Brave New World

I can almost imagine that I never read Brave New World by Aldous Huxley way back in high school since so much was unfamiliar. But I do remember the fact that I didn't like it when I read it back then and some of it jiggled memories in my brain. This reading was basically like reading a book I'd never read before. I could call this post "Brave New World Revisited" but I can't because that's the name of another book.

What did I think? Well, back in 1970-something, I would have given this book just one star on Goodreads. This time around, I gave it three stars. And I reflected that my personal sense of this dystopian novel would have been quite different as a teenager than it is as a "mature adult."

Sometime in the future, when people might be grown solely in test tubes (no more crazy ideas like mother or father), happiness and comfort will trump knowledge, beauty and wonderment. That's what Brave New World is all about. Humans are predestined to a certain castes when the embryos are developing inside of bottles. Each caste has a certain place in the social order. Okay, yes, that's what caste is. But each caste, in addition to their tasks to keep society going are provided with amble leisure time and pleasant ways to spend it. There's always soma in case someone needs a vacation from reality.

Unlike other dystopian novels I've read of late, this one is a little far fetched so looking at it very generally, it might be a bit less disturbing. But then, when I started to think about how happiness is more important than knowledge, well, isn't that what is happening in Florida now? How students are not to be taught subjects which might be uncomfortable for them? That's when my thinking went in a really dark direction.

If you're of the believe that it's important to read the classics, perhaps you should add Brave New World to your list if you haven't already read it. It was a quick enough read. Then again, there are so many good books out there. You decide.

Ella Minnow Pea

Perhaps if I had read Ella Minnow Pea, an epistolary novel by Mark Dunn, back in 2002 when it was first published, perhaps then I might have found it entertaining. Reading this in 2022, I was somewhat horrified.

The premise is somewhat cute. There's a fictional island nation off the coast of South Carolina called Nollop, named after Nevin Nollop, the person who penned the famous pangram, "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." That pangram happens to be the sentence my dad insisted that I type as I was first learning to type. It is the sentence that includes all the letters of the alphabet, perfect to type while learning the keyboard. 

At the center of Nollop is a statue of Nevin Nollop with the phrase stuck in with individual letters. As each letter alls off the statue, the island's Council bans each letter. They can't be used in speech or in writing. Punishments are incredibly harsh. Nollop folks have always prided themselves on their interest in language. Banning letters is extremely difficult for most.

Ella Minnow Pea is an 18-year old resident of Nollop. She communicates with her family and neighbors by mail since Nollop hasn't had reliable phone service since some hurricane years earlier. She was very quick to realize that soon she will have no freedom of expression. That's what struck me reading this novella in 2022 - how easy it is to trample freedom of expression and what arbitrary punishments can do to a society.

This really jumped out at me.

    Yes, that is now the topic on every lip. This salient, impertinent, Hamlettian choice.

    To leave or not to leave.

    To waive claim to our homes. To renounce our mother soil. To give up everything to those who warrant only our lowest contempt - to those who aspire to reign in outright tyranny, who misperceive Nollopian thoughts in service to rapacious intentions. Can they not see that we see what is happening here?

That is how I feel about life in the United States about now. Slowly but surely our rights are being stripped away. Do we stay and fight? Do we leave?

Ella and her correspondents must come up with creative ways to express themselves once they can no longer use certain letters in the alphabet. She is disgusted. She is one of the few who remains to fight the fight and restore the freedom of expression to her nation.

Like I said, the premise could have been cute but to read this now, it was most disturbing.

It Can't Happen Here

Goodreads can sum up It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis far more succinctly than I could hope to.

"The only one of Sinclair Lewis's later novels to match the power of Main Street, Babbitt, and Arrowsmith, It Can't Happen Here is a cautionary tale about the fragility of democracy, an alarming, eerily timeless look at how fascism could take hold in America. Written during the Great Depression when America was largely oblivious to Hitler's aggression, it juxtaposes sharp political satire with the chillingly realistic rise of a President who becomes a dictator to "save the nation." Now finally back in print, It Can't Happen Here remains uniquely important, a shockingly prescient novel that's as fresh and contemporary as today's news."

I first spotted this novel in Barnes & Noble sometime prior to the 2016 election. It put a little shiver of fear in me at the time, but I didn't even want to go down that road so didn't even consider reading it. Now, feeling as though democracy is as frail as its ever been in my lifetime, I decided to take a second look.

I found It Can't Happen Here a little difficult to read. The sentences were long, I didn't understand some of the historical references and often had no clue if characters were from real life or totally imagined. Once I realized how I could skim without losing the drift of the story, that's what I did. Another thing that made this difficult for me to read is that it was overtype satirical. Like ridiculous. Like spread out the satire a little bit or something! But satire was piled on.

There were so many passages in the novel that I highlighted because they were so relevant to today. I won't bore you with all 30-something that I highlighted, but I will share two with you.

• He believed that dissent - even a cranky, erratic, eccentric, old-fashioned version of it - was not disloyalty but at the heart of an American democratic identity. 
  This is so counter to those who say, "If you don't like it here, leave." I don't believe that's in the spirit of democracy. If you don't like it here, but this is your country, voice your dissatisfaction and work towards improving things. Don't just walk away - and don't allow yourself to be chased away.
  
  
• ... most of them newspapermen, disliked the smell of him more than before they had met him... Even they, by the unusual spiritedness and color of their attacks upon him, kept his name alive in every column...
  If that's not descriptive of the trump era, than I'm not sure what is!

That's as political as I care to get here. If anything that I've written intrigues you, you might want to take a look at this classic novel. I expected to lose sleep with worry and finish up with a increased sense of dread. That didn't happen, although the book did give me some things to think about... and more things to throw about while conversing about politics with my husband or kids.

 

Goldilocks - Science Fiction, Not the Fairy Tale

As I think I've mentioned before, my Books & Beer Club has a schedule of genres for the year. It makes sure that we read from a wide variety of books. I always shudder when we're approaching science fiction or fantasy months. Those are always difficult for me to read. Back in April, I was reading some list of new recommended titles and Goldilocks by Laura Lam sounded like a book I might be able to recommend to the Club. I must have requested it from the library, although I'm not sure why I would have done that. But it arrived on my virtual bookshelf so after I finished Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari's expanse, I picked up Goldilocks. (I'm still not sure that the title of Goldilocks  was a good choice.)

The timing of the reading was a bit unsettling at the beginning. Sapiens left me with the feeling that Earth might be doomed. Or at least humans. Goldilocks picks up at that point. The Earth is in trouble. Human life on Earth might cease to exist within the next 30 years.

Dr. Valerie Black is determined to take a team of women scientists to Cavendish, in the Goldilocks Zone, to start a new colony. Conditions could be right for human habitation. They do make it into space and face setback after setback. Finally some secrets are unveiled and the crew is forced to make some very difficult decisions.

This is not one of my genres yet I found this absorbing. A real page turner. But there was backstory missing. Other than climate change ravishing the country, there were hints at political turbulence, about women being forced out of the workforce. I wish we'd had a little bit more of that story.

What was crazy, almost, was it's as though this novel was being written now. Written now. In July of 2020. Not published in early 2020 meaning it was written sometime earlier. I'm not sure that this is the best book to read in the midst of a pandemic, but I did enjoy it as much as I hoped I would.

1984

When 1984 arrived and I realized I'd never read George Orwell's  1984, I purchased a copy and read it on a European vacation. I don't remember being terribly disturbed by the book then. Yes, it was a downer. Looking back, it didn't seem like the book had come true.

Now, 35 years later, I wonder. Seems like so much of Orwell's words were prophetic. Which makes the idea behind this novel particularly disturbing. There's talk of "fake news." Orwell describes "two minutes of hate." I can go on and on. But I choose not to.

Perhaps this book should be re-read as a cautionary tale? But will people get it? I'm not so sure.

Books and Beer Club read this as our science fiction pick for 2019. A good part of our discussion centered on whether or not we considered this science fiction. Most of us did not.

Should you read this novel published in 1949? Probably. Will you enjoy it? Probably not.

Fahrenheit 451

Where have I been this time? I was traveling in Canada. I stopped traveling with a laptop shortly after I got my iPad. Since the last time I traveled, I even purchased a keyboard for my iPad thinking it would be easier to blog while away. WRONG. Do you know how difficult it is to get used to typing on one of those little blue tooth keyboards? I keep kicking myself out... although I'm not sure out of what!

Once again, thank heavens for e-books. I was in the midst of reading The Elephant Whisperer by Lawrence Anthony when I left for Canada. I was finding the book fascinating and thought for sure I'd be able to finish the book while waiting at the airport for my flight and then on the flight. Again WRONG. In fact, the book expired when I was only about one third of the way through with it. Thank goodness, the day before that expired, Fahrenheit 451 was available for download. While The Giver by Lois Lowry was my Books and Beer Club selection for July, it was also recommended that we read Fahrenheit 451 for comparison, because it's a book that everyone must read. Yes, I'd never read Fahrenheit 451. I remember it being a favorite of a good friend from high school. Somehow, I'd never been persuaded to read it. Another classic I can check off on my list of books I never read but probably should have. If you haven't read it, you probably should!

Wow! What a book. Like The Giver, Ray Bradbury's award winning novel is a dystopian novel. The government controls the lives of the people. The majority of the people seem content. But that's really where the similarity ends. In The Giver, the "purpose" of the control is to eliminate pain. That didn't seem to be the case at all in Fahrenheit 451. There were far too many miserable people in this book.

The overall premise is that books are bad. Firemen no longer fight fires, they start and control fires, in the quest to eliminate all books. 451 degrees on the Fahrenheit scale is the temperature at which paper combusts into flames. The book was written during the early days of people having televisions in their homes. Bradbury's plot, speculative fiction, wonders what life would be like if people no longer read books but got anesthetized by television. Reading this book in 2016, I needed to repeatedly remind myself that this book was published in 1953 and was the future as Ray Bradbury imagined it. So much of what he imagined is our reality today.

The world of Guy Montag, the protagonist in the novel, is not a nice place. It's a world full of war and darkness. The citizens seem even less connected to each other than in The Giver. It's a world where stomach pumping is a completely run-of-the-mill occurrence. It's a world where people found with books might be burned with their homes and their libraries, no matter how large or small.

To keep this post (and blog) non-political, I won't expound at all on my connections between the novel and the current situations, I just want to point out that there are many comparisons that can be made.

I can't imagine a world without books, where people sit numbed out in their living rooms watching larger than life television sets. Where "the family" refers to characters view on television rather than the loving people in one's life. But now... I'm off to search for the movie online...

Gathering Blue - The Giver #2

Okay. I'm going to make a great big confession here. (Too bad none of my former students are following me. They'd love this!) When I read Gathering Blue by Lois Lowry in 2000, I saw no direct connection between The Giver and its sequel. It wasn't actually a sequel. It was called a companion book.

There were similarities. The societies in each book were tightly controlled. In The Giver, the population was generally content, well-fed, and clean whereas in Gathering Blue, the population was generally miserable, hungry, and dirty. Sounds opposite but in both cases a small group of people ruled the masses and all they did in each of the communities. The connection was ever so slight and if I hadn't just read Son I might have missed it again. Or... maybe I would have realized it rereading The Giver quickly followed by a reread of Gathering Blue. I'd like to think that the latter is true.

When I read it the first time, I loved Gathering Blue but in a standalone kind of way. I loved that even with Kira's miserable life she was still kind, caring, strong, as well as being braver than she gave herself credit for. I loved reading about her gift. I loved the spunk of Matt. Now I love it on a totally different level. It's a much grittier book than The Giver. The writing is concise yet still affords the reader the ability to visualize most of what is being read.

To say too much more will ruin not only Gathering Blue but The Giver as well. I don't want to do that. If you read The Giver and enjoy it, then I suggest following it up with Gathering Blue. And pay attention! You don't want to miss the connection!

The Giver

This isn't the first time that I read The Giver by Lois Lowry. I was introduced to the middle grade science fiction novel in a graduate reading class in 1999. Not being a fan of science fiction, I read it begrudgingly and was surprised when I enjoyed it. I went on to read the sequels as they came out, Gathering Blue and The Messenger. The fourth book in the series, Son, came out after I left full-time teaching and my reading of young adult fiction slacked off. It's been on my "to be read" list for years. It might be time to pick that one up.

When The Giver was suggested in Books and Beer Club last week, I remembered that I did like the book. I remembered some of the story but not all. And I remembered that my favorite book in the series was The Gatherer. But for the life of me, I couldn't tell you why.

Some of the book club members mentioned that the movie of The Giver which was released in 2014 is on Netflix. Rather than my normal preference for reading the book and then watching the movie, I figured since I'd already read the book (albeit 17 years ago), I could watch the movie before the reread.

More details of the novel came back to me as I watched the movie. I loved the movie. It seemed very loyal to what I remembered of the novel. The cinematography was wonderful.

The night I watched the movie, I downloaded The Giver from the library. I started rereading it the following evening.

The setting of The Giver is a time in the future, after some really bad things have happened in the world and people are living in planned communities where sameness is the goal. There's no need for real decision making as the community makes all the decisions for the whole. Clothing and food and dwellings are provided by the community. Family units consist of a father, a mother (who are put in a family unit based on temperaments by the community) and two children, a boy and a girl (did you expect anything else?) specifically selected for them. There is no love. Every relationship is planned out by the community. After the children are grown and assigned to their own dwellings, the parents go to the place where childless people live. As opposed to the place where older people go.

In the community, there's no love. There's no emotion. There's no color. At twelve years old, children are thanked for their childhood and are assigned jobs based on their aptitude. Again, there are no choices involved.

Oh, and naturally there are no birthdays. There's nothing individual at all in the community. Each December there's a ceremony where all the babies born in the prior year are assigned to their family unit. There's a prescribed change for children at every single age. At 9-years old the children receive a bicycle, the only form of transportation in the community.

The year that Jonas becomes a twelve, all the other twelves are assigned to jobs. Jonas wonders what is going on when he doesn't get an assignment. The reason for that is because Jonas is selected for the most honored job in the community. Jonas is going to be the Receiver of Memory. Apparently memories, good and bad, interfere with living the kind of life those in the community wish to live. One person holds all the memories of past time so that everyone else in the community is living in the here and now. The previous Receiver of Memory is responsible for the training of Jonas. As such, the previous Receiver becomes the Giver. Through the transfer of memories from Giver to Receiver, Jonas begins to question the dystopian community he lives in.

As much as I loved the movie, I loved the book that much more. My memory served me correctly and the movie was very true to the novel with just some small exceptions. Since I was rereading the book and I'd seen the movie, I was able to move a little bit beyond the main story and catch details I hadn't caught before. There's definitely more to this novel that meets the eye.

I'd recommend this book to readers who enjoy young adult fiction and to those who have always wondered what it would be like to live in a world where you don't have to make choices, everything is done for you, there's no war, no religion, and people generally get along.