In the Mood for Fictions

This morning I have managed to free myself momentarily from a lot of busywork that I had to deal with throughout these past 3 weeks. So I reckoned: what better topics to post a blog about but those 5 books I read a week ago? A few posts back, I mentioned being lent 5 books by a friend, who then insisted that I return them after a week. Slogging through all those books was not easy, but I had them dealt with after 10 days (after I doggedly pleaded to him to give me 3 days more. You’ll find out later which of the book slowed down my reading the most). I will tell you now if they are good and worth picking up.

I started with Mockingbird by Walter Tevis. It is common to read a review that bemoans how underappreciated Mockingbird is, and I wouldn’t have heard of it had I not been paying attention to SF Masterworks series of, well, sci-fi masterworks. The story takes place in a future where the world is ruled by robots, and humans do nothing but drug themselves. Spofforth, one of the 3 protagonists, is the most intelligent machine in existence. He is sad as he watches humans lose literacy, the ability to bear children, and the ability to have emotional connections with anyone. Despondent, his only goal in his life is to die. He then comes into contact with a person who has learned how to read and has shown the will to improve such skill. It’s when such person rediscovers the meaning of reading that everyone realizes that there may still be hope.

I often read scifi, and though I love that genre, I dislike its tendency to belabor its philosophies while neglecting the characterizations (Isaac Asimov’s Foundation is very guilty of this). That distracts me, because I believe that novels cannot successfully deliver its message when their characters are unidentifiable. Thankfully, though Mockingbird’s speculation of the future and the caution that comes are very powerful, its characters are its finest points, because you really get to know what they dream of, how they change, what they believe in, and how they live.

I then read Ursula Le Guin’s Lathe of Heaven, which also has good character developments but maybe not as great as Mockingbird’s. It, however, has a very thought-provoking plot: when dreaming – and by dreaming I mean what you unconsciously do while you’re sleeping – George Orr can alter reality. Horrified by such powers, he went to a psychotherapist named Dr. William Haber, in hopes to find a way to cure his special condition. Haber has other plans, though. At first he is using the dreams to advance his careers, but later on he starts to use it for something bigger. Orr opposes Haber’s goals; why he opposes is the book’s high point, because that’s where the story unveils as a study on ethics and an analysis of what happens when someone plays God.

By the way, mention the author’s name to any scifi nuts and, chances are, you’ll get some lively responses. I’m quite embarrassed to admit that this is the first Ursula book I’ve read (and if you can suggest her other works, please do so).

Something Wicked This Way Comes is not the first Ray Bradbury’s book I’ve read, though. My first encounter with his work is through Fahrenheit 451, which I consider as one of the best books there is. When I started Something Wicked… I thought I was going to like it too, and now that I’m done with it, all I can say is that I want more of 451 and less of Something Wicked. I liked the setting – hey, it’s about a haunted carnival! – and I liked what it tried to say - as a bildungsroman with a horror twist, Something Wicked… messages about what makes us fearful made sense. What I didn’t like is the way it was written. Instead of reading like a story, Something Wicked…read more like an author rollicking with words as a dog would rollick in mud. That could’ve worked for other kinds of stories, but not for horror, as I found its language more comical than horrifying. I would’ve liked it more had the story been more straightforward. Even at less than 300 pages this book dragged.

Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes… well, what’s there to say that your high school teacher hasn’t already said? I was among the unfortunate students of a school that never required us to read this book, and I assume that most of you have already read it, so I’ll make this short: Flowers for Algernon is about a dumb person who wants to make himself better, so he volunteers to be the first human test subject for a brain operation that has made a mouse extraordinarily smart. Is the book any good? Well, for me, if a work of fiction succeeds in making me feel sympathy for its characters, then it is a winner, and in that respect, Flowers is a winner (I probably have to write a post that expands my opinion of this book, but at the moment I’m getting worn out from all the writing and the summarizing).

The last and the easiest book, is Coraline by Neil Gaiman. It’s such a light read that it took me merely an hour to finish, and I can’t say I was too satisfied. The author has a penchant for writing stories about people who go from our world to another, more magical world, and after Neverwhere, Stardust and Coraline I think it’s beginning to get old. Unlike the first two, however, Coraline is billed as a children’s story, and is, literally, much closer to home. The titular girl lives in a house, and in this house there’s a door that leads to a place where there is an alternate version of the house and its inhabitants. Once again, I was won over by the synopsis, but when I read it all the way through I felt cold about it. I find it funny that Coraline’s weak points are Something Wicked’s strong points, and that the opposite is also true. While I wanted Something Wicked to be more straightforward, I wanted Coraline to be a bit more roundabout. As it is Coraline just comes off as a book that appears allegorical, only to finish too soon that whatever profound messages it has are not fleshed out.