Heat & Light by Jennifer Haigh

Exceedingly well-written, burnished totally boring novel about fracking and its effect on persons, peoples, communities.  There's something about that evenly-spread "American" third person omniscient narrator voice that I loathe, mixed in with pious liberal journalistic info.

Under the Net by Iris Murdoch

Events stream past us like these crowds and the face of each is seen only for a minute.  What is urgent is not urgent for ever, but only ephemerally.  All work and all love, the search for wealth and fame, the search for truth, like itself, are made up of moments which pass and become nothing.  Yet through this shaft of nothings we drive onward with that miraculous vitality that creates our precarious habitations in the past and the future.  So we live:  a spirit that broods and hovers over the continual death of time, the lost meaning, the unrecpatured moment, the unremembered face, until the final chop that ends all our moments and plunges that spirit back into the void from which it came.

[from Under the Net]