This Week in Books – 19-11-25

This Week in Books is a feature hosted by Lipsy at Lipsyy Lost and Found that allows bloggers to share:

• What they’ve recently finished reading
• What they are currently reading
• What they are planning to read next

A similar meme is run by Taking on a World of Words.

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I finally finished reading The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami. Please know that me taking a long time to read it (there was no post last week, as nothing had changed!) was not in any way the fault of the book, rather I was ill for a few days, and couldn’t read at all. I also snuck in Freezing Point by Anders Bodelsen, translated by Joan Tate, to keep the dystopian vibes going.

Sara is returning home from a conference abroad when agents from the Risk Assessment Administration pull her aside at the airport. Using data from her dreams, their algorithm has determined that she is at imminent risk of harming her husband. For his safety, she must be transferred to a retention centre, and kept under observation for twenty-one days.

But as Sara arrives to be monitored alongside other dangerous dreamers, she discovers that with every deviation from the facility’s strict and ever-shifting rules, their stays can be extended – and that getting home to her family is going to cost much more than just three weeks of good behaviour.

Then, one day, a new resident arrives, disrupting the order of the facility and leading Sara on a collision course with the very companies that have deprived her of her freedom.

The Dream Hotel is a gripping speculative mystery about the seductive dangers of the technologies that are supposed to make our lives easier. As terrifying as it is inventive, it explores how well we can ever truly know those around us – even with the most invasive surveillance systems in place.

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A lost dystopian classic, set in a future without death, introduced by Sophie Mackintosh, for fans of Jeff VanderMeer, Emily St. John Mandel, and Jacqueline Harpman’s I Who Have Never Known Men.

You don’t own yourself any longer. Society owns you.

Bruno, a young magazine editor, seems to live a charmed life, until he discovers a growth on his neck – the first sign of incurable cancer. But his doctor offers him a unique opportunity: Bruno can choose to be ‘frozen down’ until medical science has found a cure for his condition. He makes his decision, just after meeting and falling in love with an enigmatic ballet dancer.

Decades later, he wakes up to find himself cured, but the world is now a very different place. Freezing technology is now ubiquitous, the pleasures of life have been subtly drained and society has started to fracture. Bruno must decide what he really wants from his life and whether it’s worth the cost.

Fans of dystopian fiction will love this creepingly claustrophobic classic, which asks all the big questions about ageing, death, scientific progress and the meaning of life.

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I’m currently reading Lula Dean’s Little Library of Banned Books by Kirsten Miller.

From the author of The Change, comes a novel about book banning and those brave enough to stand up against this censorship.

IT’S TIME TO RISE UP

In Troy, Georgia, local woman Lula Dean has campaigned to cleanse the town’s reading habits. All the ‘disgusting’, ‘pornographic’ and downright ‘un-American’ books have been removed from public spaces. Now, the townspeople are only allowed to read ‘appropriate’ books from Lula’s personal lending library.

But a small group refuse to be told what they can and cannot read and, unbeknownst to Lula, her personal collection is slowly restocked with banned books: literary classics, gay romances, Black history, spell books, and more.

One by one, each person who borrows the books from Lula’s library find their lives changed in unexpected ways. And as they begin to reveal their new selves, it’s clear that a showdown is fast approaching – one that will change the town of Troy forever …

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My next read might be Death Takes Me by Cristina Rivera Garza, translated by Sarah Booker and Robin Myers.

A city is always a cemetery.

When a professor named Cristina stumbles upon the corpse of a man in a dark alley, she finds a stark warning on the brick wall beside the body, scrawled in coral nail polish: ‘Beware of me, my love / beware of the silent woman in the desert.’

After reporting the crime to the police, the professor becomes the main informant of the case, led by a detective with a newfound obsession with poetry and a long list of failures on her back. As the bodies of more men are found, the detective tries to decipher the meaning of the poems, and the stream of violence spreading throughout the city.

A dark and dazzling literary thriller that flips the traditional crime narrative on its head, Death Takes Me explores with masterful imagination the unstable terrains of gender and violence, death and desire.

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And that’s my week in books! What are you reading this week? Let me know in the comments! 😎