This is a story set in a future where antibiotics are no longer effective due to overuse. People over the age of seventy are refused healthcare and end up in hospitals called waiting rooms.
Stuff about Books I've Read
I listened to this on Spotify. I started before he actually became Prime Minister, but just got around to finishing it now. On election night, I stayed up most of the night, going to bed as Labour hit the 326 total to become a majority and Jacob Rees-Mogg lost his seat.
This month’s pick for the Dystopian Novels Book Club. I’ve read it before, but so long ago that I’d forgotten most of the details. In it, a group of boys crash land on a deserted island and attempt to build a society with each person filling different roles. Throughout the course of the book, this all falls apart, descending into arguing, fighting, and eventually murder.
The eleventh book in the Discworld series. In this one, Death is removed from his duties and made mortal by the auditors for developing a personality. I think this is the first appearance of the auditors, literally faceless bureaucrats of the universe. This is also the story that introduces the Death of Rats, since living creatures start creating new mythological beings to replace the missing Death.
This month’s pick for the Dystopian Novels book club. It’s just been released on paperback after winning the 2023 Booker Prize. It tells the story of a family in the Republic of Ireland living through the rise of a totalitarian government.
I got my copy from Standard Ebooks, which is a site making excellent ebooks of public domain books. I’m finding them to be better than anything I’d find on the Kobo store other than Penguin Classics.
This was this months pick for the Dystopian Novels Book Club. It is a science fiction novel set in a future where women have been stripped of all rights in the US. Humans have gained contact with multiple alien species, and only a subset of linguist families called The Lines are able to communicate with them. There are a group of women who are creating their own language centred around the female perspective in the hope of freeing themselves.
This was this months pick for the Dystopian Novels Book Club. I really thought I had already read this, but if that’s the case it was long enough ago that I didn’t really remember the details.
This is the Dystopian Novels Book Club pick for this month. I remember thinking that the Netflix film was okay, but very overhyped. I enjoyed the book quite a lot more, but maybe I’m just able to accept it on it’s own terms more easily without the hype.
This was published in 1939, and is set in 1930s Berlin. I’m not sure how much this book is real events and how much is fiction. The main character is the author, although he is mostly just an observer of interesting characters. Each chapter is a different subject, or a diary entry of a different time.
This book was written in a rush and then hastily extended and edited during the disastrous Truss government. It shows in places, reading like a tabloid opinion column and lacking depth. It’s fair enough given how little time they had to write it I guess.
This is a return to the earlier style of books where the plot is only there to ferry you from one joke to the next. The dungeon dimensions don’t really serve much purpose other than to add some “boding” as Gaspode would call it. I guess also to be able to wrap it all up in the end so that Holy Wood doesn’t exist again.
Rory Stewart walks from Herat to Kabul in Afghanistan not long after the fall of the Taliban. He does the walk in the winter months, stopping off at the villages and towns along the way.
This month’s book club pick.
Absolutely amazing. I remembered this being my favourite for a long time when I was a kid, and I can see why. This is such a massive step up from the previous books in the series. Pyramids had something to say about tradition and dogma, this has something to say about human beings. The characters have significantly more depth to them, and the plot threads are followed in more detail and tie together brilliantly.