I have to agree with the other reviewers it's Atwood at her best, and so help me disturbing as can be, disturbing as the Handmaid's tale. I have actually listened to the audio-book (unabridged!) and it is the absolute best narration - the way he reads it makes you believe you are there with Jimmy or Snowman if you wish - I really loved this book and am sorry, it's over.

Keep reading - this is not your usual Margaret Atwood story line, or is it? A brilliant and illuminating novel about a possible future for a world that has come to worship at the altar of technology. The story has considerable tension in it to keep the reader glued to the book to see what comes next. Above all, this is a book about "words" and the beauty of language lost. Atwood flavors her grim vision of the future with the spices of words no longer in the vernacular, creating an intense paella that is immensly satisfying and yet somehow shot through with loss. Atwood exhibits her marvelous sense of story and language in this book, leaving the reader running for a dictionary of ancient words to reintroduce them to everday talk. Words, lost or unrecorded, die a death, unmourned.

Atwood's latest and strangest novel is truly unlike anything she has previously written, and readers of Atwood's other novels may find themselves flipping to the front, checking to see if her name is really on the title page. Like "The Handmaid's Tale," which was also set in the future, "Oryx and Crake" describes a dystopic tomorrow-land--but there the similarity ends. Featuring an uncharacteristically sparse prose and an abundance of scientific content, Atwood's bitingly satirical and hauntingly apocalyptic novel seems heavily influenced by science fiction novels of the last three decades, even while it recalls such classics as "Frankenstein," "Brave New World" and especially "Robinson Crusoe."

"Oryx and Crake" is technically a single-character novel; "Snowman" (or Jimmy) is the surviving human after a cataclysmic global disaster. He serves as a mentor of sorts to the strange yet harmless "Crakers," who have been so genetically altered that they resemble humans only in their basic appearance. Their blandness is so thorough that neither Snowman nor the reader can tell them apart. Through a series of flashbacks, Snowman describes his closest friends Crake and Oryx and their role in bring the world to its present state; and he mockingly details his attempts at elevating them to the status of gods for the new species. Atwood doesn't really develop these two characters; instead she (through Snowman's eyes) presents only the basic, painful "truth" behind a new Genesis mythology.

The novel, one could argue, depicts a second character: the scientific community. Through extrapolation (one might say exaggeration--but I'm not so optimistic about industrial self-control), Atwood projects into the future the topics of today's headlines: anthrax, genetically modified foods, cloning, gene splicing, weapons of mass destruction, the overuse and abuse of psychiatric drugs, Internet porn, SARS, ecoterrorism, globalization. On a lighter level, she also skewers the moronic corporate brand names flooding the market these days: anyone who thinks her inventions are far-fetched should consider such mind-numbingly lame (and inexplicably popular) trademarks as Verizon, ImClone, MyoZap, Swole, Biocidin, and Rejuven-8.

"Oryx and Crake" may well fall short of some readers' expectations for "a Margaret Atwood novel." But judged as an entry in the genre of science fiction, it's a powerful and visionary masterpiece.

I really tried to get into the letters of Scott and Zelda. I thought it would broaden my knowledge of this artistic couple and help me to understand their work. I tried. I failed. I just could not get interested in Zelda's shallow world of parties and dances. I tried skipping to the meatier stuff later in her life; still could not quite muster up the empathy needed to relate to this woman. Her life was no doubt tragic and sad, but I was not moved. Perhaps it is heresy to say, but I still am not convinced F Scott is the great American novelist he is marketed to be; the letters in this book did not keep my attention long enough to desire to get to know them better.

This is a vivid, moving portrait of a marriage told in the couple's own words to one another. While biographer and commentators on the Fitzgeralds and their period have provided their own interpretations of the most famous exemplars of the Jazz Age, Breyer and Barks have chosen to let the protagonists speak for themselves and to each other. The result is a look at two human beings struggling to find their identities, define their relationship, and establish their place in the world relative to one another. That they only partially succeeded but never stopped trying is what makes this collection of their letters compelling reading.
Highly recommended for anyone who wants to know what the world looked like to those living in, and often trapped in, its confines.