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BOOKS I READ: Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932). Huxley’s dystopian world of sameness, castes, and soma, is disrupted by John the Savage. He longs for the freedom to live and suffer as an individual, not as part of a numbed out collective living in a moral vacuum largely defined by a promiscuous population that never feel the wrath of time—aging has been abolished, too.
I was compelled to reread Huxley’s Brave New World after reading Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death. In that 1985 book, Postman uses it warn against rampant consumerism fueled by marketing that makes an urgent appeal for things you don’t need because they will, somehow, make you happy and distracted. Brave New World is more than that, of course, offering takes on the role of literature and religion in people’s lives, and how their omission can be used for political control of the masses.
Check out my Bookshop.org stand; and browse my reading log. The previously added book to the reading log:
