That Moment When...

Have you ever been reading a book and come across a line or a passage that suddenly changes your perspective on the author? Maybe it sends the author up a notch or maybe it's like, "Oh! I thought he was that kind of author but he's actually that kind of author." Am I making sense?

The first three books in John Scalzi's Old Man's War series were discounted during Amazon's Prime Day. I had always been kind of interested in these but also kind of not or maybe I should say less interested than I was in some other books but the Prime Day discount seemed like a good opportunity. Not only were they discounted but they are standard size paperbacks which seem to be increasingly rare these days, at least in the books I most want to read, which annoys me no end.

So anyway I got them and started reading the first book and it's good. I'm not a big fan of military sci-fi but this is fleshed out enough with personalities and interesting dialog, and of course, interesting technology, to make it seem like not just military sci-fi.

So I finished Old Man's War and immediately moved on to The Ghost Brigades. It's been a fun read. Then about three-quarters of the way through the book, maybe a little more, I come across this line:

And as for thinking, what about thinking requires you to observe yourself doing it?

This begins a couple of pages long discussion about consciousness. I'm not sure I'm buying it, or maybe I'm just not completely able to wrap my head around the concept of a being that thinks but is not aware. That's kind of beside the point though. What I am charged up about is discovering an author who explores tricky subjects such as consciousness. So, now I'm suddenly a Scalzi fan and I have added several more books to my Must Read list.

BTW, Scalzi is really entertaining on Twitter. I have liked so many of his tweets I'm starting to feel like a creepy celebrity stalker.