What I read in October

The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu--It's hard to talk about this book, the second in a trilogy, without telling you things about the first book that I want you to be free to discover on your own. Suffice it to say that the English translation of the first book won the Nebula in 2015, I was expecting to be disappointed with the second book, and I wasn't. I'm not generally a fan of hard science fiction, and I find this trilogy challenging at times, but the questions it poses and the answers it posits make the effort more than worth it.

A Man Called Ove by Frederik Backman--Another translation, this time from Swedish. My mother-in-law gave me this book for my birthday back in the spring, but it didn't come to the top of the reading queue until the fall. The first chapter made me laugh out loud and annoy my children by reading bits of it to them. Ove is a delightfully lovable curmudgeon.

The Plot Against America by Philip Roth--I picked this up on a whim, because I was running out to pick up kids, thought I might need to wait a bit, and none of the many books I am in the middle of happened to be in the room with me, so I grabbed this one off the shelf. It's an alternate history in which Lindbergh (yes, that one) defeats FDR in 1940 and cozies up to Hitler. It was like reading about the current election without reading about the current election. I was engrossed by this book right up until the last page. The ending felt as if Roth realized he had hit his word count or reached his deadline, slapped a final sentence on the book, and mailed it off. I can't think of the last time I've been caught completely off-guard by a bad ending. Usually I have ample warning that a book is going to disappoint, but this one felt like a slap in the face.

I also listened to almost all of Galileo's Daughter, which I read in 2012. It was my book group's selection for the month, and I decided to give audio books another try, because my library system had it available in that format. Nope, still don't like them, and not only because the last two files didn't download properly. This is actually a decent book, even the second time through. The parallels with the current religious objections to the teaching of evolution are as obvious as they were the first reading, but this time I thought more about why I found Suor Maria Celeste--a nun who was sincerely devoted to her father--somewhat annoying.  I wanted her to be angrier that Galileo simultaneously didn't pay to make her legitimate, like he did for her younger brother, and wouldn't let her marry because anyone who would offer to marry an illegitimate woman would not be worthy of the Galilei name. I did not want her to be so grateful for the chance to sew collars for Galileo. It's hard to shake my feminist ideals.

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson--Much like when I read Dracula several years ago, I wished I could have read this book fresh, without having it be part of my cultural background for as long as I can remember. It would have been more suspenseful. And yet, there was still a fair bit I didn't know, so the final reveal was interesting, and the Victorian exploration of human nature was somewhat unexpected.