No review, but I figured I should at least blog about what I read casually. 

I finished my summer reading this weekend (not as crazy as it sounds; I have second semester English, and this week is the first of the new semester), and the books assigned this year were George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. I preferred Huxley’s novel, but both were decent, and relatively readable when compared to some past assigned reading. Though they both had expectedly depressing endings.  However, they are also both perfect examples, in my opinion, of books made into classics for their importance rather than their quality.

Neither book is particularly well-written. The characters are flat on the page, and the settings hardly mentioned. Brave New World in particularly could have really used a copyeditor. If we’re going on literary merit or normal people appeal, these books are far from remarkable. It’s the ideas that have made them classics, the dystopian cautionary tales about conformity and information control. While I find the ideas intriguing and important, I really didn’t think that reading the books was particularly productive. Regardless, they didn’t suck, I was able to read them without hating words, and I guess that’s an improvement over last year’s books. 

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