By now, I’ve read The Hunger Games several times, but this time, I got to teach it. When I was assigned to teach the same English Composition II course that I’ve taught the last four years in a row, I was initially disappointed. I had been hoping to test out a new survey course. I consoled myself by deciding to teach a new book, and with a theme of social justice and storytelling, I landed on The Hunger Games. Most of my students were pretty […]
The future is dystopian and full of idiots
Pajiban’s might have seen the trailer for the new Tom Hiddleston/Jeremy Irons movie based on this book which looks pretty great. It’s full of gorgeously brutalist architecture and stylised sets and cinematography that hint at the original time period of the book (the mid 70’s). My advice, maybe just watch the movie and skip the book? First up, I’m going to tell you that a bunch of dogs get killed and/or eaten in this book. That is a total deal breaker for me and if I’d […]
To clone or not to clone, that is the question
A pretty enjoyable debut novel. The premise is a good one and seems fairly unique for young adult dystopian fiction. Cate lives in the remains of the United States where the population has been decimated. Still, her parents generation survived and rebuilt to give their kids a decent life. With the population being so small and having seen so much death, many parents have taken preventative measures by having their children cloned. Their clones live in a laboratory, but they feel and remember all the […]
And Poof! They Were Gone
Book Bub loves to sell dystopian fiction at a discount price and therefore, I read a lot of dystopian literature when I’m too lazy to go to the library and/or hack into my mom’s Kindle account (note: I’m not actually hacking, she gives me permission, but it feels cooler when I say the word hack). This book caught my attention though because Stephen King mentioned this series on twitter several times (and not in a “the publishing company gave me money for this blurb kind […]
Nolite te Bastardes Carborundorum
There are certain books that are always on our periphery. They live at the edges of our consciousness, going “Hey, read me sometime, will ya?” The ones we always think we should get around to, but there’s always something newer and edgier and shiny-er that’s grabbing our attention. For me, one of those books has always been The Handmaid’s Tale, which did dystopia before it was cool. The other night, I gave in and started a 30-day free trial of Kindle Unlimited, just to see if it […]
A dystopian novel that reads like an epic poem. Not sure that’s a compliment, in this case.
My first exposure to Chang-rae Lee was an essay, “Mute in an English-Only World,” found in my Composition reader at my PhD institution. I taught it my first year teaching and realized that it had been taught for the last ten years. I received a suspiciously large amount of papers on the essay, which made me realize there were way too many papers floating around about the essay. So I had to ban it. The essay was not my favorite, either. It was somewhat hard […]
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