Top Ten Tuesday: Bookish Worlds I’d Never Want to Live In

 

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme created by The Broke and the Bookish and now hosted by Jana at That Artsy Reader Girl.

The rules are simple:

• Each Tuesday, Jana assigns a new topic. Create your own Top Ten list that fits that topic – putting your unique spin on it if you want.
• Everyone is welcome to join but please link back to The Artsy Reader Girl in your own Top Ten Tuesday post.
• Add your name to the Linky widget on that day’s post so that everyone can check out other bloggers’ lists.
• Or if you don’t have a blog, just post your answers as a comment.

This week’s topic is Bookish Worlds I’d Want To/Never Want To Live In.  There are certainly some fictional worlds created by authors that I’d never want to live in.   Click on the title to read my review of the book description on Goodreads.

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The Rain Never Came by Lachlan Walter – In a thirsty, drought-stricken Australia, some individuals resist forced evacuation by the government to less affected areas.

To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee – Tom Robinson, a black man, is accused of assaulting a white girl against a backdrop of racial tension.

Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens – In one of many story lines, financier Mr Merdle’s fraudulent activities bring about a banking collapse.

Stranger by David Bergen – The brutal reality of the dangers faced by desperate people trying to enter the United States illegally via a kind of modern day ‘underground railway’, which operates by virtue of bribes and officials who look the other way, but whose organisers have no regard for the safety of the people they transport.

Oliver Loving by Stefan Merrill Block –  One warm, West Texas November night, a shy boy named Oliver Loving joins his classmates at Bliss County Day School’s annual dance.  But as the music plays, a troubled young man sneaks in through the school’s back door. The dire choices this man makes that evening will tear the town of Bliss, Texas apart.

1984 by George Orwell – A vision of a totalitarian, bureaucratic world where the media and the distortion of the language is used to manipulate and control the population.

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury – In this imagined world, firemen start fires rather than put them out in a bid to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book.

House of Cards by David Dobbs – A journalist stumbles upon a web of intrigue and financial corruption at the very highest levels of government, risking everything in the process.

The Burning Chambers by Kate Mosse – A secret is handed down against the backdrop of a time when, for some, practising your religion is outlawed.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K Dick – A post-apocalyptic world in which electric animals are crafted so well they seem real and androids are so lifelike they themselves may not be aware they are androids.

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So, we have: countries suffering the effects of climate change; individuals being discriminated against because of their skin colour; a financial crisis brought about by the greed of bankers; borders patrolled to prevent people seeking a better life in another country; a massacre in a school; a surveillance society controlled by the spread of ‘fake news’; literature and the ideas it contains considered a dangerous commodity; scandal, intrigue and worse at the heart of government; persecution based on your religion; and the threat posed to humans by artificial intelligence.

Who’d want to live in worlds like that?  Good to know they’re only fictional.  Oh, wait a minute….