"After World is an unflinching and relentlessly bleak tale of humanity's mass extinction, shot through with pathos and veined with seams of tragic tenderness and care. ...
Sen Anon â the story's semi-protagonist â is 18 years old when the world learns that every person alive has been sterilized and so the human race is living out its last years. ...
The news triggers a manic insistence that this is a good thing â long overdue, in fact â and the perfect opportunity to scan every person alive for eventual reincarnation as virtual humans in an Edenic cloud metaverse called Gaia. That way, people can continue to live their lives without the haunting knowledge that everything they do makes the planet worse for every other living thing, and each other. Here, finally, is the resolution to the paradox of humanity: our desire to do good, and our inevitable failure on that score.
And so the Earth is converted to a place of mass suicides, as people gurn and mug while boarding airplanes filled with explosives so they can go out in a literal blaze of glory. The food will run out soon, and the government makes sure everyone has a suicide pill for the day when the hunger grows too intense. Not everyone is lucky enough to get on one of the suicide flights, and, being eager to see themselves off before they harm the planet further, just hang themselves in the garage or jump off a roof. They are counted as heroes, but also nuisances, because disposing of the bodies is a lot of work.
But some people â young people â are given a mission to live on for as long as possible. These are the observer/recorders who are charged to spend the last days of the species closely watching the return of the natural world, the seeing off of humanity, and to write it all down in longhand in a succession of notebooks that are taken away by drones. This is part of the story humanity cooks up for itself about extinction being a noble choice, rather than a chaotic act born of desperation. ... After World is a book that goes hard. Pitiless, merciless and relentless, it takes you to the darkest depths of climate despair and reveals the indestructible beauty at our species' core."- (Cory Doctorow)
i'm actually surprised at how many i actually did read on this list.
i did not read: Treasure Island, Twilight, Iliad, Odyssey, Hitchikers Guide, LOTR, Harry Potter or Goosebumps. But, pretty much everything else i had to read for school or like Interview w/ a Vampire, Flowers in the Attic i just read on my own. i LOVED Great Expectations.
This cracks me up...and it's so true.
I did read the LOTR Trilogy when I was way younger....I couldn't put it down. I read Interview with a Vampire, because vampires. I read Lord of the Flies....I didn't read the Odyssey, but I watched O Brother Where Art Thou. Same thing....
i'm actually surprised at how many i actually did read on this list.
i did not read: Treasure Island, Twilight, Iliad, Odyssey, Hitchikers Guide, LOTR, Harry Potter or Goosebumps. But, pretty much everything else i had to read for school or like Interview w/ a Vampire, Flowers in the Attic i just read on my own. i LOVED Great Expectations.
This cracks me up...and it's so true.
I did read the LOTR Trilogy when I was way younger....I couldn't put it down. I read Interview with a Vampire, because vampires. I read Lord of the Flies....I didn't read the Odyssey, but I watched O Brother Where Art Thou. Same thing....
The Chapel Hill Public Library, and apparently many other libraries around the country, have different sorts of "Banned Book Week" observations and projects. This library has a contest to design a cover for a "famous" banned, challenged, or censored book - 5" x 7" on paper. Some people submit photos or scans of larger works but I did this, actual size, with inks and watercolors. Seven winners receive a monetary prize and the submissions are made into trading cards that they sell. The winners get a few sets of cards and a "poster" of their work as well. I'd done it years ago but they hadn't had it for the past few years. Anyhow, it was fortunate that I had been studying and drawing whales for the last several weeks because it turns out that "Moby-Dick" was banned in 1996 by a school and/or district in Lindale, TX, because it âconflicted with their community valuesâ.
I just checked this book out... not sure yet if it belongs on Awful Library Books or not...:
Yeah, there's some wild stuff on that site. Speaking of predictions, this one Apocalypse 2012: A Scientific Investigation Into Civilizationâs End - from 2007 - turned out to be a little off.
