Authors, Writers, Publishers, and Book Readers

Books that were much better on the second reading

I have many favorite books and not so favorites too that I've read. :) If you had to recommend a fantastic book that everybody should read not once but twice, what would it be?

Today I was surfing and rediscovered Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. I read this in high school and never appreciated how good it was until I was much older and reread it. I had missed so much of it!

Are there any books you've read that didn't get a fair assessment the first time you read them and were much better second time around?

Bibiliomania has a full copy of Brave New World online free if anyone's curious about the book, by the way.

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Permalink Reply by KeriAnn Green on April 1, 2010 at 4:49am

What's the book about ?

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Permalink Reply by scribbler on April 2, 2010 at 8:34pm

KeriAnn, if you'd clicked the link Kay supplied you would have seen the summary that tells you all about it.

Brave New World is one of the most influential and powerful novels written in the twentieth century. It is one of the best known "dystopian" (implying "nightmare world") fictions alongside H.G. Wells' The Time Machine and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Huxley imagines a future world where children are processed genetically in bottles rather than conceived 'naturally', and belong to one of five classes according to their intelligence: from perfect "Alphas" down to moronic "Epsilons". Learning takes place by repetition teaching during sleep, but basically this consists of enforcing certain behaviour patterns through suggestion. This is backed up by the legal drug 'soma' that pacifies people through a false sense of fulfilment. The story is that of an unhappy Alpha-Plus man called Bernard Marx who is unusual for his genetic caste in being short and unorthodox in his ideas. He has fallen in love with a girl called Lenina, who he takes to an island of 'savages' where he meets a handsome young savage called John. This boy turns out to be the son of the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning and Bernard manages to bring him back to 'civilization'. The story follows John as he is treated as a circus freak. John's desire for Lenina that is ruined by his antiquated notions of love that derive from Shakespeare. John becomes the focus of the novel as it leads towards its sad conclusion. This is as successful a cautionary tale now as it was at the time of its publication in 1932, and is just as popular.

KeriAnn Green said:

What's the book about ?

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Permalink Reply by Kay Elizabeth on April 8, 2010 at 1:50pm

Speaking of classics, you can now download the famous original War of The Worlds radio broadcast free. For our younger members, it's famous because the story was performed as if it was a live news broadcast. There was widespread panic because some had missed the earliest parts that explained it wasn't real and genuinely believed we were being invaded by aliens. Keep in mind that this was in 1938 when radio was how people kept up with the news around the world before the days of the Internet and mobile phones.

http://www.archive.org/details/OrsonWellesMrBruns

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Permalink Reply by Kay Elizabeth on April 12, 2010 at 1:52am

It's interesting to see how differently you perceive books from childhood when you reread them once you're all grown up. For a truer insight into the fairy tales of The Brothers Grimm for example, you can go here. As the website explains, the tales originally were not as sanitized as the versions you will read for today's more politically correct world.

The exact print source is unknown. The etext appears to be based on the translation by Margaret Hunt called Grimm's Household Tales, but it is not identical to her edition. (Some of the translations are slightly different, the arrangement also differs, and the Grimm's scholarly notes are not included.)

The etext received by the Universal Library did not include story titles. They have been restored in this edition, based on Hunt's titles. (Thanks also to Steve Nickolas for restoring the end of the last tale in this version.)

Grimm's Fairy Tales