8. Kurt Vonnegut, Armageddon in Retrospect

This is a book of short stories published after KV's death.  Most of them are stories about the goings on in POW camps towards the end of WWII, others are about the havoc that followed the allied victory and there are a couple of other random ones about different subjects.

The stories are all quite sarcastic in the traditional KV style.  I particularly enjoyed the title story which is about an institute that is set up on Oklahoma to proove that people are crazy because they are possessed by the devil.  The institute is backed by a rich oil magnate who pours his entire wealth into the thing and the "scientists" there conduct experiments - and one large scale clinical trial - with devices that are supposed to rid the body of the devil.  One device is a headset that shoots a low intensity current between the person's ears.

There is some controversy about how finished these stories actually were when they were found and how much work the author's son, Mark, put into finishing them.

7. John Christopher, The World in Winter

This is a PA love story (better reviewed by the Mount Benson Report and Olman's 50).  A sudden reduction in solar radiation results in a significant cooling of the northern hemisphere and the emergence of a new ice age.  The story centers around Andrew, David and their wives.  Andrew produces a television show and David is a mid-level civil servant.  They are introduced to one another at a cocktail party.  Andrew's wife subsequently leaves him for David and David's timid wife begins a loving relationship with Andrew even though it lacks intimacy.

As the weather gets colder, critical supplies begin to dwindle and violence increases.  The government gives up most of the country and establishes "green zones" around key cities leaving most of the population outside the zones to fend for themselves.  Carol, Andrew's ex-wife, leaves with their children and moves to Nigeria and soon afterwards Andrew and David's ex-wife move to Nigeria as well on the promise that David will follow them soon.  There is subtle social commentary throughout the book focused on racism in the west, this commentary is magnified when the elite white's move to Nigeria and find that they are the underclass and are forced into doing menial low paying jobs for their black task masters.

In Nigeria, after a dark false start, Andrew manages to land another television production job and begins to lead a good life for himself and David's ex.  At the same time his ex-wife becomes a live in prostitute for a wealthy Nigerian business man.  The Nigerian authorities concoct a plan to invade England and Andrew joins the mission and returns to London where he finds David's ex-wife who had left Andrew and moved back to England in order to be with David.

I have not described the soap opera aspects of this book in as much detail as I could but I think that you catch the drift.  It's a good book and a quick read.

6. Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian

In a word this book is gruesome, for example:

Two thick ropes of blood and two slender rose like snakes from the stump of his neck and arched hissing into the fire.  The head rolled to the left and came to rest at the expriest's feet where it lay with eyes aghast.

They found the lost scouts hanging head downward from the limbs of a fireblacked paloverde tree.  They were skewered through the cords of their heels with the sharpened shuttles of green wood and they hung gray and naked above the dead ashes of the coals where they'd been roasted until their heads had charred and their brains bubbled in the skulls and steam sang from their noseholes.  Their tongues were drawn out and held with sharpened sticks thrust through them and they had been docked of their ears and their torsos were sliced open with flints until the entrails hung down on their chests.

...those right pilgrims nameless among the stones with their terrible wounds, the viscera spilled from their sides and the naked torsos bristling with arrowshafts.  Some by their beards were men but yet wore strange menstrual wounds between their legs and no man's parts for these had been cut away and hung dark and strange from out their grinning mouths.

Blood Meridian is the story of the wild west in the 1870s as told through the eyes of a 24 year old always referred to as the kid.  The kid joins up with a division of the army who doesn't want to give up fighting the Apaches even though the American-Mexican war is officially over.  The division wanders down into a valley and is promptly slaughtered by the Apaches.  The kid gets away and joins a band of protection for hire thugs who provide protection to, at this time, Mexican villages and towns and are paid by the number of scalps that they bring in.  The band does reasonably well, if you can call it that, indiscriminately killing whomever crosses their path - Apaches or otherwise - however, it meets its end when one day it is attacked by the Yumas.

As with his other books the writing is so light and fluid that one does not ever feel absorbed by the book.  Nevertheless, it is a great story that is well put together and nicely told.