#Reading log
2025-01-22: It’s always interesting going back to a book a long time after the first read. It feels like the book has changed, but mostly it’s me. I remember clearly how I was in Edinburgh last time I read it. It feels much shorter now, more compact. First is the section of the walkthrough of the hatcheries, how the director explains to all the students how they raise the perfect specimen of human beings. Then it’s about getting to know a few of the individuals living in this world. And how Bernard Marx is unsettled by his lack of freedom. He starts feeling anxious about sharing everything in an open world. He wants privacy. Then on a trip to the jungle he finds the savage and brings him back to the “modern” world. Towards the end it culminates in a couple of dialogues between the World Controller Mustapha Mond and John The Savage.
2016-02-29: There’s been two books on my reading list for years. 📚 Brave New World and 📚 1984. Two classics covering the same theme that I never got around to read. This weekend as I was on a trip to Edinburgh I finally decided to open this one up. Huxley‘s 📚 Island is one of my favorite books and I think that is a reason why I haven’t read this until now. 📚 Island was Huxley’s utopia, his answer to the dystopian 📚 Brave New World. I was not sure I would get anything out of this. But I was of course, very wrong. What Huxley depicts in this book is that humans would be enslaved by their own comfort. That a totalitarian state would use pleasure as a forcing rule. People aren’t born anymore but instead “hatched” and conditioned from the very start by thought patterns conducted by the state. People think what the state wants them to think. And if anything goes wrong or anyone starts acting too “free minded”, there is always soma, a drug that comfortably takes away all your anxieties without the slightest side effect. It’s a very interesting topic in today’s society where I can draw a lot of parallels to the comfortable life of some of the characters in the book. I’m thrilled to pick up 📚 1984 next. It’s going to be a complete different view of the totalitarian state.