Book 36: "Turtle Diary" by Russell Hoban

I think of the turtles swimming steadily against the current all the way to Ascension. I think of them swimming through all that golden-green water over the dark, over the chill of the deeps and the jaws of the dark. And I think of the sun over the water, the sun through the water, the eye holding the sun, being held by it with no thought and only the rhythm of the going, the steady wing-strokes of the flippers in the water. Then it doesn’t seen hard to believe. It seems the only way to do it, the only way in fact to be : swimming, swimming, the eye held by the sun, no sharks in the mind, nothing in the mind.

Two strangers, William G. and Neaera H., become obsessed with freeing the sea turtles at London Zoo, and the head reptile keeper agrees to help them do it. Both lonely and living aimless lives, they are gripped by the long journey of the sea turtles across the oceans, and the fact that the turtles know exactly where they are going and can navigate their way across vast oceans to one particular small island. It is quite a sad book, about two people whose plotting doesn’t bring them closer together, as they realise that they are too similar to be a good fit, but by the end of the book there are some hopeful signs for their future. I enjoyed it a lot.

Book 37: "The Naked Sun" by Isaac Asimov

When Detective Elijah Baley is summoned to Solaria to investigate a murder, he is the first earthman to visit the Outer Worlds in centuries. Each of the twenty thousand Solarians live on a huge estate maintained by robots, and although they all know each other and socialise by 'viewing' each other via tri-dimensional viewer, they are phobic about personal contact, and it is only husbands and wives who, reluctantly, 'see' each other in person. None of the Solarians can understand how the murderer and his/her victim could have stood being in each others' presence long enough for the murder to occur, but they are all convinced that the only possible suspect is the victim's widow. Baley finds it very hard to understand their phobia, just as they can’t understand his phobia of being outside. The Aurorans have sent R. Daneel Olivaw to work with him, as they believe that there could be a motive behind the murder that could threaten the future of the human race both on the Outer Worlds and Earth itself, but the robot's need to protect Baley from harm threatens to scupper the murder investigation.

Another re-read.