I think the Asian Club is jinxed this year. Last night was the second consecutive event which, unbeknownst to us when we scheduled it, conflicted with other Asian activities in Morris County. Thus we had a minimal crowd at the Winter Dance and virtually nobody at our volleyball tournament last night. Except for the necessity of paying for the totally-unneeded security cop, my president Rita and I were able to go home early and not waste our entire Friday night out.

We are trying to hire 5 new math teachers at the two high schools in town, but most of the prospective teachers who have done demonstration lessons for us have underwhelmed us. So far the district math supervisor has offered jobs to three of them, including my brother who is going alternate route. After working in industry for twenty-five years, he has decided he wants to be a teacher. He taught while in grad school, and at the local county college a few years ago, so he has a fairly good idea what teaching entails, although I hope he is ready for the workload and stress of a high school teaching job. All of which depends on his accepting the offer, of course, and he and the district business administrator agreeing on salary.

Robert A. Heinlein is generally considered the most outstanding science fiction writer of the 20th century by serious fans and critics of the genre. Since I started reading science fiction near the tail end of his career, I really did not read much Heinlein fiction until I had already read a lot of sf which was both more sophisticated than his work and incorporated all the innovations he had pioneered several decades earlier. Thus I was never particularly impressed by Heinlein as much as those who encountered him earlier in their reading careers.

However, recently the Science Fiction Book Club is offering two collections of Heinlein novels from the 1950s, which are generally considered among his best stuff even though they were originally marketed as “young adult” novels. This sparked me to read two of his novels from that era in my collection, Time for the Stars and The Star Beast. While neither novel is particularly sophisticated or literary, they are pleasant time-passers for nights when I am stressed and tired from school and do not want to read anything very deep or challenging. Any of you whose knowledge of fantasy & science fiction is restricted to *slambang* movies or Harry Potter books might find the Heinlein young adult novels very worthwhile and–dare I say it?–a step in the right direction. I recommend you try one of the above, or Citizen of the Galaxy, Have Spacesuit Will Travel, The Rolling Stones, Red Planet, Between Planets, or Rocket Ship Galileo this summer.