Until then, here’s what I’ve been
reading of late...
Abide
with me by Elizabeth Strout (novel, audiobook)
Strout’s 2006 novel reminded me of
Marilynne Robinson’s 2004 novel Gilead:
small town America in the 1950s, church ministers at their centre... But Abide with Me is colder, less lustrous.
No doubt this is in part due to the contrast between Tyler Caskey’s New England
Protestantism and John Ames’ Midwestern Congregationalism. In Strout’s next
book, Olive Kitteridge, she finds a
way to turn this bitterness into something compelling (see the title character;
the novel in stories structure helps too), but Abide with Me is no Olive
Kitteridge.
The Handmaid’s Tale
by Margaret Atwood (novel, audiobook)
I spent the first half of this
dystopian novel thinking: if this was really a dystopian novel something would
be happening right now. Of course, the quid
pro quo of a real dystopian novel (read: genre fiction) is less character
development, less controlled writing (and less acclaim for its author). Things
pick up eventually — we even get the staple of the genre: a long, thinly
disguised information download to explain how things got so... dystopic. And hey, I wasn’t complaining.
All up, I liked the book, but at this point in time I might have liked it more
if the needle moved a notch or two back towards genre.
The
Botany of Desire
by Michael Pollan (non-fiction, audiobook)
This is the second Pollan book I've listened to this year
after A Place of My Own.
This one delves into the history of the apple, the tulip, cannabis and the potato
to tell the story of how humans have changed plants and how we might have
actually been doing the plants’ bidding. There was plenty of interesting stuff
(I didn’t know that all commercial apple varieties are grown from clones rather
than from seed; I’d never heard of Tulipomania), though each section seemed to
lose momentum three-quarters of the way in and the wheels were allowed to spin
to fill the page-count or hammer home Pollan’s thesis. 
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