While I found the subject matter – a couple moves to the Caribbean island of Anguilla to start a restaurant – fascinating, the text itself was so poorly written and the people telling the story so – let’s face it – dull that I just could not continue.

While I found the subject matter-a couple moves to the Caribbean island of Anguilla to start a restaurant-fascinating, the text itself was so poorly written and the people telling the story so-let’s face it-dull that I just could not continue.

What I think makes this book amazing is that is only about a rather ordinary family, a character portrait of a father at the end of his life, his wife and his three adult children. Yet it remains absolutely engrossing from beginning to end. Would we find our own families as fascinating if we were allowed into every nook and cranny of their lives, into their most secret thoughts? Franzen has flayed open each member of the Lambert family and shown us everything with no flinching, from insanity and death and wasted lives to failures of marriages, careers and love affairs—all the messy stuff that gets to the heart of what it means to be human. As Franzen sums it up: “The human species was given dominion over the earth and took the opportunity to exterminate other species and warm the atmosphere and generally ruin things in its own image, but it paid the price for the privileges: that the finite and specific animal body of this species contained a brain capable of conceiving the infinite and wishing to be infinite itself.”

Despite all that, I wouldn’t say that The Corrections is a downer. It mirrors life in that way, too: sometimes melancholy or depressing, some points of utter despair and other spikes of hope, but mostly just moving on.

Science fiction meets the hard-boiled detective story in this tale of a future in which humans have moved to other planets and practically conquered death, all by discovering how to download the human personality, memories and perhaps the soul into a microchip that can be transplanted from one body to another (the exact procedure for how this is done is never adequately explained, by the way). Sure, the plot is sometimes a little muddy and disjointed, and sometimes the science is suspect, but the premise is fascinating, and Morgan explores many aspects of it. He introduces us to Meths (short for Methuselahs): emotionless people who have lived hundreds of years in clones of their perpetually young bodies. He shows us the consequences of emerging out of prison, where the punishment is years of suspended animation in cold storage, thrust into a body that is not your own. How much of love is physical or chemical, and how much is mental? Morgan asks. And when death is so meaningless, how much is a life worth?

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This short Christmas special of a novel ranks among Moore’s worst, mostly because I think he wasn’t trying very hard. He brings back many characters from previous novels, including the dumb angel from Lamb (hence the title), and the result is something like a watered-down television reunion show, the kind they make when they have no other decent ideas.

Neresian’s surreal trip through modern-day Manhattan evokes Alice in Wonderland with its twisting, almost nonsensical plot. But even though its protagonist-a loser who names himself Joseph Aeiou-is a total douche, we still get caught up in his nightmare, as he is played for a fool by pretty much everyone he meets.

Written during what I like to call the “macho science fiction” period, Clarke’s classic novel suffers from the same issues as many of his contemporaries, i.e., stilted 1950s-era dialogue and female characters who, when they do appear, are flat stereotypes who are ultimately inconsequential. But we can forgive those failings because this is a seminal “first contact” novel, one that spawned a sub-genre.

Aliens suddenly arrive at Earth just as we are ramping up the space race, aliens that are clearly so much more advanced technologically and so much more powerful than we are, that the human race basically lays down all our weapons and calls it a day. Thus, the aliens — or the Overlords, as we call them — usher in a golden age of peace and prosperity (and some boredom) for all mankind. No one wants for anything, and there is no war, so maybe it doesn’t matter that original art and music and scientific innovation have also largely disappeared. Still the unspoken question is: What do the aliens really want? What are their ultimate goals for mankind? The outcome is surprising and crosses into uncertain moral territory. This is a compelling early work of science fiction that all fans of the genre should read.

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While I am a fan of her more speculative fiction, I’m finding that Margaret Atwood can write about almost anything and make it fascinating. This long mainstream novel is a character study of Elaine, a female artist growing up in Toronto who finds herself riding the wave of early feminism. The narrative moves back and forth from the present, when Elaine has returned to her native city for a showing, to her past, from her early childhood through her first marriage and divorce.

Clearly, the most formative time in Elaine’s life is when as a pre-adolescent girl, she was bullied mercilessly by her friends in the torturous ways that only girls can seem to devise. Ironically, she can’t even remember these events, having blocked the abuse completely, until she is going through her dying mother’s things and discovers some meaningful items from her childhood that bring the memories flooding back. I think all women can relate to what Elaine experienced, and I even found myself cheering out loud when she finally stands up to her tormentors. Still, she never quite gets over it, and that incident will shape her life and her art, even when she doesn’t remember it.

Atwood tells a wonderful coming-of-age story here, while aptly weaving in the history of the feminist movement, especially in art, and drawing parallels between the young bullies and the militant feminists Elaine will later encounter.

I found this book very unpleasant to read. The POV character, a professional tower climber who at the beginning of the book witnesses a girl videotape her own suicide by drowning, is simply unlikeable in every possible way. He becomes obsessed with the drowned girl, and steals her things without reporting her death to the police. Then he tracks down her family using some very basic detective work, and for the next several months watches their anguish at not knowing what has happened to their daughter and sister. He dates the dead girl’s midget sister and plays one cruel, anonymous prank after another on her, never showing the slightest bit of feeling for her. The portrait of small-town North Carolina life given in this novel is bleak and hopeless, a series of pointless tragedies and random cruelties, where every human being lacks even common decency. There is no reason to like these people, their world or this book.

This is the ultimate homage one writer can give to another. It is the story of three women united across time and space by one powerful novel: Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf. The characters, who are all profoundly touched in some way by the novel, are rendered in such exquisite, loving detail that the reader’s life in turn becomes entwined with theirs.

Woolf herself is one of the main characters, just beginning to write Mrs. D while dealing with the repercussions of what today would probably be diagnosed as bipolar disorder. Mrs. Brown is reading the novel in post-World War II Los Angeles, a where where she feels completely out of place, unfulfilled and trapped. And in the present day, “Mrs. Dalloway”-as she is nicknamed by her oldest friend-bustles through the day preparing for a party she is giving in her dying friend’s honor (another author).

Following the same structure as Mrs. D, the novel spans only one pivotal day in the life of each woman, a day that seems like a microcosm of their entire lives. And as their stories unfold, we gradually learn that all three women are more closely linked than it seemed at first—indeed, their lives are inextricable entwined with one another’s.