The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood

I just started this work and was horrified to discover that the pigs from Oryx and Crake are back. Those swine give me nightmares! Thankfully, a hold came in from the Library so I switched to Dreamfever by Karen Marie Moning. I only have two weeks to read it. What a change! I went from "literature" to pure entertaining bubble gum. We all need that now and then... I will return to Ren and Toby, though. I liked their characters immediately. If I were a more patient person, I would re-read Oryx and Crake before returning to Year of the Flood, but I doubt that will happen.

The Year of the Flood -- From the Publisher
The long-awaited new novel from Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood is a brilliant visionary imagining of the future that calls to mind her classic novel The Handmaid's Tale.

Adam One, the kindly leader of God's Gardeners - a religion devoted to the melding of science and religion - has long predicted a natural disaster that will alter Earth as we know it. Now it has occurred, obliterating most human life. Two women have been spared: Ren, a young trapeze-dancer, locked inside a high-end sex club; and one of God's Gardeners, Toby, who is barricaded inside a luxurious spa. Have others survived?

By turns dark, tender, violent, thoughtful, and witty, The Year of the Flood unfolds Toby's and Ren's stories during the years prior to their meeting again. The novel not only brilliantly reflects to us a world we recognize but poignantly reminds us of our enduring humanity.

Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde

I am having such a good time reading the Eyre Affair. It is refreshing and fun, and challenges me to use my English degree. I'm not even finished yet, but I would recommend it!

Here is a overview from Amazon.co.uk:
Pirouetting on the boundaries between sci-fi, the crime thriller and intertextual whimsy, Jasper Fforde's outrageous The Eyre Affair puts you on the wrong footing even on its dedication page, which proudly announces that the book conforms to Crimean War economy standard.

Fforde's heroine, Thursday Next, lives in a world where time and reality are endlessly mutable--someone has ensured that the Crimean War never ended for example--a world policed by men like her disgraced father, whose name has been edited out of existence. She herself polices text--against men like the Moriarty-like Acheron Styx, whose current scam is to hold the minor characters of Dickens' novels to ransom, entering the manuscript and abducting them for execution and extinction one by one. When that caper goes sour, Styx moves on to the nation's most beloved novel--an oddly truncated version of Jane Eyre--and kidnaps its heroine. The phlegmatic and resourceful Thursday pursues Acheron across the border into a Leninist Wales and further to Mr Rochester's Thornfield Hall, where both books find their climax on the roof amid flames.

Fforde is endlessly inventive: his heroine's utter unconcern about the strangeness of the world she inhabits keeps the reader perpetually double-taking as minor certainties of history, literature and cuisine go soggy in the corner of our eye. The audacity of the premise and its working out provides sudden leaps of understanding, many of them accompanied by wild fits of the giggles. This is a peculiarly promising first novel. --Roz Kaveney