Lucas Stoffel

Educated Book Review: Tara Westover didn't set foot in a classroom until she was seventeen. She grew up in rural Idaho with a father who was almost certainly bipolar, possibly schizophrenic, and definitely a survivalist who believed the government was coming, the Illuminati were real, and doctors were agents of the devil. Her mother was an herbalist and unlicensed midwife. Her brother was violently abusive. And nobody — nobody — thought there was anything wrong with any of th

The Amber Spyglass is the book where Philip Pullman finished building his cathedral and then knocked it down. This is a children's novel about the death of God, the liberation of the dead, the nature of consciousness, and two children who fall in love and must be separated forever. It should collapse under the weight of its own ambition. It doesn't. It soars.

Dune is the book that every other science fiction book is either descending from or reacting against. Frank Herbert published it in 1965, and sixty years later it still feels like the most complete world anyone has ever built in a novel. Every detail — the ecology, the religion, the politics, the economics, the technology, the biology — connects to every other detail with a precision that borders on obsessive. This isn't worldbuilding. This is world-engineering.