Last night I finally finished the 700+ page Don Winslow opus, The Border. It was (supposedly) the final installment of a trilogy about the Mexican and Central American illegal drug trade and the development of the infamous cartels. I did not enjoy this last installment at all but pushed myself through it. Full of paper thin stereo-typical characters, a plot spread way too wide, a la Game of Thrones, and contrived over the top political virtue signaling, it was, in my assessment an utter failure. This was an incredibly disappointing summer read as his last book, The Force, was an outstanding accounting of police corruption in New York City driven by an unforgettable anti-hero.
So, I am due for a cleansing science fiction read and out of my queue I pulled Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, which won a Hugo award years ago for its depiction of a post apocalyptic world and a theme of the cyclical nature of human civilization. I think I was vaguely aware of this book, but recently found it on one of those web lists of books that absolutely must be read, so I grabbed it off Amazon… I’ll let you know how it goes…