The Time of Our Singing by Richard Powers. Review from Jane Shaw Dietrich:
Richard Powers is one of my favorite authors, and I think I’ve read almost all of his often-very-long novels. That was one of my favorites. Some of them are a bit too intellectually dense and go off the deep end into true weirdness. But I’m currently reading his latest book, Orfeo, which just came out and is also about music; I like it immensely. The protagonist is an elderly composer (well, about our age) who wants to encode a piece of music into the DNA of a bacterium and is fleeing from an accusation of bioterrorism. Powers seems to like codes, but he doesn’t go into too much detail about it here, as he did in an earlier book, The Gold Bug Variations, which I must have read about 20 years ago. It’s also about music, and codes, as you might guess from the title.
from Susan Rhodes Brown: Regarding A Time of Our Singing by Richard Powers, I am enthralled. This is a book in which every word counts – a real pleasure after flipping pages in The Goldfinch. Susan sends her wonder and thanks to Jane for the suggestion.
