In college, I read few books outside of my coursework, but a couple of those that I did read turned out to be pretty influential for the kinds of things I started devouring immediately upon graduation, mostly tending towards post-modern reconstructions of genre fiction. The House of Leaves for one, then Do Android Dream of Electric Sheep?, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, and Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, a strange tale of the end of the world built along converging lines of past and the future. 
 Since then, Atwood has been a little hit or miss for me. The Blind Assassin became another favorite soon after, and The Handmaid's Tale, but Alias Grace, and other more realist ventures felt rather underwhelming and incomplete. So apparently it's her formalist sci-fi that gets me, and here, in a darkly imagined, elaborately structured sequel of sorts to Oryx (or rather Durrell-esque parallel telling, perhaps), she's in pretty solid form. 
 It's been a decade since Oryx, and this story didn't immediately mesh with my recollection, a more fully-fleshed treatment of plausibly near future ecological collapse but taking more time to set up its pieces and with less immediate urgency. And what if my tastes have simply veered in the last ten years? But then her world-details began to win me over, decaying inner cities and a central cult-group who built religion of environmentalism, scientific principle, and Saints Days devoted to various biologists (which then become the organizing structure of the chapters, incidentally), and by the time recollected details from the previous book begin to turn up halfway through, the plotting had coiled into page-turning fervor. Atwood's plotting may over-rely on coincidence, here, but she manages to both re-wire and expand upon the original story without really needing it there for support, so it works. But I now so definitely need to return to Oryx in order to patch up the fuller story, and track down a few unremembered peripheral characters. 
 Besides just being a good, eerie apocalypse story, this sparkled with compelling characters (though I sometimes wondered why we followed Ren rather than her more able counter-part Amanda -- more of an every-women, perhaps?), satiric detail, corny corporate naming that didn't actually feel forced, and for a story with so many ecological and environmental details, it's not overly message-driven. Evironmental collapse is just an utterly plausible plot context that Atwood presents matter-of-factly and without over-discussion. Also, this moves rthe action from Oryx's cloistered upper-crust lives out into the anarchic proletariat lives, which is a plus. Apparently this is planned as trilogy, and while so many series seem rather forced, each of these independent enough in its development that I'll be fine with another.