Atwood has visited the future before, in her dystopian novel, The Handmaid's Tale. In her latest, the future is even bleaker. The triple whammy of runaway social inequality, genetic technology and catastrophic climate change, has finally culminated in some apocalyptic event. As Jimmy, apparently the last human being on earth, makes his way back to the RejoovenEsencecompound for supplies, the reader is transported backwards toward that cataclysmic event, its full dimensions gradually revealed. Jimmy grew up in a world split between corporate compounds (gated communities metastasized into city-states) and pleeblands (unsafe, populous and polluted urban centers). His best friend was "Crake," the name originally his handle in an interactive Net game, Extinctathon. Even Jimmy's mother-who ran off and joined an ecology guerrilla group when Jimmy was an adolescent-respected Crake, already a budding genius. The two friends first encountered Oryx on the Net; she was the eight-year-old star of a pedophilic film on a site called HottTotts. Oryx's story is a counterpoint to Jimmy and Crake's affluent adolescence. She was sold by her Southeast Asian parents, taken to the city and eventually made into a sex "pixie" in some distant country. Jimmy meets Oryx much later-after college, after Crake gets Jimmy a job with ReJoovenEsence. Crake is designing the Crakers-a new, multicolored placid race of human beings, smelling vaguely of citron. He's procured Oryx to be his personal assistant. She teaches the Crakers how to cope in the world and goes out on secret missions. The mystery on which this riveting, disturbing tale hinges is how Crake and Oryx and civilization vanished, and how Jimmy-who also calls himself "the Snowman," after that other rare, hunted specimen, the Abominable Snowman-survived. Chesterton once wrote of the "thousand romances that lie secreted in The Origin of Species." Atwood has extracted one of the most hair-raising of them, and one of the most brilliant.

Starred Review. Valentino Achak Deng, real-life hero of this engrossing epic, was a refugee from the Sudanese civil war-the bloodbath before the current Darfur bloodbath-of the 1980s and 90s. In this fictionalized memoir, Eggers (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius) makes him an icon of globalization. Separated from his family when Arab militia destroy his village, Valentino joins thousands of other "Lost Boys," beset by starvation, thirst and man-eating lions on their march to squalid refugee camps in Ethiopia and Kenya, where Valentino pieces together a new life. He eventually reaches America, but finds his quest for safety, community and fulfillment in many ways even more difficult there than in the camps: he recalls, for instance, being robbed, beaten and held captive in his Atlanta apartment. Eggers's limpid prose gives Valentino an unaffected, compelling voice and makes his narrative by turns harrowing, funny, bleak and lyrical. The result is a horrific account of the Sudanese tragedy, but also an emblematic saga of modernity-of the search for home and self in a world of unending upheaval.

That a review of House of Leaves should start off with metaphors and comparisons is not to take away from its breathless sense of invention. Big, bold, beautiful and arrogant, a near-reckless energy hums from every page -- in short, the exact kind of book destined to become an instant cult classic. This is a book that invites comparisons, a vast bibliovore swallowing up its predecessors and digesting them in its rumbling bowels, using influence as fuel, reference as bloodstream, and textuality itself as a skeletal system. It is insufferably postmodern, maddeningly hip, and utterly in love with itself; and like a Boardwalk funhouse, it's filled with shameless tricks, distorted mirrors, and not a few genuine shocks. Oh yes, Mark Z. Danielewski has produced one hell of an ambitious first novel; and one that succeeds on a surprising number of levels.

Danielewski's eccentric and sometimes brilliant debut novel is really two novels, hooked together by the Nabokovian trick of running one narrative in footnotes to the other. One-the horror story-is a tour-de-force. Zampano, a blind Angelino recluse, dies, leaving behind the notes to a manuscript that's an account of a film called The Navidson Report. In the Report, Pulitzer Prize-winning news photographer Will Navidson and his girlfriend move with their two children to a house in an unnamed Virginia town in an attempt to save their relationship. One day, Will discovers that the interior of the house measures more than its exterior. More ominously, a closet appears, then a hallway. Out of this intellectual paradox, Danielewski constructs a viscerally frightening experience. Will contacts a number of people, including explorer Holloway Roberts, who mounts an expedition with his two-man crew. They discover a vast stairway and countless halls. The whole structure occasionally groans, and the space reconfigures, driving Holloway into a murderous frenzy. The story of the house is stitched together from disparate accounts, until the experience becomes somewhat like stumbling into Borges's Library of Babel. This potentially cumbersome device actually enhances the horror of the tale, rather than distracting from it. Less successful, however, is the second story unfolding in footnotes, that of the manuscript's editor, (and the novel's narrator), Johnny Truant. Johnny, who discovered Zampano's body and took his papers, works in a tattoo parlor. He tracks down and beds most of the women who assisted Zampano in preparing his manuscript. But soon Johnny is crippled by panic attacks, bringing him close to psychosis. In the Truant sections, Danielewski attempts an Infinite Jest-like feat of ventriloquism, but where Wallace is a master of voices, Danielewski is not. His strength is parodying a certain academic tone and harnessing that to pop culture tropes. Nevertheless, the novel is a surreal palimpsest of terror and erudition, surely destined for cult status.

The Argonautica (Greek: Ἀργοναυτικά) is a Greek epic poem written by Apollonius Rhodius in the 3rd century BCE. The only surviving Hellenistic epic, the Argonautica tells the myth of the voyage of Jason and the Argonauts to retrieve the Golden Fleece from the mythical land of Colchis. Another, much less-known Argonautica, using the same body of myth, was composed by Valerius Flaccus during the time of Vespasian.

In the first book, the ship Argo is built and a crew of around fifty heroes is assembled in response to an oracle received by King Pelias. Led by Jason, the heroes include Heracles and his companion Hylas, Castor and Pollux (the Dioscuri: sons of Tyndareus and brothers of Helen and Clytemnestra), Orpheus, Meleager, Zetes and Calais (sons of Boreas), Peleus (father of Achilles), Laertes (supposed father of Odysseus), Telamon (father of Ajax), and the ship's builder, Argos. Their goal is to travel to Colchis and to obtain the Golden Fleece. After Jason suggests the election of a leader, Hercules (Heracles) recommends Jason himself, and the heroes agree.

Setting sail from the eastern coast of Thessaly, the Argonauts first reach Lemnos, where the women, led by their Queen Hypsipyle, have murdered all of their husbands. Omitting the murder from her story, Hypsipyle convinces the men (except for Hercules) to breed with the women in order to repopulate the island. ...

[spoiler]In the last book, Medea offers to put the dragon guarding the fleece to sleep in exchange for the Argonauts taking her aboard their ship and away from the father she has betrayed. Jason agrees, promising again to marry her, and she uses her skill with drugs to neutralize the dragon. Departing with the Golden Fleece, the Argo is pursued by Aietes and by Medea’s older brother Absyrtus. Jason proposes to leave Medea to Artemis, protector of virgins, an idea which causes an enraged Medea to threaten setting fire to the ships until Jason explains she is the bait in a trap set out for Absyrtus; the trap works, and Absyrtus is ambushed and killed by Jason, causing the Colchians to scatter.[/spoiler]

First, What is the What by Dave Eggers. I am half way through the book now, and am stunned by its power. This book is funny and tragic, edifying and appaling. Best read in ages.

Though Perec (1936-1982) is "experimental" in the tradition of Joyce and Nabokov, his work is rich with word games and acrostics that reveal the secret life of language this euphoric novel, winner of the Prix Medicis, will enchant a range of readers.

This is a very surprising novel in its richness and depth. It covers the treatment of the Japanesein the Pacific Northwest during WW2 when out of prejudice they were interred in camps. In this novel, Guterson handles this disgraceful episode in American history within an excellent murder mystery.

The story is set in 1950s on Washington's remote San Piedro Island and begins with a mysterious death of a fisherman. Kabuo Miyamoto is accused of the fisherman's murder, suspicion aroused more out of the post-war distrust of Japanese-Americans than anything else. To complicate this, the town's newspaperman, Ishmael Chamber, must deal with his own feelings from childhood for his love of Kabuo's wife, Hatsue. Snow Falling on Cedars is very well written and handles a complicated and sensitive subject so well that I almost overlooked that at the heart of the book is a mysterious murder.

I really don't want to read another book about gods for a while.

British blogger Phillips's delightful debut finds the Greek gods and goddesses living in a tumbledown house in modern-day London and facing a very serious problem: their powers are waning, and immortality does not seem guaranteed. In between looking for work and keeping house, the ancient family is still up to its oldest pursuit: crossing and double-crossing each other. Apollo, who has been cosmically bored for centuries, has been appearing as a television psychic in a bid for stardom. His aunt Aphrodite, a phone-sex worker, sabotages him by having her son Eros shoot him with an arrow of love, making him fall for a very ordinary mortal-a cleaning woman named Alice, who happens to be in love with Neil, another nice, retiring mortal. When Artemis-the goddess of the moon, chastity and the hunt, who has been working as a dog walker-hires Alice to tidy up, the household is set to combust, and the fate of the world hangs in the balance. Fanciful, humorous and charming, this satire is as sweet as nectar.