DYSTOPIA #2 
The Drowned World by JG Ballard

Every time I read Ballard I am struck by how utterly brilliant, scarily accurate and chilling his writing is, whether speaking about our contemporary world or an imagined future.  In The Drowned World Ballard imagines a future where solar flares have destabilised the sun, burning off our ionosphere and causing the Earth's temperature to soar, melting the polar ice caps, flooding much of the land mass and returning life on the planet to Paleozoic conditions.  Under these conditions vegeation returns to tropical and swampy and reptiles and gigantic insects replace mammals as the dominant species.  Dr Kerans is part of a scientific expedition sent from mankind's last outpost in the Arctic to map the new geography of the flooded planet, a futile effort as the sun's temperature continues to increase and floods and storms change the shape of the land.  His narrative tells of the descent of the psyches of the expedition crew from their apex of evolution back down into their evoluationary past, reminding us as the best dystopias do of the flaws of our so-called civilization and the fragility of our dominance over the planet.

DYSTOPIA #1
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

AbeBooks regularly send me some excellent reading lists, and this is me getting stuck in about the first of them.  A nice short read to get me started.

Really enjoyed it, although first published in 1976 Fahrenheit 451, about a dystopia in which books are burned because of their status as contraband and in which television and mass media have taken over people's lives and their ability to think independently.  Still so relevant today

The Irish Male at Home and Abroad by Joseph O'Connor

With a great black sense of humour and deep sarcasm, O'Connor's observations for his column for the Irish Times on his experiences both at home and whilst travelling are side hurtingly hilarious.

No Shame No Fear by Ann Turnbull

A good introduction for teenagers to the subject of Quaker persecution in the 1600s under King Charles, but a little thin, although a nice Romeo and Juliet style story.

The Missing by Andrew O'Hagan

A meditation on the thousands and thousands of people who go missing in the UK every year, some deliberately, some due to harm coming to them but many simply falling between the cracks of society, taken away by dementia, drugs, unhappiness.  Deeply sad and moving.

Labyrinth by Kate Mosse

Mosse's great page turner opens in the French Pyrenees in July 2005 when Alice Turner, a volunteer at an archaeological dig, spots a belt buckle and on digging it out dislodges a large rock which falls away to reveal the entrance to a mysterious cave.  Inside are the skeletons of two people lying on a labyrinth and Alice's story becomes increasingly intertwined with that of Alais, an 11th century noblewoman caught up in the persecution of the Christian sect of Cathars by the Catholic Church.  A really good entertaining read 

Human Traces by Sebastian Faulks

I was tentative beginning this book because I so loved Engleby, the first book by Faulks I read, and was afraid I would be disappointed.  I wasn't.  In Human Traces Faulks traces the early history of psychiatry from the alienists of the late 1900s through to the end of the first world war, but does so through the lives of two extraordinary men, Englishman Thomas and Breton Jacques driven by personal history and their own youthful intelligence and fire to understand how the mind works and to solve and cure mental illness.  Towards the end I got a little confused with characters but this was more than made up for by Faulks bringing to life a time in history when the fields of psychology, psychiatry and neurology were in their infancy.  His research into different areas of study must have been intense: the sanotoriums in the Alps, fossilised human footprints in the Great Rift in Africa, fin de siecle Paris and London, fighting in the Italian Alps in World War One, Faulks brought all of these alive for me with heartbreaking force.

Relentless by Dean R. Koontz

A new Koontz book is always a joy to me, as his books have been my comfort and constant companion since I was a child, and although the moral undertones and endless capacity for optimism that good things will in time come to good people feels at times naive, I am a committed fan.

When Cubby Greenwich receives a scathing review of his book by the feared critic Shearman Waxx he is inclined to do as his beautiful loving wife and tiny Einstein son advise and let it go, but then curiosity gets the better of him and a chance encounter with the critic in the toilet of his local favourite restaurant swiftly turns into something more sinister. Gripping and uplifting.

At The Back of the North Wind by George MacDonald

A strange and at times quite lovely old tale of a little boy called Diamond, his father's horse, also called Diamond, and the boy's encounter with the North Wind who appears to him, usually in form of a beautiful large lady but who can shrink and grow and become more fearsome creatures.  A little heavy on the morals but it is a Victorian book

Pastworld by Ian Beck

A really entertaining read.  The year is 2050 and the world is a little bland, but for those with the money they can escape via airship to Pastworld, a futuristic theme park, a re-creation of Victorian London in all it's immensity, dirtiness and viciousness.  No electrical or electronic items are allowed, anything brought in by the visitors (Gawkers) has to be authentic.  In this world of gaslight, horse drawn cabs, poverty and noise lives Eve, a 15 year old girl who does not know that the stars above her head are a sky dome and that her guardian's reluctance to let her go outside is to protect her from the knowledge that her London is not real.  When Eve runs away from home a carnival of adventure and excitement is set in motion with a fabulous cast including a Jack-the-Ripper style villan with his band of dangerous raggedy men, carnival acrobats, bearded women and dwarves, pickpockets and spiritualist seances.

Yaxley's Cat by Robert Westall, The Kingdom by the Sea by Robert Westall, Before Wings by Beth Goobie & What I Was by Beth Rosoff

These four books are all children's ficition, the first two for slightly younger readers than the latter two.  It strikes me that for children's fiction to work the parentals have to be got rid of, Yaxley's Cat doesn't, for me, work because it is written not from the point of view of the two children who, frankly, come across as pretty awful, but from their mother's point of view. 

Having loved his Blitzcat I liked the look of the story in Yaxley's Cat, mother on holiday with two children exploring in Norfolk come across an abandoned cottage and get permission to live in it.  They are soon joined a cat that they find out belonged to the previous owner, Yaxley.  As they find out more about the mysterious Mr Yaxley, his unexplained disappearance years earlier and as they meet the people of the local village horror and the terrible truth begin to be revealed.

In The Kingdom by the Sea Westall draws on his childhood experiences during World War II.  Harry has just made the run down his garden from his house in Newcastle to the bomb shelter at the bottom of the garden when a bomb makes a direct hit on his house and, pulled from the wreckage of the shelter, he takes off, reluctant to live with his repugnant Aunt Elsie.  Grief stricken he draws on the common sense drilled into him by his Air Warden father and finds shelter under a boat on a beach and company in the figure of a lost dog that, without him, would be put down.  Like a pilgrim he moved steadily north along the Northumberland coastline to Holy Island, meeting a wonderful range of characters and having to leave as people begin asking questions about him or paying him unwanted attention, until after a disastorous trip to Lindisfarne where he finds himself cut off by the tide crossing the causeway he finally finds refuge with a man broken by the loss of his son in Malay at only age 18.  But the refuge is not permanent, and Westall's powers in this book are at their height, deliniating Harry's experiences exquisitely.

In Before Wings 15 year old Adrien's release from her parents is through them leaving her with her aunt Erin at summer camp, freed to discover the usual teenage book preoccupation of dawning love and challenging emotions, but with the added element that Adrien had a near fatal brain aneurysm two years earlier and ever since has been stuck between the worlds of the living and dead, able to see the dead and perilously close to joining them.  In Before Wings Adrien learns to live again rather than just waiting for the weakened blood vessels in her brain to give again, and observes and solves the mystery of the five girl ghosts haunting the summer camp and her aunt.  Well written.

Lastly, in What I Was the release come through being at boarding school and is the memories of a Hilary, a man in old age remembering events in 1962 when he met and fell in love with Finn, a boy his own age living alone in a tiny hut on an island near by his school.  The fact that it is clear that the man writing this memoir is recalling personal history with deep pain and regret adds to the aching tenderness of this powerful story and the sense that tragedy is sure to strike long before it does.

Someone Like You and Lock and Key by Sarah Dessen

After being really impressed by Dessen's Just Listen I thought I would give these two a go.  I was a little disappointed with the predictability of Someone Like You in which the main character, Halley, has to rise to the challenge of providing support for her best friend Scarlett after her boyfriend dies and she becomes pregnant, and has to handle her own relationships with her mother and own boyfriend, but everything was a little superficial and never achieved the depth of Someone Like You.  Lock and Key was a little better.  Ruby lives in near poverty with her itinerant mother, moving on from place to place until she is finally abandoned and pulled out of child services to live with her ultra rich estranged sister and her husband.  Dessen follows Ruby as she struggles to cope with her change in circumstances from borderline destitute attending one of the roughest schools in the county to the new world of very rich and attending the kind of school where kids are on the fast track to being the next generation of the country's rulers

The Solitaire Mystery by Jostein Gaarder

12 year old Hans Thomas is taken by his layman philosopher father on a road trip from their home in Norway over the Alps and down through Europe to search for Hans' errant mother in Greece and ask her to come home.  Lovely to read a book that actually asks you to thinks, both about an unfolding mystery within a book regarding a deck of playing cards, a magical lost land and the fantastically ridiculously named Rainbow Fizz, and about the nature of loss, love, and the importance of never losing your childlike curiosity and wonder at the world.

The Spell by Alan Hollinghurst

"Alex is an uptight 36-year-old Foreign Office man who suddenly falls for Danny, the 22- year-old son of his ex-lover's new lover (are you following this?) The infatuation with Danny is as much an infatuation with the ecstasy-fuelled nightlife to which Danny introduces him, and it's hardly a surprise when the relationship fizzles. But Alex is forced into confronting his desires and the novel ends leaving him unsure but at least taking stock and looking forward. The story veers wildly between an intoxicating London and a windswept, traditional Wessex, as if Hollinghurst can't yet reconcile true rural Englishness with the possibilities afforded by cosmopolitan queer London." - interesting, especially with regard to the passages about ecstasy, but ultimately a bit vapid

The Histories by Herodotus

Am extremely pround of myself for having finished this but what an effort, put me off reading for a good few weeks while I recovered