Books!

Okay, I really need a break from reading papers. It turns out that my lab's grant application needs to be submitted with a clearer hypothetical model and future plan, so I've been going crazy trying to read up on the literature and come up with a cohesive idea of what might be going on. It's really frustrating because I'm trying to connect three very complex pathways, which may or may not interact, and of course we don't have any preliminary data yet to confirm any of this, so it's all speculation and AAAARRRGH!!!

Anyway, I'm writing this to get away from all that, so that's all that I shall speak of the desperate search for funding. So let's talk about books. In particular, I've read three lately that I want to talk about

Jose Saramago - Blindness
Ever since Stin wrote a post about this book, I've had a strange fascination with it. There's a part of me that's intrigued by the macabre, the same part that loves horror movies for their aesthetic appeal. For one thing, I love anything post-apocalyptic. If society falls apart, I'm all over it.
Anyway, for those of you not familiar with this book, it's about an epidemic of blindness that infects everybody except for one woman. The story focuses on her and a few of the first victims of the epidemic, who are all quarantined in an abandoned mental hospital. Of course, since nobody can see anything, all public order falls apart and soon there are feces in the street and blind people raping each other. It's an incredibly pessimistic view of the fragility of public order.
It is upsetting on quite a few levels. First of all, it plays on the base fear of disease and blindness. Secondly, the writing induces a visceral response to the conditions that these people are forced to live in. The violence, lack of sanitation, and general hopelessness conveyed really make it hard to read, because it is almost constant and one finds oneself cringing every few pages because of some of the descriptions. Lastly, it's a really negative view on human nature itself. These people regress to a semi-animal state so easily. While some post-apocalyptic books focus on the rebuilding that goes on after, all that you get is the total hopelessness of the situation. Nobody tries to do anything positive except for the protagonist, who also happens to be the only person who can see everything that's going on. It's like NOBODY has the strength to continue through all of the trials
Other than that, some of the literary techniques seemed a little heavy-handed to me. The conspicuous lack of names for any of the characters was clearly intentional, so that the reader could imagine the story happening to anyone. Also, the last bit of the book seemed to include too much pseudo-philosophical rambling about death, blindness, and the nature of god
My final thoughts: It's a good book, though you should avoid it if you have a weak stomach or want to maintain a positive outlook on human nature.

Lois Lowry - The Giver
Yeah, I just finall read this book. It's one of those books that every pseudo-intellectual nerd loves in junior high, along with Ender's Game and A Wrinkle in Time. All in all, I enjoyed the couple of hours I spent reading it, but I'm definitely too old for it. First of all, anti-utopia books have been done before. It leaves one wondering exactly how many of the ideas came straight from A Brave New World (I never actually finished that one, so I can't answer it.) Secondly, it just rushes through everything too quickly. It's an incredibly simplistic view on the situation, relegating the power of human emotion (or lack thereof) to a 120-page book. I do wish that I'd read it when I could have appreciated it, but I didn't really gain anything significant by reading it now

I also wanted to talk about the Chronicles of Narnia, since I also just reread those, but I'll either skip that or save it for later, because I should probably get more work done now.