Out of Africa by Denisen/Blixen

I really enjoyed listening to this classic book, but it's been so long since I finished it that I can't write a meaningful post. Oops.

Don Quixote by Cervantes

This is the first book I purchased with my new audible.com subscription.  I thought it would be a good choice for audio because I've already tried to read it and found it way too long-winded to hold my attention.  I always wanted to read it though, because of its reputation and importance in the history of literature.

Don Quixote was originally published in two parts in the 1600s.  It tells the story of Don Quixote, a dude who decides to be a knight, and his squire Sancho Panza, and all the wacky situations they get themselves into.

The narrator (the reader of the audiobook) actually brings a lot to this - DQ is really funny at times, a fact which was less apparent to me in reading it, and I think it had a lot to do with the voices he chose for the characters and his own accent.  It had me feeling like I was listening to a 40-hour episode of Monty Python.  Also, I was able to focus on the humor of the story since I didn't feel like I was wasting my life reading unnecessary flowery phrases.

So, once I got into it I realized that DQ is really entertaining.  Some of the jokes seemed a bit old and cheesy but this book is about 400 years old and had a huge influence over subsequent media, so of course I wasn't going to see something new.

Beyond the comedy, I really enjoyed the relationship between DQ and Sancho and the way it changes over time.  These two characters are very well developed and we see both their goodness and asshattery.

The end was a little disappointing, somehow I expected a little better end for such a well-crafted story, but considering that it's about 2% of the book I can easily forgive it.

All in all I'm glad I finally finished the book, but it's definitely not for the faint of heart, and I won't be reading it again.

Brave New World by Huxley

(Blog note: I'm trying to write more meaningful posts from here on out for the following reasons: to force me to think more about what I'm reading, to get a little writing practice, and just in case anyone else reads this blog in the future.  Considering this, posts may not be in order of finishing, and may get edited a bunch - I haven't written non-technical pieces in a long time!)

This classic by Huxley was published in 1931.  It's made multiple "best novels" lists and judging by my experience working at a bookstore, it must be typical reading for some college courses (we always had this book in stock, in higher quantities than many others in the same category).  Surely it's well-studied and excessively analyzed by experts.  My goal here is not academic, but to give an outline of how this casual reader experienced the novel.

Brave New World falls into the genre of dystopian novels since it describes a future world which Huxley must have assumed the reader would find undesirable, if not alarming.  People live in a drug-soaked haze of total comfort, with no unmet desires.  Originality, individuality, emotional attachment, frugality, and nature itself are among the things vocally despised by the citizens of this future London.  The pleasure of sex has been severed from emotion and reproduction (which is taken care of in giant factories), and people are encouraged to have sex frequently and swap partners frequently.  The baby factories are just the beginning of a mass-produced life cycle; dozens of identical humans are bred to perform their function perfectly, then conditioned chemically and through sleep-learning to be happily conformist.  Even though higher-level persons are well aware of this conditioning, they do not fight it but rather embrace it.

Into this world comes John the Savage, who is found in the uncivilized zone by slightly rebellious Bernard and brought back to London.  John's reaction to the society around him is the main focus of the second half of the book.

I think the main point of this book is to show us the future setting that Huxley envisioned.  We often imagine how a catastrophic war or environmental disaster could bring an end to happiness as we know it, but there is more than one way to skin a cat, as they say.  Huxley shows us how the complete opposite - lack of any struggle whatsoever - could also bring about our downfall.

Personally I didn't particularly enjoy reading this, although I truly wanted to because I liked the premise. The writing style just didn't click with me, it really felt like I was reading something for english class.  If you want to read about depressing things happening in the future (here I am lumping together dystopian and post-apocalyptic novels) then I can attest to more enjoyable options.

Anna Karenina by Tolstoy

(finished Oct 2009)

I read this book very quickly, and at the time I felt that I couldn't wait to finish it.  But now having finished it, I miss it very much.  Tolstoy's style is unobtrusive, just the way I like it.  I still don't know how to feel about any of the characters, and I like that very much too.  Also, I have absolutely no desire to get married after reading this book.  Every wife is nagging and annoying, every husband a bit of a sissy.