Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood

I can't go any further on this list without including some Margaret Atwood, if only because she is one of the few authors whose entire cannon I have read. This isn't her best work, that would be Alias Grace, if you ask me, but this is her most vivid and thought-provoking novel. The story flips back and forth from shortly after the apocalypse to the events leading up to the end of days. The landscape of the future is noisome and arid, stuffed with rotting leftovers from the human age, all now irrelevant, while the past (our future) is sterile and corrupt. The characters are vapid, selfish and small, filled with data but ignorant of the most basic sense of humanity, slavishly serving a morally bankrupt society dominated by massive drug corporations. The reader can't help but wish they'd go extinct. And then they do.
Jimmy, or Snowman, manages to survive, and so do his charges, genetically modified humanoids, created to survive in Earth's hostile environment, created to be nice and care for each other and not let sex and the will to power turn them against each other. So, in the presence of these little guys, we are left with a flavour of hope, however bleak the present landscape. And that's quite an accomplishment, if you ask me.
I bought this copy full price at Book City on Bloor as soon as it came out in paperback, as I usually do with her books. I read it at my old house, in the back yard in a hammock I bought in Mexico for twelve dollars and two pens on my way back overland from Costa Rica. I meant to go to Argentina, but misjudged distance, money and massive transportation challenges.
This book has really stuck with me. It is harsh, but fair, but even so, I don't see reading it again in the immediate future.
Score- +3 (6 released, 9 saved)