The Year of the Flood

The Year of the Flood, Margaret Atwood, 2009, Doubleday. Genre: SciFi. 434 pages. Finished 3/23/13.

LesOpinion: Gentle Reader, you already know my thoughts about SciFi as a genre. The saving grace of Atwood's SciFi is that the woman can write. The Year of the Flood is another dystopian novel--the contemporary world beset by the tyranny of corporations, Big Pharma, and climate change. Good luck to us all.

Circumstances under which I recommend this book: You like SciFi and want to read a reasonably good book. If you don't like SciFi, you should stick with The Handmaid's Tale.

Wilderness Tips

Wilderness Tips, Margaret Atwood, 1991, Doubleday, Genre: Collected Short Fiction. 227 pages. Finished 3/16/13.

LesOpinion: Margaret Atwood is one of those authors so prolific that you get the feeling that she never stops writing. That she has to collect short fiction (and poetry), because her brain just keeps churning out tale after tale. The good news is that Atwood is a terrific writer.

Short fiction doesn't get much attention in popular circles, being reserved these days for the academic set. That's a shame. In Wilderness Tips, Atwood tells full stories about small incidences of the everyday world.

Circumstances under which I recommend this book: You want to keep some excellent nightstand or bathtub reading at hand.

The Handmaid's Tale

The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood, 1986, Houghton Mifflin, Genre: SciFi. 311 pages. Finished 3/9/13.

LesOpinion: The first rule of The Library Quest is that you don't talk about The Lib...wait, no, it's "If I've already read the book at a different time, I can choose whether to re-read it." This is the first previously read book I chose to read again.

The Handmaid's Tale envisions a dystopia in which right wing attitudes toward women's reproductive capacity are taken to their logical extreme. In light of the recent "Republican war on women," the story is particularly harrowing, the horror of the book exacerbated by its sparing, restrained prose.

Circumstances under which I recommend this book: All.