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, 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, Hugo Award, 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

When She Woke by Hillary Jordan

September 4, 2014 by Christina

Fiction — audiobook. Read by Heather Corrigan. HighBridge Audio, 2011. 10 hours, 42 minutes. Library copy. In this imaginative retelling of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Hannah Payne awakens to find her skin is now the red — the color of blood. She is a convicted criminal sentenced by the State of Texas, who criminalized abortion as murder, to be “chromed”, and her skin color has been genetically modified to broadcast to the world her crime. Hannah devoted her life […]

Categories: 2014 Reads, Audiobook, Dystopia, Fiction, North America, Science Fiction, United States • Tags: Heather Corrigan, Hillary Jordan

The Leftovers by Tom Perrotta

August 12, 2014 by Christina

Fiction — print. St. Martin’s Press, 2011. 355 pgs. Library copy. Imagine if two percent of the world’s population disappeared on October 14th? No virus. No war. One minute your brother, neighbor, coworker is there and the next? Poof — gone. Three years later, the residents of Mapleton are still struggling to make sense of the sudden disappearance of their loved ones. The town’s reverend has launched a slanderous campaign to prove the event was not the Rapture because the […]

Categories: 2014 Reads, Book Club, Dystopia, Fiction, North America, United States • Tags: Tom Perrotta

Bumped by Megan McCafferty

May 30, 2014 by Christina

In 2035, a virus renders everyone over the age of eighteen sterile and teenage pregnancy is not only rampant but encouraged. Sixteen-year-old Melody is still “prebump” meaning she has yet to become pregnant, but her parents are economists and have negotiated a record-breaking contract for her. Biding her time until a sperm donor can be found, Melody wants to become president of her high school pregnancy club and resents the intrusion of her newly found twin sister, Harmony, into her […]

Categories: 2014 Reads, Dystopia, Fiction, North America, United States, Young Adult • Tags: Megan McCafferty

Divergent by Veronica Roth

March 9, 2014 by Christina

Fiction — print. Katherine Tegen Books, 2012. 487 pgs. Borrowed from a friend. Dystopian Chicago is divided and ruled by five factions, each dedicated to the cultivation of a particular virtue — Candor (the honest), Abnegation (the selfless), Dauntless (the brave), Amity (the peaceful), and Erudite (the intelligent). Each year, sixteen-year-olds from each faction must select the faction to which they will devote the rest of their lives. An aptitude test helps guide their choice, but ultimately each person must make […]

Categories: 2014 Reads, Chunkster, Dystopia, Fiction, North America, United States, Young Adult • Tags: veronica roth