So I just finished reading two books.
The first one Rob and I read together. We decided to read it because of the controversy surrounding the release of the movie...I'm referring to The Golden Compass. We first checked it out of the library quite some time ago. It took us a while to read it, mostly because it wasn't the kind of book that I was very eager to get on with very often. Anyway, I thought I'd briefly comment. Putting it very simply, in the book, there's a substance called dust which you find out in the course of things is basically like a particle that is equivalent to sin. It begins to stick to children when they go through puberty. There are adults who are desperate to figure out how to keep the dust from beginning to stick to the children or to wipe out dust all together, but this leads them to basically do terrible things to children. In the end, the main character, a girl named Lyra, concludes that if these adults who do such bad things are trying to get rid of dust, then dust must be good...which is basically like saying if the people who want get rid of sin are so bad (which means they're so full of sin)then sin must be good. Which I have to say, is one of the silliest things I've ever heard.
I don't really care to read the other books in the series, but I am vaguely curious to see if the author has any kind of better points, or if it's all just as lame.
The other book I just finished reading is Brave New World, which I read in the 10th grade, but decided to re-read after it was mentioned once by our pastor and again in the books we are reading for small group. Both times it was mentioned as somewhat prophetic in talking about people as slaves to their own desires/happiness, being enslaved to entertainment, etc. I have to say, it's a very good book. There was a lot I didn't remember. Here's a section that I thought was particularly good:
Mustapha Mond, one of the world controllers, has just finished reading a manuscript...
"Not to be published." He underlined the words. "The author will be kept under supervision. His transference to the Marine Biological Station of St. Helena may become necessary." A pity, he thought, as he signed his name. It was a masterly piece of work. But once you began admitting explanations in terms of purpose-well, you didn't know what the result might be. It was the sort of idea that might easily decondition the more unsettled minds among the higher castes-make them lose their faith in happiness as the Sovereign Good and take to believing, instead, that the goal was somewhere beyond, somewhere outside the present human sphere; that the purpose of life was not the maintenance of well-being, but some intensification and refining of consciousness, some enlargement of knowledge. Which was, the Controller reflected, quite possibly true. But not, in the present circumstance, admissible. He picked up his pen again, and under the words "Not to be published" drew a second line, thicker and blacker than the first; then sighed, "What fun it would be," he thought, "if one didn't have to think about happiness!"
