"The Years of Rice and Salt" by Kim Stanley Robinson goes on my favorite reading list. I don't save books, but I don't think I will be able to give this one away.
I have read most of Robinson's books. There is a kind of flatness to them that should be off-putting, but something always pulls me through. The entire Mars trilogy was worth working through just for the last sentence of the last book. It was only two words, repeated three times, but the rightness of that repetition was thrilling. It wouldn't take any thrill to make that trilogy worth reading, but at times I did have a 'so what' feeling. But I kept reading.
"The Years of Rice and Salt" only gave me that so-what feeling in the second-to last section, which seemed to drag a little, and ended so abruptly I had to go back and reread the last paragraph, after I was into the next life, to make sure I hadn't missed something.
But lives are like that, aren't they? Small, inconsequential, sometimes with a so-what quality, and sometimes over without a bang. The last section of the last life acknowledged that smallness, and also how comforting it feels to imagine karmic rebirth and evolution. And that just because a belief is comforting doesn't mean it isn't true. Most satisfying for me was the unexpected discussion of wanting and what it means.
