To all the pages I've read before

Having a hard time knowing how to take this book.This is the second book of the MaddAddam trilogy (and I just noticed that is a palindrome), of which Oryx & Crake was the first.And really, it feels more like an addendum to O&C than a novel proper. As it is Atwood, it is a very well written addendum, but it feel slight in comparison. And really, that is not fair, as this is really about the human toll of the scientific madness from the first, but I dare say I found that just so much more interesting.Oryx & Crake felt like a warning. One that would eat society whole if we took no heed of it (alas... we have not). This is more of a 'here are the effects' that not heeding that warning. And this should be vibrantly scary thing, as a global plague wipes out near all of humanity, only Atwood sprinkles in quite a bit of hope though out and it becomes hard to see the horror of humanity's decimation. She focuses on the people in a strange religious group/cult called the gardeners. They have rejected the conspicuous consumptive ways of modern society, living on cast offs and their own gardened fruit. She has Adam1, the leader of the sect, recite a sermon and a song to frame each chapter. And after the second one, I learned to just skim these, as they were not my bag in the slightest. But it takes at least a third of the book to really humanize them, but she clearly does, as you root for them all to have been spared from the plague, knowing of course this can not be.Atwood writes at least 493 leagues better than me, so it is hard to suggest improvement from her, but this just seems a slight read in comparison to O&C. And perhaps that is because while O&C was the creation of a dystopic world, this is about the survivors. And while very strange, also about utopia, both from the gardeners attempts to create it for themselves at the beginning of the book and in the realization that the surviving few must actually create it to keep going.Also, why do I enjoy dystopia over utopia? hmmm...