Forget the Hollywood rehash of
The Amityville Horror. If you really want some scary heeby-jeebies, read Margaret Atwood's
Oryx and Crake.
More on Atwood below, but first...
So who else is getting their summer reading list ramped up?
Anyone even still getting the kind of summer lags that allow for reading lists?
Here's a few titles I have read recently or am working on currently, with my five cent review.
Please offer your own short recs and reviews. Call it our ad-hoc DKos Book Club.
Okay, we may never generate the kind of bookclub publicity that Oprah can (e.g., putting You, the Owners Manual on backorder across the nation's bookstores), but we can probably boost a few royalties for progressive--or at least open minded authors.
Recommended fiction
Margaret Atwood's
Oryx and Crake.
Read an excerpt
As in The Handmaid's Tale, Atwood takes a stab at dystopic prophecy, and the results are chilling and disturbing.
She foresees a future where genetic engineering, climate change, and class polarization run out of control in a culture dominated by a corporate police state: "CorpSeCorps--we stay alert, so you don't have to".
The narrative is delivered by the apparent sole human survivor of social and ecological armegeddon, "Snowman", pka Jimmy. In rewinding the tape of his life's memory, we are told how the world was gradually turned upside down.
You can't neatly fit Atwood's perspective into an ideological box; the novel may weigh against unchecked climate change and corporate oligarchy, but it also warns against unfettered technology and bioengineering "progress".
Atwood accomplishes the "we can but should we?" technological cautionary tale, as Michael Crichton has often attempted, but she does it with infinitely superior skill as a writer and thinker.
Above all, there is a palpable plausibility to Oryx and Crake that might well scare the crap out of you.
Recommended current affairs
I diaried on Marcia Angell's The Truth About Drug Companies back in February, so I won't go into detail, but it a must-read if you want to understand the politics and economics behind health care reform.
And our hero Paul Krugman cited Angell's book last week in his ongoing series on health care reform.
Recommended classic
In the category of books you shoulda read in school but bailed out instead with the Cliff's Notes:
George Orwell's Animal Farm.
My kid just completed a unit in middle school on Animal Farm, and I read it also to help her on it. I was struck by the amazing parallels between the decay of the animals' Rebellion into thinly veiled Stalinism, and our present day not-so-gradual decay of principled conservatism into opportunistic theocracy and corporatism.
As Napoleon (the bad pig) and his barnyard version of Scott McClellan, Squealer, effectively rewrite their animal subjects memory of events--Snowball wasn't a Hero First Class fighting against Farmer Jones, he was leading the human attack against us!--so too has BushCo rewritten our recent memory: We didn't go to war to prevent use of WMDs; we went to bring democracy to the Mideast!
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I've got a few more, but I'm still working on them and will review them in a future edition.
Now it's your turn. What's in your book bag?