Dystopian Novel:Little Brother by Cory Doctrow (2008--384 pages)

When he ditches school one Friday morning, 17-year-old Marcus is hoping to get a head start on the Harajuku Fun

Madness clue. But after a terrorist attack in San Francisco, he and his

friends are swept up in the extralegal world of the Department of Homeland

Security. After questioning that includes physical torture and psychological

stress, Marcus is released, a marked man in a much darker San Francisco: a city of constant surveillance and civil-liberty forfeiture. Encouraging hackers

from around the city, Marcus fights against the system while falling for one

hacker in particular. (Booklist)

THE INSPIRATION FOR BLADERUNNER. . . Grim and foreboding, even today it is a masterpiece ahead of its time.By 2021, the World War had killed millions, driving entire species into extinction and sending mankind off-planet. Those who remained coveted any living creature, and for people who couldn't afford one, companies built incredibly realistic simulacrae: horses, birds, cats, sheep. . . They even built humans.Emigrees to Mars received androids so sophisticated it was impossible to tell them from true men or women. Fearful of the havoc these artificial humans could wreak, the government banned them from Earth. But when androids didn't want to be identified, they just blended in. Rick Deckard was an officially sanctioned bounty hunter whose job was to find rogue androids, and to retire them. But cornered, androids tended to fight back, with deadly results."[Dick] sees all the sparkling and terrifying possibilities. . . that other authors shy away from."--Paul WilliamsRolling Stone

Dystopian Novel:Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Phillip K. Dick

(1968—256 pages)

Dystopian Novel: Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932—288 pages)

• "Community, Identity, Stability" is the motto of Aldous Huxley's utopian World State. Here everyone consumes daily grams of soma, to fight depression, babies are born in laboratories, and the most popular form of entertainment is a "Feelie," a movie that stimulates the senses of sight, hearing, and touch. Though there is no violence and everyone is provided for, Bernard Marx feels something is missing and senses his relationship with a young women has the potential to be much more than the confines of their existence allow. (Amazon)

Dystopian Novel: Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (2005—304 pages)• Kathy, Tommy, and Ruth were once

classmates at Hailsham, a private school in the English countryside. "You were brought into this world for a purpose," advised Miss Lucy, one of Hailsham's guardians, "and your futures, all of them, have been decided." The tightly knit trio experienced love, loss, and betrayal as they pondered their destinies... The novel is narrated by Kathy, now 31 and a "carer," who recalls how Hailsham students were "told and not told" about their precarious circumstances. (Why were their writings and paintings so important? And who was the mysterious Madame who carted their creations away?) (Booklist)

Dystopian Novel: The Adoration of Jenna Fox by Mary E. Pearson (2008—288 pages)

• Seventeen-year-old Jenna Fox awakens after more than a year in a coma to find herself in a life—and a body—that she doesn't quite recognize. Her parents tell her that she's been in an accident, but much of her past identity and current situation remain a mystery to her: Why has her family abruptly moved from Boston to California, leaving all of her personal belongings behind? Why does her grandmother react to her with such antipathy? Why have her parents instructed her to make sure not to tell anyone about the circumstances of their move? And why can Jenna recite whole passages of Thoreau's Walden, but remember next to nothing of her own past? As she watches family videos of her childhood, strange memories begin to surface, and she slowly realizes that a terrible secret is being kept from her. (School Library Journal)

Dystopian Novel:My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult (2004—432 pages)

• Anna is not sick, but she might as well be. By age thirteen, she has undergone countless surgeries, transfusions, and shots so that her older sister, Kate, can somehow fight the leukemia that has plagued her since childhood. The product of preimplantation genetic diagnosis, Anna was conceived as a bone marrow match for Kate -- a life and a role that she has never challenged...until now. Like most teenagers, Anna is beginning to question who she truly is. But unlike most teenagers, she has always been defined in terms of her sister -- and so Anna makes a decision that for most would be unthinkable, a decision that will tear her family apart and have perhaps fatal consequences for the sister she loves.

• (Amazon Summary)

Somewhat Dystopian Novel: Animal Farm by George Orwell (1945—130 pages)

Due to Brevity, it must be paired with The Girls of Slender Means• Power corrupts, but absolute power

corrupts absolutely-and this is vividly and eloquently proved in Orwell's short novel. "Animal Farm" is a simple fable of great symbolic value, and as Orwell himself explained: "it is the history of a revolution that went wrong". The novel can be seen as the historical analysis of the causes of the failure of communism, or as a mere fairy-tale; in any case it tells a good story that aims to prove that human nature and diversity prevent people from being equal and happy ,or at least equally happy. (Anna Hassappi)

(Post-War) Novel: The Girls of Slender Means by Muriel Spark (1963—176 pages)Due to length, must be read in conjunction with Animal Farm

• It is, as the title indicates, a story about a group of girls--no less concerned with love and money than those in Mary McCarthy's "group" and no less satirically presented, but with how different a slant! These girls were living in London in the spring of 1945, right after the European victory, in a four-story Edwardian mansion known as the May of Teck Club.

• This building--converted long ago from a private establishment to a home for "Ladies of Slender Means" below the age of 30 who had to live away from their families in order to "follow an Occupation"--was still serving its purpose. Now decayed and shaky, its tall shabby rooms and its long windows with their newly replaced panes had a certain grandeur. Although the girls sometimes damned it as a "hostel" in their darker moods, they really rather liked it and enjoyed showing their guests both the house and the garden behind where a wartime bomb had burst, and where another--according to an aging spinster who had been in the house at the time--lay unexploded. They liked the guests to be told about this other bomb. It was always good for a laugh. (Virgilia Peterson (NY Times))

War Novel:Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (1969—215 pages)

• Kurt Vonnegut's absurdist classic Slaughterhouse-Five introduces us to Billy Pilgrim, a man who becomes unstuck in time after he is abducted by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore. In a plot-scrambling display of virtuosity, we follow Pilgrim simultaneously through all phases of his life, concentrating on his (and Vonnegut's) shattering experience as an American prisoner of war who witnesses the firebombing of Dresden. (Amazon)

War Book:For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway (1940—480 Pages)

• In 1937 Ernest Hemingway traveled to Spain to cover the civil war there for the North American Newspaper Alliance. Three years later he completed the greatest novel to emerge from "the good fight," For Whom the Bell Tolls. The story of Robert Jordan, a young American in the International Brigades attached to an antifascist guerilla unit in the mountains of Spain, it tells of loyalty and courage, love and defeat, and the tragic death of an ideal. In his portrayal of Jordan's love for the beautiful Maria and his superb account of El Sordo's last stand, in his brilliant travesty of La Pasionaria and his unwillingness to believe in blind faith, Hemingway surpasses his achievement in The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms to create a work at once rare and beautiful, strong and brutal, compassionate, moving, and wise.

War Book: Sunrise over Fallujah by Walter Dean Myers (2008—320 pages)

• Robin's parents aspire for him to go to college, but following September 11, he feels compelled to join the Army instead. By early 2003, Robin has completed Basic Training and is deployed to Iraq where he becomes part of a Civil Affairs Unit charged with building the trust of the Iraqi people to minimize fighting. Civil Affairs soldiers are often put into deadly situations to test the waters, and Robin finds that the people in his unit, who nickname him "Birdy," are the only ones he can trust. Robin quickly learns that the situation in Iraq will not be resolved easily and that much of what is happening there will never make the news. Facing the horrors of war, Robin tries to remain hopeful and comforting in his letters to his family, never showing his fear or the danger he actually faces. (Stephanie Petruso)

War Book:If I Die in a Combat Zone by Tim O’Brien (1973--224 pages)

• Before writing his award-winning Going After Cacciato, Tim O'Brien gave us this searing, intensely personal account of his year as a foot soldier in Vietnam. The author takes us with him—to experience combat from behind an infantryman's rifle, to walk the minefields of My Lai, to crawl into the ghostly tunnels, and to explore the ambiguities of manhood and morality in a war gone terribly wrong. (Barnes and Noble Overview)

War Book: Dispatches by Michael Herr (1978—278 pages)

• Written on the front lines in Vietnam, Dispatches became an immediate classic of war reportage when it was published in 1977.

From its terrifying opening pages to its final eloquent words, Dispatches makes us see, in unforgettable and unflinching detail, the chaos and fervor of the war and the surreal insanity of life in that singular combat zone. Michael Herr’s unsparing, unorthodox retellings of the day-to-day events in Vietnam take on the force of poetry, rendering clarity from one of the most incomprehensible and nightmarish events of our time.

Dispatches is among the most blistering and compassionate accounts of war in our literature.