I feel as though my reading preferences have become notoriously predictable here on my blog thanks to my Read or Rid series. If you haven’t figured it out yet, my reading genre preferences tend to be fantasy, historical fiction and, as of late, classics. I’ve always stated that I would like to read more literary classics, so a few months ago I decided to make this claim a reality and started exploring well-known and influential texts. The most recent classic I’ve read is Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, which was published in 1932.
I was aware that this text is a classic, but in typical Lauren fashion, I didn’t allow myself to read too much about it prior to starting to read it. I do this intentionally when it comes to classics to prevent myself from deciding I won’t like a book based on its synopsis before reading it, and also to broaden my reading materials.
Brave New World reminds me quite a bit of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four in terms of its dystopian setting and a government system possessing far too much control over the public. Here is its synopsis, from goodreads.com:
“Brave New World is a dystopian social science fiction novel by English author Aldous Huxley. Largely set in a futuristic World State, whose citizens are environmentally engineered into an intelligence-based social hierarchy, the novel anticipates huge scientific advancements in reproductive technology, sleep-learning, psychological manipulation and classical conditioning that are combined to make a dystopian society which is challenged by only a single individual: the story’s protagonist.”
This book is considered to be science fiction, a genre I do not typically enjoy. I didn’t love this book, but I think that’s the point – Huxley offers a depiction of a society so dominated and controlled by science and government that the reader is left feeling unsettled, which is exactly how I felt while reading it. It’s harrowing and, again, like Nineteen Eighty-Four, stands as a warning to individuals as to what could occur if we lost our sense of self.
It is, undoubtebly, a read.
Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash
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