Society For Displaced Glitchen of a Literary Persuasion discussion

Given that we're starting this month late, how about we aim for finishing reading by 7th Feb?

I'll be starting BNW in a day or two... 30 pages from the end of The Casual Vacancy at the moment (which eventually got fairly interesting).

I'm in. Will finish by 2/7.

I've started it also!

just have to pick up the book at the library!

I'll be picking it up at the library on Thursday.

OK, all read. Anyone have ideas about how we'd "discuss" here? I've never been part of an online book discussion group before!
--ER.

I'll start with a suggestion that works for a local book club I'm in as a convo starter. (1) Did ya finish the book, and (2) did you like it, dislike it? (Or something else -- it's not necessarily a binary.)

I finished it this past weekend. I have mixed reactions.

The good: I was surprised at how some aspects of the story were very modern, considering it's 80 years old. The idea of placating the masses with lowbrow entertainment and drugs is very 'reality TV', isn't it? The cynic's view of a society and government that's entirely devoted to getting people to spend and consume as much as possible also feels very familar.

The bad: At points the narrative lapses into lecturing. Cory Doctorow has this tendency too, I think. It feels like when you put too much paper into a shredder at once. You're going along and then...whurrm... chug..chug..chug...

Laura, I have the feeling we had very similar reactions! To prove my point, here's the review of the book that I posted this morning, along with the 2 stars I gave it:
- - - - - - - - - - - -
I was certain I'd read this book in my far past when I was exploring dystopias, but it came across as unfamiliar to me. I found the first 7/8 of the book engaging and troubling, as they were meant to be, but found the final few chapters highly ineffective. For some reason, Huxley changed his style and decided to use the long conversation between Mustapha Mond and John as a bully pulpit where he could pontificate on the morals of society without having to write anything more subtle. It was a long, drawn-out "tell, not show", shouting the meaning of the entire book to that point as if his readers were of far less than Alpha intelligence. I was not surprised by the ending, but I felt it was thrust upon us too abruptly. Perhaps he was rushed into publishing?

While I found so much of this book chilling, especially having been written over 80 years ago and predicting so many nuances of 21st century "civilized" life, I found it ultimately disappointing. With a different approach to the last section of the book, I might have found it more satisfying.

I've not finished yet so *putting my fingers in my ears for now* :-) - I'll weigh in in a couple of days when I've finished.

My first thoughts for the discussion (and I've never been part of anything like this before either) was to create a new folder for each book & then people can create their own threads in there to discuss whatever points they want. But given that there's only a dozen of us, maybe that's overkill & we should just keep one folder for all the books. Feel free to start new threads but put the month or the book initials on the front of the subject so we can keep things straight. That sound good?

Sounds good. Never have done an online discussion like this before either!

Jon, I think that will work well!

ER, yes, we are thinking along the same lines! :)

I finished & am still thinking about what I read.... so jumping in here (Is there any live chat feature of Goodreads where we could all meet at a certain time and have a real-time chat? Not sure if anyone is interested in that, but it may be nice.)

I thought the concepts of the book were interesting, but didn't care for the style too much. I thought the ideas of the future were clever, efficient and - disturbing to think of how government could overcome and take over society so thoroughly.

It was amusing that consumption & waste were encouraged compared to how we view things like that now - that they would be the downfall of our environment (Pixar's Wall-E).

The characters made me uncomfortable - with everyone "unemotional". I didn't feel for the them, thought they were childish, even though everyone was a victim of their conditioning & society - I still didn't have sympathy & couldn't relate to them. Even the loneliness of Helmholtz & Bernard - I didn't have compassion for them. Lenina was always ill-at-ease, the conditioning not really satisfying her & I found it annoying - really? if there was that much discord in Alpha minds, I'm surprised things had progressed as far as they did. Actually, it's a bit contradictory -- this is a self-absorbed, conflicted group in a world where everyone was supposed to be meaningless, and the whole society was more important than the individual. (I keep thinking that a sequel to this book would be an Alpha uprising since they all seemed so dissatisfied.)

The only character I felt for was John with his sadness and loneliness.

At the end - I think the mockery and obsession people suddenly had for John was their way of searching for extreme emotions. The one unique thing that didn't fit into all their perfect plans exploded into something everyone wanted to experience. (Sounds like reality tv). But didn't end well for John. A message to readers to conform? Or how ugly uniform happiness could be?

I found it quite a tedious book to get through. It felt, overall, as though Huxley was putting too much energy into lecturing about his ideas and less energy into actually telling an interesting story. Maybe serious writing is like that!

There's obvious parallels with 1984 - in both books technology was used to enslave and control the population, but in very different ways. You could say that we have both today - the elements of Brave New World with wall-to-wall reality TV and a consumption-led society to keep us happy & quiet vs the 1984 elements of CCTV on every corner and government spin-doctoring to keep us controlled. It's quite amazing to see how much we take for granted today that was totally way-out prediction back in the 30s & 40s when those two books were written.

There were plenty of neat touches though. I liked the idea of embracing technology & production to the level that Henry Ford is raised to god-like status... resetting the calendar from the date of the Model T & turning all the crosses into Ts.

Diane - I liked your comment about "tell, not show"... I definitely felt that. Too often Huxley would lapse into a character lecturing someone about how things should be rather than letting it come out naturally in a story line.

Tammy - that's an interesting point about "who do you sympathize with?". In a society where the individual is supposed to be unimportant, have no meaningful attachments and being generally replaceable, I guess it's in keeping that we don't really feel attached to any of them!

Since I didn't enjoy this book completely, I read it like a school assignment. Took notes, kept ideas in my mind to discuss. I hope the next book is more enjoyable!

Haha - too right Tammy... it felt like a school English assignment.

For a lot of people I think it probably was at some point. I don't think I ever read it at school, but it DID seem familiar as I worked through it. I had a voracious reading phase about ten years ago (got my first PDA & could read every time I had 30 seconds of free time) so think I probably read it around then.

But it's one of those books that gets referenced ALL the time, so I think it's nice to know what it is that's being referenced.

Howl's Moving Castle is a lot more fun to read :-)

English Assignment. Too right. The first time I read it, it was a high school English assignment, and was immediately followed by 1984. They are a pair, despite the years between publication.
I didn't particularly like Brave New World the first time I read it and I thought his vision of a world controlled through distraction was ridiculous. Huxley saw much clearer than my adolescent hubris. Orwell was always rated higher than Huxley as a writer, for the reasons already outlined here. Huxley is more prophet than writer, and couldn't restrain his overwhelming need to preach.
Despite this, I'd still put both books on any required reading list because after the wars, the future looked much bleaker- a world in which individual rights are subjugated to the common good as defined by elusive hidden power. These are cautionary tales, often referenced without actual knowledge on the content.
In the late 70s I thought both Brave New World and 1984 were outdated and wrong. I'm not so sure anymore.

At some point, I'd like to read something else by Huxley - see how much of what I didn't enjoy was his writing style & how much was just this book.

The years between this & 1984 neatly wrap WWII. You can see some lessons from that in 1984... the Wikipedia page for 1984 has some great examples - drawn from the Soviets, the Nazis and general "life in wartime": the redefinition of language and history to suit the leadership's current position, the continual state of war with the redefining of enemies and allies (definitely seen that in the last decade or two!).

You're right Asta - I think people often say "wow, that's so Brave New World" about something without knowing the source material. It's nice to actually know what's behind it.