ADVENTURES IN READING! - Hyperion by Dan Simmons - 1st entry

What am I reading?

Hey, thanks! I thought you'd never ask.

I used to teach Reading to middle school students but the truth is that I'm not the world's greatest, fastest or most consistant reader. Alot of times I'll get 50-150 pages into a book and I'll just A.D.D.-on-to-the-next-one. This is, without a doubt, the effect of too many comics, which I've read voraciously since before I could read letters. Hopefully, blogging about my genre-trash reading habits will help me finish books, something that I'm told is great but have never actually experienced.

I'm currently reading the Hugo Award-winning (ooh la la!) Sci-Fi novel Hyperion by Dan Simmons. All you hot babes out there will be pleased to know that leading man Bradley Cooper is supposedly attached to a film adaptation of this seriously awesome but fundementally unfilmable story.

I'm about 120 pages into the book, dangerously close to my typical breaking point, but so far it's pretty good! Hyperion deals heavily with a philosophy of time, explored, so far, mostly through a concept called 'time debt' where people in faster-than-light transit age at a slower rate relative to the rest of the universe. For example, a once-apprenctice can age and climb a career ladder while his former boss gets off a ship to meet an older and more experienced version of his once-apprentice. Mind-bendy!

One of the most unique features of this book is that it shares the same structure as The Canterbury Tales, a book that college wanted me to learn about while I was distracted by Spider-Man and coeds. There's one core story with a cast of seven characters, each of whom takes a turn telling their own story. What would you call that? Faceted? Mosaic? I don't know, but so far, like I said, it's pretty good.

If you have read this book and didn't like it, please comment with a warning before I make the terrible mistake of finishing it.