Saturday, June 26, 2010

Brave New World

OK, so I'm already done with this book. It's a pretty quick read. Like The Road, it reads a little like a writing exercise (the idea is X, now go!), but unlike The Road, it isn't a complete failure.

"Not a complete failure?" you say, "but it's a classic!" And classics, I say, usually aren't that fun to read. This one was at least engaging. The world that was portrayed had a bit more thought behind it. Character development was really weak, which I could see as part of the point of the book; the characters are SUPPOSED to be weak. Still, I like it when I can really get into the heads of the characters in a book (at least one of them), and that didn't happen at all here.

Impression? I liked it and am glad I read it, and recommend that if you are another of those rare souls that initially escaped this book, you pick it up and spend a couple of hours with it.

2 comments:

Betsy said...

Brave New World is one of my all-time favorites. It's definitely an easy read, and I agree that the characters are pretty shallow the first read through. I actually liked this book better and better the more times I read it, but I think I'm drawn to the dystopia more than the characters.

As for book recommendations, these are the ones we've been passing around the house lately:

For more dystopian fun, try Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick or Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow

A slightly longer (and better, I think) dystopian book is The Gate to Women's Country by Sheri S. Tepper

For hilarity, I'd go with Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide series of books if you haven't already read them (super easy read, and very funny)

And for historic fiction...
Heavy on the fiction: Doomsday Book by Connie Willis
Heavy on the history (but way fascinating): The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson

Niki said...

Thanks for the book recs! I finally got around to the Hitchhikers' Guide series while I was in Vanuatu and I enjoyed it very much.

I'll put a couple of those books on my library request list, and keep a couple more in mind for the future :)