The Road, reviewed by raidergirl3 and CompletedWrap Up

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

The Road finishes up the dystopian challenge for me. It was a bleak book, but a good read. The prose was perfect for this post apocaolypse tale, of a father and son walking across America. It was dark, and bleak, and depressing and how could a person survive this life? And would you want to? And it is also a book about surviving and hope and love, because those will always be there in life as well.

My full review is at my blog: here

To finish up this challenge, and with only a few weeks to go, here is the list I originally committed to:

Books I plan to read:
1. The Giver by Lois Lowry (banned book challenge as well)
2. Never Let Me Go by Kazou Ishiguro
3. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
4. Brave New World by Huxley
5. either The Road by Cormac McCarthy or Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell (recced by laura)

I read all five, but not Cloud Atlas, plus I also read We by Yvengy Zamyatin and Uglies by Scott Westerfield.
Favorite Book: Never Let Me Go, The Giver and The Road

I really enjoyed this challenge, and the books I found. This is a genre I would not have thought I would like, but I have had to revise this opinion, because I have a stack of new books I still want to read, including Pretties, Specials, Oryx and Cake, Children of Men.
Thanks for the challenge.

Pamela - Dystopian Challenge Completed

I have successfully completed my 3rd challenge. I really enjoyed this challenge as 4 out of the 5 books I read I rated with an 8 or higher.

1984 by George Orwell [completed May 18th, 2007]
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley [completed August 26th, 2007]
The Giver by Lois Lowry [completed April 28th, 2007]
The Road by Cormac McCarthy [completed July 4th, 2007]
Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood [completed September 17th, 2007]

In The Country of Last Things - Wendy's Book Review

You would think that sooner or later it would all come to an end. Things fall apart and vanish, and nothing new is made. People die, and babies refuse to be born. In all the years I have been here, I can't remember seeing a single newborn child. And yet, there are always new people to replace the ones who have vanished. -From In the Country of Last Things, page 7-

Anna Blume arrives in an unnamed city to search for her brother - a journalist who has vanished without a trace. The city is one of unspeakable destruction and horror, where dead people lie in the street (either by their own hand, or from hired assassins, or from starvation or violence). Things disappear daily along with memories. To survive, Anna becomes an object scavenger, gathering up things from the past to sell for food and shelter. Who and what can survive in this bleak and desolate city? Paul Auster's novel is written from Anna's point of view - and presented in a letter she writes to someone in her past. For Anna, there is no going back "home."

In spite of what you would suppose, the facts are not reversible. Just because you are able to get in, that does not mean you will be able to get out. Entrances do not become exits, and there is nothing to guarantee that the door you walked through a moment ago will still be there when you turn around to look for it again. That is how it works in the city. Every time you think you know the answer to a question, you discover that the question makes no sense.
- From In The Country of Last Things, page 85-

Unable to go back, and uncertain about going forward, the reader learns how Anna survives and what she finds in a place where everything seems to be lost. The novel is not particularly hopeful - the characters not only lose the past, but also their faith.

"I don't believe in God anymore, if that's what you mean," I said. "I gave all that up when I was a little girl."
"It's difficult not to," the Rabbi said. "When you consider the evidence, there's a good reason why so many think as you do."
"You're not going to tell me that you believe in God," I said.
"We talk to him. But whether or not he hears us is another matter."
-From In the Country of Last Things, page 96-

The novel is well written and I found myself turning the pages seeking the same answers that Anna seeks. Auster offers a glimmer of promise - but, ultimately I finished the book with a feeling of disappointment.

Mercy's Maid's Book List

Here is my list of books I would like to complete for this challenge:

1. 1984 by George Orwell * Completed
2. The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin
3. Animal Farm by George Orwell * Completed
4. The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
5. Pretties by Scott Westerfeld * Completed
6. Uglies by Scott Westerfeld * Completed
7. Specials by Scott Westerfeld * Completed

**I keep adding to my list, but I don't seem to be speeding up my reading of this genre.

raidergirl3 update

Never Let Me Go by Kazou Ishiguro

Awesome book, suspenseful, best dystopian novel I've read. His prose is wonderful and the way he weaves the memoirish story, kept me reading continuously. Not as over the top dystopian as the others I've read, which is why this world was so possible.

full review here

One of the first dystopian novels, written in the early 1920s and translated from Russian, We by Yevgeny Zamyatin is pretty good. This is a creepy preview of Stalinist Russian, where logic and mathematics rule the society, and the group (we) is more important than the individual. Our main character, D-503, loves his world, but an encounter with I-330, a rebel female, turns his thoughts and world around.

I loved how he used math references for everything, to make sense of what was hapening to him. full review here

I just have The Road left to read, and I'm waiting in line at the library for it now.

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

I finished reading Oryx and Crake maybe a month ago. It was the only title on my challenge list that I'd been dying to read, but I'd picked this book up a few months ago and just couldn't continue to read it. But I tried again, and the timing was right. I've only read this and The Handmaid's Tale by Atwood, but she has quickly become one of my favourite authors in the way her stories develop, the character's voices, her style of writing - it's all very beautiful and I am in awe of her.

I find it very difficult to summarize the plot, so I leave amazon to do that for me:

In the beginning, there was chaos..." Margaret Atwood's chilling new novel Oryx and Crake moves beyond the futuristic fantasy of her 1985 bestseller The Handmaid’s Tale to an even more dystopian world, a world where language--and with it anything beyond the merest semblance of humanity--has almost entirely vanished.
Snowman may be the last man on earth, the only survivor of an unnamed apocalypse. Once he was Jimmy, a member of a scientific elite; now he lives in bitter isolation and loneliness, his only pleasure the watching of old films on DVD. His mind moves backwards and forwards through time, from an agonising trawl through memory to relive the events that led up to sudden catastrophe (most significantly the disappearance of his mother and the arrival of his mysterious childhood companions Oryx and Crake, symbols of the fractured society in which Snowman now finds himself, to the horrifying present of genetic engineering run amok. His only witnesses, eager to lap up his testimony, are "Crakers", laboratory creatures of varying strengths and abilities, who can offer little comfort. Gradually the reasons behind the disaster begin to unfold as Snowman undertakes a perilous journey to the remains of the bubble-dome complex where the sinister Paradice Project collapsed and near-global devastation began.

This is a very chilling and upsetting story about the uses and abuses of science in regards to genetics, which isn't a subject I'm very familiar with (and Atwood doesn't, thankfully, spend a lot of time on the actual science-y bits) but the disasterous outcome of the novel seems entirely within our reach.

Uglies reviewed by raidergirl3

I knew this book was popular because there are 6 or 7 copies of each part of this trilogy in our high school library. At the last minute, I grabbed a copy for the summer and I'm glad I did. It wasn't on my list for the Dystopian challenge, but it certainly counts. I'll be getting Pretties and Specials before the summer ends.

It's several centuries after our world, the Rusties, has died out. In this future world, to ensure everyone is treated equally, sixteen year olds are given an operation to become pretty. Tally can't wait for her operation, to become pretty and join the parties and fun life in New Pretty Town and leave the Ugly Town she's been living in. Then, just before her birthday, Tally's new friend Shay, tells Tally that she is running away and doesn't want to be pretty. Tally is conflicted, but the authorities find out and give her few options. I won't tell anymore than that, but I haven't put this book down since I picked it up for a *short* diversion from the very intense book The Bone People. So much for a short diversion.

Uglies is a young adult book, and quite an easy read and somewhat predictable, but I was needing some brain candy. Just like I enjoy Captain Crunch every few months for breakfast, I was needing some easy reading. Uglies was a big old bowl of Captain Crunch.

previously posted at my blog