Book 13 - William Golding "Lord Of The Flies"

William Golding "Lord Of The Flies" (Faber & Faber)






This is one of those books we had to read at school. Then I hated it, but now as an adult returning to it after fifty or more years, I have reconsidered it.

The Lord of the Flies by William Golding describes the lives of young boys stranded on an island after their plane has crashed, evacuating them from a war stricken Britain. The boys are ecstatic, rejoicing in their new freedom on the island. As time passes, however, the struggle to survive becomes increasingly difficult. The young boys find that the freedom that they had once rejoiced, may become the culprit of their demise. The hopes of being rescued are overshadowed by the fear and jealousy of some of the young boys, who become increasingly aggravated and violent as time progresses. Their only aspirations to survive rely on the order that the majority wishes to rebel against.

Freedom and order are the main themes of the book that relate to utopias and dystopias. The boys are rejoicing over their new freedom and feel as though they are in a utopian state. Without order though, basic animal instinct emerges in most of the boys, and over comes them. The boys go into frenzy and their utopia becomes a dystopia. A utopia, as depicted in Lord of the Flies, would be one with order and rules, essential for human survival and sanity, while a dystopia would be one of free reign; since humans are unable to handle total freedom without reverting to killer animal instinct.

This is a brilliantly imaginative (and probably quite plausible) investigation into a hypothetical microcosm containing only young boys, and situated in what is essentially a very lonely, isolated place, with no rules or regulations except those they ordain for themselves, and reflecting the true nature of man without civilisation. The narrative is intense and gripping; the characters plausible and engaging. The unpleasantness of some scenes are not to everyone's taste, but I'd recommend it to just about anyone else.

Book 14 - Nicholas Baker "The Mezzanine"

Nicholas Baker "The Mezzanine" (Granta Books)





Nicholson Baker's novels are examples of of trying to imbue the minute trivialities of modern life with unseen philosophical and personal significance. Exhibiting an affinity for minutiae and ponderous disquisition, he is noted for transforming otherwise banal human activities into finely wrought descriptions of thought and serious consideration. His technique of extreme magnification and loitering contemplation has been described as creating a “clogging” effect in his fiction, thus slowing narrative time to a near standstill while retraining the reader's attention on otherwise overlooked objects and minor events, all presented through Baker's scrupulous authorial subjectivity.

The effect of this in The Mezzanine, an essentially plotless, stream-of-consciousness novel, which examines in great detail the lunch-hour activities of a young office worker named Howie is bracing for about two pages. His simple lunch—a hot dog, cookie, and milk—and purchase of a new pair of shoelaces are juxtaposed against his reading of a paperback edition of Marcus Aurelius's Meditations. Baker's digressive novel contains copious footnotes, some of which are several pages long, while following the ruminations of Howie as he contemplates a variety of everyday objects and occurrences, including how paper milk cartons replaced glass milk bottles, the miracle of perforation, and the nature of plastic straws, vending machines, paper towel dispensers, and popcorn poppers. That he would take more than eighty per cent of the novel to reach his epiphany from a random passage in the Meditations, which lasts less than a page before he returns to memories of cookies and milk as a youth, gives you some idea of the misadventure that this slight novel encompasses.

The author's hubris at thinking that his disquisition on drinking straws and shoelaces constitutes a novel of humour or ideas or anything else is merely a symptom of the artistic morass of literature at the end of the twentieth century.

Book 15 - Ian Stewart "Taming the infinite"

Ian Stewart "Taming the infinite" (Quercus)



This book was originally published in 2008, and is a brief and rapid introduction to mathematics. Organized historically, it starts with counting bones in prehistoric times, proceeds through Babylonians and Greeks, and ends up with the proof of Fermat's theorem. The later chapters explore the relationships between and development of analysis and differential equations. This was interesting but unsatisfying, since the concepts could not be explained easily without mathematical notation. I came away tantalized with the feeling that I might have learned something if there were more details. In conclusion, a good start that only whets the appetite.

One to read in conjunction with another more acadenic version.