I finished up Venus of Dreams and I can't really say I enjoyed it much. The main character, Iris, was somebody you could really root for when she was young, but as she aged throughout the book she became self-absorbed, selfish, and even something of a Mary Sue, in that of the thousands and thousands of people working on terraforming Venus she was always right there wherever anything important was going to happen and everyone around her automatically adopted her suggestions - even her enemies. And I would have preferred a bit more action over the 536 pages; a great deal of this was devoted to character development, which would have been fine if it was a character I actually still liked after the first hundred pages or so.
But I'm now moving on to Bad Ronald by Jack Vance, one of my all-time favorite authors. While he's primarily known for his fantasy and science fiction, this is a modern novel (well, it was written in 1973) about a teenager implicated in a murder, whose mother then seals him up in a hidden section of the house they live in and tells everyone he ran away. The plan is for them to move away to somewhere where nobody knows them once she's saved up enough money - but then she dies from an illness and a new family buys the house, not knowing about Ronald still hidden away there in his secret room....
Johnathan