Follow Friday - The BBC's "Who's Line Is It Anyway?" Ran for 136 Episodes

It's Friday again, and this means it's time for Follow Friday. There has been a slight change to the format, as now there are two Follow Friday hosts blogs and two Follow Friday Features Bloggers each week. To join the fun and make now book blogger friends, just follow these simple rules:

1. Follow both of the Follow My Book Blog Friday Hosts (Parajunkee and Alison Can Read) and any one else you want to follow on the list.
2. Follow the two Featured Bloggers of the week - Head in the Clouds and In Vogue With Books.
3. Put your Blog name and URL in the Linky thing.
4. Grab the button up there and place it in a post, this post is for people to find a place to say hi in your comments.
5. Follow, follow, follow as many as you can, as many as you want, or just follow a few. The whole point is to make new friends and find new blogs. Also, don't just follow, comment and say hi. Another blogger might not know you are a new follower if you don't say "Hi".
6. If someone comments and says they are following you, be a dear and follow back. Spread the love . . . and the followers.
7. If you want to show the link list, just follow the link below the entries and copy and paste it within your post!
8. If you're new to the Follow Friday Hop, comment and let me know, so I can stop by and check out your blog!

And now for the Follow Friday Question: Bookselling Time: Go to your biggest bookcases. Go to the second shelf from the top and pick out the sixth book from the left. Hardsell that book to us – even if you haven’t read it or if you hated it. (if you don’t have bookcases, don’t have six books on one shelf, etc, pick a book at random).

First, I'll point out that the terms of the challenge were designed in such a way as to guarantee that I'd pick a book written by an author with a name early in the alphabet since I organize my books alphabetically by author. As a result, I was entirely unsurprised when the book that popped up was The Postman by David Brin.

Second, I'll admit that yes, that is the cover of my copy of the book. I don't like book covers that are built around the movie adaptation of the story, but that's the copy I was able to find when I went looking for the book several years ago, so that's the copy I have.

But about the book. Ignore the self-indulgent Kevin Costner movie, which didn't really follow the book much at all. Excise it from your mind. Have you done that? yes? Good. Now we can talk about the book.

The Postman is a set of three connected stories set in post-apocalyptic America that focus on a character who works as a postman. He isn't actually a postman. Instead, he found a postman's van with a long-dead postman in it and took the corpse's coat because he was cold. He also took his bag of undelivered mail, because the blasted landscape of the Pacific Northwest is a little light on reading material following the devastating events that reduced the United States to a lawless pre-industrial wilderness. The first, and best, of the three stories describes the way this character almost accidentally restores the populace's faith in their country and civilization.

The second story, which is quite good, is about how this emergent society reaches out to make contact with other struggling communities to form alliances. The third story, the weakest of the three, deals with the push-back from those who don't want a reemerging American Republic to succeed. Or at least they don't want it to succeed unless they can be in charge. The third story has some interesting plot points about the responsibilities of the strong when they deal with those who are weaker than they are, but I found it to have a few flaws, mostly in the form of a kind of deus ex machina style ending. This only mildly detracts from the overall excellent quality of the book.

If you want a thoughtful and interesting set of stories about how civilization might reemerge after a nightmare of destruction, then The Postman is the book for you.

Go to previous Follow Friday: Stony Plain 135 Indian Reserve Is Home to the Enoch Cree Nation

Go to subsequent Follow Friday: There Are 137 Atoms in a Chlorophyll Molecule

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