Chance congruence of relevant reads

I spent the last few days relaxing over in Maine (turns out southern Maine is at about the same latitude as upstate NY) at Jenn's parents' house. While there I had the luxury of doing a good amount of reading. For the occasion I had brought my copy of The Handmaid's Tale since it had been a while since I read it and I had put it at the top of my recommended pile for Jenn to read. It's a wonderful book that, to my mind, should be required reading for all responsible citizens. For those not familiar, this 1985 book portrays a chilling (and aptly relevant for our times) futuristic society where radical Christian zealots have taken over the country under the pretense of protecting citizens from Islamic terrorism. They have gradually installed a highly controlled patriarchal-religious-military society where, due to perceived declines in birthrates and massive clashes over abortion rights, have forced all non-believing or divorced women to be virtual procreation slaves; worshiped as vessels of divine birth and reviled as whores at the same time. If you think about it, this kind of nightmare isn't that far removed from some of the idealized societies that some real world Christian (and Islamic) fundamentalist organizations have been calling for.

Anyways, if you haven't yet, I do highly recommend this book. But finishing it earlier than anticipated into our Thanksgiving vacation, I had to make an emergency trip to a rural Maine bookstore for more reading. I was actually in the mood for some straight forward sci-fi, but sadly, the store we went to (a small one) didn't have anything that appealed so instead I bought a used copy of All Quiet on the Western Front, the classic anti-war tale (written in 1928) of a German soldier during World War I that I hadn't read since high school. Again, without consciously thinking about it I had stumbled across a book that I think is extremely timely and relevant to current events here in the U.S. I'm about half way through the book and it truly is a classic that brings the horrors of war and how war and violence twists and destroys the lives of soldiers in countless ways. Again, highly recommended.