The Invisible Circus by Jennifer Egan

I needed a few Europe-themed books for my vacation to France this year so when Mom suggested that I'd like this one I went to Barnes and Noble with it on the top of my list. Jennifer Egan's Look At Me was great, so I had high expectations for this. Unfortunately, B&N only had a paperback version of this that actors from the movie adaptation on the front, but I bought it anyway.

Phoebe, the protagonist, is the youngest of three children, the eldest of which was her now-deceased sister, Faith. Faith went to Europe as a hippie teenager, and died under mysterious circumstances there. We meet Phoebe as she is a frustrated high school student. "At her vast public high school Phoebe had felt reduced to a pidgin version of herself, as during "conversations" in French class--Where is the cat? Have you seen the cat? Look! Pierre gives the cat a bath--such was her level of fluency while discussing bongs or bands or how fucked up something was at a party." Her life stagnating (and her relationship with her mother strained), she takes off to Europe seeking more information about Faith's death.

As the book progresses, and Phoebe makes her way through Western Europe, we learn more about her family history. The relationship between Faith and her father emerges as incredibly unhealthy, her father relying on her sister for strength: "Maybe nothing of hers could compete with their father's need of her, her [sister's] unique and seemingly bottomless power to save him." Faith becomes less elegant and more flawed as Phoebe follows her sister's route through Europe.

This book is very well written, which makes up for the occasional inevitability of the plot. Egan's ability to capture certain moments between characters was shockingly good, particularly for a first novel. Had I not already read other books by her, I'd worry that she exhausted all her beautiful prose in one place. The following scene occurs between Faith's former boyfriend and his new girlfriend: "Carla exclaimed at something she'd found, set down her cigarette and circled the time with a stubby pencil, her other hand groping for Wolf as if for a pair of glasses or a cigarette pack finding his wrist without lifting her eyes from the paper. The gesture transfixed Phoebe--the inadvertence of it, the thoughtlessness."

What I also liked about the book was that it was both a coming of age story as well as a journey story. At the beginning of the book, Phoebe is young; in many ways, she is frozen in time from when her sister died. As she moves through her trip she grows up and is clearly a young woman by the time she returns home. She falls in love for the first time and expresses several universal feelings about it: "Seeing Wolf clothed, out in the world, Phoebe, often was shocked at how unmarked he was physically by all that had happened between them. Their flesh seemed ready at times to fall apart limb from lib, yet here they both were, intact. Somewhat creaky, lips faintly bruised, but unmarked in any permanent sense. If they went their separate way, there would be no proof. This troubled Phoebe."

This was a great work of female fiction. Thanks, Mom.

Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut

One of the reasons I went to Brown for college was so I didn't have to take a set of required courses. Like, say, um, Biology. But every year, I remember seeing legions of freshman dutifully taking introductory biology and the first course assignment was to read Vonnegut's Galapagos. And every year, I remember thinking, "well gosh, I like books, maybe I'd like Vonnegut, maybe I'd LIKE biology." But I never tried it. So this year, when August rolled around, I decided to symbolically start a school year by reading Galapagos.

Awesome. This book was absolutely awesome. It made me want to read more Vonnegut and go to the Galapagos. Maybe go to the Galapagos and read Vonnegut. Anyway, I'm clearly on a sci-fi kick and this fit right in. A great story, cleverly told, with plenty of commentary on evolution and ethics.

At its simplest, it's about the story of several people on a cruise through the Galapagos Islands (home to many interesting species - particularly evolutionarily). Of course, there is a world-wide armageddon that begins when the cruise begins, and it's narrated several millenia in the future, but hey, it's Vonnegut.

The book is equal parts science and poetry. The science deals a lot with genetics and evolution. Writing about dental care, the narrator (millenia in the future) remarks, "It would be nice to say that the Law of Natural Selection, which has done people so many favors in such a short time, had taken care of the tooth problem, too. In a way it has, but its solution has been draconian. It hasn't made teeth more durable. It has simply cut the average human life span down to about thirty years."

Vonnegut wrote the story using many techniques that ensured the reader could not focus on the plot. He often interrupts his own descriptions or stories to tell you ahead of time what the resolution of a particular situation will be. It puts the reader in a position of analysis, like the narrator who knows the ending, rather than one of following plot. For example, he writes, "He was unmarried and had never reproduced, and so was insignificant from an evolutionary point of view. He might also have been considered as a marriage possibility for Mary Hepburn. But he, too, was doomed. *Siegfriend von Kleist would survive the sunset, but three hours after that he would be drowned by a tidal wave."

As someone who doesn't read the New York Times Book Review because of how much plot they give away in their reviews, I was incredibly frustrated by this aspect of the book. But it also challenged me to understand what was going on through different eyes, which is not something just any author can accomplish. Another example: "It just might have been fatal that the colonists killed off all the land iguanas almost immediately--but it turned out not to have been a disaster. It could have mattered a lot. It just happened that it didn't matter much at all." The narrator says this, hundreds of thousands of years later, and the reader is forced to understand that the action in this story is reasonably insignificant and that plot is not the narrator's point.

Like all good science fiction, Vonnegut is ultimately making a socio-political point. This one, I believe not just about technology and environmental damage (although he is commenting on that, albeit deterministically), but about people's treatment of each other.

"It pains me now," his narrator writes, "even a million years later, to write about such human misbehavior. A million years later, I feel like apologizing for the human race. That's all I can say."

If you like Vonnegut, or science fiction, or evolution, or even a challenge, this is a great book. If you're more comfortable in the Oprah range (don't be ashamed), then skip this one.

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

I was looking for something reliable at the library, and decided on an Atwood book. I think I was in the mood for a women's friendship book and instead I ended up with a dystopia sci-fi book, but it was a good one. I was definitely reminded of how good a sci-fi writer Atwood is, this book pushing her capabilities further than even Handmaid's Tale.

This book takes place in an alternative future, alternating between two times. The first is when the world as we know it reached its peak of scientific "progress". This time is best captured here, in a discussion of a major company's business model:

"There were pigoons at NooSkins, just as at OrganInc Farms, but these were smaller and were being used to develop skin-related biotechnologies. The main idea was the find a method of replacing the older epidermis with a fresh one, not a laser-thinned or dermabraded short-term resurfacing but a genuine start-over skin that would be wrinkle- and blemish-free."

The second time frame in the story takes place after this world has imploded due to too much technology being misused. The new world can only be described as post-apocolyptic, reminding me of a wasteland I don't remember since seventh grade's Canticle for Liebowitz.

"Along the road is a trail of objects people must have dropped in flight, like a treasure hunt in reverse. A suitcases, a knapsack spilling out clothes and trinkets; an overnight bag, broken open, beside it a forlorn pink toothbrush. A bracelet; a woman's hair ornament in the shape of a butterfly; a notebook, its pages soaked, the handwriting illegible. The fugitives must have had hope, to begin with. They must have thought th'd have a use for these things later. Then they'd changed their minds and let go."

The narrator is named Snowman (formerly known as Jimmy in the old world), and he was best friends with Crake and in love with Oryx, the title characters. Now Snowman seems to be the only human left on earth, kept alive by specially bred species who used to be science experiments. Growing up, he worshipped Crake as an older brother-style role model. His life starts to fall apart while Crake becomes the darling of a multinational conglomerate. As the story unfolds we learn more about Crake's motives and drive, and more about Jimmy's path to becoming Snowman.

I liked reading this book and thought it had a more satisfying ending than Atwood's books usually have. However, it's not for the weak of heart. It's hard-core sci-fi and takes some patience to learn all the language and ocnstructs relating to this new world.

Timeline by Ken Follett

I was unexpectedly home in New Jersey and ran out of books, so I ransacked Jo's bookshelf. She has always liked Michael Crichton so I was in luck. I ended up lugging it back to Boston, hardcover and all. Part science fiction, part historical fiction, 100% action.

This was a fun book. It's about a high-tech company in the near future who figures out a way to time travel. Their corporate goals intersect those of a group of academics who are excavating a 14th century village, the Dordogne in France. The academics end up getting sent back to 14th century France, and that's where things get interesting.

I had forgotten how good Michael Crichton is! There were no particular passages in the book that I thought were exceptionally well-written, but I could not put the book down. Reminiscent of Ken Follett's Pillars of the Earth, this book demonstrated an author's comprehensive and extensive understanding of a reasonably obscure topic (in this case both particle physics and French history) brought into a great story.

The preface, written with the book in 1999, made me chuckle. Crichton writes of the futuristic setting for the book: "It is a world of exploding advances on the frontiers of technology. Information moves instantly between two points, without wires or networks. Computers are built from single molecules. " Check, check.

Definitely a good read, specifically for you science types out there.