Brave New World - Aldous Huxley - Part 4

Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

2017 Reading Challenge - Day 158

  June 7, 2017 

Book 47 - Brave New World
Aldous Huxley (1932)
 Part 4 - 142-188
Reading Time - 1 hour

Well... our hero, Bernard, is the Savage's guardian and his esteem takes a big boost. Everybody wants to meet the Savage but... eventually the Savage refuses to cooperate and Bernard's status takes a big hit. The Savage, whose name is John, is quite disillusioned with the Brave New World. He had found a book back in his village of Shakespeare and reads it with avid fascination. Somewhere along the line, he has picked up some old world morals and this new world is just one big shock to his system after another.

This book does give me glimmers of The Hunger Games trilogy... the shallowness of the Brave New World folk. And sometimes, I get a glimmer of today... how we too are wrapped up in shallow pursuits of beauty and youth, games and status. Entertainment that has no depth to it... how we get lost in the television in the evenings, watching other people live their dreams (vacations, property renovations)... living vicariously in many ways. 

Brave New World - Aldoux Huxley - Part 3

Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

2017 Reading Challenge - Day 157

  June 6, 2017 

Book 47 - Brave New World
Aldous Huxley (1932)
 Part 3 - 87-141
Reading Time - 1 hour

Everyone is Happy in the Brave New World. Happy thanks to soma, a drug that puts them in a jovial state (or sends them into dreamland). Much better than alcohol because there's no ill effects afterwards. Our friend Bernard is in trouble with the Director of the centre where he works. He isn't behaving like he should outside of work... he is not behaving with infantile decorum but being "different". He's threatened with transfer to a centre in Iceland if doesn't shape up. Unfortunately, the Director while signing a permit for Bernard to visit the Savage Reservation, reminisces about his own trip there when he was younger and how the woman he went with disappeared. Bad mistake Director!

Bernard has a date planned with a co-worker, Lenina, and he takes her on a visit to the Savage Reservation. It's a fenced off area in New Mexico that has "savages" (basically Indigenous people and others who aren't tweaked like the folk outside the wall). While there, they find the lost woman and her (gasp) son. Bernard realizes that this woman is the Director's woman-friend and that the son is the Director's son! People in a Brave New World don't live in families and since they are decanted from a bottle (rather than born), the idea of a mother and father is abhorrent to people. Bernard is a smart guy and gets permission (from the Controller) to bring the woman her son back to civilization.

When he gets back to work, the Director has decided to send him to Iceland but... Bernard brings in the woman and her son (this is front of a bunch of Alphas) and... well... the Director resigns immediately. He's been accusing Bernard of being weird and... my goodness... here he got a woman pregnant and has a son by her!

Holy... it's a weird world!

Brave New World - Aldous Huxley - Part 2

Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

2017 Reading Challenge - Day 156

  June 5, 2017 

Book 47 - Brave New World
Aldous Huxley (1932)
 Part 2 - 37-86
Reading Time - 1 hour

Apparently this Brave New World is built upon consumption and stability. The goal is to have very stable individuals and thereby create a stable world. Consumption is key... all humans are expected to consume things... the more, the better. It kind of reminds me of our own society in which consumption is becoming the be-all and end-all. We are no longer citizens... we are consumers. In Brave New World... people are brainwashed (in their sleep as children) to believe that it is better to buy a new thing than to mend an old thing. That isn't so far off from today... where we are faced with the planned obsolescence of everything from TVs to blenders to smart phones.

We also meet Bernard Marx, a rather stunted Alpha who is different than the others (people speculate that he had some alcohol dumped in his bottle when he was a fetus). Because he is shorter, he is treated as different and feels different. He's a bit of an odd duck to be sure and reminds me a bit of 1984's "hero". It's a Brave New World and Bernard doesn't fit in... wonder what will happen to him.

Brave New World - Aldous Huxley - Part 1

Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

2017 Reading Challenge - Day 155

  June 4, 2017 

Book 47 - Brave New World
Aldous Huxley (1932)
 Part 1 - vii-xxi; 1-36
Reading Time - 1 hour

Another book on my 2017 Reading Challenge list. I'm pretty sure that I had to read this book in high school but... honestly, I don't really remember much of it... or anything of it.

There is a fairly long introduction by Christopher Hitchens and then a Preface by Huxley himself, written a few decades after the original publication of the book.

The first couple of chapters take us on a tour of a Fertilization and Incubation centre... from the introduction of sperm to egg, all the way through to birth of an infant from a bottle. There are 5 castes of humans - Alpha, Betta, Gamma, Delta, Epsilon. And while the fetuses are in-vitro (in bottles), they are tweaked so that when they are decanted (born), they may be stunted Epsilons or high-caste Alphas... and everything in between. We learn that the lower cast embryo cells are forced to subdivide into more and more buds so that 16000+ infants can come from one fertilized egg. Essentially, you end up with 16000+ identical humans - ideal for staffing a factory or something. We learn that the infants are brainwashed in their sleep. We learn that sex is open and free and that young children are encouraged and expected to engage in sexual activity. It's a weird world... that's for sure! In these first few chapters, we meet what appear to be some of the main characters in the book.

War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy - Part 1

War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

2017 Reading Challenge - Day 154

  June 3, 2017 

Book 46 - War and Peace
Leo Tolstoy (1869)
 Part 1 - first 40%
Reading Time - many hours

Well... War and Peace... go figure. This book is on my 2017 Reading Challenge list although... I had thought I might postpone it to next year but... I was on a trip and I had the free Gutenberg version on my e-book reader and so I started reading it.

A couple of things... I always thought War and Peace would be a long and tedious read but... it is surprisingly readable. Go figure! The chapters are quite short... 12-30 pages in my e-book reader which is nothing.

I do have to say... the first section was very hard going... trying to keep all the characters straight in my head. There are so many of them that come flying at you, and with their unfamiliar Russian names, that it's a bit overwhelming. I did a bit of research and found that the BBC had done a recent mini-series on War and Peace. So I kept looking up the actors for the different parts... and trying to figure out who were the main characters so I could focus on remembering them! That definitely helped. I wanted to know, for example, what a Hussar uniform looked like.

BBC cast of War and Peace

Some people don't like the War scenes in the book and are tempted to skip over them. I, on the other hand, found them quite enjoyable. But then I've read a fair few novels about the Napoleonic Wars - particularly Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe series which follows the adventures of a British rifleman as he fights his way through Portugal and Spain with Wellington's army. In that way, it's nice to get a Russian take on the war. Being interested in WW2 history and the insanity of Hitler's attempt to invade Russia in 1941... and how the German Army was devastated by the Russian Winter and the Russian Army. I know that Napoleon also tried the same thing in 1814... or was it 1812? Anyhow... I'm hoping that the book will cover some of that.

There's no way I can write about each chapter or sections of this book. It would seem to be more helpful to focus on the characters. I've heard that the characters change quite a bit throughout the book. Right now... I'm liking the Rostov family... and Prince Andrew's family. Pierre just annoys the heck out of me. He is so indecisive and weak that I just want to shake him by the scruff. I know some people really identify with Pierre... but that's not me. I rather like Nicholas... and Prince Andrew. Natasha is good too as is Princess Mary.

The blogs on this book are going to come interspersed with other books... I'm reading them concurrently and can't wait until I finish War and Peace to continue with the blogs!

The Believing Brain - Michael Shermer - Part 6

The Believing Brain - Michael Shermer

2017 Reading Challenge - Day 153

  June 2, 2017 

Book 45 - The Believing Brain - From Ghosts and God
to Politics and Conspiracies - How We Construct Beliefs
and Reinforce them as Truths
Michael Shermer (2011)
 Part 6 - pages 280-344
Reading Time - 1 hour

Two last chapters.... Geographies of Belief. A cute story about Christopher Columbus and how he was really convinced he had discovered a cross-Atlantic route to India even thought nothing in the New World remotely resembled India. His belief shaped how he saw the world. Basic point is we are not as rational as we like to think (we are not Mr. Spock). The author argues that the only way to avoid the pitfalls of our highly non-rational brain is science.

There is a final chapter on Cosmologies of Belief - we start back with Galileo and how he was trying to get people to accept the helio-centric vision of the solar system. And then a bunch of stories about other astronomers... it was a bit of a hard slog... even though I like astronomy.

His final thoughts are this... science has a null hypothesis. Basically... we formulate a hypothesis and assume it is false. The evidence has to satisfy us to 95-99% certainty. The burden is on people to prove something... not to disprove it. Fine... but I really think this could have all been said in an essay not a massive tome like this book. I probably should have stopped reading after the first chapter but I kept hoping that I'd get something out of it. Did I? I suppose.... the conservative/liberal moral values chart was helpful. Glad to say I am DONE with this book. And I will leave Michael Shermer to his hobby horse. He kept referencing Skeptic Magazine (which he publishes) and kept referring to talks he's given and YouTube videos he's done. All well and good but after a while it got a bit tedious. And this is from me, a scientist.

The Believing Brain - Michael Shermer - Part 5

The Believing Brain - Michael Shermer

2017 Reading Challenge - Day 152

  June 1, 2017 

Book 45 - The Believing Brain - From Ghosts and God
to Politics and Conspiracies - How We Construct Beliefs
and Reinforce them as Truths
Michael Shermer (2011)
 Part 5 - pages 228-279
Reading Time - 1 hour

Now we're into politics... and the distinction between liberals and conservatives. Basically... there is a difference in moral values. Liberals emphasize harm/care and fairness/reciprocity while conservatives emphasize in-group/loyalty, authority/respect and purity/sanctity. This is actually a very helpful thing to have it laid out so clearly.

Maybe I missed it at the beginning of the book but... what is "belief". For me... belief is an idea, a theory of how we are and how the world works. It is not the same as knowing. In many respects we can say that a lot of our scientific theories are simply beliefs as well. Up until now... all the evidence supports the belief... and until it is proved false, it works. Which makes me wonder... if someone wants to believe in God... and the evidence works for them... then that's their belief. They have a theory that God exists... and unless something comes along to disprove that theory.... I don't know... but that's just how it seems to me.

On the other hand, our brains want us to be right so we interpret information to confirm our beliefs. Hindsight is 20/20 so after the fact, we can find all sorts of indicators that we're shocked that we missed. The author goes into a long section on cognitive biases that shape our beliefs.