A Berkeleian Summer -- Round 2!

HEY, readers! Happy summer! Here, as last year, is a list of projected summer reads. Remember, this list is subject to change at any time, and I don't anticipate finishing all of them (though I'll try to come close). Should you have any further suggestions, please comment!

SHOULD PROBABLY READ FOR COLLEGE

The Elements of Style (Strunk & White)

JUST PURCHASED

1984 (George Orwell)

Labyrinth (Jorge Luis Borges)

The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde)

Little Brother (Cory Doctorow)

It's Kind of a Funny Story (Ned Vizzini)

52, Volume One (Geoff Johns, Grant Morrison, Greg Rucka, Mark Waid, & Keith Giffen)

ON MY SHELF

The Fellowship of the Ring (J.R.R. Tolkien)

Dragonhaven (Robbin McKinley)

Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)

The Hunger Games (Suzanne Collins)

Taken (Edward Bloor)

Speaker for the Dead (Orson Scott Card)

The War of the Worlds (H. G. Wells)

Interworld (Neil Gaiman & Michael Reeves)

The Invention of Hugo Cabret (Brian Selznick)

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Philip K. Dick)

The Perks of Being a Wallflower (Stephen Chbosky)

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (Susanna Clarke)(

The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)

The Pirates! (Gideon Defoe)

The Rule of Four (Ian Caldwell & Dustin Thomason)

Richard III (William Shakespeare)

FROM LOCAL BOOK SALE

Writers of the Western World

The New York Times, Page One

OTHER BOOKS

Henry VI, Part 1 (William Shakespeare)

The Chronicles of Narnia (C. S. Lewis)

Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (Hayao Miyazaki)

The Dark Tower series (Stephen King)

East (Edith Pattou)

House of Leaves (Mark Z. Danielewski)

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (Jane Austen with Seth Grahame-Smith)

Young Avengers, Vol. 2 (Allan Heinburg & Jimmy Cheung)

AND

The Complete Marvel Civil War (Various; over 100 issues)

More madness

I've been sitting here trying to decide which pop culture reference to use for The Knife of Never Letting Go, by Patrick Ness. Is it a post-apocalyptic novel, like The Giver? Is it a Michael Crichton thriller? Is it a journey, like The Lord of the Rings? After all the books I've read, those seemed like some of the most likely options, but I've come to realize it's like none of them. It's something entirely different.

The first work The Knife of Never Letting Go reminds me of is Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass (or Northern Lights, for British readers). Like that novel, Knife is a high-concept one: we open on a world pretty much the same as ours but for one important difference. In The Golden Compass, the difference is the animal soul which accompanies every living human. In The Knife of Never Letting Go, however, it is that everyone can hear everyone else's thoughts, all of the time -- and thus, humans are "Chaos Walking" (also the title of the trilogy which this tome opens).

Erm, actually, there are some exceptions. But never mind -- we always hear what's on the mind of the main character. First-person narratives are not a new thing; they were pioneered by Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and by other epistolary novels. However, more effectively than in any other book I've read, Patrick Ness manages to get inside the head of Todd, the main character. My thoughts and concerns were often Todd's own. In scenes of horror, sickness, and death, these techniques are exceptionally good.

Of course, everyone else hears what's on Todd's mind, also, which brings me to the second work The Knife of Never Letting Go reminds me of: The Invention of Lying, a movie written and directed by Ricky Gervais and Matthew Robinson. In that film, each character was a compulsive truth-teller (before the protagonist discovered the ability to say an untruth). However, I never quite believed the openness of that world as well as I did this one. That may partially be due to the fact that here, the compulsive mind-talkers have sometimes spent years covering up things they don't want revealed about themselves through their thoughts. It may also help that the mind-talkers are given a foil: women do not have the condition. Therefore, once Todd leaves his home of Prentisstown, he meets people whom he can't read -- and thus we have conflict and intrigue in a book whose very gimmick is transparency.

I should mention that this book had some of the most obvious Meaningful Names in all of literature. Todd comes from Prentisstown, or "Apprentice Town", where boys are made into men. He and his counterpart, Viola, head to a city called Haven for respite from their pursuers. The climax, in which one character is tempted to bite a metaphorical apple, takes place at The Falls. It was like hitting the reader over the head with an anvil.

Another problem: sometimes Todd had to describe the scenery, and he wasn't very good at it. No, that's not right. Patrick Ness wasn't very good at it. There are ways that people notice things, I think, and Ness could have done a better job at it. The pictures were not picturesque.

But that's nitpicking. This is the most thrilling book I've read since Under the Dome at the beginning of the year. It's also got some of the best character development. Boy growing to man -- humble town becoming much more sinister -- enigma growing transparent. The book is action-packed, and touching, and finishes with a killer twist ending. It may also be the closest I've ever come to crying while reading -- the book is that good at getting you to relate to the main characters.

By all means pick this up, along with the sequels. (The Ask and the Answer is released in the US now, and Monsters of Men will follow soon.) I suspect that, like The Aldous Lexicon, these are meant to be read as three parts of a whole. Here's hoping that the next ones are this brilliant.

Madness?! This is... no, wait, I guess it actually IS madness.

If communists want two works of literature that demonstrate the positive qualities of the society they advocate, they need look no further than the two books I read most recently: Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley, and "Lycurgus" from Plutarch's The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans.

Also, if a literature or philosophy teacher wanted to point out the immortality of human ideas, s/he might look at these two works. It's uncanny how similar they are, even though one was written within the first two centuries A.D., and the other was written a mere eighty years ago. Also, one is a history and the other is a hypothetical dystopian (utopian?) future.

Plutarch's "Lycurgus" is a sixteen-page, small-print summary of the life of the man who made Sparta what it was famous for: a perfected military state, a force to be reckoned with in the ancient days. After delving briefly into Lycurgus's background, Plutarch talks about how the man ruled Sparta and its people. There are the ordinances put in place, and then there are small anecdotes that demonstrate their value, and the sayings by the ancient Spartans, and the analyses of the differences in details of other historians' accounts of Lycurgus's life. It's a pretty varied account, and also a fairly interesting one, as histories go.

On the other hand, we have Brave New World. I'll put this out front: it's by far the best dystopian novel I've read since Fahrenheit 451. It's not as good as that one, because it peters out at the end (though that could have been due to the fact that I was hurrying to get through it, without savoring it as much as I did earlier chapters). In this novel, biological engineering has become commonplace in the conception and development of human beings. Everyone is conditioned from birth to enjoy being part of a certain social rung -- and there's no room left for error, so the creative stuff like books and religion have been banned. (Not, that is, that the civilians would enjoy doing such things if they encountered them.) As a replacement, humans are compelled to give in to any sexual desire they have, at any time; the consequence of having a baby has been eliminated through the means of birth control, and because the new conception methods eliminate the requirement of human reproduction to go through the sexual organs.

It's a mouthful, but that's the basic premise. The first few chapters set up the world, the next few bring some characters strictly out of their comfort zone into the savage lands (previously Nevada), and the last few detail the fallout when they return. Like The Golden Compass, the success here lies in the details provided in each scene which teach the reader about the world they've stumbled upon.

Meanwhile, "Lycurgus" is much more chronological and procedural. The biography is mostly chronological, but most of the middle talks about the development of children, also emphasized in Brave New World. And of course, Plutarch continually relates the state to the leader, whereas the identity and sentiments of the leader of Brave New World are largely a secret out of necessity to the society and to the story.

As I said, reading these two works back-to-back makes one think about the immortality of ideas. Could this really be the picture of a "perfect" society? Plutarch gushes over the accomplishments of Lycurgus, but Huxley isn't so keen on the utopia he presents. The French quote at the beginning of the novel surmises of a day when humans turn away from utopias and prepare to live in the imperfect yet much more alive present. Whatever the case, both pieces are superb visions of a society quite unlike ours.