Orfeo (Richard Powers)

There is a lot to like in this book, especially if you know something about music. Peter Els is a retired composer who spent his life searching for music that would break through the walls of reality and people's souls, giving up his family and, to a certain extent, polite society in the search. In his final years he goes back to an early, abandoned love of chemistry and starts dabbling in do-it-yourself biochemistry, tinkering with the genetic sequences of common household bacteria. Along the way he comes to the attention of government officials and finds himself to be the target of an increasingly hysterical government manhunt. It's difficult to talk about music in a way that conveys anything like the experience of listening, but Powers has done this rather well. On the other hand, the characters, including Peter himself, are less well drawn. I never grasped anything like the core of Peter's personality that would lead him to make the choices he did, particularly at the end of the book. It felt more like the masks of an ancient mime, illustrating large themes, than the intimate story of real people. Overall, though, I was drawn in and really wanted to find out how Peter's story would end.

The Waters Rising (Sherri Tepper)

A complex, fantastic tale of a post-apocalyptic land, after the Big Kill that resulted from the reckless use of technology. This world has talking animals (left over from genetic engineering experiments) and killing curses (from old biological weapons), and people drawn together by destiny to save humans from the rising waters and ancient killing machines. I found the mix of technology and fantasy unconvincing, along with the big underlying reality, which is that the waters are rising now not just because of climate change but because a huge icy comet that had been trapped in the earth when it originally formed had broached its boundaries, and the water it was made of was being squeezed out to drown the entire world, right up to the highest mountains. The solution to this problem didn't really convince me, either. So while it was a pleasant enough story, it didn't really work well for me.