Some time ago the BBC released a list of 100 books, classic and otherwise, and along with it a claim that most people have read only six of them. A former English major, I tallied up my own number, expecting that I had at least half of them on my bookshelf. To my literary dismay, I'd only knocked down 36 of the 100. Feeling demoralized and humbled, I recently printed out the list, determined to conquer them all. But, before I could get to any number of the novels I hadn't read, I had to revisit one I had: Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. So much was lost on me when i first read it way back in high school, probably because a) it was an abridged version and b) I was an antsy teenager. Thus I recently picked up a new copy, ready to try and finally appreciate and contextualize Huxley's satiric vision of a "utopian" future where humans are genetically bred and pharmaceutically anesthetized to passively serve a ruling order. It only took the first page for me to realize what I'd missed before. The second paragraph, describing the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre, had me gasping in awe:
"Wintriness responded to wintriness." Chills! It feels like I'm reading the book for the first time, and, though it's not getting my number up, I'm ok with that.
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