I’ve been trying to recapture the magic of Claire North’s second novel, Touch, for three books now. Harry August was like Diet Touch, The Sudden Appearance of Hope was a bit boring, and The End of the Day dragged so much I didn’t finish it. “Ah well,” I said to myself, “so Claire North is a one-hit wonder for me. SO BE IT.” And then just when I thought I’d gotten out, she lured me back in with 84K, a dystopian novel in experimental-but-not-too prose about a man who leaves his comfortable life behind in favor of burning down the…
Leave a CommentTag: dystopian fiction
This week, the Reading the End Bookcast has a very special announcement! But you’ll have to wait until the end of the episode to hear what it is. Meanwhile, we’re talking about dystopian fiction and finishing up the Forcening1 with Patrick Ness’s The Knife of Never Letting Go (sorry, Whiskey Jenny). You can listen to the podcast in the embedded player below or download the file directly to take with you on the go. Episode 57 What We’re Reading The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, Becky Chambers (also, I watched Ex Machina and it was creepy) Does Jesus…
1 CommentI stealth-borrowed The Age of Miracles from my friend the Enthusiast on a day when he wasn’t at work and I forgot my Nook at home. The subway ride with nothing to read was so unbearably boring I wanted to rip all of my hair out of my head just to have something to do. The Enthusiast has one and a half shelves full of readable books at his cubicle, but I didn’t want most of them. I almost borrowed Coetzee’s Disgrace, but luckily Lil Liv Tyler, who sits at the desk across from the Enthusiast, warned me that (spoilers,…
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Divergent, Veronica Roth
The beginning: There are five factions in Beatrice’s world, each of which values a particular quality above all other qualities; once you choose your faction as a teenager, it’s where you belong all the rest of your life. When Beatrice (Tris) takes the aptitude test that will indicate whether she best suits Abnegation (the faction in which she was raised), Dauntless, Amity, Erudite, and Candor, the results she receives are frightening. She’s Divergent, not controlled by the quality of any one factor, and this (her tester tells her) is a very unsafe thing for her to be. The end (spoilers…
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