Brave New World

Aldous Huxley

Having read it

★★★☆☆

For all its prescience – seemingly more relevant in and around the 2020s – it is quite a dull read, despite some good parts and its final few chapters; maybe its plodding narrative (which I did skip and skim a bit, but still caught some interesting points!) acts as a reflection of what happens when society becomes a civilized dystopia.

Womp womp.

A good passage

The Savage meanwhile wandered restlessly round the room, peering with a vague superficial inquisitiveness at the books on the shelves, at the sound-track rolls and the reading-machine bobbins in their numbered pigeon-holes. On the table under the window lay a massive volume bound in limp black leather-surrogate, and stamped with large golden Ts. He picked it up and opened it. My Life and Work, by Our Ford. The book had been published at Detroit by the Society for the Propagation of Fordian Knowledge. Idly he turned the pages, read a sentence here, a paragraph there, and had just come to the conclusion that the book didn’t interest him, when the door opened, and the Resident World Controller for Western Europe walked briskly into the room.
Mustapha Mond [(the Controller)] shook hands with all three of them; but it was to the Savage that he addressed himself. ‘So you don’t much like civilization, Mr Savage,’ he said.
The Savage looked at him. He had been prepared to lie, to bluster, to remain sullenly unresponsive; but, reassured by the good-humoured intelligence of the Controller’s face, he decided to tell the truth, straightforwardly. ‘No.’ He shook his head.