Wishful Drinking/ Carrie Fisher /163 p.

"Wishful Drinking" is Carrie Fisher's memoir about growing up as the daughter of "America's Sweethearts" Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher and her subsequent battles with alcoholism, drug addiction, and bi-polar disease. The book stems from her hugely successful one woman show, and tends to take the form of quick one-liners. That sometimes disguises both her penetrating insights and the depth of her struggle to overcome mental illness. If you want long reminiscences about her days as Princess Leia or her marriage with Paul Simon, you'll be disappointed, although there are funny stories about such topics as her dad's philandering ways and having a phone intervention with Cary Grant (yes, THE Cary Grant). It's much more a look at how she sees the world she grew up and now lives in and how she ultimately survived it. Insightful, poignant, and frequently hysterical.

Julian Comstock: A Story of Twenty-Second Century America / Robert Charles Wilson (413 p.)

In an interview with Tor.com about his latest book, Canadian sci-fi author Robert Charles Wilson revealed that, upon deciding to write a novel set 150 years in the future, he looked to popular books of 150 years ago, to see the difference in culture and worldview that he would have to convey between today and his future setting.  As it turns out, this look backward ended up influencing Julian Comstock much more directly: the characters speak as if they had stepped from the pages of a mid-19th century novel, often to hilarious effect; the post-oil future looks uncannily like a coal and steam driven Victorian era...and somehow, nary a machine gun has survived what the novel's religious establishment calls "The False Tribulation" that followed the end of the "Efflorescence of Oil" and the era of "The Secular Ancients" (that is, us), despite ongoing war with the Dutch over Labrador, and various other conflicts.  As prediction in any linguistic or technological sense, the novel cannot be taken seriously.

Nonetheless: once one accepts the idea of a chunk of the 19th-early 20th century being picked up and plunked into the 2170's...this novel is a treat: a splendid read, with memorable characters, a social, political and religious world spun and extrapolated comically and tragically from the substance of America, past and present, and a narrative that is capable of stirring the mind and moving the heart.

-Rachel

Links to Tor.com Interview, Part I and Part II.