What I'm Reading Now

Audrey Schulman, Theory of Bastards

This is the best book I've read in awhile -- one of those stay-up-until-2:00-in-the-morning books. Told mainly from the point of view of a MacArthur Fellow who studies sexual behavior in primates (mostly human, but in the book it's bonobos), it's the story of a couple months in her life, with frequent flashbacks to her past. She's disabled, which has made her, interestingly, a better scientist; and she's living just before and during climate collapse, which she ignores as assiduously as most people do, right up until she can't.

There are some great characters in this, not all of them human, and the writing is great. Five stars, can't wait to read more by Schulman. (Recommended on Jo Walton's reading list, where I get a lot of my favorite reads; and like her I have some nitpicks about the actual science, but by the time I was thirty pages in I didn't care, I would follow Schulman anywhere.)

Kathleen Flynn, The Jane Austen Project

Time travel and Jane Austen -- obviously a book written exactly for me! And I do like it a lot. A doctor and Jane Austen scholar (that's one character) travels back in time with an actor and a Jane Austen scholar (the other character) to meet and research Jane Austen and to get (if they can) the letters that Austen's sister famously burned upon her death, as well a completed copy of the Watsons.

Things don't go quite as planned, obviously; but what really works in this novel is Flynn's ability to give us the world of 1815, and the Austen family. There's a romance between the two Austen scholars which is pretty well done. I kind of wanted a different ending, but it works for the novel. Recommend for all fans of Austen and time travel.

Gary Groner, The Way

Also a post-collapse/post-apocalyptic novel. Here, a virus has wiped out most of the world's population and remains endemic, killing almost everyone as they age into their forties. Will, one of the few people to survive past fifty, is tasked with taking information about a possible cure from Colorado (where he is the only survivor of a bunch of Buddhist living in a retreat in the mountains) to San Francisco, where a group of scientists still have the technology to do something with the information.

We can gloss over that bit, since the cure is just a McGuffin. What we have here is a travel quest through a world where most of the surviving population are feral children and adolescents, and where any towns or groups of young adults have to try to survive in a lawless landscape. Will struggles to maintain his non-violent worldview, which keeps him from killing or harming anyone or anything, while knowing he benefits from violence done by others. Also, he has two animal companions, a crow and a cat, with whom he can talk. This is either magical realism or some side effect of the virus, I was never sure which.

Anyway, compelling story and great characters. Even an acceptable ending. I liked this one a lot.

Ray Nayler, The Mountain in the Sea

I finally read this one, which everyone was raving about a couple years ago. I love Nayler's short fiction and his novellas, but I could never get past the first ten pages of this one. Finally I just kept reading, forcing myself through the first hundred pages, and it did get better. It's still not my favorite by Nayler. I think he works better with shorter fiction.

Anyway, this is another apres le collapse /apocalyptical novel, and it's about that -- how humans are destroying the ecosystem -- but also about some human fighting to preserve a small bit of that ecosystem, as well as a scientist who is studying octopuses in that preserve. The last half is pretty good, but I don't know if it's worth slogging through the first half to get there.