Oryx and Crake

Back from a vacation on the beach and I finished two books while away and started a comic. That’s my mark of a good vacation, how much reading I can get done in amongst eating good food. I finished Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood first. Gonna admit that it was a bit dissonant to be on a beautiful beach while reading about the destruction of the world, but that’s Atwood for you. And right now I find a bit of comfort in Atwood’s writing.

Oryx and Crake is the first in a triology, the MaddAddam Triology and I can’t wait to read the next books. In what is usual topics for Atwood, it’s a near future dystopia, we humans are responsible for destroying ourselves. And that’s what makes it fascinating, in the human quest to splice genes to make them the best and everything perfect, we’ve managed to cock it all up. But I enjoyed the main character and his determination to live, to keep going, and those things are helpful for me to read about right now.

Human society, they claimed, was a sort of monster, its main by-products being corpses and rubble. It never learned, it made the same cretinous mistakes over and over, trading short-term gain for long term pain. It was like a giant slug eating its way relentlessly through all the other bioforms on the planet, grinding up life on earth and shitting it out the backside in the form of pieces of manufactured and soon-to-be-obsolete plastic junk. (p 243)

They understood about dreaming, he knew that: they dreamed themselves. Crake hadn’t been able to eliminate dreams. We’re hard-wired for dreams, he’d said. He couldn’t get rid of the singing either. We’re hard-wired for singing. Singing and dreams were entwined. (p 352)