The Time Machine by H.G. Wells

December 2, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – audiobook. Read by Kelsey Grammer. Apple, 2018. Originally published 1985. 4 hours, 7 minutes. Free download. Identified by the narrator as simply “The Time Traveler”, a Victorian English scientist and gentleman inventor living in Richmond, Surry is invited to a weekly dinner party to share about his latest invention. At this particular dinner party, the narrator recounts the Traveler’s revelation that he has built a machine capable of carrying a person through time. Encouraged by the audience’s response, […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Audiobook, Classics, Classics Club, Dystopia, Europe, Fiction, Science Fiction, United Kingdom • Tags: H.G. Wells

The Natural Way of Things by Charlotte Wood

October 25, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – Kindle edition. Europa Editions, 2016. Originally published 2015. 208 pgs. Purchased. Yolanda and Verla awaken from a drugged sleep to find themselves in an unfamiliar room wearing “stupid Amish clothes” and under guard by two men in boiler suits. Neither woman knows how or why she ended up here; neither woman feels like they can really trust the other enough to ask. Perhaps, after all, they are on a demented version of ‘Survivor’ or ‘Big Brother’ where they […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Awards and Prizes, Dystopia, Feminism, Fiction, Oceania, Stella Prize • Tags: Charlotte Wood

The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi

September 4, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – print. Knopf, 2015. 371 pgs. Library copy. Set in the not-too-distant-future, Bacugalupi’s novel finds the southwestern United States desolate and abandoned after a series of Category 6 hurricanes – a new categorization on our 1 to 5 scale – flattens coastal Texas and a massive, continuous drought has stopped the Colorado River from flowing downstream at the rate required by the Colorado River Compact of 1922. The details are sketchy as the story largely takes place in the […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Book Club, Dystopia, Fiction, Mountain West, North America, Science Fiction, United States • Tags: Paolo Bacigalupi

The Power by Naomi Alderman

April 26, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – print. Little, Brown and Company, 2017. Originally published 2016. 387 pgs. Purchased. Teenage girls across the globe now hold a tremendous amount of power – electric currents flowing through their bodies can be harnessed to hurt, maim, and even kill. As these young women learn how to harness and transfer their powers, they topple male-dominated power structures around the globe, including the Saudi Arabian government, the United States military, and the religious authority of the Pope. The collapse […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Awards and Prizes, Dystopia, Europe, Feminism, Fiction, Women's Prize • Tags: Naomi Alderman

Tell the Machine Goodnight by Katie Williams

February 8, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – Kindle edition. Riverhead Books, 2018. 304 pgs. Library copy. Apricity is happiness, proclaims the company’s advertising slogan for a machine that reads your DNA from a cheek swab and provides three recommendations that will enhance your happiness. Its suggestions run the gambit; everything from arrange fresh flowers to cut off the tip of your middle finger, “Pearl had always marveled at this: to think that the solution to one’s happiness lay next to the residue of the bagel […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Book Club, Dystopia, Fiction, North America, Science Fiction, United States • Tags: Katie Williams

The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness

July 5, 2018 by Christina

Fiction — print. Candlewick Press, 2009. Originally published 2008. 479 pgs. Purchased. Soon after arriving on the New World, all the settlers were infected with the Noise germ, allowing them to hear everything each other thinks. As the last remaining boy in a town full of men, Todd Hewitt isn’t allowed to converse with those who have become men, and he longs for the day he can become a man and join the ranks of those living in Prentisstown. “Everything on […]

Categories: 2018 Reads, 20BooksofSummer, Book Club, Chunkster, Dystopia, Science Fiction, Young Adult • Tags: Patrick Ness

The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick

April 18, 2018 by Christina

Fiction — audiobook. Read by Jeff Cummings. Brilliance Audio, 2015. Originally published 1962. 9 hours, 58 minutes. Purchased.  In 1962, fifteen years after the end of World War II, a defeated America has been split into three zones — the Pacific States ruled by Japan, the East Coast colonized by Nazi Germany, and a demilitarized zone comprised of the Rocky Mountain states. In Colorado and Wyoming, individuals who once (and still) identified as Americans live far freer than those on either […]

Categories: 2018 Reads, Asia, Audiobook, Awards and Prizes, Dystopia, Europe, Fiction, Germany, Japan, North America, Science Fiction, United States • Tags: Philip K. Dick

Pure by Julianna Baggott

January 21, 2016 by Christina

Fiction — print. Grand Central Publishing, 2012. 431 pgs. Purchased. Fifteen-year-old Pressia survived the Detonations, a nuclear fallout that wiped out most of the Earth’s population and fused the survivors with the animal, rock, or thing closest to them. Pressia fused with the doll she was holding whilst waiting for her grandfather to pick her and her Japanese mother up at the Baltimore-Washington airport, and the doll now covers her right hand — its eyes flipping open or closed depending upon the angle […]

Categories: 2016 Reads, Dystopia, Fiction, North America, United States, Young Adult • Tags: Julianna Baggott

Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins

December 16, 2014 by Christina

Fiction — print. Scholastic, 2010. 390 pgs. Gift. In the final installment of Collins’ dystopian series, Katniss Everdeen – the “Girl on Fire”, the Mockingjay – has now become the symbol of a revolution following her disastrous rescue from the destroyed arena of the Quarter Quell. Separated from Peeta and Johanna, Katniss is reunited with her mother, sister, and Gale in the one district the Capital claimed to have destroyed and utilized as an example of what could occur in […]

Categories: 2014 Reads, Dystopia, Fiction, Young Adult • Tags: Suzanne Collins

Zone One by Colson Whitehead

October 17, 2014 by Christina

Fiction — audiobook. Read by Beresford Bennett. Books on Tape, 2011. 9 hours, 57 minutes. Library copy. Mark Spitz is a sweeper — a civilian employed by the government in Buffalo to walk through lower Manhattan and kill “malfunctioning” victims of the plague. These victims exist in a catatonic state and sit in front of their televisions or computers transfixed by these remnants of their former lives. Non-malfunctioning victims, whom we would call zombies, have already been eradicated by the military as […]

Categories: 2014 Reads, Abandoned, Audiobook, Dystopia, Fiction, New York, North America, United States • Tags: Beresford Bennett, Colson Whitehead

Wool by Hugh Howey

September 28, 2014 by Christina

Fiction — print. Omnibus edition. Simon & Schuster, 2013. 509 pgs. Library copy. A woman in my book club spent ten minutes of a recent meeting trying to convince all of us to read Howey’s novel. Her suggestion was shot down because the book is too new and, therefore, difficult for people to acquire (I spent nearly six weeks on the waitlist for one of the sixteen copies at my public library). I decided to read it based on her […]

Categories: 2014 Reads, Chunkster, Dystopia, Fiction, North America, United States • Tags: Hugh Howey

Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

September 19, 2014 by Christina

Fiction — audiobook. Read by Frank Muller. Recorded Books, 1986. Originally published 1949. 9 hours, 48 minutes. Library copy. Freedom is the freedom to say two plus two makes four. Yet in the city of London located in Airstrip One (formerly known as Great Britain) — a province of the superstate Oceania (formerly known as the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom) — men and women are denied that freedom by a political system called English Socialism, also known as […]

Categories: 2014 Reads, AP Literature, Audiobook, Classics, Classics Club, Dystopia, Europe, Fiction, United Kingdom • Tags: Frank Muller, George Orwell