03/22/2012

Pastor wrote a good blog entry I think on the Trayvon Martin situation. I was happy to read it: Link

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Unrelated:

I’m sick of hearing about the hunger games. K…

They’re doing a live shot on the news and the people lined up for it look kind of like the Twilight crowd, but with a few men sprinkled in.

Ha – see, I generally get annoyed with whatever is popular in books… the Cheeto lit.. but dystopian stuff is some of my favorite. I could read 1984 again every year and still love it.

I think definitely that’s my favorite work of fiction. I remember reading that book and it was like I was gorging myself, embarrassing myself in gluttony trying to devour its pages.

I think why it was so amazing to me, why dystopian fiction is so amazing to me, is that these books create not just a story but an entire world. It was a whole world for your mind to play in, and the book 1984 was just a tiny part of this world. Winston Smith, Ingsoc, newspeak – they were just a few pebbles in this world.

You read through 1984 thinking about what your station in this world might be, if you would be one of these cogs who becomes a dissident. There’s a love story in the book that is very, very effective even for someone who doesn’t typically care for romantic fiction. I felt it, you know?

There are major things in the book that are ambiguous or up to you to interpret. I won’t spoil anything, but there is a person in the book who is supposedly the opposition leader – it’s ambiguous whether he’s even real. You think about it over and over as things happen in the book, what is real?

You have to read that if you haven’t. I’ll buy you a copy of it if you promise to read it. Ha. You can love it without even extrapolating things from modern politics onto it. But I do feel the world is currently in desperate need of dystopian fiction.

There is so much in the world there that Orwell constructed, and dystopian fiction is so perfect for that. Vonnegut wrote a pretty accessible one called Player Piano, if you are interested in these.

I enjoyed Brave New World, not as much as 1984, but for the same reasons – the world.

How can people eat up these lame teenage romance novels when there are things out there that stimulate the mind like this? There’s no lame shiny emo vampire world. It’s like a playground for your mind versus giving it an entire planet.

Anyway, all of this started with me and my ‘get off my lawn’ thing with the hunger games. haha.

I’ll wait for Netflix.