Lord of the Flies

Lord of the Flies by William Golding



      Apparently, this is a classic, one of those books you are told that you have to read by the time you start getting a job and having no time to read and stuff, but when you finish them you start to wonder why these things became so famous, because they are really not that great, and it had a lot of repetition and metaphor and all that good stuff. Now I have nothing against metaphors, they are perfectly fine. But olden metaphors either make no sense, or they go on for so long that you forget what they are metaphoring. For example, do you really need an entire page to say what the wind is like? Really? So as you can see, I am still me, and I still require at least a paragraph to actually start writing anything about the book I intent to write about in the first place. For example (sorry, I get sidetracked easily. Like that one time...), This entire blog was supposed to be about books, but at least one fourth of it is about something else entirely. But anyways, this time for real...

Lord of the Flies by William Golding




      This one is a classic (see above).  It starts, and this is a little confusing, with some (two) school boys walking along on what they think is an deserted island, after there school plane crashed because it's World War Two and 50% of all planes crash, not including the ones that just crash into the end of the runway, and the ones that just explode when they engine starts. This is clear to the 19whenever-it-was (maybe 1960?) reader, because planes full of schoolboys were constantly crashing into islands (?!) at the time.
      So anyways, they find a conch shell, which they blow into, and all the little schoolboys come running. They form something that seems vaguely like a supposed democracy, that is actually a dual-warring dictatorship (a dictatorship run by two dictators who are subtly battling for power), with a touch of hippocracy, because that is just a word spelled wrong that sounds good in this situation, not because there were any hippos, political or otherwise. Basically the whole story is just the two popular kids, one of them that is moderately intelligent, and one who is moderately strong, fighting for dominance, and the only person who has any brains at all, you guessed it, the unpopular nerd (GO NERDS!!!) attempting to stop them all from dying. I think something sorts of dramatic happens at the end, but I was reading this kind of late at night, so I was half asleep. So I cant spoil it for you.

Fahrenheit 451

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

This book was written about 50 years ago, so it is in a different style of writing than more modern books, which makes it a bit of a harder read, but still a good one.

This book is in the future, but it is the future from 50 years ago, so it doesn't have aliens and lasers or anything. No new inventions, but people think a different way. Knowledge isn't worth anything, and TV screens cover all four walls in the room, and pointless facts are screamed endlessly into peoples face. The book goes something like this:

It is about a guy named Guy Montag, but he is referred to as Montag most of the time. He is a fireman, who's job is starting fires. He burns illegal books (all books) and the houses they are found in. One day, he meets a girl who makes him rethink his life, and he starts to rebel, which gets him into a lot of trouble. I really can't think of what else happens, because most of it is about how Montag is thinking, which is really hard to sum up into a summary.

It has a little bit of an abrupt ending, but the last ten or few pages give a sense of ending, so although it has an abrupt ending, you knew it was coming and were ready for it. So I think it works well.