Brave New World
A couple of months ago Christopher mentioned his long-lasting interest with a Brave New World. After I followed the Great Books I class at Concordia, I’ve always been interested in reading my way through books that have shaped society around them. Thanks to Judith I got a copy and started reading on the bus every morning.
At first I was a little bored by the “shocking” futuristic utopian society that the text describes. Tubes baby and behavioural conditioning taken to the extreme and a serious cult of youth. It felt like everything was so widely different that it couldn’t scary because I couldn’t tell how society could even get to that point. I read it like an anthropological study of a world far away. Where people are weird and believe weird things. That feeling stayed with me pretty much throughout the book until 2-3 chapters before the end, when the Savage meets with the world leader and discuss philosophy.
That conversation is, I believe, the main point that the author wanted to make. He invented a world and characters inhabiting it and staged it all so that those two people could talk for an evening. It seemed like a set-up, a sort of devil’s advocate conversation of “what ifs” and the only way he could make his point was to give us background (the rest of the book.)
I have to say, that conversation is pretty intense and brings ideas together that I’d never envisioned before and for that the book is very interesting. On the other hand, I pity teenagers who were forced to read this for school because I don’t think I would have gotten so much out of it without philosophy classes in both college and university to give me some background.
I’ll probably read it again in 5 years and find it completly different. I think this book will stick with me for a while. A slicky-oily-akward of feeling in the back of my head when I’ll read some technological articles.
*** for appreciation of the story
***** for “iconic book” status
Tags: Books, brave new world, utopia
This entry was posted on Saturday, April 25th, 2009 at 8:26 pm and is filed under Books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
3:12 pm on April 27th, 2009
I really liked it when I read it but can’t remember an awful lot about it now. I put that down to my aging memory more than anything else though.
3:50 pm on April 29th, 2009
Well, I’m as useless as Shaun here. I read it about a year ago and don’t remember a lot, although apparently I thought this (last paragraph) at the time. I don’t quite understand what I was trying to say, which is bad. I’m sure I had no intention to sound incoherent.
What I can remember is that I didn’t read really deeply into the philosophy of it, but I was annoyed by mr savage going insane and monk-like. It seemed like a crappy ending to an otherwise enjoyable book.
6:27 pm on April 29th, 2009
Yeah, the Savage was a little too monk-like for a guy who learned to read with his mom’s embryo-instructions. It’s a miracle he understand a quarter of the Shakespeare stuff. He was beyond emo.