"The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (ねじまき鳥クロニクル Nejimaki-dori Kuronikuru?)" by Haruki Murakami.

If I died yesterday, I would not have been richer for the shattering experience (in a good way!) that is the reading of "Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" by Mr. Murakami! Well, I am dramatizing, of course, as it took me almost three weeks to finish the audio book (with AMAZING voice acting by a SINGLE person, exactly the way I prefer it. It is an audio book, not radio-drama), but this book is becoming my new favorite book and that hasn't happened  since "Cien Anos de Soledad" replaced Tolkien about  10 years ago, and Tolkien replaced "Against the Fall of Night" about 7 years before that.

This book is a masterpiece of modern literature, seamlessly fusing all previous genres, and jumping and combining genres in a seemingly unintelligible jumble, just to let the reader realize, in an emotion catharsis, that all that is really not important anyway, and art is somewhere beyond all that, beyond form, right into the middle of the "thing in itself" to paraphrase Kant.  Without respect of linearity, whether of time or place, Mr. Murakami still weaves an irresistible web of characters and events that seem so real, one could almost swear one already knows them.  Starting with such seemingly trivial passages like several pages on cooking noodles and making coffee, the life of the main protagonist, Toru Okada, an educated, intelligent, but lacking ambition, man in his 30s, becomes more and more weird with every passing page culminating in, well, do we dare say it, well, Mr. Okada saved the World in a way.

Mr. Okada's wife Kumiko dissapears, and the entire book is mainly concerned with Mr. Okada trying to find her and get her back.  His brother-in-law Noboru Wataya is a powerful politician, who seems to have suddenly catapulted in power, but who hides a terrible dark family secret which threatens the very existence of his sister, Kumiko, just like driving their youngest sister into a suicide years ago.  Throw in there clairvoyant characters named after Mediterranean islands, Malta and Creta Kano; fashion designers who "fit" something evil out of people and are named Nutmeg and Cinnamon Asakawa, mother and son, and finally the diabolical Mr. Ishikawa, a disturbing charicature of a man, queerly resembling a familiar from the medieval magical grimoires.  Finally, the entire thread is held by an underaged teenage girl Mai Kasahara who through letters and personal visits, helps make sense of Mr.Wind-Up Bird's world, as she calls Mr. Okada.

This book is a masterpiece of world literature and true world heritage, the heritage of the entire human race.  It is a privilege to enjoy Mr. Murakami's book and I wish that pleasure upon many people to come!

"Xenocide" by Orson Scott Card

This is the third book in the "Ender Tetralogy", which was the original envisioning of the series (which got much expanded afterwards and pretty much turned into a franchise).  The original envisioning was a trilogy actually, "Xenocide" and the following book "Children of the Mind" supposing to be one volume, but it became too lengthy for one book, so it got split into two.  "Xenocide" is the only Ender Tetralogy book where the story doesn't end naturally on the last page, but actually ends in mid-action.  "Xenocide" is a very ambitious book, almost like a space opera of the likes of Dan Simmons or Ron Hubbard.  There are multiple settings (on two planets) stories, plots, twists, etc.

The Starway Congress fleet is advancing towards Lusitania with the MDD device on-board, while Ender is trying to get the piggies (pecaninos) and the hive queen off the planet before Jane is turned off for the most part.  A genetically enhanced, but OCD_controlled humans on the planet called Path are much more intelligent than normal humans, and are used by Congress to advance their aims.  Path is populated by Chinese, and lives in a very traditional, patriarchal, class society.  Meanwhile on Lusitania, human scientists are trying to develop a form of the Descolada which will give Pecaninos their life processes, but will not be aggressive and harmless to humans.  They call this new virus the "Recolada" but it only gets created during the first faster-than-light experimental trip.

Eventually Jane with the help of Ender, Grego and some insights from the Hive Queen finds a way how to travel faster than light and pretty much instantenously to anywhere in the universe. However, as a consequence of the first trip, Peter and Valentine, as they were in Ender's mind were created in flesh and blood.  The book ends with Peter bringing a virus that will cure the people of Path of their OCD.  The solution to all plots is in the next and final book of the "Ender Tetralogy" - "Children of the Mind".