Book 1: Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

To start off the journey I figured I'd read a book I've read before. This is to help ease my mind into a more serious mindset. The last 20 or so books I've read have been about vampires, werewolves and such.

Date started: April 13, 2010
Date finished: April 20, 2010

Overall I really liked this book. It had been so long since I read it last it was almost like I was reading it for the first time. One part of me thinks about how nice it would be to live in a world like this: no problems, no worries, no relationships. Everything and everyone was happy to do what they were meant to do and be who they were meant to be. Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons: all want to be exactly who they are and don't want to be in any other class because of how they've been conditioned. As Lanina, and Alpha, states one time "I'm glad I'm not an Epsilon." Epsilons think the same thing about Alphas. They do the jobs they were conditioned to, they never get into serious relationships so they never have to deal with that drama, and they are rationed out grammes of soma each day so they can relax every night and forget about everything. This society lives in a world where they don't have to worry about disease, age, starvation, fear, anxiety of what's going to happen tomorrow, torture, pain, anything. Like I said, one part of me thinks this would be they way to live.

Then the other part of me, the overemotional, caring, short tempered, anxious side of me would hate that kind of life. As bad as times can be with fights with your family/friends/boyfriends, times when you seem stuck in a dead end job and want to get out, worrying about if you really live in a safe neighborhood, if you can really trust your neighbor who you wave to every time you see them; these times are overridden by the joys of loving your family/friends/boyfriends and being loved back back by them, unconditional love that you wouldn't trade anything in the world for, the time when you finally get that promotion or new job that you've worked so hard for and know that it was fully yourself who made the accomplishment, the time when you do find out how trustful and wonderful your neighbors are, or hear about strangers and their neighbors, how they open up their homes and lives to you in times of dire need. All of these times of life when you realize there is good in a world of bad make it all worth it, to me at least. I wouldn't trade that for a perfect Utopian society. Not even for daily rations of soma and unlimited amounts of obstacle golf. I choose as the Savage chose. "I like the inconveniences...I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness, I want sin...I'm claiming the right to be unhappy."

*Chapter 3: I was not a fan of this chapter. They way it was jumping around many different conversations after 1 sentence in each. The conversations between Lanina & Fanny; Henry, the predestinator & Bernard; the controller's speech; and also the hypnopaedia being implanted into the brains of the young. It was just a tad confusing and I'm not really sure what the point of it was.

*Another think I rather enjoyed and found slightly humorous, is how the citizens would constantly repeat the hynopaedic sayings that had been conditioned into them since day one: "A gramme is better than a damn" "Ending is better than mending" "The mores stitches the less riches" "A gramme in time saves nine" All of these sayings seem kinda creepy, but if you think about it, it today's socitey, we almost have the same thing: "The early bird catches the worm" "A friend in need is a friend indeed" "A penny saved is a penny earned" "Absence makes the heart grow fonder" "All good things come to those who wait." Now these sayings are implanted in our brains hypnopaedically like in Brave New World, but they are sayings that will always come up, almost on a daily basis.