Meandering about the blogosphere, I found the Dystopian Challenge. Lisa at Books.Lists.Life even supplies a handy link to Wikipedia definitions and a Dystopian Reading List.
Many of my favorite high school reads are listed: A Clockwork Orange, Handmaid’s Tale, 1984, Brave_New_World, Fahrenheit_451, Animal_Farm, plus William Gibson’s cyberpunk novels like Neuromancer, Idoru and Mona Lisa Overdrive.
In university I read Sir Thomas Moore’s Utopia, and Plato’s Republic, Voltaire’s Candide and Francois_Rabelais‘ Pantagruel, Gargantua and Le Tiers Livre. For ‘fun’ I read Naked Lunch and then watched the film which made me squirm.
More recently I have read The Giver, Oryx and Crake, Snow crash and the teen dystopia Feed, which I reviewed here
I read more than I view but I love dystopian films, especially:
Brazil
Metropolis
Johnny_Mnemonic (Ice-T good, Keneau Reeves, okay)
A Clockwork Orange
Minority Report
Blade Runner (one of the few films I’ve watched more than once)
The Dystopia Challenge seems made for me. By November, I have to read 5 books in one of my favorite forms. Here’s my list so far:
Never Let Me Go
Pretties
Welcome to the Monkey House (I need to reread this one)
I’m looking for brand new Dystopias or novels aimed at teens to fill out the rest of my list. Any suggestions?
Happy (unhappy) reading.
My teen daughter read Pretties (and the next two in the series.) She loved them and at the same time found them disturbing.
Oooh! Handmaid’s Tale! Loved that one.
booklogged: Thanks for the info. I’m looking forward to reading Pretties even more now. Are you doing the Dystopian Challenge?
Heather: I also saw the opera in Toronto at the (former) Hummingbird Centre. It was stupendous. Modern music which perfectly highlighted the drama and grostequerie of the scenario.
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