Cordelia's Honor - Lois McMaster Bujold

I absolutely loved our bookclub's most recent pick, Cordelia's Honor. It is the story of Captain Cordelia Naismith, a scientist/explorer in the mold of Star Trek's Captain Janeway - kind, strong, resourceful, compassionate, and with a powerful moral compass. Cordelia is enjoying a routine survey mission to an unclaimed planet when she and her crew are attacked by a squad of Barrayans, a militant race with a revered warrior caste, the Vor. She is taken prisoner by their honorable commander, Aral Vorkosigan, and the two unexpectedly fall in love. Eventually, Cordelia returns with him to Barrayar as Lady Vorkosigan, where the two are swept up in intergalactic politics and domestic revolution. Powerfully written, with interesting reflections on war, love, gender dynamics, and the stigma of disability. Not your typical romance novel.

The Dante Club is the first novel, a mystery, by Matthew Pearl, who developed it from a senior thesis completed while he was an undergrad at Harvard - quite a spectacular debut, featuring intimate and fascinating knowledge of Dante's Commedia and the "Club" - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., James Russell Lowell and others - that first translated it into English. In a sharp parallel with current events, the story also explores the fate of veterans of the civil war, returning to civilized Boston after enduring unimaginable horrors on the battlefield. These subjects combine in a series of meticulous and grisly murders, carried out with fidelity to some of the punishments in The Inferno. Quite a good read!