Dune

As I started reading this book, literally one of my first thoughts was Why has no one ever recommended this book to me? I was sucked in from the first chapter. I had been afraid that I wouldn’t be able to finish the 800+ page novel in the course of a month but found instead that I couldn’t put it down.

I’ll be the first to tell you that I’m not usually a science fiction fan. I don’t enjoy books full of futuristic battle scenes, evil alien overlords, or intergalactic romance with badly written female characters. I do, however, enjoy engaging action, multi-faced characters, and the dynamics of relationships, all of which Frank Herbert’s Dune has. I’m a firm believer that excellent literature can come in any genre, and this book was a great example. It touched on a variety of topics, including politics, addiction, loyalty, environmentalism, religion, racism, gluttony, marginalization, self-fulfilling prophecies, parental love, nepotism, and the idea of the common good, just to name a few.

I kept having to remind myself that this book was written almost fifty years ago. The technologies described seemed so believable that the suspension of disbelief usually needed for stories set on other planets in the distant future was hardly needed. The characters felt contemporary and the issues – such as mining for spice resources and the extreme water shortage  - caricatures of our own current problems. I also have to give credit to authors who can weave such intricate stories and back stories as to need to include appendices and glossaries in the back of their own novel.

I really enjoyed the shifts in the point of view, giving insight into many of the different characters in the story. It was fascinating to watch the protagonist, Paul, evolve from a sheltered teenager from a royal household to a highly-revered messianic leader of a rebellion, and to follow his mother, Jessica, as she struggles between understanding the grandiose destinies of her family and fostering maternal feelings and instincts.

Despite my apprehensions about reading a brick-sized scifi novel, I really enjoyed this book and highly recommend it. Even if you don’t usually read science fiction.

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea

I finished this book ages ago, and have read multiple things since then, so this is going to be another abbreviated blog post.

I added this book to my 2012 reading list for a couple of reasons: 1, it’s a classic I had never read, and 2, I was fascinated by the character of Captain Nemo in the film version of the graphic novel The League of Extraordinary Gentleman. In the movie, fictional characters including Tom Sawyer, Dorian Gray, and Dr.Jekyll/Mr. Hyde go on adventures together aboard the Nautilus with Nemo himself, and the portrayal of both the man and the boat were intriguing. It’s modern technology designed in the Victorian era, a veritable steam-punk visual interpretation.

So upon reading the book, I expected maritime adventures, which I got plenty of. There were plenty of descriptions of deep sea aquatic life, beautiful scenery and of course, the lost city of Atlantis. The basic plot of the book is this: Boats traveling the ocean have been reporting a massive animal, possibly a whale or a narwhal, menacingly lurking in the waters. An academic, his butler, and a whaler board a boat to help track it, and after a confrontation with the creature they discover that it is not an animal but a submarine, controlled by the Captain Nemo, who takes them on as prisoners. When he learns that the one man is an academic, he treats him nearly as an equal, but explains that the men will never be able to leave the ship as no one can know that he (Nemo) is alive and controlling the machine.  The three men stay on board for a while – enough to travel the length of twenty thousand leagues while under the sea – but eventually escape, after Nemo attacks a boat from his homeland, killing all on board, in retaliation for something done to his family.

In the end, I had lots of questions. What happened to Nemo and his family that caused him to exile himself to the bottom of the seas, and kill innocent people as retribution? What happens to the Nautilus and its crew after they hit the maelstrom? Does the narrator tell the world about Nemo, or do the men keep his secret? I wanted to know a lot more about Nemo – who he was, why he did the things he did – but Jules Verne left this pretty ambiguous, which frustrated me. I did, however, like reading about the technologies that Verne imagined in the 1870s such as breathing apparatuses, energy production, and undersea tracking. I wish the book had explored the character of Nemo more and described the undersea landscape less.

A Room with a View

I know I’ve been neglecting this blog a little lately – okay, more than a little, it’s been over two months since I last posted, which is not at all like me. I’ve been really busy, I promise! Since I last updated with my review of The Help, I was hired full-time at my office (yay!) and finally made the move to Columbus (double yay!!). Unfortunately I totally missed finishing a book in the month of July. At one point I thought I would be able to make it in the last few days of the month, only to realize that I had got September’s book instead. Sigh.

So now that I’m in my own place, and have a lot more free time on my hands, I was able to get and read July’s book, A Room with a View by E. M. Forester. The novel is about a young woman and her chaperone traveling in Italy sometime before the First World War, with a major theme being the societal roles of women at the turn of the last century. The young female lead, Lucy, is quite an independent young woman, especially for her time period. She wants to learn and have adventures but all of those things are considered “unladylike” and instead she is expected to do a little traveling, meet a nice young man, settle down and get married. While she is in Italy with her older cousin Charlotte they stay at a pension (a term I learned while reading The World According to Garp) and meet the eccentric novelist Eleanor, two kind elderly sisters traveling the world, a kindhearted and funny but socially improper gentleman, and his young son, George, who, if he lived today, would be exactly like Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s character in (500) Days of Summer: a sad, creative hipster hoping to meet a Manic Pixie Dream Girl.

While Lucy doesn’t quite fit the mold of the uber-bubbly and quirky as the stock Manic Pixie Dream Girl, she is a kind and thoughtful young woman that everyone seems to be drawn to. She has two men in her life: the successful and traditional but boring and condescending Cecil, and the odd and progressive but exciting and romantic George. The two men represent the conflicting parts of her life: the conventional lady that her elders expect her to be, and the unconventional woman that she wants to be. Should she follow societal norms and become the perfect hostess and housewife, or follow her own heart and strike out on her own, getting a flat in London and seeing the world her own way?

What I loved about Lucy is that despite being innocent and naïve to a point, she also knows that she is, and longs to discover things for herself. She is constantly frustrated and people telling her what she can do and what she can’t and how she should feel and what she should want. In an important scene where she (Spoiler Alert!) breaks her engagement with Cecil, she tells him,

“I won’t be protected. I will choose for myself what is ladylike and right. To shield me is an insult. Can’t I be trusted to face the truth but I must get it second-hand through you?”

In a wonderful moment for ladies everywhere, she chooses to think for herself instead of succumbing to those who try to control her life. Good for you, Lucy! She may not know exactly what she wants for her life, but she knows what she doesn’t. In the end, it’s almost as if she were the emotional, brooding creative type (she plays the piano exquisitely) who needed a Manic Pixie Dream Guy like George Emerson, who runs around in his shorts after playing in mud puddles and kisses her amongst the violets without asking her first, to show her what life is really like.

I really enjoyed this novel, and could tell it was written at the cusp of the flapper era, where women like Lucy often did the unconventional. It reminded me of a mix between Pride and Prejudice and The Importance of Being Earnest, with a little bit of modern British romantic comedies stirred in for good measure.

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A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

This was a lovely book that I am so glad to have read. Set just before World War I, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith is the coming-of-age story of a little girl named Francie growing up in New York. We meet her as a child, get flashbacks to her parents lives to learn the circumstances into which she was born, and follow her through her early teens as she experiences school and work and life. In my version there is a forward by Anna Quindlen, who explains that the plot of the book is hard to pin down, but the best way to describe it is as a book about "what it means to be human." I would agree, this novel is not just about a little girl growing up in a sad family in a poor neighborhood, but it's about relationships with your parents, learning about love, doing your best, making the most out of life, and all those little lessons that life teaches you without you really realizing it.

Francie is a wonderful character. She reminds me a little bit of Scout Finch in her intelligence and tenacity. She's not as much of a tomboy as Scout was, but she has that same understanding of the world - that doing what's right is important. She didn't understand when people treated others unjustly, just like Scout. They both have this quality that makes them simultaneously innocent and mature beyond their years, and I suspect that this is part of what has made both of them such beloved characters.

I could see myself a lot in Francie - she was a shy and quiet little girl, who loved reading and spent much of her time at the library. She vowed to read every single book they had and later wanted to become an author, writing stories and compositions in school. Her proudest moment was getting published in her school's magazine, and I could resonate with her excitement as she saw her name in print for the first time. She was also the kind of girl who was often lonely, especially in a crowded room of people, but was independent and didn't mind spending time by herself.

It was interesting to read this right after The World According to Garp. Both books follow the lives of a young character who wants to become a writer, discussing their lives and their families and their thoughts. Both of them have plots that are hard to pin down and both are set in a specific time and place in American history, both on the outskirts of a war. And yet the two are told so differently! I think I've decided that part of the reason I didn't like Garp was that I couldn't find any meaning behind it. People tried to do things that made them happy, but for what? Most of them ended up unhappy, having lived a ridiculous and bizarre life. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, on the other hand, featured people struggling through unhappiness in a routine and mundane life, and ending up happy. Where the characters of Garp seemed to spiral out of control into weirder and weirder individuals, the characters of Brooklyn gathered themselves and stood proudly, becoming better than they were at the start. Even if it didn't have an outright moral, Smith's book gave live meaning - even boring, everyday life. I would recommend it in a heartbeat and am sure I will read it again.

The Bell Jar

This month's selection, The Bell Jar, was included on the 2012 reading list for a few different reasons: first, it is considered a classic, as in a no English major worth their salt has never read Sylvia Plath kind of classic; and second, it is important to me to read classic novels written by women. I choose my reading list after carefully scouring best-seller lists, lists of American classics, and recommendations from other readers. It seems that, overwhelmingly, the books commonly considered to be classics - both traditional and modern - are written by men. Out of TIME Magazine's list of the top 100 novels, only 15 had female authors. That's less than a quarter, which seems low to me, as women have been publishing novels since the mid 1800s or earlier.

Last year somehow turned out to be the year of distopian novels, and it seems that this year might be the year of characters with psychological disorders - two out of the three books I've read this year have been set in a mental hospital. It was actually very interesting to see how the hospital Esther stayed at compared to the hospital in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, which was published only a year before, in 1962. In Cuckoo's Nest the hospital was much like a prison, where in Bell Jar it was more like a dormitory. Chief and McMurphy had horrible experiences with the shock treatments, while Esther's went pretty smoothly. And no surprise, considering the contrast in treatments - the men got worse, while Esther got better.

This book is a fascinating insight into the life of a young woman in the 60s. She felt monumentally alone, being distanced emotionally from her family and somewhat outcast among her peers. Her stream of dates and writing scholarship to New York made her seem happy, but deep down she never was, and didn't know how to deal with it. Her journey into insanity was very subtle - I didn't realize how odd she was acting until she threw all of her clothes out of the window and into the wind. Esther's downfall escalated from there, eventually finding her holed up in a dark part of the basement after swallowing a bottle of pills.



I was struck by how much this novel reminded me of the movie Girl, Interrupted - until I found out that it is based off of the memoir of a woman who spent time in a psychiatric hospital during the 60s when she was young. It's no wonder that when I was reading I kept imagining the hospital in the film. The girl she knew in the hospital, Joan, reminded me a lot of Brittany Murphy's character Daisy, who also seemed well adjusted but came to the same tragic end.

This novel was beautifully written, which gave it an almost haunting quality, as it is essentially about a young girl's life. Below is one of my favorite passages, written about the weather:

"When we came out of the sunnily lit interior of the Ladies' Day offices, the streets were gray and fuming with rain. It wasn't the nice kind of rain that rinses you clean, but the sort of rain I imagine they must have in Brazil. It flew strait down from the sky in drops the size of coffee saucers and hit the hot sidewalk with a hiss that sent clouds of steam writhing up from the gleaming, dark concrete." - pg. 41

How delicious is that writing? This is why it is important to read books like The Bell Jar. New books focused on plot just don't have the same quality.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Even if you haven’t seen it, you know about the movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest from 1975. You know it stars Jack Nicholson as a sane person in a 1960s asylum. You know calling someone “Nurse Ratched” means they are a terrible person. And you know her ward is not the kind of place you want to spend an extended period of time.

And if you’re like me, you haven’t seen the movie, and that really is all you know about the story. I knew this would be a controversial book but as is my policy with the books on my reading list, I had no idea what else the book was about. I like it best that way so I can read the book with an open mind and free of misconceptions.

I expected this book to be harsh. I expected a messed-up group of people trying to make it in a messed-up world. I didn’t expect psychological torture, lobotomies, and men treated like children so long they started acting like them.

In a nutshell, Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is about a man who for unknown reasons has been living in an Oregon insane asylum, and feels obliged to share about a man named McMurphy who came to the ward to get out of work  and ruined his life in the process. He even says at the beginning of the book, before he starts his tale, that “you think this is too horrible to have really happened, this is to awful to be the truth…but it’s the truth even if it didn’t happen.” Which brings me to what ran through my mind for the majority of the book: Can I trust this guy? He’s been committed for years, is he a reliable narrator or do I take what he says with a grain of salt? We learn that he’s been pretending to be deaf and mute for years and this invisibility has caused people to say things in front of him they wouldn’t otherwise. This gives him a little more credibility – he knows much more than he’s letting on – but he’s also convinced that there are mechanical listening devices in the walls, so there’s that.

The main character is not the narrator but McMurphy, played by Nicholson in the movie. He comes to the ward sane – with a complicated past, like a lot of men, but still sane. He’s an outgoing and rebellious man who tries to give the sheltered men he’s living with a taste of dignity and life on the outside. Nurse Ratched doesn’t like him meddling with the emasculation of the men on her floor and makes it her personal vendetta to bring McMurphy into submission as well.When punishment doesn't work she turns to psychological assault, which works on most of her men. When that doesn't work she sends him for electrical shot treatments - and when he refuses to succomb to her after that she forces him to be lobotomized. By the end of the novel he has completely transformed from a rambunctious man's-man to a sad vegetable of a human being. The narrator's introduction was correct: it does seem to awful to be true. 

According to IMDb, the tagline of the film when it came out was "If he's crazy, what does that make you?" - which is a really good question. McMurphy wasn't crazy, but was nearly forced into madness just for being insubordinate. This novel is a disturbingly telling story of what can happen to a person's personality when it runs out of control. I'm not surprised that this novel is considered brilliant or that the film adaptation is a classic.

Mrs. Dalloway

I started to write the post about this book but realized it's been entirely too long since I finished it to write anything that made any sense. I really need to be better about writing right after I finish the book rather than a month and a half later when I've finished another book. Next year's resolution? Maybe.

Anyway, I did take some notes about what I'd read right away so that I'd have something to talk about. I'll try to make some sense out of them for you.

Notes:

Seamless transition from the inner monologues of one character to another. Woolf weaved the storylines together by connecting the memories of a specific event between two people.

The loneliness individuals feel - no matter how surrounded, all felt misunderstood. You know the saying "a man is an island"? This novel proves that despite the family, friends, colleagues, and everyone else, most people spend a lot of time feeling alone.

Reliability of narrator challenged by shifting points of view. You have to believe what you read with a grain of salt when it comes to having a first person narrator in a novel. In this book there are nearly a dozen narrators, which gives the storyline a lot more believability.

Multiple viewpoints create a more complete snapshot of personalities and relationships. There are things that a person do not notice about themselves and their own lives, but that other people can see more clearly. The multiple viewpoints in this book give a glimpse into what peoples lives are really like.

An almost melancholy portrait of the lives the characters could have had but missed. Almost every character in the book looks back on how their life has played out over the years and sees things they wish they could have done - the places they should have gone, the people they should have married, the friends they should have kept. They all seemed to look at their present life with sadness and desperation.

People still think like this. Did I miss my chance? Do I matter? Is it all worth it? This novel was written in 1925, but so captures the way people think that it is still applicable even now close to a hundred years later.

Brideshead Revisited

I have to confess, I’m getting pretty sloppy about writing these blog posts. I finished this book probably two weeks ago and instead of blogging about it right away when it was fresh in my mind I put it off over and over again. It’s becoming a bad habit, waiting to long and then not having much to say about the book when all is said and done. I feel like I’m cheating it in some way by not giving it a proper memorial. Better late than never, though, right?

The complete title to Evelyn Waugh’s book is Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder.

[Sidenote: I always forget that Evelyn Waugh is a man. Evelyn seems like such a feminine name, it’s not even one of those gender neutral it-could-go-either-way names like Kelsey or Jordan or even Shannon. It probably sucked having a girly name. Then again, I’ve always lived as a girl with a boy’s name, and it has served me pretty well. Except that time I was at the ER as a kid and the doctor was surprised I was female (Didn’t the F on the chart tip you off? Why am I trusting you with my healthcare?). But I digress.]

Starting the novel, I knew it would be about the life of Captain Ryder. The prologue starts in the outer ring of the narrative with some scenes from his life during the war, so it all makes sense. He literally revisits Brideshead, an estate tied to his past, which propels us into the novel-long flashback that is his character’s autobiography from college to sometime before he joined the army and explains the importance of the estate.

As the flashback/biography begins, we are introduced to Charles Ryder as a college student at Oxford and all his experiences beginning at that point. There he meets a fantastically absurd young man named Sebastian Flyte who is not only popular and fond of drinking parties (which are much different in 1923 Oxford than they are at modern universities, most notably being the absense of red plastic cups) but carries with him to all of his social engagements a Teddy-bear that he speaks of as if it were real. It’s as if he were some sort of debauched Christopher Robin and his bear Aloysius is a socialite version of Winnie-the-Pooh. Or maybe their relationship is more like Calvin and Hobbes. Either way its pretty atypical of the traditional 1920s male collegiate.

Through his friendship with Sebastian he meets the Flyte family with which he becomes permentanly entangled. He finds himself in the middle of a messy separation where Sebastian’s father moves to Italy with his mistress, his mother dies, and the family falls into dissaray. A daughter is married of shamefully and Sebastian becomes a runaway drunk. Meanwhile Charles is fostering his artistic abilites and becomes somewhat famous, marrying for image rather than admiration, and eventually having an affair with the shamefully married sister of his former best friend. At the end of the book Sebastian is living near a Catholic mission in Morocco as a marginalized character half in and half out of society, pious but too fond of drinking. Charles divorces his wife and leaves his children to take up with Sebastian’s sister, who after the death of her father leaves him. It is no surprise then that he is an empty shell of a man serving in the army during WWII barely admitting that he even knows the Brideshead estate at all.

The book was written really well, as the characters and locations all seemed lifelike rather than pastiches of reality. Early on the relationship of Charles and Sebastian reminded me of the sense of male camaraderie that is popular again in society, a “bromance” if you will. Seeing so much of Sebastian early in the novel had me expecting that despite being Charles’ point of view that this book would tell the story of his life instead. I think I would have much rather read about the life of a young man who carries a Teddy-bear and ends up lush in the tropics rather than a morose young man who becomes a lonely and cynical artist.

A Clockwork Orange

I know it's the middle of August, and I'm just now getting around to posting the July book review. I've been doing pretty well with reading my novels before the end of the month like I intended, but in July this just didn't happen. My little sister got married at the end of the month (yay!), and with all the wedding prep I completely ran out of time to even buy a copy of the book. I just finished reading it, which is definitely going to put a strain on finishing my August book before the first of September, but I'll be pressing on! Maybe this year I will finally accomplish one of my New Year's resolutions.

The word that best describes my initial reaction to Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange is "perplexing." The story was completely bizarre and somehow extremely familiar. I know it sounds weird, but I feel like I know someone who acts kind of like Alex, repeating words three times and acting tough but listening to classical music in their spare time. Maybe I just have some odd friends.

In a lot of ways, this book reminds me of Huckleberry Finn. It's about a young boy, out causing trouble while speaking in an unfamiliar dialect, who goes through a brief transformation before returning to his old ways. That's probably where the parallels end, though. Where Huck is a redeemable character, helping out Jim and generally trying to make a good life for himself in the only way he knows how, Alex is different. He's young like Huck, only fifteen in the horrible first part of the novel, but commits horrible crimes like assault, rape, and murder without any smidgen of remorse. It's been five years or so since I've read Mark Twain's book, but I remember him doing ridiculous things like stowing away or stealing because he needed the money to survive or he was helping someone. Alex, on the other hand, did things that were against the law for the sole reason that it gave him pleasure. He enjoyed beating up old men and and leaving people bleeding in the gutter.

I have to say, the first couple chapters of this book were hard to read. And not just because half of the words are made up. In part one, the reader is tagging along while Alex and his gang (his "droogs") do drugs, break into houses, beat people senseless, rape women, seducing little girls, and killing an old lady. It's disgusting and disturbing to follow them do these things so nonchalantly, like it's a typical Friday night. And for them, sadly, it was.

It was no surprise then when Alex was hauled off to jail. He was a menace to society and everyone knew it, except maybe his mother, who it seemed to live in denial. The state of the jail didn't surprise me either - overcrowded, dangerous, unrefomative. "Cram criminals together and see what happens. You get concentrated criminality, crime in the midst of punishment," explains one of the jailers. So they take him out and send him to a government facility where he can be turned into a new citizen.

This section reminded me a lot of George Orwell's 1984. When they put him in the room and made him watch films all I could think of was the "Two Minutes' Hate" propaganda that the government forced everyone to watch. In both circumstances they were made to watch things they didn't want to in order to be brainwashed by the government. Granted, Alex's experience was heightened by whatever concoction they injected into his system that caused him to associate pain with violence, which made it even worse than Big Brother's hate videos.

This is a small book, but there is so much going on. What is it about society that has made it possible for hooligans to run the streets at night causing this much chaos? Why are intellectuals seen as outcasts? How did this bizarre slang come about? The prison chaplain was an interesting touch, trying to practice Christianity in a world where kids like Alex wish they were the Roman soldiers who nailed Jesus to the cross, because it would be satisfyingly "ultra-violent."

Despite his political selfishness and anger, I think I liked the character of F. Alexander, the writer whose wife had been raped and beaten by Alex and his droogs that later took him in and recognized him as a victim of the state. F. knew that what they had done to Alex was wrong - they had taken away his free will, and as F. quotes, "A man who ceases to choose ceases to be a man." It would be better to choose his own way and be bad then be forced to do good, the writer argues, which is true. Without choice we are nothing but machines, which is the premise in the book written by F. Alexander, also called A Clockwork Orange. He writes that people are being turned into machines when they are more like fruit, naturally cultivated on a tree grown in the "world-orchard" and planted by God because He "had need of us to quench his thirsty love." It's a fascinating explanation.

By the end of the novel, Alex realizes that he does not want to be clockwork, and is glad when he is re-reformed to not be affected when seeing violence. The last chapter sees him at 18, released into the world, realizing that there is more to life than "ultra-violence" and finally wishing for a normal, settled-down life. Maybe in this sense he becomes like Huck Finn again.

I can see why this is considered a classic, with it's foreboding future, themes of free will and liberty, and a timelessness that makes it seem set in modern times despite it having been written nearly 50 years ago. Now I have another film to add to my watch list: Stanley Kubrick's 1971 adaptation, a classic in and of itself.

Brave New World

This month it was time again for a pre-1970's selection, and the lot fell to Brave New World, the 1932 classic from author Aldous Huxley. It's a small novel, but one that is often referenced and is most likely on the same Time Magazine's Top 100 Novels of All Time list that the majority of these books are included on. Finally having a day free to read I delved in and hoped that I would like it as much as I was told that I would.

I knew that it would be about a utopia, judging by the French epigraph, which when translated spoke of the reality of utopian societies and the fact that modern society may instead be turning towards the imperfect. Chapter one threw me into the heart of the "new world" - the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre, where individuals were cloned, predetermined, actualized, and molded into who society need them to be.

In this new society, children are taught to want to do the job they've been created for, and to be glad that they are in their specific strata and therefore not envious of anyone else. "Everyone is happy nowadays" is a phrase characters often utter; and indeed they are -  stresses, tragedies, passions, every sort of extreme has been erased from their lives, leaving them to live in the moment and feel good about it. Religion has been replaced with industrialism, with Ford being used in place of God, obviously an homage to Henry Ford, his Model-T (all crosses have been repurposed as T's), and his ways of capitalism and assembly lines. Freud is thrown into this odd religion/patriotism (they believe Freud is Ford's psychological persona) and subsequently all happiness and entertainment is sexual in nature. Promiscuity among children is encouraged, all films are pornographic and/or violent and relationships have disappeared in favor of "everyone belongs to everyone else" mentality. With cloning as the main means of reproduction, nuclear families have also disappeared and asking someone about their mother is a dirty insult. Humans almost world-wide are psychologically trained to accomplish exactly what society needs them to, and they are more than content to follow along unquestionably. 

I am really fascinated that I happened to line up this novel directly after Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. It's interesting to see how two different authors, 50 years apart, present a utopian society and the people in it. Huxley's world looked forward to the future, while Atwood's world did the opposite and reverted to the past. Atwood's characters could remember the world before the utopia, while Huxley's characters knew nothing of the past. Atwood used surrogates to repopulate the human race, Huxley used artificial cloning. Yet somehow, they both taught the same message: Utopians are unnatural. They do not work, no matter how complicated or simplistic they are created to be.

I loved Huxley's jumping between characters and storylines, especially in Chapter Three with the juxtaposition of at least three stories told alternately one line at a time. Brilliant. I also enjoyed the inclusion of John, the savage, and his love of Shakespeare. Ironically, the one that is considered the most uncouth is instead the most intelligent and the most aware of what is actually going on in the world. He's the one who fights for religion, for modesty, for goodness, for education - and when he learns that nowhere in the world, not on the reservation or the outside, is any of this accomplishable, he kills himself rather than succumb to the modern ideal.

It's no wonder that this is considered a classic. It speaks of the human condition, what is important in life, and what is important enough to die for. It forewarns the dangers of putting too much stock in industrialization, of ignoring education and history, and of altering the natural way of life. And all in less than 200 pages.

Slaughterhouse-Five

One of my favorite things about reading new books or watching new movies is the excitement that comes with watching a storyline unfold the first time. There's a reason I don't read too many reviews or summaries of books - I'd rather find out about them on my own. So when I was researching novels to read this year, I purposefully didn't research them much farther than their basic Amazon.com description so I could enjoy the drama of being a first-time reader.

Slaughterhouse-Five is the kind of book that is often referenced but rarely described. Kurt Vonnegut is typically hailed as a genius writer, and the only other book by him that I've read - Galapagos - was facinatingly disturbing (it revolved around a group of people left on an island in a post-apocalyptic world attempting to repopulate society, but one of the people had a birth defect and at the end, hundreds of years later, human life has evolved into hairy, walrus-like creatures. Aren't you glad I didn't put that one on the reading list?).

Unfortunately, I started writing this post right after I read the book and ran out of time to finish my train of thought. It's been almost a month since then, so rather than try and finish it, here's the list of observations I planned to blog about:

- Interesting way to write about a personal experience without using the first person point of view
- Billy Pilgrim: did the character really time travel, or was he influenced by Trout's books? He did travel before he read Trout, though...
- Why did Trout's books match Pilgrim's experiences so well? He asked at the party if he had gone through a time window. Maybe he traveled too?
- Maybe Pilgrim's time traveling is a metaphor for his insanity and trying to deal with Dresden
- Tralfamadorians see time all at once, seeing all times simultaneously, knowing all outcomes. Much like C.S. Lewis' "sheet of paper" description of how God sees time in Mere Christianity and how characters like Rochester experience time in Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair
- Pilgrim calls his time-traveling experiences a disease, what does this mean?
- Tralfamadorians explain that they can't change outcomes because the moments are structured - but by whom?

Some interesting thoughts - I'll have the reread the book to expound upon them.

Atlas Shrugged

One of my goals/resolutions for 2011 is to read a novel every month. I've been constantly reading for school for as long as I can remember, and now that I've finished college, I've been going through a bit of reading list withdrawal. So I took matters into my own hands, and set myself a schedule of books to read for the year, made of up novels I've always wanted to read but haven't had the opportunity to. January's choice was Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand.

Before reading this book, I knew next to nothing about it. I knew that colleagues who had read it loved it, and had read online that it was considered the second most influential book after the Bible. Based on those observations I knew it had to be on my 2011 list. And topping off at 1074 pages, I put it first to get it out of the way. 

As I began reading, I was quickly enamored by the story and Rand's style of writing. The characters and dialogue were all completely believable and everything seemed contemporary, despite having been written in 1957. In my mind I imagined the scenes unfolding in a tone much like the movie Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, with sepia tones, 50s versions of future technology, and classic vintage clothing.

The giant calendar looming over the city should have tipped me off, but the corrosion of America into an Orwellian dystopia was something I hadn't anticipated. The first couple hundred pages paint the country as a prosperous, forward-moving nation, albiet one with an underlying unease manifested in the phrase "Who is John Galt?". As the narrative progresses the dystopia slowly comes into control, beginning with the arguments of morality, reason and duty until the government becomes completely corrupt and starts promoting concepts like "we must control men in order to force them to be free (pg. 127)" and outlawing dog-eat-dog business competition because it's "unfair". Soon the nation is in chaos, the rich are getting richer while the poor are getting poorer, and technology is being used for all the wrong reasons. As this is happening we are also following romances, searching for a missing person, researching mysterious objects, watching marriages unravel, and realizing that everything that is happening - from bars in New York City to counties on the other side of the planet - is not only intertwined but is following the plan of a single man with the intent to change the way the world works. If this isn't a story of epic proportions, I don't know what is.

Besides the obvious comparison to 1984 I was reminded of various other books, and most specifically Moore and Gibbons' Watchmen. Their graphic novel classic is another story in which a single, self-centered genius hordes the great minds of the world in order to throw society into a state of chaos that he believes will promote an improvement for the greater good - the difference between the two being that in Watchmen, the genius is on the 'bad' side. I'm curious if this book had any influence on them.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book, and despite how much I love the writing and the emphasis on the importance of intelligence, there are some things that the book promotes that I have trouble with. Rand is operating under the practice of Objectivism, a philosophy which I do not know much about outside of the fact that she pioneered it. According to our friend Wikipedia, Objectivism teaches reality independent of consciousness, knowledge found through logic, and rational self-interest, among other aspects.  The most challenging part of the novel for me was the radio address promoting this philosophy, because a lot of it seemed to go directly against my personal beliefs. In the address character John Galt preaches that justice should always preside over mercy, that a person's pleasure is more important than the welfare of their neighbors, that a man's mind is the only judge of truth, that love is earned as a reward for virtue.

As a Christian, I cannot agree with these statements. Justice is a great concept, but mercy is what leads to forgiveness and reconciliation - and there is no one so perfect as to be above the need to be forgiven. It's important for people to be happy, but never at the expense of someone else's life. I cannot agree that a man's mind is the only judge of truth - believing that the world is flat doesn't make it true. And what good is love if it's conditional and must be earned? I also cannot believe that faith is the absence of intelligence, or that following God causes man to "become an abject zombie who serves a purpose he does not know, for reasons he is not to question (pg. 944)." In my opinion, based on Galt's speech, Objectivism leaves no room for error or mistakes or even flaws. It ignores the concept of living life with purpose and settles instead on the fickle emotion of personal happiness as the end-all-be-all of existence. In addition, it doesn't make sense to me that the characters preach that the individual is greater than the group while suffering torture in the name of their plan to create a better world, or that faith is unintelligent but believing that truth is truth because "existence exists (pg. 933)."

Although I did not agree with some of the basic teachings in this novel, I can still appreciate the skill it took to not only write such a hefty novel but to create a complicated web of unique characters and to invent an entirely new philosophy. After reading it, I can absolutely see why it is considered the second most influential book. Rand's writing is fabulous, but when it comes to philosophy, I think I'll stick with the number one most influential book.