A Brave New Book

Yes, as someone with an English degree, I am not very proud of the fact that I have not read a lot of classic literature.  In fact, when I read the top 100 classics everyone should read, I do not think I even get to 20 that I actually have read.  But, this past year, I have vowed to change that and started today with A Brave New World by Aldous Huxley.  When first recommended to me, I thought the book sounded a lot like one of my favorite books, We by Yevgeny Zamyatin.  After doing some research, I came to find that some authors actually believe that Zamyatin's book was what inspired Huxley.  But onto my thoughts.

The reader inside of me that reads for pleasure, wanted to stop the book in the first few pages.  When I come across a word that I don't know, I have to stop and look it up.  Needless to say, if you have read the book before, you'll understand what I mean when I say that it took me a fair amount of time to even get through the first chapter because of how much time I spent in the dictionary.  But after I got through the first hump of all the medical jargon, and into the dialogue and plot, it started getting easier.

Then I hit the next obstacle, which was a series of stream of consciousness writing.  Now, though I have not read a lot of classic novels, I have read some Faulkner and some Joyce, so stream of consciousness is not new to me.  This however, was the easiest it has been.  I thoroughly enjoyed that though Huxley jumped from place to place sometimes even in the middle of his sentence, the changes were distinguishable because of the break in the paragraph (Perhaps this was available only in my edition of the book, but I appreciated it) and he kept it simple by jumping in between three different scenes.

I thoroughly enjoyed the description Huxley used in the novel.  While he used some complex and sometimes hard to understand comparisons, it tied well into the book because it was about a society that was as simple and it was complex, and conventional comparisons would not have applied.

The plot was somewhat predictable, but reading a novel that was written in the 1930's, in 2012, may have something to do with that.  Because it was a classic, it has undoubtedly inspired many writers to revisit the idea of a dystopia. Also, with the way the world is today, one can't really blame writers for imagining brain-washed individuals blindly following the government and not really knowing the truth or what free will is.

Overall, I enjoyed reading the book, for pleasure, and for what it has to offer on a literary level.  I am looking forward to writing a paper, or a few, on certain aspects such as Freud's presence in the novel, the government's influence in the civilized society and how it compares to government structures today, or how the behaviors we find taboo now are considered normal in the novel's civilized society, and what we consider normal was considered taboo and what Huxley was trying to say.

All in all, I admire Huxley for writing with such an innovative perspective of the time, for using a lot of texture with quoting multiple other literary greats in his own book, and for creating another great book that I got lost in.