Play Book Tag discussion

The number of voters between neurodiversity and dystopian was actually quite close, but the people with lots of participation points didn't hold back when voting for their favorite, which was:

dystopian

Please share your reading plans and recommendations below!

Remember, for the regular monthly reads, the book can be shelved as dystopian on Goodreads, or be a book that is not yet shelved that way but you feel should be.

One way to find books to read for this tag is to please visit:

https://www.goodreads.com/shelf/show/...

I was torn but saw I had this book on my TBR so will give it a try Never Let Me Go

Just requested 1Q84 (Books 1 & 2) from the library! It's the only dystopia that fits with the rest of my challenges this year, but if I struggle with it I'll only review the first book.

I had a short list on my phone of possible dystopian novels. So I just ordered like three of them from the library. None of them really fit my challenges and aspirations, but queen of the cheerleading is one of the oldest books on my TBR. The other one that I think has promise is gather the daughters. But since I have other priorities in July that are going to come first, I might as well see what does and doesn’t come in at the library and make a choice after the 15th. After all, July is reserved for his Majesty’s Dragon, the hearts invisible furies, and beartown. The young queen will simply have to wait her turn. I’ve never not finished a challenge yet.

Just realized I’m actually gonna have to look at that darn list after all. Probably should try to see if there something I’ve read that Rachel might like. So I can maybe even make a suggestion for those of us who wouldn’t have been drawn towards dystopian fare.

I am #17 on the waiting list at the library for 6 copies of Red Clocks. Hope it comes through quickly for me. Waiting to see what everyone here recommends before determining a plan B.

As for my recommendation, well The Road is my favorite book that fits the tag closely followed by The Stand.

I do have Oryx and Crake out from the library now as the back up of all back up plans.

I hate dystopian so I may skip this month.

Jamie wrote: "I hate dystopian so I may skip this month."

Ha ha, well I hate magical realism, but found one that was pretty good. Maybe someone will recommend something here that will not seem so bad. Have you read any of the YA ones - - faster paced and more fantastical as opposed to realistic?

Robin wrote: "I was torn but saw I had this book on my TBR so will give it a try Never Let Me Go"

I really enjoyed this book when I read it, which has been something like 9 years ago now!

I will be joining Anita in reading Red Clocks, and I know that several other people expressed an interest in that book as well (Susie!).

If I get to a second book, then I may finally pick up Cinder. Linda has been reading the Lunar Chronicles and has rated them favorably and that is enough to convince me!

I am finishing up The Power this weekend (too early for the dystopian tag—drat!), but I recommend it for those of you looking for a good read and like newer books.

Jamie wrote: "I hate dystopian so I may skip this month."

For you, Jamie, (looked at your book shelf to get a better sense of what might work)

https://www.bustle.com/p/17-ya-dystop...

https://normahinkens.com/ya-dystopian...

Jamie wrote: "I hate dystopian so I may skip this month."

Hopefully you can find something that strikes your fancy! Maybe a "dystopian light" book.

I really enjoyed Ready Player One, which I would call less dystopian and a bit more sci-fi adventure. Maybe something like that?

Nicole R wrote: "I really enjoyed Ready Player One, which I would call less dystopian and a bit more sci-fi adventure. Maybe something like that? ."

Oops! Nevermind. I see that you read it and gave it 5 stars! So at least my recommendation was a good one! lol

What about Artemis? I think I saw it on your TBR list.

Anita wrote: "Jamie wrote: "I hate dystopian so I may skip this month."

For you, Jamie, (looked at your book shelf to get a better sense of what might work)...

Thanks for the links Anita - I never thought about graphic novels for this one, and there are so many good ones!

I really liked Y: The Last Man, Vol. 1: Unmanned and the whole series.

For me maybe Alan Moore - Watchmen or V for Vendetta. Two classics I've never gotten around to.

Or another installment of The Walking Dead, Vol. 1: Days Gone Bye

I've ordered Red Clocks at the library. In the meantime I'll read American War, which I've already picked up last week.

Books I recommend include:
Blindness
Shades of Grey
Bird Box
Station Eleven

I have a lot of books on my tbr list with this tag but most of them are currently checked out of my local library. It looks like I'll be reading Ink and Bone and possibly Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Sushicat wrote: "I've ordered Red Clocks at the library. In the meantime I'll read American War, which is I've already picked up last week."

Oooo....American War was very good as well!

Rachel N. wrote: "It looks like I'll be reading Ink and Bone and possibly Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?"

I love that Ink and Bone is part of The Great Library series! And, Androids is totally classic dystopian/sci-fi. I look forward to your review as it is one that I have always been interested in reading but have never gotten to.

Rachel N. wrote: "Books I recommend include:
Blindness
Shades of Grey
Bird Box
Station Eleven

I have a lot of books on my tbr list with this tag but mo..."

I loved Station Eleven

I didnt know Bird Box was dystopian! Feel like I may own that one . . .hmmmmm.

I scanned the first 10 pages of the dystopian tag and I have soooo many on my shelf...

Some recommendations:
On the Beach by Nevil Shute
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
1Q84 by Haruki Murakami
The Windup Girl and The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi
Annihilation and the sequels by Jeff Vandermeer

Some others that I want to get to soon:
An Ember in the Ashes
The Fifth Season
Golden Son (since I really liked Red Rising)
Perdido Street Station
The Dispossessed
The Dog Stars

If anybody cares, dystopian and post-apocalyptic are not the same thing. Station Eleven is more the latter. But it's an excellent book and I recommend it. :)

I'll be re-reading China Mountain Zhang. The first time I read it I was too busy with distractions, but I liked it, so this read will be more 'for real' for me.

If I have to DNF it (if it's not as worth reading as I remember), or if it doesn't qualify, I'm not sure what I can read. I do not like this genre, this exploration of how ugly & nasty people and societies can become.

Otoh, if we're going to go ahead and say that post-apoc. does count, I've several of those, those books about people rebuilding towards a better future. (Well, ok, not all P-A books are about rebuilding, consider Mad Max and A Boy and His Dog... I'll definitely be skipping those!)

Cheryl wrote: "If anybody cares, dystopian and post-apocalyptic are not the same thing. Station Eleven is more the latter. But it's an excellent book and I recommend it. :)

I'll be re-reading [bo..."

Hmmm - looks like I did not consider too much the boundaries of the genre when I scanned the list...

Per Oxford Dictionary:
An imagined state or society in which there is great suffering or injustice, typically one that is totalitarian or post-apocalyptic.

I second a lot of the above- it seems some of my favorites fit this genre- not sure what that says about me!

I’d like to add the classics: 1984, Fahrenheit 451, and Brave New World.
I’m hoping to finally get to It Can't Happen Here.

Well, the shelf has a lot of books on it, so there's still a lot of choice.
Anita, do I understand correctly that we readers get to decide how strict/ inclusive to be? If it's on the shelf erroneously, you'll still accept it?

It's just frustrating *for me* that the shelves are crowd-sourced and the 'crowd' was never informed that their tags would be used to define genres. We lose interesting distinctions when we shrug & accept imprecision.

But hey, I got away with Wrinkle in Time for Magical Realism, so I can't complain too much!

We encourage members to read books that fit the tag. The book can appear on the shelf, or it doesn't need to be there. We allow each member to decide for themselves how strict they want to be in terms of interpreting what books truly fit the tag. Some of us like to hew closely to the definition in order to stretch our reading horizons while others just care about reading a good book.

We occasionally host competitive activities and when we do we let people know exactly what criteria we will use to evaluate the books.

But for the monthly reads we are very relaxed . . .

I will say that personally I do wish the lists were edited as opposed to crowd sourced, but in my mind I try to look for books where at least 15 or so people tagged a given book with the tag in question . . .not 2 people.

Ah ha ha ha ha ha... you know me well enough to know, I won't participate!

Although, I ♥ magical realism, and I did read some, I didn't post them there, as they were kind of dumb & bordered on fantasy...

I was hoping that Sarah Addison Allen would have had something new...

I am not a great fan of dystopian .... but THANK YOU, Anita for mentioning Cormac McCarthy's The Road. I even have a little notation on my TBR next to that book that YOU recommended it (back when we were on Shelfari).

I second some of the previous suggestions
Fahrenheit 451
1984
Shades of Grey
The Stand

The last time we had this as our monthly tag (July 2010), I read Barrie's Peter Pan
Snippet from my review:
It’s really very dark; conditions are bad in Neverland – frequently no food, everyone sleeping in one bed, their clothes in tatters. And they are subject to terror – pirates and redskins, not to mention mermaids and the beasts of the forest.

Anita wrote: "I didnt know Bird Box was dystopian! Feel like I may own that one . . .hmmmmm."

Over 200 people tagged it dystopian and having just read a bunch of definitions of dystopian I'd say it fits. Red Clocks was sitting on the new book shelf at my library so I picked it up for this tag since it looks like a bunch of people are reading it next month.

Rachel, Thank you! I am excited because I do own it. Seems like a great back up to Red Clocks if I can't get that one from the library.

Does anyone think The Shadow over Innsmouth by H P Lovecraft might be dystopia? I've just bought that as someone recommended it and I've never read any Lovecraft.

Peter Pan as dystopia! That's great!

I've read so much in the subgenre that I don't have an obvious target for my reading. Likely works of P.K. Dick yet unread. He above all captures that paranoid feeling of living under the prying eyes and insidious controls of a twisted society.

I was happy to take stock of dystopian novels that have given me much pleasure. I throw out a lot that shined for me as a kind of smorgasbord of choices. They fall into the classic type and smaller categories with various more recent slants.

There are a lot that people can obviously consider for reading that have a huge readership (and likely already read):
1984, Fahrenheit 451, The Road, Cloud Atlas, The Hunger Games, Ready Player One, Red Rising, The Game of Thrones

I recommend these below that are of the classical form, where a dystopian society of the future is projected as the outcome of a rampant escalation of power over the individual, ranging among economic, religious, biological, social, political, and/or military controls:

A Clockwork Orange—Anthony Burgess
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress—Robert Heinlein
The Futurological Congress—Stanislaw Lem
The Windup Girl—Paolo Bacigalupi
The Dervish House—Ian McDonald
The Crying Lot of 49--Thomas Pynchon
Never Let Me Go—Kazuo Ishiguro

With cyberpunk we usually get a world that is dystopian, but we get to dwell with folks who are trying to fight back in cool tech-savvy ways, frequently with either a noir flavor or a devil-may-care outlook:
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep—P.K. Dick
Snow Crash—Neal Stephenson
Altered Carbon—Richard Morgan
The Peripheral—William Gibson

When society is rebooting after an apocalypse, the same old power grabs can play out to dystopian proportions:
Blindness--Jose Saramago
Oryx and Crake—Margaret Atwood
Dies the Fire—S.M. Stirling
Julian Comstock—Charles Wilson

Then one can consider choosing a dystopian tale involving an alternate history or a parallel universe of some kind:
The Man in the High Castle—P.K. Dick
The City and the City—China Mieville
Dark Matter—Blake Crouch
Chronic City—Jonathan Lethem

Cheryl wrote: "Peter Pan as dystopia! That's great!"

One that was amazing that I already read is called Everland dont remember who it's by but it had my attention the whole way LOVED ITTT

does anyone have 5 dystopian book recommendations that you find really good?

I read Children of Eden by joey graceffa I know it's going to annoy alot of people when I say I didn't enjoy it but I didn't so... anyone hoping to read it go into that be warned

I don't much care for this tag, but that feels fair considering this month's was my favorite genre. Still, once I got to looking, I have at least three or four in mind that I could stand. Etherwalker would have worked for either neurodiversity or dystopia, so I might still go with it. Then there's The Gigantic Beard That Was Evil, a surreal graphic novel that's been on my tbr for a while. I think I've already read The Lathe of Heaven, but that was a long time ago and it's one of those books that you look back on and wonder if you dreamed it (ironic in this case). And I could always use this as a chance to read The Boy on the Bridge.

I will put in a plug for Archivist Wasp because I read it last year and quite liked it, and I think it's self published or at least from a small press. Weird, but not too weird, and not depressing, rare in this genre.

I'm just glad Christmas didn't win. ;)

I'll probably read Cloud Atlas unless I see another suggestion here I like better. As for recommendations the main dystopian I've read has been YA such as The Hunger Games, Divergent, Matched and Uglies.

I have a lot of books with this tag on my shelf. I am excited because I should be able to knock a lot off the TBR in July.

Recommendations:
More Than This
The City & the City
For Darkness Shows the Stars (retelling of Austen's Persuasion, may be good for those who are not fans of the genre)
Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in Letters

Some that I am considering:
Autonomous
An Excess Male
Infomocracy
The Last One
Cards of Grief
Borne
Company Town
Moxyland
The Stand

I didn't realize Game of Thrones would be considered dystopian. I'm on the second book now.

YES! I'll be reading The Road since I bought it last month!

Whew! Not Christmas. I had two books I could think of to read for that tag...

This was my second place choice. I might get around to Red Rising. Pretty sure there were a couple more on my to-read list too.

I've read so many dystopian books and not shelved them as such (hardly any, actually) that I don't know where to begin since I have many that would suit different types of readers and probably won't think of them.

What I am already going to read are:

Obsidio is shelved dystopian over 60 times and my son and I are reading/listening to the series, so that's one for sure, and there's at least one other book I'll be reading that's dystopian and Reaper.

However, I might finally read We. I've read 29/50 on the first page, so you could say I read dystopian, but it goes in surges often. I have been reading it since I was in high school. I don't recall the first one I read, but I read Ayn Rand's dystopian novel when I was about 20. Anthem.

There are many I could recommend, but for Ayn Rand fans, I suggest Anthem, not that it is my favourite, necessarily. As for the Oroyx and Crake trilogy, I actually liked the second one, but not being a Margaret Atwod fan (I was reading it for a personal dystopian challenge one year), I didn't like the first and couldn't stand the third so discarded the third one.

For Paulette Jiles fans I suggest Lighthouse Island

ANITA I suggest, given that you really liked the two Ayn Rand novels you have on your read shelf, that you try her Anthem.

Many of you will no doubt read the newer y/a ones, but there are so many good ones that are older I don't know where to begin, as I mentioned.

I like dystopia, even though I didn't vote for it.

Recent recommended reads include:
The Wolves of Winter
All the Little Children
The End of the World Running Club
Exit West

and one I read but didn't love but it might be somebody else's cup of tea: Census

Not sure what I will read as I have several on my TBR, but I might read:
The Book of M

Amy wrote: "but queen of the cheerleading is one of the oldest books on my TBR. .."

I love being able to finally get to the oldest books on my tbr and crossing them off when I'm done!

I'm surprised no one has mentioned The Handmaid's Tale yet, since Series 2 has just been on tv recently in the UK!

There's also Brave New World if you want classic dystopia!

For recommendations, I have 4 books on my favourites (they've probably all be recommended already!) that I have tagged "dystopia"

- Ready Player One / Ernest Cline
- The Hunger Games / Suzanne Collins
- Divergent / Veronica Roth (though the rest of the trilogy isn't nearly as good!)
- Unwind / Neal Shusterman (especially if you can get your hands on the audio!)

Sushicat wrote: "I really liked Y: The Last Man, Vol. 1: Unmanned and the whole series...."

Oh, I agree on this one!

Some options for me include:

- Crossed / Ally Condie
- Ink and Bone / Rachel Caine
- Wool / Hugh Howey
- Pills and Starships / Lydia Millet
- The Road / Cormac McCarthy
- Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands / Chris Bohjalian