Sleeping Giants - Sylvain Neuvel

Sleeping Giants - Sylvain Neuvel - 320 pages

A girl falls in a sinkhole with a giant robotic hand in the bottom.

Years later, she becomes exactly the scientist needed to find all this mysterious golem's pieces and put them back together, but what the robot is for and who made it are the main mysteries that unfold as it all comes together.

Presented as a series of interviews, reports, and recordings rather than in a traditional narrative style, this novel is mysterious and mercurial as the pieces are slowly gathered from around the world and assembled into a mechanical creature of epic proportions.  But the implications are as complex as the machine itself, pitting powerful individuals, corporations, and governments against one another in a race to figure it all out.

The Dragon Behind the Glass - Emily Voigt

The Dragon Behind the Glass - Emily Voigt - 336 pages

Fish. The final frontier.

...Okay, not really.  But seriously, the history of fish tank fishies is really interesting stuff, especially as told by Emily as she travels all over the world in search of the elusive wild Super Red Arowana, a fish whose domesticated counterpart sells for tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars to collectors around the world.  She Indiana Jones's her way through remote and urban jungles on a quest to find this primordial fish that langors in the tanks of the rich and privilaged, but has been fished to near extinction in the wild due to high demand.

There's something fascinating in her quest and the stories she hears from modern day adventurers.  Some are breeding fish for profit, some are travelling to find elusive new species of every kind for fame, fortune, and maybe just the fun of it, and some are worried about the ecological implications of humankind's obsession with caging the wild.  Maybe ecology is really at the root of this story; by the end, even I was feeling cynical about the possibility of righting our wrongs as the apex of the food chain (whether we're eating our prey or cramming it in a glass bowl for entertainment purposes).  Species altered by the breeding hands of people are no longer comparable to their wild counterparts; is an animal extinct if it only exists in our living rooms and hotel lobbies?

The Insides - Jeremy P. Bushnell

The Insides - Jeremy P. Bushnell - 304 pages

This urban fantasy novel follows Ollie, an ex-magician turned butcher (of meat, not people) and Maja, a finder of things.  Their paths cross at the intersection of a magical knife and a sociopath in a pig mask, as each hunts down their own very important thing.

The great thing about this story is that it's weird- weird because it's set in a world so similar to our own that it's almost believable aside from the subtle magic and hopefully that dude in the mask.  Also, giant inter-dimensional grub worms in the freezer for the win.