Book Review: Shikasta

01 Aug 2012

How do you define a good book?

Should it have a complicated story: full of metaphors and allegories and difficult-to-understand concepts and words? Or is it a book that just keeps you turning its pages till you finish it?

One of my favourite books is ‘The Game of Kings’ by Dorothy Dunnett. Not one of the people who I’ve leant it to has ever finished it. Most didn’t get past the first few pages. So when I say I didn’t enjoy this book, don’t be too hard on it.

Written by a Nobel prize winning author, it is a science fiction novel about the Earth seen as a ‘project’ by intelligent beings in another planet. I found it a little too wordy and the ‘let-me-tell-you-what-is-wrong-with-you’ kind. A philosophical book disguised (and not too well) as science fiction