storms, and Yamata-no-Orochi, an eight-headed serpent. It also draws heavily from the Chinese epic Journey to the West, and a certain amount of H.P. Lovecraft mythos. If one understands Shirow's basic premise, then his bizarre mythological mystical language is no different than the obtuse pseudo-science spouted in many science-fiction novels. But unlike those science-fiction novels, Shirow keeps his story moving at a gripping pace, filling any moment that begins to lag with a strange fantastical black humor, and sometimes downright silliness. For fans of Shirow's more comprehensible works like Appleseed or Ghost in the Shell it may not resonate, but it sure is one heck of a ride.

David Foster Wallace's sprawling epic chronicles drug use and abuse largely in two separate narrative arcs that wind around each other, like the strands of a DNA helix, that highlight the internal lives, from every possible angle, of his protagonists. Naturally the book is replete with Foster Wallace's use of inter-story addendums (in an extensive use of end-notes) that grant the format a slight documentary feel, as if Foster Wallace were a journalist who had managed to peer into the soul of his characters. This adds to it's considerable heft, both in the weight of the subject material and actual physical weight. One gets the feeling that Foster Wallace so desperately wants you to understand his subject's reality that he includes everything, absolutely everything, that is remotely pertinent to the story. This makes the book a massive undertaking, for Foster Wallace and the reader both, and is not to be lightly taken up. But if you have the time and mental tenacity to brave Foster Wallace's sea of words, in which every mot seems absolutely necessary, the journey is quite worthwhile.

Despite it's sci-fi prologue, this book shares more than a little with the writing of Thomas Pynchon in its frenetic parody of the American Millitary Industrial Complex. Lem's hearty mockery of bureaucracy, and all it's absurd trappings, makes for good reading. And unlike Pynchon (excepting Crying of Lot 49) you won't be hurting your back lifting it, as it weighs in at a compact 204 pages.