Book # 19 & Sci-Fi Book # 7 - Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

Next week is Banned Book Week, so hey I figured I'd read Brave New World next. Usually the book is challenged because it has sex, drugs, anti-religious viewpoints and suicide.  I'm guessing that whoever challenges this book never actually reads it since the author's point is that he's against drug use, promiscuity and is pro-religion. I remember reading this back in high school but I'm not sure if it was assigned or not. 

The book is set in a future in which everyone is genetically modified and gestated in a laboratory. As the children are raised they receive subliminal suggestions in their sleep to make them all think alike. And everyone takes the drug soma whenever they're stressed out or need to get away from their problems. There is no marriage or religion anymore either. The plot gets going when Bernard Marx, an Alpha male that gets some grief for not being as physically perfect as most Alpha males, takes a female coworker, Lenina, to visit a "Savage Reservation". This is a small area of the world where the world government decided not to incorporate into all of its future goodness. While there they discover a young man, John, that was actually born to a woman from the "brave new world" society that was accidentally stuck on the reservation. They bring John, "the Savage", back to their society. What follows is total culture shock for the Savage. 

I enjoyed the book and there's a lot to think about in it. Like... if in this future society everyone is so happy most of the time can it really be all that bad? A.

Book # 67 - Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray

It seemed like it took me forever to get through Vanity Fair. I started out really enjoying it. The first third was funny and charming... and all of the plot lines were satisfactorily resolved in the last third... but the middle was a bit of a slog. Just a few too many characters.  Still overall I enjoyed it.

The story follows two friends, Rebecca Sharp and Amelia Sedley, as they leave school and begin to make their way into society. Rebecca doesn't have any family or money and isn't the most scrupulous person in getting ahead. Amelia however is the total opposite and is probably way too nice to everyone. Both find husbands and have a child but the circumstances of each are complete opposite. At the mid-point of the story we find one of them at the height of society and the other barely managing to survive... and of course by the end their roles are reversed. It was a nice read but could have just been a tad shorter. A-

Horror Book # 50 - The Bachman Books by Stephen King - Book 1: Rage by Richard Bachman

Way back in the early 90's I went through a bit of a Stephen King phase... or so I thought. Looking back on it now I realize that I only completely finished two of his books at that time. Somehow though I owned maybe ten King books. I think it was maybe 200 pages into The Stand that I just got too busy with other stuff and wouldn't return to King for awhile. Anyway... a couple weeks ago I was reading an article about King that made me want to start in on his Dark Tower series. Plus I watched a new movie based on one of his books, Cell, that got me into looking at his entire bibliography. So then I found a good bunch of my old high school copies that I never read, dusted them off, and added them to my to-be-read shelf. But then I read that one of this books, Rage, was actually out of print. Of course this was one that I didn't own and it being the one book of his that is out of print because of the "sensitive nature" of what it is about only made me want to read it even more. So then I tracked down a used copy of The Bachman Books which contains Rage. So once again I was adding Stephen King books to my to-be-read shelf. Plus I put a library hold on a Kindle copy of the first Dark Tower. So maybe I'll be reading a bunch of Stephen King in the future.... But I also discovered over the last two months that being a parent of a newborn is pretty much all consuming and that finding time to sit down and read for more than two minutes at a time doesn't happen very often.

I think I read somewhere that King wrote the first draft of Rage as a teenager and it is one of his earliest publications. And that's what it reads like... but I mean that in a good way. It feels like a young King channeling his teenage angst into a pretty intense story with a good deal of emotion. Unlike some of his later work this feels like he's really writing from the heart. The story is pretty simple... one day a high school kid snaps, kills a couple of teachers, and takes his class hostage. Apparently there have been a few kids that have read this book and did exactly that... so that's why it is no longer available. I can understand why King would remove the book, it probably weighs on him the influence the book has had on some kids. Still, I enjoyed the book and I'll give it an A-.