Mars

"The red world and the blue are brothers. They were born together in the seething maelstrom of dust and gas spinning out from the heart of the vast cloud that was to become Father Sun. 


For uncountable time each world was engulfed in endless violence. Monsters roared down out of the sky, pounding the worlds mercilessly in a holocaust of terrible explosions.  Under such awesome bombardment there could be no solid ground; the rocks themselves were liquid bubbling magma as the fiery rain from the sky went on and on, blotting out the radiance of the newly bright Father Sun with steaming clouds that covered each world from pole to pole"   

                    --Ben Bova, Mars

Are you in love yet?  I am only half way through this novel (the first Ben Bova I have read).  It is slow, methodic and about as close to Pablo Neruda I have seen in the English language. It's one of those books that I can read a paragraph like the one above and I want to look up and find someone to share it with so that I can ask; "did you see that!?" It's this pulsing story that makes you wonder what is going to happen next, it makes you curse the fact that the book must be put down to sleep or to work or other such mundane things.  So I guess the point of this post is... I recommend this book.