I kind of love crazy fictional dystopias. In fact, on my list of favorite books, you'd find The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood and Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. I started to think that it was just the dystopian aspect that I was digging, but then I read books like China Mieville's Perdido Street Station and Phillip K. Dick's Do Android's Dream of Electric Sheep? and I realized that no, it's not the weird possible future aspect that I was into: it's the fact that in these potential futures, a person's body becomes more political and less individual. In other words, your uterus, your organs, they are all existing as a factor of the greater good.

So, I think I'm going to be rocked out of my mind by Kit Reed's newest tome Thinner Than Thou, where religion has been replaced by a worship of thinness. It's won some awards and the reviews are looking pretty good. Check out the synopsis from Powell's:

The Dedicated Sisters are a religious order sworn to help anorexic, bulimic, and morbidly obese youth. Throughout the land, houses of worship have been replaced by the health clubs of the Crossed Triceps. And through hypnotically powerful evangelical infomercials, the Reverend Earl preaches the heaven of the Afterfat, where you will look like a Greek god and eat anything you want. Just sign over your life savings and come to Sylphania, the most luxurious weight-loss spa in the world, where the Reverend himself will personally supervise your attainment of physical perfection. But the glory of youth and thinness that America worships conceals a hidden world where teens train for the competitive eating circuit, where fat porn and obese strippers feed people's dark desires, and where an underground railroad of rebellious religions remember when people worshipped God instead of the Afterfat.

Ooooh, sounds like the perfect thing to stash on a carry on for the long flight to your summer vacation. I don't know about you, though, I'll probably not be reading this one on the beach. I don't know that I can deal with all of that thin versus fat while sprawled on a beach blanket in my bathing suit, no matter how compelling the imaginative future may be.