One of the reading challenges I have taken on this year is Book Riot's "Read Harder Challenge." This involves reading one book from each of 24 categories during 2016. It's exposing me to types of books I would never normally pick up to read, many of which I'm really enjoying.

(Warning: minor spoilers ahead)

One of the categories is "Read a dystopian or post-apocalyptic novel." The first title that came to my mind was On the Beach by Neville Shute, which I recalled classmates reading and talking about when I was in high school. I believe a movie based on the book came out around that time, too. So I read that one for the challenge. Not surprisingly, as the novel was written in 1957, the source of the apocalypse is nuclear war, WWIII. It was a chilling and sobering book in spite of certain dated aspects -- fewer than one might imagine, actually.

Tonight I finished a recommendation from my son Paul, The Last Man by Mary Shelley. The novel was written in 1826, and the story begins in 2067. As was typical for that time, the book was written in three volumes, and would, I believe, have benefited from being quite a bit shorter. There are many pages of reflection on surroundings or detailing the emotions that a character is feeling that made me want to skip ahead to the point where the action continued.

Trying to look ahead 2-1/2 centuries into the future is ambitious, and there are quite a few charming anachronisms, such as the fact that the characters still fight with muskets and swords, and travel by horse and carriage. On the other hand, Shelley's England is one where there is increasing pressure to remove the monarchy, something that is timely now. Her agent of apocalypse is "the plague," also a timely choice. Of course today's busy international air travel would have made her scenario even more likely than she knew at the time of writing.

I read a marvelous biography of Mary Shelley and her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, earlier this year (Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley by Charlotte Gordon), which made me aware that Shelley wove several of her own personal tragedies into the story of "The Last Man". Undoubtedly this contributed to the powerful scenes of grief and mourning in the book.

I'm taking a break to read some cheerful books next...but I do have "Wool" and "Station Eleven" on my bookshelf, ready for the next time I want to look ahead to the apocalypse.