BlakeAtwood.com

The sequel to The Eyre Affair in the inventive series about Thursday Next, Literary Detective. She enters books. She time travels. She saves the world. All in a day’s work. Fforde’s as an imaginative author as I’ve ever come across. Fforde knows his classics and constantly drops allusions.

www.jasperfforde.com

Not quite as strange as I was hoping, although some touching scenes abound. A hard-luck story where the protagonist constantly tries to redeem himself.

A fearful read if all the details are true. I seldom read political non-fiction, but this book was very interesting, attempting to show that Bush, and moreover Cheney, sought to enter Iraq as soon as they assumed the Presidency.

I saw Thank You for Smoking, a film based on the book of the same name penned by Buckley. I enjoyed the satire in the movie and assumed correctly that Boomsday would be similar. It is, only instead of smoking, the culprit is aging. Think Swift’s A Modest Proposal with geriatrics in the main role. Or roll, as the case may be.

Via Phil Cooke at The Change Revolution:

Media theorist and writer Neil Postman (Amusing Ourselves to Death) has a pretty brilliant comparison of the two visions:

“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with feelings instead of facts. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions. In 1984, Huxley added, that people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us. We must face the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.”

Uh.

Yikes.

I’m going to go find a hole and hide there until time travel is invented and I can back a few thousand years when we didn’t have to worry about any of this.