“I’m getting better.”

Okay, sorry to any of you who are not fans of “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.” I’ve not been updating this blog lately (“Lately?” you ask sarcastically), but I hope that will change before much longer. In the meantime, I plan to post a couple quick reviews just to prove that I’m still reading e-books (though not as many as I’d like to be reading). Without further ado:

The Day of the Triffids, by John Wyndham, is a sci-fi classic I’ve managed to miss reading since…well…since I was born. Triffids was written in 1951, yet I found it had aged better than many of its contemporaries, probably because it did not dwell too much on technology, instead focusing more on the people.

This is a post-apocalyptic tale told by one of the survivors, where “survivors” in this case are those who were not rendered blind by some generally unspecified cause, which the author speculates was the result of some sort of human-built space weapons. A side effect of this catastrophe is that it allows the Triffids, a kind of mobile, bio-engineered plant, to get loose and start causing problems. (Note that this deviates from the movie adaptation, which suggests these problems originate from some alien source beyond Earth.) The bulk of the novel then follows the attempt of the narrator to cope with the situation along with others he finds, including one he falls in love with.

I’m glad I finally got around to reading this. It may not be the best sci-fi novel ever, but I found it to be compelling, easy to read, and surprisingly modern in some respects. Four thumbs up out of five.

“I think I’ll go for a walk.”