Wes’s Life

Let me first throw out the fact that I absolutely love books about Utopias and Dystopias. I was intro­duced to them during high school as required read­ing. I loved Fahren­heit 451, thor­ougly enjoyed The Giver and I need to re-​read Brave New World (I didn’t read it as well as I should have). It surpised me that I had never heard of Ayn Rand until recently. So when I stum­bled upon it at the book­store and read the back cover I imme­di­ately picked it up.

First off, this book is short; some­thing around 100 pages short. The book I pur­chased appar­ently had the Eng­lish ver­sion, which she revised for Amer­i­can audi­ences, in the back with her revi­sions scratched in with a pen. This didn’t really entice me, I just thought the book was longer. I man­aged to finish this book in about three hours or so (with a nap in the middle some­where). I can tell you that the first chap­ter is con­fus­ing until you “get it.” After that, the book goes very fast. I’d rather not say to much, but it fol­lows the typ­i­cal sto­ry­line of real­iza­tion, prob­lem, solu­tion, sat­is­fac­tion.

I liked it a lot, but I’m prob­a­bly pre­dis­posed to liking this kind of book, with all of the other Utopia/Distopia books that I have read and enjoyed before. If you need a brief intro­duc­tion to the world of Utopias, def­i­nitely pick it up.

I started read­ing 1984 by George Orwell a few days ago and I am about halfway through and I have found some quotes worth keep­ing.

“Then for three dread­ful days she did not appear at all. His whole mind and body seemed to be afflicted with an unbear­able sen­si­tiv­ity, a sort of trans­parency, which made every move­ment, ever sound, every con­tact, every word that he had to speak or listen to, an agony. Even in his sleep he could not alto­gether escape her image.”

“If there was any relief, it was in his work, in which he could some­times forget him­self for ten min­utes at a stretch.”

“It could not have been ten sec­onds, and yet it seemed a long time that their hands were clasped together.”

I recently fin­ished When Will Jesus Bring the Pork chops? by George Carlin. While there are some great parts which deal almost exclu­sively with polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness, the major­ity of the book seemed below my sub­stan­dard col­lege humor. It almost seemed as if Carlin started to get tired of writ­ing so he just slapped some­thing down on paper and his editor didn’t care. If you like Carlin and haven’t read any of his books, I highly rec­om­mend Brain Drop­pings, def­i­nitely his best book. I haven’t tried Napalm and Silly Putty, but a friend of mine told me it was a good book.

Any­ways, my next book will be A Game of Thrones by George RR Martin.