Read: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is set on Earth, which has been largely abandoned as people emigrated to Mars after the end of WWT or World War Terminus. The Synthetic Freedom Fighter, a weapon of the war, was modified to become the "mobile donkey engine of the colonization program", and each emigrant received one. These androids are so sophisticated that it is difficult, almost impossible to tell between them and human beings. They were banned from Earth but some of them still make it there, fleeing from slavery.

Rick Dekard makes his living hunting down these rogue androids. But how do you know an android from a human? Empathy.

"Empathy, evidently, existed only within the human community, whereas intelligence to some degree could be found throughout every phylum and order including the arachnida."

The book explores what it means to be human. I found it quite fascinating that ownership of animals was one way the humans emphasized empathy. But as animals are also a symbol of social status, they are very expensive. Dekard himself owns an electric sheep, that is, until he can afford a real animal. To distinguish androids from humans, bounty hunters pose them questions involving animals while measuring involuntary eye movement and blushing. But the sophisticated androids often prove this incredibly difficult. The situation of 'chickenhead' Isidore further confounds this issue. He's human but has had brain damage, and as a result wouldn't necessarily have the typical human responses to these questions.

Like plenty of science fiction, the book can initially be a bit difficult to get into. But sometimes that's the fun of reading science fiction - figuring out the pieces of the puzzle that you're thrown into, often head first. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep was my first Philip K. Dick book and it was quite an interesting read. I look forward to reading more of his works. Blade Runner is loosely based on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. I'm going to have to move that up my Netflix queue now.

This book is my third read for the Sci-Fi Challenge.
(Source: Library)

Click here to buy Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep from Amazon. I am an Amazon Associate.

Women Unbound Challenge

Eva from A Striped Armchair, Care from Care’s Online Book Club, and Aarti from Booklust are hosting this challenge dedicated to women.

The challenge runs from November 2009-November 2010 and participants are encouraged to read nonfiction and fiction books related to the rather broad idea of women’s studies. There are three levels that participants can target:

Philogynist: Read at least two books, including at least one non-fiction read
Bluestocking: Read at least five books, including at least two non-fiction reads
Suffragette: Read at least eight books, including at least three non-fiction reads

Initially I decided to go with the Bluestocking level and ran through my own TBR list for books that seem to fit. But after browsing some of the participants' blogs and checking out the books' availability in my library, I couldn't help adding more to my original list (and delaying my post in turn!) and realizing that I have plenty in my pool to go for the Suffragette level. Woohoo! Hopefully those on the list (especially the fiction picks) actually qualify for the challenge. In other words, my list is most likely to change.

My pool:
Fiction
The Female Man by Joanna Russ
Bastard out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison
The Scent of the Gods by Fiona Cheong
Then She Found Me by Elinor Lipman
Mary Reilly by Valerie Martin
Evelina by Frances Burney
The Painter from Shanghai by Jennifer Cody Epstein
Becoming Madame Mao by Anchee Min
Bone by Fae Myenne Ng (Vasilly's list)



Non-fiction
Polite Lies: On Being a Woman Caught Between Cultures by Kyoko Mori
Hope in a Jar: The Making of America's Beauty Culture by Katy Peiss
Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: The Frightening New Normalcy of Hating Your Body by Courtney E. Martin
The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women by Naomi Wolf
Hungry: A Mother and Daughter Fight Anorexia by Sheila and Lisa Himmel
Foreign Correspondence: A Pen Pal's Journey from Down Under to All Over by Geraldine Brooks (from Eva's list)
When Heaven and Earth Changed Places by Le Ly Hayslip (from Eva's list)
Lakota Woman by Mary Crow Dog (Vasilly's list)
Letter to My Daughter by Maya Angelous (Eva's list)

Added:

Kabul Beauty School: An American Woman Goes Behind the Veil by Deborah Rodriguez

Food and Loathing: A Life Measured Out in Calories by Betsy Lerner

Jane Goodall: The Woman Who Redefined Man by Dale Petersen

RIP IV Wrap-up

It was my first ever reading challenge so it will always be special! Plus it was such a fun way to read my way through my first fall here!


I ended up reading:
1. Affinity by Sarah Waters (completed 31 August 2009)
2. The Strain by Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan (completed 8 September 2009)
3. The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson (completed 11 September 2009)
4. The Collector of Hearts by Joyce Carol Oates (completed 17 September 2009)
5. Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman (completed 28 September 2009).

And actually a couple more I never did review (*guilty look*):

Ghost in Love by Jonathon Carroll
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Stories by Robert Louis Stevenson

Thanks Carl for hosting this fun challenge!

Read: Classics of the Macabre by Daphne du Maurier

Oh why oh why did it take me so long to read Daphne du Maurier? I only picked up Rebecca earlier this year. I think I always had this fear that it would be like my experience of reading Wuthering Heights when I was a teenager (it was a gift and I felt that I needed to read it. I didn't like it. Mostly because I wasn't quite ready to read it. I think I ought to go pick up Wuthering Heights again. I might be more ready now!). And for some reason I'd always associated Rebecca with that experience. But I took the plunge and Rebecca was such a gorgeous, completely absorbing book.

And then, somehow, it took me several more months to pick up another du Maurier! And this one was surprising. And good. And a bit creepy. But very entertaining.

Included in this collection are Don't Look Now, The Apple Tree, The Blue Lenses, The Birds, The Apple Tree, The Alibi and Not After Midnight. My favorites were The Birds and Don't Look Now. I have yet to watch the film version of The Birds, and now am quite curious to see how it was done because it was not what I expected (random attacks by birds) but more like an all-out, highly organised war. Don't Look Now is set in Venice and follows a couple who are grieving over the death of their young child. They meet two elderly women, one of them is psychic and has a warning from their dead daughter.

I also loved the silly awkwardness of The Blue Lenses, in which a woman emerges from an operation to restore her sight and begins to see people for who they truly are. I think that du Maurier's writing really shone in The Apple Tree, for she managed to bring the creepiness out of an apple tree. An apple tree, creepy? Really? That's du Maurier!

Go read this collection, or any of her other collections of short stories! I know I'll be heading for the 'D' shelf on my next library visit.

Click here to buy Daphne du Maurier's Classics of the Macabre from Amazon. I am an Amazon Associate.

Read: The Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler

It is the year 2024 and the world is a mess. Children don't go to an official school because they're not allowed to leave their walled community, which are more like prisons than homes. If they have to go outside, residents go in groups and with guns. Water costs more than gasoline, and when firefighters or the police have to be called in for an emergency, they have to be paid. There is poverty and lawlessness. It is a dangerous, frightening world.

Our narrator, the teenaged Lauren Olamina, the daughter of a minister, is a unique character. She is hyperempathetic: "I get a lot of grief that doesn't belong to me, and that isn't real. But it hurts". As a child, she would even bleed when she saw others bleeding. Not only that, she has found her god, the book of which she calls Earthseed, which she continues to write as the story progresses. She is an incredibly strong, resilient person, especially for someone that young. She studies up on survival strategies and plans to head north as soon as she is able. She doesn't understand how life can go on as normal - or at least what is normal to the community - for her family and neighbours.

Then one night, their community is attacked, their houses destroyed and their belongings looted, many of the residents are killed, the others have fled in all directions. Lauren manages to escape with her survival kit and comes across two of her neighbours and they join her in her northern quest on the dangerous highways.


The Parable of the Sower was a great read. It was well-paced, although initially slow going. Butler has created a very believable future which is the result of the collapse of civilisation. While it can be terrifying with all the dark and disturbing things happening around them - violence, slavery, hunger, poverty - Lauren and her growing group of followers show that there still is hope.

This is my first read for the Sci-fi Challenge.

Read: The Collector of Hearts by Joyce Carol Oates

The beauty of this collection of 27 short stories is in the everyday. And how terrifying the everyday can be. Oates, like Shirley Jackson (whose Haunting of Hill House was my previous RIP IV Challenge read), is very adept at leading the reader into the story,  and placing these subtle hints and whispers in our minds that we become such an active part of the story, that, at the end of it, we're not quite sure if we are the ones who are creating the horror...

Of course, with 27 stories, some read and forgetton. But the ones that did stick in my mind included The Sky Blue Ball, where the unnamed teenaged narrator throws around a ball with an unseen stranger across a high brick wall. Another creepy one was The Hand-puppet, where young and shy Tippi creates a rambunctious hand-puppet that more or less freaks out her mother. One of my favorite stories was Posthumous, one of the shortest of short stories. However, I feel that even to provide a synopsis would reveal too much! You can sorta guess what it's about from the title though. 

So if you're looking for something a little spooky, something that makes a nightmare out of the mundane, this is the book for you.


This is my fourth read for the RIP IV Challenge, which essentially completes the challenge. But I'm not done yet, as there are many other RIP IV-related books left on my TBR list.

Read: Hellboy Library Edition

Synopsis: This handsome collection of the first two Hellboy arcs is comparable in splendor to DC’s slipcased Absolute gatherings of Sandman and The Dark Knight. Arc one, Seed of Destruction (1994), is Hellboy’s origin story (but see Hellboy Junior, 2004, for his prehistory), revealing how Nazis were behind it all, though they were being used by that old Russki bogeyman, Rasputin. The somewhat longer Wake the Devil (1997) shows Hellboy putting the kibosh on the worse-than-Nazis scheme Rasputin got rolling in Seed. Scott Allie introductorily opines that Hellboy isn’t the red demon we know and love ’til Wake, but Mignola’s Ben Shahn–meets–the Austrian Secession–meets–Mervyn Peake style is uniformly magnificent. - Booklist

I was first introduced to Hellboy in the Guillermo Del Toro movie Hellboy and then with its sequel Hellboy II: The Golden Army, as I suspect many people were. The movies were quite a romp, fun and funny and full of great Hollywood special effects. It didn't quite prepare me for the dark world filled with mythological creatures that Hellboy creator Mike Mignola imagined for the comic series (however, the two animated films Hellboy - Blood and Iron and Hellboy: Sword of Storms did). In Seed of Destruction, the basis for the first Hellboy flick, Hellboy learns about his origins and his connection to Grigori Rasputin and the Nazis. In Wake The Devil, Hellboy meets the goddess Hecate.  And it made me realize just how R(eaders) I(mbibing) P(eril)  IV-friendly these comics are. For also included in the gorgeous (although a bit unwieldy) Hellboy Library Edition, Vol. 1: Seed of Destruction and Wake the Devil are Baba Yaga, a vampire, frog-men, harpies, rituals and resurrection (oh my!). And did I mention the homunculus? This is the stuff that nightmares are made of.

One thing that always does it for me when reading graphic novels, are the extras at the back of the book. In this case, pages from Mignola's sketchbook. These are a very welcome insight into the artist/writer's development of Hellboy aka Anung un Rama aka the World's Greatest Paranormal Investigator, and the other characters that feature in the series.

I'm joining the Sci-Fi Challenge!

I came across the Sci-Fi Challenge hosted by Stage and Canvas via Farm Lane Books and thought that sounds right up my alley as I've been trying to read more science fiction books this year.

Essentially it requires the reading of "3.14 or 8 books (or audio books) of the science-fiction genre" from August 28, 2009 to August 8, 2010. I will aim for 8!

Here's my pool:
The Children of Men - P.D. James
I, Robot - Isaac Asimov
Parable of the Sower - Octavia Butler
His Majesty's Dragon (Temeraire, Book 1)- Naomi Novik
Red Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson
Passage - Connie Willis
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?- Philip K. Dick
Childhood's End - Arthur C. Clarke
The Female Man - Joanna Russ
The Other End of Time - Frederik Pohl
The Illustrated Man - Ray Bradbury
The Telling - Ursula K Le Guin
Woman on the Edge of Time - Marge Piercy
Fledgling - Octavia Butler