The Passage by Justin Cronin

After reading this short profile of Dan Fogelman (the screenwriter for, among other things you'd know, "Cars"), this book caught my attention.  I have enjoyed post-apocalyptic novels for a long time, insofar as you can "enjoy" them, and this one sounded great.

It starts out with several seemingly unrelated storylines - a prisoner on death row, a young girl, and mysterious medical excursion in South America.  Slowly, these stories combine into a story of a medical experiment gone bad - so bad, in fact, that it brings on the end of the recognizable world.  The book continues many years on, where some survivors are living in a fortress and follows their life for a while.  After that, it follows a few survivors who leave the fortress in search of some necessary supplies - and after that, it would be a shame to tell you what happens rather than suggest you read the book yourself.

The thing about this book is that it is an epic.  It's 1,000 pages of pretty small print, and I just got lost in it.  In a good way.  The characters were compelling, the story engaged me, and the author created decades or even centuries of history.  (It was not until I finished that I found out that this is the first of a planned series of three.)  I also liked the varied devices the author used - narrative mixed with some episolatory and diary entries.

Reviews of this book compare it to Stephen King's The Stand. It certainly felt like a similarly monumental read.  And, in fact, King was quoted on the back of the edition I read.  If you like this kind of book, this is an excellent execution.

WWW: Wake by Robert Sawyer

LOVE LOVE LOVE Robert Sawyer and his great science fiction.  Starting with Rollback, I've enjoyed several of his books, so I jumped in and bought all three in this series.

Well this one was really strange.  Not that his other books weren't strange - following the Neanderthal branch of evolution for example - but this one was really unique.  The story follows a teenage girl who is blind.  She's well-adjusted and settled into her life with a loyal best friend and plenty of technology to enable her to be connected to blogs, friends, and other resources online.  However, when she is offered the chance to try a new medical procedure to restore her sight, she takes it.

After this procedure, she can't see our world, but she can see some organized sets of images in her head.  Through the help of her physicist father and her doctor, she figures out that the most immediate effect of her operation is that she can "see" the structure of the Internet.  Not the EM fields in the space we live in, but the logical connections between sites and pages.  To tell you anything else about the book would ruin it, but it gets a lot weirder after that.

Reading this book was pretty quick - I get the idea that this book was written as Young Adult sci-fi.  That didn't bother me because the concept was cool, but it did make for a slightly less sophisticated book with less social commentary than his other novels.  If you haven't read Sawyer in the past, I'd suggest Rollback, Flash Forward, or Hominids as better places to start. 

I am interested to see where Sawyer takes this story in the two sequels. 

Our Kind of Traitor by John le Carre

Picked this book up in the Toronto Pearson Airport.  I had enjoyed The Spy who Came in from the Cold, and after a long week of business travel it was time for something easy. 

The book is about a young British couple who meet a Russian mobster while on vacation in Antigua.  Unsuccessful in extricating themselves from his friendly overtures, they find themselves in the middle of a dangerous negotiation. 

What I liked most about this book was that the point of view the story was told from was very unique.  Most of the spy novels I have read follow a career spy into a new situation, or follow a new spy into his or her first escapade.  This, delightfully, did neither. While a quick plot-driven airport read, the book also paid great attention to building the characters.