Post #1

IB Junior English! How exciting!

My favorite out of the three books from the summer reading was Brave New World.  Whenever I read the word savage my brain jumped to Pocahontas and it made the reading experience a lot more enjoyable!  I did find it strange that everyone "belonged" to everyone else and that children were brainwashed in their sleep, but hey, it wouldn't be dystopian without a few issues here and there.

I don't know what was going on in the world when Brave New World was written or the types of drugs that were available during that time period.  It seemed to me that Soma would be the equivalent of today's hallucinogens that people take to escape from their problems.  Soma meant different things to different characters.  The savage's mother (her name escapes me) was dependent on it, while the people who were integrated into the dystopian society presented in the novel saw taking the drug as a leisure activity.

My least favorite book was The Stranger.  I thought the writing style was dry, overly simplistic, and boring to read.  The style the author chose probably meant something, but I was much too bored to pay a lot of attention to it.  I know the book was originally published in French, and I wonder if some of the richness of the novel was lost in translation.  I'm guessing not, because French isn't that hard to translate.

The narrator of The Stranger bothered me because he just didn't care about anything.  He may have loved his mother, but it didn't matter.  He only wanted to get married if Marie wanted to, but it didn't really matter to him.  He completely disreguarded, in my opinion, one of the biggest parts of the human experience: emotion.  Not to say that the author did that, he made up for Frenchie's lack of zeal by using colors and things like that.  That part of the book was one of the few I enjoyed, which is why I'm doing my IOP on it!

If I were to write an essay on Eyes, I think I would choose to focus on the motif of nature throughout the novel.  Several important events in the novel were brought about through natural means, such as the huge symbolic hurricane, Teacake getting rabies, ect.  Nature is often idealized as perfect and harmless, and I feel like Janie's changing view of it is an important part of her characterization.