Basil Hallward sees Dorian Gray as his true inspiration as a painter, and the story begins with him finishing a portrait of the young man. During this same afternoon, Basil introduces Dorian to his friend Henry Wotton, a true dandy who swears by a hedonistic lifestyle, wherein the only real pursuits in life should be feeding the senses. Dorian is young and incredibly pliable, and Henry convinces him that beauty is what matters in life and to cherish what he has while he has it.

Always! That is a dreadful word. It makes me shudder when I hear it. Women are so fond of using it. They spoil every romance by trying to make it last for ever. It is a meaningless word, too. The only difference between a caprice and a lifelong passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer.

Dorian, immediately influenced by Henry’s outlook on life, finds himself distraught with the idea of someday losing his looks, and upon seeing his newly painted portrait, wishes offhandedly that he could sell his soul and have the painting grow old instead of him. And that’s exactly what happens. He spends his life acting selfish and petty, and the the portrait grows older and more horrid in his place.

He doesn’t just age gracefully and keep his looks, he actually doesn’t age at all. At 40 he still looks 20. This is brought up briefly when he tricks someone by pretending to be a young man, but I feel like those around him his entire life would be less oooh, how beautiful you still are and more aaaah, get away freakish manchild, but maybe that’s just me.

That is the reason I hate vulgar realism in literature. The man who could call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one. It is the only thing he is fit for.

Dorian Gray both glorifies hedonism, something it was widely criticized for when first published, and shows us its pitfalls. The picture may give Dorian leave to do as he wishes, but the shame of the image drives him deeper and deeper into his frantic vanity. It’s also a novel about influence, and how those around us can inspire, in the case of Dorian’s initial influence on Basil, or ruin us, in the case of Henry’s influence on Dorian.

I came into this expecting to love it, and I was a little disappointed overall. I found the dialogue heavy bits of this book incredible – I loved every scene in which Henry spoke – but the description heavy bits, especially a couple of chapters mid-way through, were very dull to me. I still really enjoyed this, though, and it makes me think I’ll love his plays.

I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects. A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies. I have not got one who is a fool. They are all men of some intellectual power, and consequently they all appreciate me. Is that very vain of me? I think it is rather vain.

This book was brought forward as evidence against Oscar Wilde’s character when he was charged with sodomy and sentenced to two years of hard labour. He was released impoverished and in poor health, and he wandered about Europe for a couple years before his death in 1900.

With all the hype surrounding the film adaptation of The Hunger Games, I broke down and decided to read it. I was a little worried I was getting myself into the next Twilight, but I’m glad I picked it up.

Set in a post-apocalyptic alternative (or is it??….it is) future of our world, a new country of Panem is under rule by a totalitarian government. This government occupies the central capital, whose technology is so advanced as to seem alien to us, and the twelve surrounding districts live in squalor. Seventy-five years ago the districts rose up against the capital in revolt and were crushed, and since then as a punishment and a reminder, they’re forced annually to participate in The Hunger Games.

Each year a male and a female child between the ages of 12 and 18 are chosen in a lottery from each district to participate in the games. Each year a child is within the eligible age, an entry is put in the lottery for them, and every entry stays until they enter the games or reach the age of 19. So a child of 12 will have one entry in the lottery, and a kid of 18 will have 7 entries. The kids can also put extra entries in each year, each entry earning them enough grain to (barely) feed a family member for the year. So a child trying to help support a family of 4 could have 35 entries when he’s 18. This makes it much more likely for the poor to be chosen.

The story is from the view of Katniss Everdeen, a 16-year-old girl from District 12. She’s poor and has to feed her family by illegally poaching in the woods outside the approved boundary, and as a result she’s grown strong and independent, which makes her a formidable foe and a trustworthy ally when she finds herself in the games.

It’s a fun look at a warped future of reality television, complete with how they work behind the scenes to give false impressions to the audience. The story moves along very quickly, and Collins does a great job of building suspense and making you care about the characters. Some of it did feel predictable, but there were a few moments that took me by surprise.

A lot of people seem to be focused on stating how derivative this story is, which gets on my nerves a little. I’ve only read the first of the series, but a story is not Nineteen Eighty-Four because it has a totalitarian government, it’s not The Running Man because it has a televised reality contest in which people die, and it’s probably not Battle Royale because the government is forcing a group of kids to fight to the death, although to be fair I haven’t actually read or seen that yet. I am willing to guess that while the main device of the books are similar, the tone and the characters and the message and how the plot moves along is likely sufficiently different.

I remember an English instructor once saying that if you gave a class of students a basic frame of a story and asked them all to write a novella around that, you’d end up with a different story from each student, and I think that’s true. I don’t think it’s wrong to bring up parallels and discuss them, but when people start drawing conclusions and making accusations based on (often superficial) similarities it comes across as a hipster trying to be clever. Art inspires more art, and coincidences happen, and neither are wrong. Take a deep breath and think of is as a type of parallel or convergent evolution if that helps.

Anyway, enough with the ranting. I really enjoyed this. It’s essentially every daydream I had between the ages of six and fifteen packed into a novel, so it was quite fun to read through that. I’ve heard the series goes a bit downhill from here, but I’ll likely take the chance and pick up Catching Fire sometime soon.

The story is framed by a group of men sitting in a boat on the River Thames, listening to Charles Marlow tell a story from his past. Our narrator is actually one of the unnamed men on the boat, but almost the entire novella is Marlowe telling his story.

It’s a story of his time captaining a steamboat on the Congo River. I’m not sure they mention that he’s in The Congo Free State, as it was then called, but I knew this going in. When he first arrives, he stops briefly at a trading station and returns to find his boat sunk, possibly due to sabotage. He spends a few months repairing it, and during this time he learns about Mr. Kurtz, a man both hated a revered in the station – revered for his skill at acquiring ivory and hated for fear he’ll take over their manager’s position and for rumours that he’s gone rogue.

They had behind them, to my mind, the terrific suggestiveness of words heard in dreams, of phrases spoken in nightmares.

There are also rumours that Kurtz is seriously ill, so after Marlowe repairs his boat, he takes a small company of men and a crew of native cannibals up the river and into the heart of the jungle’s darkness, only to discover the heart of man’s darkness.

Every time I try to keep the meat of the story vague I end up sounding a bit like a tool. Oh well.

Why frame the story with the men sitting on the boat? I think it’s to keep us out of Marlowe’s head, to allow us to hear him struggle with interpreting his feelings. We feel like we’re sitting on that boat, letting someone work through a story they desperately need to tell.

I love novels about people exploring new lands and encountering new cultures. The depiction of the Congolese felt a wee bit Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, but if you write that off as an unfortunate artifact of the time, it’s an exciting old travelogue with a lot to say, bringing up questions and letting you answer yourself.

The language in this is wonderful, but dense at times – particularly when he’s struggling with the imposing silence and darkness of the jungle. I probably listened to the entire second part of this twice, because I kept getting distracted. It would’ve been a great audiobook for a flight or bus ride, somewhere you wouldn’t feel guilty about just sitting there listening.

Kenneth Branagh was an amazing narrator. There was really no doubt that he would be great, but he really lived up to my expectations. I checked on Audible, and he also narrates a Graham Greene novel and a collection of Chekhov stories, so I’ll eventually make my way to those. I don’t know if I would have enjoyed this as much without his performance.

This is my first Piers Anthony novel. My dad was a big fan of him when I was growing up, and I always saw his books lying around the house. Curiosity got the best of me, and I thought I’d start with his most famous.

Zane is a would-be photographer who has fallen on rough times. The story begins with him in an enchantments store looking for something that will change his life for the better, even though he can barely afford food. It’s an interesting scene, and does a good job of introducing the world. On A Pale Horse is set in what looks like modern earth, at least modern for the time, but magic and mythical beings have become a mundane part of life. There are cars but also magic carpets, photographers but also magicians – magic has been integrated into this society in much the same way technology has been integrated into ours.

His times fall even harder, and he eventually decides to off himself. In his apartment, while pulling a gun up to his head, Death walks in. His early arrival startles Zane and Death ends up accidentally taking the bullet. If you kill Death, you become Death, and so Zane take on the position.

He’s still mortal, and can still be killed, but Death’s accoutrements give him the special powers with which to perform his new job. The cloak protects against harm, and the shoes let him walk on water. He also has several pieces of jewellery that have been imbued with enchantments: an earing, a bracelet with a few gems on it, and a watch. He basically becomes the pimpest Grim Reaper you’re likely to see.

Most of the newly deceased travel to heaven or hell on their own, but those with a balance of good and evil in their soul need to be collected and sorted out individually, which is where Zane and his new magical bling come in. We follow him as he learns how to be Death, and over this time a conspiracy is revealed. We find that it might not have been blind luck that landed him this position.

The premise of this novel highlights what I love about the fantasy genre – being able to personify abstract ideas, for example, and play with the physics of a world allows us to really examine and challenge our regular lives without inhibition. This genre has a unique ability to pull this sort of feat off in a way that’s often underappreciated (and to be fair, often underutilized). Telling lies to reveal truth, as they say. Piers Anthony spends a lot of this novel building up scenarios that are designed to examine difficult to answer questions.

The problem lies in the execution, I think. I really could not get over his style of writing. The dialogue in particular, to me, felt so wooden. Some of it was almost as if he was trying to mimic witty Oscar Wilde dialogue and failing miserably at it, and some of it was just plain ol’ bad. Here’s a fun example:

She screamed “Mr. Z! You’re hurt!” She hurried to inspect the corpse, running right past Zane as if not seeing him. “In fact — you’re dead!”

That was not a flippant, comedic scene, or at least it hadn’t come across that way in the lead up. It was a landlord finding the dead body of a tenant. The entire book read like this – clunky and awkward. I dug some of his descriptive use of language, but it really didn’t work for the dialogue. No one speaks like this, no one has ever spoken like this, and I pray that no one will ever speak like this in the future.

I’m glad I read this finally, but it fell a bit flat. I don’t see myself continuing with the series.

What uses are there for cadavers? How have they been acquired over the years? What eventually happens to them? These are the questions that Mary Roach sets out to answer in this surprisingly funny, and often disgusting, book.

We begin with an introduction into how they’re used medically. From anatomy students to a plastic surgery workshop, the cadavers help train our medical professionals so they don’t screw up on the living. I couldn’t help but imagine accidentally walking in on that plastic surgery workshop just before it had started – a large conference room with forty decapitated heads resting on tables. That could be a shock first thing in the morning.

It wasn’t long until I had been lured into a false sense of security. I’m not that squeamish a person, but I don’t do well with bodily fluids or maggots while I’m eating lunch. There were some very specific explanations on what happens to a cadaver as it decomposes. This was at a Body Farm, where they test body decomposition in various environments to get a better understanding for forensic investigation, so it’s very worthwhile science and not gratuitous, but I should have avoided that chapter during lunch.

The chapter on body snatching was quite interesting. Cadavers were, and are, a necessary part of medicine, but in the UK before 1832 only the bodies of executed murderers were legally acceptable to use. There just weren’t enough for the required training in the country, and with no refrigeration to keep the few legal cadavers fresh, they had to look elsewhere. Paying body snatchers to retrieve fresh bodies from the cemetery became surprisingly common. It happened so often that people began to bury their dead in Mortsafes – locked iron cages. It’s an interesting moral situation, needing to steal corpses to help the living.

Roach also describes some controversial experiments around head transplants, such as Vladimir Demikhov creating a two-headed dog and Robert White transplanting a monkey’s head onto another monkey’s body. The bit that got me was when she described the act of feeding the Franken-monkey as a bit of a ‘dirty trick’, since his esophagus hadn’t been attached. It’s quite creepy, but it’s also research that could contribute to human head transplants in the future. Whether that’s an ethical choice, as opposed to harvesting that body’s organs to save multiple people, is another dilemma we may someday have to consider.

Ignoring the lunch I was eating corn chowder and reading about a cadaver’s stomach contents making its way back up the esophagus during decomposition, I enjoyed reading this. It’s a good mix of creepy and interesting. I’m focusing a little on the nasty bits, but it certainly becomes obvious that cadavers are important in training our medical professionals and furthering life-saving research.

But H is different. She has made three sick people well. She has brought them extra time on earth. To be able, as a dead person, to make a gift of this magnitude is phenomenal. Most people don’t manage this sort of thing while they’re alive. Cadavers like H are the dead’s heroes.

It is astounding to me, and achingly sad, that with eighty thousand people on the waiting list for donated hearts and livers and kidneys, with sixteen a day dying there on that list, that more than half of the people in the position H’s family was in will say no, will choose to burn those organs or let them rot. We abide the surgeon’s scalpel to save our own lives, our loved ones’ lives, but not to save a stranger’s life. H has no heart, but heartless is the last thing you’d call her.

If you aren’t already an organ donor, you can likely register online. If you live in British Columbia, you can register at BC Transplant. I know I’d rather save lives after death, whether directly through donation or indirectly through research, instead of wasting away in a box somewhere.

This play is a little fucked up. Lets just make that clear. I’m not sure how it might have been received at the end of the fourteenth century, but I imagine it would raise the eyebrow of any modern reader. It’s politically incorrect in such a hilariously unapologetic way that you almost have to laugh in mild horror.

I’m going to spoil the plot now. I figure anything over five hundred years old is free game.

The play begins with an induction. A drunk named Christopher Sly is found unconscious in the street, and a lord orders his servants to place him in his nicest room for the night. In the morning they’re to dress him in lord’s clothing and offer him a lord’s breakfast, to trick him into believing that he’s just woken up from 15 years of delusion, that his life as Christopher Sly was all in his head. They do this, he believes it, and in the morning they present to him a play – The Taming of the Shrew. A note in the edition I was reading mentioned that this framing device may have had two purposes: it warmed the audience up to cruel humour and, by presenting the The Taming as merely a performance within the play, it takes away some of the sting of the misogyny.

Sly: [...]Ne’er ask me what raiment I’ll wear, for I have no more doublets than backs, no more stockings than legs, nor no more shoes than feet, nay sometime more feet than shoes, or such shoes as my toes look through the over-leather.

It should be noted that this makes Shrew a play within a play within a play. Truly the Inception of the Renaissance.

So, Baptista Minola has two daughters: Bianca and her elder sister Katherine. Bianca is a hottie and Katherine is a complete ho-bag. She’s rude, ties her sister up and hurts her, and is basically a pain in the ass to everyone within shouting or hitting distance. Baptista, for some reason, won’t allow Bianca to marry until Katherine is wed. It’s a bit of a dick move on his part, so that might be a glimpse into where Katherine developed her attitude.

Bianca’s suitors – Hortensio, Gremio and Lucentio – are being cockblocked by this silly rule. Hortensio and Lucentio decide to disguise themselves as tutors so they can woo Bianca behind her father’s back (and also because it’s Wacky Fun).

Hortensio runs into his buddy Petruchio, whose motto with women is the bitchier the better, and sets him up with Katherine. He woos her, in what is the best scene of the play in my opinion, with a witty exchange of banter – every insult she throws his way he graciously endures and returns with a compliment or joke.

Petruchio: Come, come, you wasp, i’faith you are too angry.
Katherine: If I be waspish, best beware my sting.
Petruchio: My remedy is then to pluck it out.
Katherine: Ay, if the fool could find where it lies.
Petruchio: Who knows not where a wasp does wear his sting? In his tail.
Katherine: In his tongue.
Petruchio: Whose tongue?
Katherine: Yours, if you talk of tales, and so farewell.
Petruchio: What, with my tongue in your tail?

He does threaten to cuff her at one point soon after this (warning sign numero uno), in retaliation to her hitting him, but that’s the only time in the play he actually threatens physical violence. They’re both very brash and sure of themselves, so it seems at this point like it’ll be a fun relationship to watch develop. Eventually she submits and they marry. He describes at this point, to Baptista, how he plans for their relationship to work:

Petruchio:
Why, that is nothing. For I tell you, father,
I am as peremptory as she proud-minded;
And where two raging fires meet together,
They do consume the thing that feeds their fury.
Though little fire grows great with little wind,
Yet extreme gusts will blow out fire and all.
So I to her and so she yields to me,
For I am rough and woo not like a babe.

Petruchio and Katherine get married, and he immediately rushes her off to his country home before the reception even begins (warning sign numero due). This is where it gets a bit messed up. He decides to tame her using the same technique that one would use to tame a falcon – he starves her of food and sleep. He dresses her in rags, keeps her hungry, makes sure that whenever she starts to drift off that she’s woken, and continuously threatens and shouts at all of the servants in front of her (using an exaggerated manner, as if to highlight her previous attitude).

Meanwhile, while Petruchio is waterboarding Katherine with love, things are getting sorted at the Minola estate. There’s much confusion over who’s who, but eventually Lucentio comes out on top and wins Bianca’s hand in marriage.

Petruchio and Katherine make their way back for the wedding, and we see Katherine’s final ounce of dignity and indignation fall away. Petruchio refuses to continue on the journey until Katherine declares that the moon is shining in the sky and not the sun. She’s refuses at first, but quickly gives in. Later in the journey Petruchio tells her that a man they meet is actually a woman, and she immediately agrees.

Petruchio: Good Lord, how bright and goodly shines the moon!
Katherine: The moon? The sun! It is not moonlight now.
Petruchio: I say it is the moon that shines so bright.
Katherine: I know it is the sun that shines so bright.
[...]
Petruchio: I say it is the moon.
Katherine: I know it is the moon.
Petruchio: Nay, then you lie. It is the blessèd sun.

The final scene involves Petruchio, Hortensio, and Lucentio betting on whose wife is the best behaved. None of them believe that Petruchio has managed to tame Katherine, so they have a servant call each woman and put 100 crowns down on whoever’s wife is first to arrive. Katherine turns out to be the only wife to actually show, but she eventually fetches the other two herself. When they all arrive, she lets them know how she feels.

A woman moved is like a fountain troubled,
Muddy, ill-seeming, thick, bereft of beauty,
And while it is so, none so dry or thirsty
Will deign to sip or touch one drop of it.
Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper,
Thy head, thy sovereign; one that cares for thee
And for thy maintenance; commits his body
To painful labor both by sea and land,
To watch the night in storms, the day in cold,
Whilst thou li’st warm at home, secure and safe;
And craves no other tribute at thy hands
But love, fair looks, and true obedience–
Too little payment for so great a debt.

This doesn’t come across as sarcastic at all, just the final defeated message from a broken woman. I kept thinking she’d do something hilarious at the end to show a bit of her old fiery self, but no. Play finished! Enjoy the incredibly awkward horse carriage ride home with your loved one now!

A piece of ice. If thou doubt it, thou mayst slide from my shoulder to my heel with no greater a run but my head and my neck. A fire, good Curtis.

I loved getting back into Shakespeare finally. I really enjoyed the language and imagery while reading this, and I have to admit that I did get a kick out of the bizarre plot. It’s a great concept for a horror, I think, but it is a little strange with this ending.

Years ago I read How to be Good and really enjoyed it. I wasn’t enamoured enough to run out and immediately to buy his entire bibliography, but I did mean to eventually get back to him. Better late than never, I figure. I’m extremely glad I finally did, because I ended up loving this.

The premise is simple but genius: four strangers climb to the top of an apartment building in London on New Years Eve with the intention of jumping to their deaths, but when they find each other up there it just kills the whole mood. After some discussion, they climb back down with a pact to not kill themselves until Valentine’s Day. We follow them as they struggle to come to grips with both their lives and their dependency on this newly formed gang of bewildered depressives.

A man who wants to die feels angry and full of life and desperate and bored and exhausted, all at the same time; he wants to fight everyone, and he wants to curl up in a ball and hide in a cupboard somewhere. He wants to say sorry to everyone, and he wants everyone to know just how badly they’ve all let him down.

You wouldn’t think it from the description, but A Long Way Down is actually a lot of fun. It’s a great balance of serious and hilarious. The four point-of-view characters being so different and incompatible with each other, and yet desperately needing each other, results in both great bickering and interesting insights. I wouldn’t actually want to meet any of the characters, but they’re all easy to relate to and endearing in their own ways.

Coming off of As I Lay Dying, I was able to fully appreciate Hornby’s gift for characterization. They were so distinct and interesting that I never found myself rushing through a chapter to get back to my favourite character, which almost always happens in multiple viewpoint novels at some point.

There was something else in the article I read: an interview with a man who’d survived after jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. He said that two seconds after jumping, he realized that there was nothing in his life he couldn’t deal with, no problem he couldn’t solve—apart from the problem he’d just given himself by jumping off the bridge.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to buy his entire bibliography.

I’ve read a few articles here and there of Stephen Fry’s, but this is the first of his actual books, fiction or non-fiction, that I’ve read. Even so, I knew I was going to love it going in, as I’m already a huge fan of his. I’ve spent countless hours watching his comedy, documentaries, and interviews, and I can easily spend an evening listening to him give his opinions on any topic. He uses language in a way that can elevate fart jokes to fine art.

This is his autobiography, covering the first twenty years of his life – from childhood to his acceptance into Cambridge. He strolls through his memories, stopping now and then for a lively rant or informative digression. He’s very open in this, shockingly so at times, and it stayed interesting all the way through. The majority of the book covers fairly typical events, as this was before his life in entertainment – schoolyard trouble and embarrassment, angst over his father, experimenting and discovering his sexuality in his teens, and other such experiences an ordinary kid will have growing up. He manages to recall his childhood with a clarity, an enthusiasm, and an intellect that makes it seem a little more than ordinary.

No adolescent ever wants to be understood, which is why they complain about being misunderstood all the time.

I say these were ordinary experiences, but some, such as attending a boarding school, aren’t ordinary to me, so those events are fun to read about in their own right. Half of my enjoyment of the Harry Potter series was just the idea of going off to a boarding school every year as a kid, so in a way this is like reading about Hogwarts, only with less magic and more gay sex.

At the end of his teenage years, he really begins to struggle. After a failed suicide attempt, a long string of credit card fraud, and months without contact with his family, he found himself in jail. After his release and a change of heart, he just manages to get into the entrance exams for Cambridge and secures his acceptance.

It’s not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathing—they are not all bad. Those devils have been my angels. Without them I would never have disappeared into language, literature, the mind, laughter and all the mad intensities that made and unmade me.

I really enjoyed this, I’m looking forward to reading about the next chunk of his life in The Fry Chronicles, which is sitting on my shelf now. I’m still considering picking up the audio book, though. He’s too good a narrator to pass up.

I tried to read this once before, but I eventually gave up after some confusion. I had the same issues this time around to begin with, but I decided to persevere.

The plot is fairly simple, actually. It’s set in the fictional county of Yoknapatawpha, Mississippi, and it follows the family of newly deceased Addie Bundren as they try to uphold her wish to be buried in the town of Jefferson. Never has a book been so simple and yet so bloody confusing. The plot is straight-forward, and the writing isn’t too hard to follow, especially compared to some other stream-of-consciousness writing, but I’ll be damned if I could figure out who was who for the first half of the book. There are over a dozen viewpoint characters, and a few supporting characters as well, so would it have killed Faulkner to use a few proper nouns once in a while?

He sarcastically claimed to have written this in six weeks and never edited a word of it, though apparently the reality was still a respectable eight weeks, and I’m wondering if my trouble differentiating between characters for the first half of the book was because it took a while for them to each find a unique voice. It’s that or I’m just an idiot, one of the two (don’t let the Nobel Committee sway your decision, it could still be him).

Beyond the initial confusion, I actually grew to really enjoy this. And even when I was having a hard to remembering character relationships (or even gender), the writing was still interesting and touching and at times even quite funny. It’s not a fast-paced novel, but once you get going it flows really well and is fairly easy to read.

He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn’t need a word for that anymore than for pride or fear.

Most of the characters are either despicable or infuriating, sometimes both, even in the case of the dead mother. Most of the family, especially her husband Anse and their son Cash, have a pride and sense of honour that extends well into idiotic and self-destructive. They’re all simple characters, but they do feel surprisingly well-developed near the end of the novel. I especially enjoyed Vardaman, the youngest boy in the family, and how he struggled to understand the death of his mother with both tragic and hilarious results. He ends up relating the situation to that of a fish he had gutted before her death.

My mother is a fish.

Near the end, there’s a chapter from the point of view of a character that’s gone mad. It’s written in third-person as if he’s watching himself and trying to understand why he’s acting in such a way. I’ve read quite a few novels with multiple viewpoints, and I thought that was a really interesting idea that I don’t remember seeing before.

Halfway in, I was thinking that once I’d finished this book I was done with Faulkner forever, but now I’m thinking I might try once more. Maybe it just took me a while to figure him out.

This novel has haunted me since high school. Even if I didn’t tend to bother with homework, I still always enjoyed my assigned readings, but for some reason I managed to only read half of this. I’ve been meaning to return to it for over a decade now, and I’m very glad I finally did. I have the 2012 Back to the Classics Challenge to thank for the extra push!

I loved this a lot more than I thought I would. I knew I’d enjoy it, and it would be good for me to read, but I didn’t think I’d get as wrapped up in the story and as invested in the characters as I did. That was likely helped quite a bit by Samuel West’s narration. He narrated The Day of the Triffids as well, which I loved, so I jumped at this recording when I saw it.

It’s the year 1984 and Winston Smith is living his tired, dreadful life in London, which is now in a ruined state after nuclear war. In this alternative future, what’s left of London is now in Airstrip One, a region of Oceania. The area is governed under a totalitarian IngSoc (English Socialism) government. Through constant surveillance, perpetual war, manipulating mob mentality, and the steady altering of language and history, the Party utterly controls the citizens of Oceania.

The novel begins with Winston Smith committing thoughtcrime by writing negatively about the Party in a journal. The very act of purchasing a journal could be seen as thoughtcrime, let alone writing in it, and this embarks him on an inevitable path further and further into rebellion.

Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.

So many of the ideas from Nineteen Eighty-Four are prevalent in our daily culture that it almost seems silly to recount them here, Big Brother and the Thought Police in particular. The underlying warning of allowing ourselves to be monitored and oppressed by the government is well know, but there was still a lot to gain from reading this again. I was especially interested in the way he used the manipulation of language and history as a tool to oppress.

If someone is vapourized (disappearing from society after committing a crime), they are wiped from history as well. Old newspapers are altered, removing any reference to him or her, so those committed thoughtcrimes no longer exist. It’s as if they’d never happened and subsequently are unable to stay in culture and possibly affect future generations.

It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.

Language is also being altered. Newspeak is still in the midst of being developed and absorbed into the culture, and the Party continually removes words and meanings with the hope of eventually wiping out people’s ability to express or even think certain concepts. Future generations, raised only on Newspeak and without any knowledge of Oldspeak, wouldn’t just be denied the vocabulary to express rebellion; they wouldn’t even be equipped to understand the concept of it. Knowledge and language are powerful tools, and to have those tools taken away (or to let those tools waste away) would leave us defenseless.

Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten.

I was a naive lad in high school, and I remember thinking how far-stretched this all was. Surely no society would ever allow this to happen? This time around, it all felt a little too possible. Just look at North Korea for a clear example of Nineteen Eighty-Four in action. The North Koreans weeping for Kim Jong-il is like watching Oceania’s daily Two Minutes Hate. Force people to show that emotion and you’ll eventually brainwash them into believing it.

I’m glad I revisited this. Even without the message and its cultural impact, I just really enjoyed the story, the characters, and the writing.

It was that her waist had grown thicker, and, in a surprising way, had stiffened. He remembered how once, after the explosion of a rocket bomb, he had helped to drag a corpse out of some ruins, and had been astonished not only by the incredible weight of the thing, but by its rigidity and awkwardness to handle, which made it seem more like stone than flesh. Her body felt like that. It occurred to him that the texture of her skin would be quite different from what it had once been.