Top Ten Tuesday: All-Time Favorite Dystopian Books

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme hosting by The Broke and the Bookish. This week’s topic  choosing your top ten favorite books of all time. I have decided to keep it fairly broad, and will list my all-time favorite dystopian books. 

These are not in any particular order. That is asking too much!

1. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. I first discovered this gem in an undergrad women’s lit course, and it has been a firm favorite ever since.

 

2. 1984 by George Orwell. 1984 has come and gone, but this book has definite staying power.

 

3 & 4. Cress and Winter by Marissa Meyer – Cinder does not make my top ten dystopian novels, but later books in the series certainly do. I am still surprised at how these books have turned me into a fangirl.

5. The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood – I love everything she writes, and it is quite hard not to fill this list just with Atwood’s books! This is my favorite of the MaddAddam trilogy.

6, 7 & 8. The Hunger Games, Mockingjay, and Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins – These have to be included together. I loved all three of them!

9. Blindness by José Saramago – It is rare that a dystopian author ends up with a Nobel Prize for Literature. That is how I discovered this book, from a Nobel Prize reading challenge. It is incredible (and incredibly chilling)!

10. The Giver by Lois Lowry – I have read The Giver quite a few times over the years, and I always get something new out of it.

 

 

Book Review: Winter by Marissa Meyer

Winter by Marissa Meyer

This is the book that has turned me into a Lunar Chronicles fangirl. It was 800+ pages of awesome, a pure joy to read, and I continue to be impressed by Marissa Meyer’s ability to weave together so many fairy-tale based storylines and merge them together seamlessly, all while building her own unique world.

Princess Winter. “She was a girl made of ice and glass.” Winter refuses to use her Lunar gift, and therefore battles visions and hallucinations on a regular basis. A lot of readers don’t like her childishness, but I found it fit in perfectly with her character. I also don’t believe she is truly as childish as she comes across, a thought that is hinted at a few times during the course of the novel. Winter, living under the nose of Queen Levana, seems to be in survival mode for much of the novel.

I loved that all of the events of this book take place on Luna, so the reader is fully immersed in the Lunar world. It was delightful to read about. I may never look at the moon the same way again, without picturing the city domes and Artemisia.

Winter is heartbreaking, endearing, and the perfect conclusion to the series.

Rating: 4/5 stars