Brave new world by Aldus Huxley

 

 

I just finished this book.  I'm not sure how I feel about it.  First off, I can't believe this book was published in 1931.  It feels much more modern then that.  It has left me feeling cold to be honest.  This book depicts the future world without soul.  I am not referring to soul in a religious sense.  But soulless in the sense of feeling human.  Love, doesn't exist.  Instead people are urged to give themselves freely to each other sexually.  Babies are not born but grown in labs with futures already certain.  You are either a worker or an intellectual.  The populace is encouraged to take a drug which will always make them feel better.  Soma the drug of the masses.  But what happens when you bring in a person from the outside world?  Someone who believes in God and has read Shakespear? 

 

I'm not sure why I didn't like this book as much as I imagined I would.  Maybe I'm not intellegent enough to grasp it?  I'm not sure the reason but it took me forever to finish this book.  Its not a very long book but it took me ages....which usually means I'm not totally into it.  I rate this book 7/10.

 

If you are smart as a whip and usually get stuff then this is the book for you!

 

I am going to tackle Jack London's The Cruise of the Snark.  I hope it is interesting.

 



The Crusades through Arab Eyes by Amin Maalouf

 

I love history.  The Crusades has always been a topic that I was drawn to.  The world changed after the Crusades.  I've always read books from the Christian or Western point of view.  This book was fascinating because all the sources were from Muslim Chronicles.  I can now understand why and how the first crusade was so successful.  The Muslim world (like Europe) was fractured.  Egypt was not friends with the Turks.  Baghdad wasn't getting on with Damascus and so forth and so forth.  In many ways the east were far advanced in science, medicine and obviously mathematics.  Algebra was one of the things that came to Europe because of the Crusades (art, medical practices and the carrier pigeon were other things that the Europeans took back with them). 

 

Muslims saw the Christians are barbarians.  Uneducated blood thirsty warriors(there were a few stories of Christians eating Muslims that they had just killed).  It would take 200 years before Saladin was able to bring forces together to finally kick them out of the Holy Land.  The author goes on to explain while the Christians took so many things back with them the Muslims rejected everything and anything Christian.  This maybe as simple as invader/invaded.  The conquerors take and the invaded reject.  In fact many Muslims believe Crusades are still going on in the middle east and have a mistrust of the west dating back to the 1100.  This book is a must read for all the history buffs out there.  It takes a different spin on a sad and desperate time. 

 

I rate this book 10/10.

 

I am now reading Brave new world by Aldous Huxley

The Hound of Baskervilles - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

 

 

I love the Sherlock Holmes series.  I love the movies, the TV adaptations, the graphic novels.  I'm a sucker for Holmes.  The adaptations have been very extreme. My favourite (recent) re-imagining of the story would have to be Sherlock.  This modern day Sherlock Holmes uses technology as one of his tools to unravel mysteries.  What I think the series does very well is Holmes interview style.  In the books Holmes always gets his clients to tell a story.  His deduction begins with hearing this story.  The movies (Robert Downey Jnr) does not do this as much.  Instead it uses action as a way to progress the story.  Another adaptation is Elementary which places Sherlock in modern day New York city.  His faithful companion Watson is played by Chinese American actress Lucy Liu.  Interesting choice and I look forward to this exploration.

 

But let's get back to the book.  The Hound of Baskervilles was originally published in 1901.  It is very different then the Sherlock Holmes case books as this book deals only with one mystery.  The casebooks deal with many different stories.  Another change in this book is that Holmes disappears from most of the book.  Watson becomes the main character and we follow his adventures.  Holmes eventually comes back into the story and the mystery is solved in the most wonderfully logical way.

 

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is a really amazing person.  I love how Holmes always uses logic, reason and observation as a way to solve mysteries that seem mythical or other worldly.  But Conan Doyle himself was involved in the occult and would dabble in séances.  He even believed in fairies for goodness sake. 

 

I rate this book 10/10

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

 

 

This was a pretty easy read.  While I had never read the book I knew the story pretty well.  Mostly from TV or movie adaptations.  There were no moments in the book that didn't seem familiar.  In fact it really felt like I was re-reading this book.

 

Dickens is a wonderful writer and while this is no Great Expectations (my favorite Dickens story) it was still a wonderful read.  There is not much I can say about the story.  For I am sure you know it yourself very well.  I remember in grade 3 (or was it grade 4?) being in a play version of this story.  I was the young boy who Scrooge gets to buy the big prize winning turkey near the end.  I only had 2 or 3 lines but I remember that I made a very distinct costume choice.  I needed to have a wool hat.  Don't know why this wool hat was so important.  Oh well.  Give this book to your kids to read.

 

8/10