The Probable Future by Alice Hoffman

Many years ago I read Practical Magic by Hoffman and really enjoyed it - it became a movie in the '90's too - with Nicole Kidman and Sandra Bullock.  When I saw this book by the same author at the library, I picked it up.

This book is about a family of women, each of whom has a special talent - for example, knowing if someone is lying.  When Stella comes of age and finds out that her talent is clairvoyence, she is put in a difficult situation when she sees her father commit a crime in the future.  Once a series of events comes from this, she goes to live with estranged grandmother, complicating things for her mother.

I liked the mix of supernatural and "normal" worlds - not too science-fiction, but certainly a required element of the plot.  I also liked thought the characters were well-developed and strong.  It wasn't the most memorable book I've read recently, but I did enjoy it.

WWW: Watch by Robert Sawyer

The second book in Sawyer's WWW trilogy, this one continued where WWW:Wake had left off.  After blind teenage Caitilin receives an experimental device to help her see, she figures out that this device has also given her access to a being that exists in the consciousness of the World Wide Web. As national security organizations start to notice strange patters in the Web, and as the consciousness grows in its sophistication, several ethical and practical issues start to arise.

Caitlin remains a likable protagonist, brave and down-to-earth.  Like the first book, this one still feels like a YA novel, although given the recent success of both the Twilight books and the Hunger Games books, that isn't a knock. 

Sometimes when I read trilogies, I can see how the author's style or point of view changed between writing the individual books.  For WWW, this is not the case - Sawyer seems to have had a strong idea of where the story was going and just continued more of the same - which is a good thing.  I found a great interview with Sawyer  that addresses some of his thoughts on the themes in the trilogy as well as whether it is a YA book or not.

WWW:Wonder is staring at me every day, waiting for me to experience the end of the triology.

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. 

The Illumination by Kevin Brockmeier

Brockmeier's A Brief History of the Dead has remained one of my most memorable reads, so I was happy to see he had a new one out. 

The Illumination is speculative fiction, and refers to a phenomenon that strikes society unexpectedly.  Suddenly, people's pain is visible as colored lights.  If you have a cut on your finger, your finger glows.  If you have a kidney stone, it is lit up for everyone else to see.  The implications of knowing who is in pain and in what way becomes a new factor in interpersonal interactions.  Something about this book kept making me think of Saramago's Blindness - the use of a physical ailment to make a societal point. 

This novel follows six people as they navigate in this strange new world - starting with a patient at a hospital when this all starts. Five other major characters emerge, each of them coming into possession of a set of love-letters written by the husband of the patient's hospital roommate.  These love letters form the basis of the connection among the rest of the characters, who are otherwise reasonably unrelated.

I like Brockmeier and I liked this book because it was interesting, but I'm not sure I "get" it in the end.  The two devices - the illumination of pain and the love letters - didn't mesh enough for me.  I did enjoy the characters and their stories, but wished for more out of this book.

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu

The title of this book caught my attention as a clever idea - I like when authors play around with the meta-components of a story.  In this case, the story is about a boy whose father builds time machines.  As he grows up and goes into the business of repairing time machines, he comes to terms with the complex relationships that define his family.

Yu makes many obvious nods to the pantheon of classic science fiction.  Readers are expected to be familiar with ideas like the paradox of meeting one's self while time-traveling and the alternate realities that spring up every time you make a decision.  The main character has a relationship with his custom computer and his "nonexistent but ontologically valid dog."  All of that was clever and fun to read. 

But what I really liked about the book was that all of this was really a mechanism for writing the story of how someone can grow up and learn about their parents as people.  Certainly science fiction fans would enjoy the setting and innovations, but the story was sweet too.

Makers by Cory Doctorow

WOW.  Wow.  WOW.  Loved.  This.  Book.

I don't remember where I first read about this book but the author's name caught my eye since he's one of the editors at Boing Boing, a great tech blog.  I took it to Belize and could not put it down.  It was a wild ride and I kept appreciating Doctorow's storytelling ability as well as his sharp eye for how technology impacts us.  I will warn you, though, that this book is not for everyone.  If you are not a geek, nerd, techie, or otherwise appreciative of things like the idea of a 3-D printer, then I'd skip this.

The story is incredibly imaginative and I don't want to ruin too much.  One of the first things that happens in the story is that Duracell and Kodak merge, and the new company's mission is to fund innovation in small pockets around the world.  Silicon Valley reporter Suzanne flies to Miami to check out what engineers Lester and Perry are funded to do - and she discovers them living in an abandoned mall cranking out interesting things on a 3-D printer.  In the early part of the book, Doctorow's demonstrates his grasp of how innovation can be iterative. 

As the book goes on, he exercises his ability to make social commentary about IP law and corporate espionage.  Then while you were busy paying attention to that, he's made you completely invested in several characters fraught with foibles.  And once you are distracted by that, he starts in on the value of open source communities and user-created communities, but without really making the book about technology.  Oh, and he takes on Disney and dieting on the way because, heck, why not?

I came away from this book with my brain chugging to keep up with Doctorow; I felt like he was a tour guide to the future. 

The Unit by Ninni Holmqvist

My book club chose this book for January from my list of ideas.  Last year I had noticed it on Flashlight Worthy's end of year list.  So far that site has had some great suggestions - including this one.

The Unit is a facility where older childless people go to donate themselves to science.  They live there for a few months to a few years and participate in medical experiments, donate their non-essential organs, and ultimately participate in their "final donation" of their heart and lungs.  The book follows a woman named Dorrit as she arrives at the Unit. 

On the surface, the Unit is not a terrible place - each resident has a private apartment, and there are parks, restaurants, cinemas, and many activities.  But the professional, chipper, and seemingly empathetic staff are committed to a government-sponsored strategy to use the "dispensable" humans who live there as efficiently as possible.  The glimpses we have of the "outside world" through flashbacks also depict a society that has been mandated to respect only a particular type of family and of societal worth. 

I will borrow Margaret Atwood's classification of this as "speculative fiction", as Holmqvist's world is not, strictly speaking, science fiction.  Like Atwood and other authors of the genre, Holmqvist was able to make significant social commentary with this story.  In this case, she comments on our treatment of the elderly, our views on childless adults, and, more broadly, our definitions of family.

It was difficult to think about this book without also thinking of Never Let Me Go; though the styles were quite different, with The Unit being far more transparent and emotional, the themes were very similar.  The other book this made me think of was Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.  Both books were translated from the Swedish and I couldn't help but wonder if the act of being translated was what made both books somewhat matter-of-fact or if that was an indication of a cultural norm.  It makes me wish I knew any language well enough to read the same story in the original and the translation. 

I liked this book, largely because it was well-plotted and made me think.

Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter by Seth Grahame-Smith

I missed the meeting when my book club chose this book; when I heard this was what we were reading, I was not really looking forward to it.  However, I ended up liking it more than I expected.  By the same author as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, this book took a serious look at Lincoln's little-known history as a vampire slayer, as documented in some secret diaries.

What was fun about this book was that historical anecdotes were interspersed with fantasy.  I enjoyed refreshing my memory on Lincoln and the Civil War.  But just when I would get absorbed in a section around Lincoln's beliefs or his relationship with Stephen Douglas, Grahame-Smith would thrown in a connection between vampires and slavery, or would "out" a famous politician as being a vampire.  It kept me chuckling.  The book was part narrative, part excerpted from diaries, letters, and telegrams.  There were illustrations of parts of the story as well. 

Only two real complaints with the book - one is that there were a few scenes dealing with violence against slaves that felt disrespectful to read as part of a fantasy book.  The other was that the book started in a modern-day "frame" and it would have been nice to have it wrap up that way.  Other than that I enjoyed the book as a light-hearted read.  It got me thinking whether this could be used as an educational tool with middle-school aged-kids, too.

Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood

My inlaws got me this book last year for Christmas.  Referred to by some as a "prequel" to Atwood's Oryx and Crake, it takes place during the same time period as that book, with overlapping characters.  I did not like this book as much as O+C because I didn't have thrill of discovering Atwood's creepy universe for the first time.  However, I did enjoy reading it and it kept my attention.  As usual with Atwood's books, I forget between reading them how good a writer/poet she is because her plotting is so good too.

The story follows two women who are surviving after a "waterless flood" apocalypse.  One is trapped inside a high end strip club where girls wear genetically altered lizard skins, and the other is barracaded inside a spa where women would come to get genetically created treatments that help them stay young.  Prior to the flood, both women had sought refuge with God's Gardeners, a splinter eco-friendly religion, but each had reason to leave.  Much of the story takes place in flashbacks to the era leading up to the flood, characterized by violence, "Big Brother" police, and genetically altered foods and products. 

I and am hoping that Atwood decides to return to this universe again with future books.  According to one interview I read, she wrote this one because fans wanted to know what happened after the end of O+C, and because that book was told from a male point of view.  She also commented on how environmental change (even to the degree it's worsened in the past few years) has influenced her to revisit this universe as a cautionary tale.  I wonder what other alternate points of view she could explore in a third novel.

Next by Michael Crichton

This book had been sitting on my bookshelf for a while; I think I bought it at Costco a few years back.  The book is about several storylines all relating to genetics.  On major plotline was about the legality of patenting genes, another was about hybrid humans and animals, and another was about using DNA testing to assess someone's propensity towards certain diseases.


Like most Michael Crichton books, this was a quick and easy read.  Crichton moved among the storylines often (and there were a lot of them) which I did find a little hard to follow in some places.  But overall I liked the stories and was invested in most of the characters.

This was obviously a political book for Crichton - after the story he spent about 10 pages suggesting a set of policies and laws that were necessary to ensure that genes and DNA weren't misused.  Fine airport read.

Under the Dome by Stephen King

I had been excited to read this book for months. I won it on a bet with Webster and saved it for vacation. It did not disappoint.

The book is about a small town in Maine that is mysteriously encapsulated in an invisible impermeable dome one fall day. Slowly, a series of logistical problems faces the town - what are the boundaries of the dome, how to distribute or conserve food and fuel, how to communicate with the outside world - and then they begin to face larger problems of power and order.

I expected the book to explore some of the same themes as Blindness and City of Refuge: the dissolution of society upon an apocalyptic event. That having been a pet interest of mine recently in literature, I was looking forward to King's take on this. While he did employ these themes, most obviously in the form of a power-hungry Town Selectman, his damaged son, and his rogue police force, he didn't make that the only focus of the story.

There was also social commentary on drug abuse, families, religion, sex, food, and love. There was a huge cast of characters to portray all of the archetypes found in a small town. And there was a small highly-likable band of citizens determined to break through the dome. I think that's what separated it most from these other stories - there was a palpable, visible, "before" surrounding the town that gave some people a desire to persevere and escape, not just survive.


While I didn't find this as complex as King's other epics, it was a 'work', not just a book. At 1000+ pages, Under the Dome was clearly representing an important point of view to King, and one that he attempted to write several times in the past before succeeding this time. Perhaps one of the things I liked most about this book was that it was subtle and pointed and had a quiet point to make, without all of the epic battles and reliance on the supernatural that we come to expect from King. (If you are a King fan, though, rest assured - there is plenty of blood.) For certain, the climax and the 'reveal' at the end is not a loud crescendo - and that has kept me thinking all week - why write a thousand pages that ends with a bit of a whimper - what is the greater point King wants me to know?

Recently I read somewhere (and I would credit it but I can't find the quote) that when we look back on the late 20th and early 21st century fiction, Stephen King will be prominent in the canon. I believe it.

The Lace Reader by Brunonia Barry

I received this novel from www.BookClubGirl.com but had a conflict with work during the online chat so I just got around to reading it. It was a very unusual book and I enjoyed it.

The story follows a family who lives in Salem, MA. Against a backdrop of tourist buses and daily re-enacted witch hunts, the Whitneys read lace - that is, they can see the future in the patterns of woven lace held up to a person's face. Throughout the book, the reader discovers layers of recent family history and how things are not always as they seem for the Whitneys. Uniquely, the middle third of the book is a 'short' story written by one of the characters (Towner) and based on her life, which adds to the mystique and storytelling within the book. If Towner does not already seem to be an unreliable narrator in the first section of the book, her fictionalized account of her life firmly sets her there in the second.

What I also liked about this book was that it was an old-fashioned story set it modern times. There is an element of life in Salem and in the fictional island off the coast that is timeless - people's homes are accessible only based on the tide schedule, there is a strong presence of folklore and magic and a notable absence of Twitter and Facebook. It was hard to remember that this story was taking place in the current time and not it the 1700's. Certainly that is a function of the presence of history in Salem but also of the story Barry chose to tell.

It is nice to find an author doing something unique.

Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card

Jo recommended this to me as one of her recent favorites. They story is set in the future where we earthlings are fighting an intergalactic enemy. The army on Earth recruits the best and brightest children to try and build its forces. This book follows the story of a young boy named Ender as he goes through the army training regiment.

Ender is a sympathetic and pleasant character to follow. Occasionally, his behaviors and thoughts seem unusually advanced for his age. Initially, he struggles with homesickness, and as he gets older, he also finds ethical dilemmas and challenges in being an effective leader.

While I didn't think this book was exceptionally unique, perhaps it was in 1977 when it was first released. Social commentary, common to most good science fiction, presented in the book, but I didn't find anything unusual about it. Mostly, he comments on how we perceive war as both serious and as a game. He also had some strong comments on advanced situations we put children in. Amusingly, Card makes reference to several futuristic technologies that today we would consider "email" and "IM".

Overall the book kept my attention and I would read more by Card.

Blindness by Jose Saramago

I chose to read Blindness on this vacation because Saramago is Portuguese. Web had devoured it a few vacations ago and I had enjoyed Saramago's All the Names, so I had high expectations for the book, and I wasn't disappointed.

The story is about a city where all the occupants inexplicably and suddenly go blind. Though I had read All the Names several years ago, Saramago's style and rhythm were immediately familiar to me (scarce punctuation, no proper nouns) as was the setting (an unnamed city with semi-military bureaucratic government). All the Names was more about the anonymity of individuals in such an environment, while this book shared more of the themes from Lord of the Flies - what happens to society when it is stripped of its typical order and rules?

The story in Blindness follows a small group of citizens as they navigate the new order in the now-blind city. With a few well-written phrases and anecdotes, Saramago completely characterizes the people who we follow in the story, making it irrelevant if we like them or not and more relevant that they are our only window into the story. That was a real contrast to Olive Kittridge where I got really stuck on not liking the characters. I really enjoyed Blindness, finding it very accessible, and surprisingly easy to read given Saramago's fame and accolades.

Daemon by Daniel Suarez

Gregg mentioned this book on his blog and it was a great break from the serious reading I'd been doing. Since reading Cuckoo's Egg as a teenager, I have enjoyed technology-based thrillers, and this was a great one. I had some trouble finding it at first since it was initially pulished under the psudo-psuedonym 'Leinad Suarez'.

This book is about a world-famous techie who dies and appears to be controlling events from the grave. The characters quickly find out that it is a set of computer programs (known as daemons) that he's written that begin a set of events upon his death. A World of Warcraft-type online game plays a central role in the execution of his plan.

I read this book quickly, and enjoyed the combination of action, technology, and philosophy. Unlike the drivel about technology we often see on television (what's that Lassie? someone's hacked the blowfish algorithm and the router is launching an attack on the firewall?), this was well-researched and imaginable. While some reviewers see it as a cautionary tale about the dangerous future of a world run by machines, I just found it to be a fun read. Hopefully I won't regret that sentiment in 2060!

The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly

This book was great fun to read.

It was about a young boy who stumbles into an enchanted forest after trying to escape the reality of his unhappy life. In the forest he meets many characters who are familiar to him (and us) from common fairy tales. However, their versions of the stories we know are not the same. And the little boy's search for a way home from the forest forms the narrative of the story.

I really enjoyed the book - it was a book that was full of wolves and castles and rickety bridges. The good guys were good and the villains were bad. It was perfect for staying up late and reading under the covers with a flashlight...err...grown-up booklight.

There were definitely themes of adulthood and voice of a child, etc., etc., in this book that I suppose you could appreciate. Also parallels between his life in the real world and that of the enchanted forest. I tried not to overthink it and just devoured the story.

The Blind Assasin by Margaret Atwood

I love love loved this book. Webster bought it for me at the airport when I discovered I didn't like the other book I had brought with him. I typically enjoy Atwood and I think this is one of her best.

The book has two stories in it: the main narrative and a novel that one of the characters wrote. I usually find these types of books frustrating (see Lamb's last novel) but in this case, both stories kept my interest equally. Also, I was not disappointed by the climax that ties the stories together.

The outer (?) story is about a woman looking back on her life, which includes growing up being raised by her tycoon father with her unusual sister followed by an unhappy society marriage. The inner (?) story is about two un-named lovers across class boundaries in an un-named city in an un-named time. It feels more like Atwood's sci-fi style.

I only wish that I had read this as part of a book club because I am sure I missed several layers that I would have gotten from discussions with others.

ps: I was struck by how beautifully this was written only after starting the next book I read which was written just fine but was not as beautiful as Atwood's poetic style.

Hybrids by Robert Sawyer

I flew through this, the last of Sawyer's three books comprising the Neanderthal Parallax, during our delayed flight to Rochester for Christmas. I really enjoyed both Humans and Hominids, and held off on reading this as long as possible.

Like the previous two books, this is about the characters on both sides of a portal that links our world with that of an alternate world based on Neanderthals' not becoming extinct. In this book, Mary and Ponter work out what it means to be a couple in love across these two worlds.

I enjoyed this book but thought that Sawyer tried to cover too many issues in too short a book. Within the 400 reasonably-fonted pages was an attempt to address our penal system, privacy, homosexuality, fidelity, and a few other big items. While I always appreciate the social commentary science fiction enables, I thought this book could have been better without quite so much of it.

That said, I did like the book and will miss looking forward to more books with these characters.

The Regulators by Richard Bachman

I was on a whirlwind tour of several customers with a coworker named Lance when we got to talking about books. Turns out he is a huge Stephen King fan and pointed me towards this book as well as its partner, Desperation by Stephen King, which tells the story from a different point of view.

I really enjoyed this book although it's far from the mainstream fiction that makes up more than half of what I typically read. This book is pure science-fiction with some horror built in. It is gruesome, clever, and creepy. It centers around a quiet neighborhood that begins to experience very strange phenomena one afternoon that quickly escalate into large-scale violence. That description does not do the plot justice, but I don't want to ruin any of the surprises in the story. I had forgotten how good Stephen King's writing can be and it was fun to rediscover him.

I can't wait to get to Desperation to see the other half of the story.