Being too busy to review each and every book I read while in the land of Joyce, here’s a simple list of books I read while in lovely Eire:

The Black Count
Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power
Killing Kennedy: The End of Camelot
Manhunt: The ten-year search for Bin Laden
The Quickening Maze
The Little Stranger – 5/5 for mounting horror
The Long Song
The Garden of Evening Mists
The Glass Room
The Lighthouse
Swimming Home
The Children’s Book
The Finkler Question
Room
Summertime
The Sisters Brothers
In a Strange Room
Jamrach’s Menagerie – one of the best from this trip
Narcopolis
Parrot and Olivier in America
Snowdrops – good tale of exploitation in post-collapse Russia
Half-Blood Blues: A Novel – Mischlings in the Third Reich
South: the story of Shackleton’s 1914-1917 expedition
American Psycho
Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage
The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents
A Hat Full of Sky
Equal Rites
Pyramids
Witches Abroad
Interesting Times
Maskerade
Zodiac
The Best of British SF 2
The Epic of Gilgamesh
Family Matters
A Case of Exploding Mangoes
Young Zaphod Plays it Safe
Spawn of the Comet
Ships in the Night
Toy Shop and Two Others
The Pit and the Pendulum
Year’s Best Science Fiction: Volume 11
Year of the Jackpot

That is all.

You can usually never go wrong with a Heinlein novel and this one is no exception. Inequality, whether real or perceived always seems to spawn the most dreadful atrocities and longevity is no exception. What if tomorrow you realized there were people who could routinely live to be five hundred years old? You get educated, get a career and by the time you’re good at it, you’re halfway done. By the time you retire you’re dodging senility and the grave. How envious would you be of these folks who could while away a whole century on one project and then airily drop it for another? What if they had the secret of long lives but didn’t share it with you? What would you do to them to get it out of them? Robert Heinlein tackles these questions in Methuselah’s Children, a novel about a bunch of people who live to be centuries old.

These people have a genetic gift, and there is no secret to be pried from their old brains. But try telling an enraged and envious mankind that. So the children of Methuselah have to flee Earth and rush off into the void. Their hurried departure is first seen as a blessed escape and finally a curse of exile. They stop at several worlds, all benign but none pleasant enough to settle on forever. Several adventures overtake them, but they largely survive them all and finally decide to return to Earth. By the time they return, Mankind is no longer jealous of their longevity for a good reason: they’ve discovered the “secret” on their own.

Fast paced, imaginative and well-written, this is the kind of stuff you expect from Heinlein and he does not disappoint. Pick this one up for another excursion into the mind of a master.

ISBN: 0-7090-6799-2