Although the Personal Development deadline has passed, this blog shall continue on. I have hardly stopped developing my person, and anyway, what is a life without a blog?
This week I left Woodhouse for a little furlough at Matt's Ilkley pad. It was splendid; I spent my time walking Matt's dog, eating other people's expensive quiche and reading books. In particular, I completed Aldous Huxley's dystopian classic, Brave New World. It is the most depressingly poignant book that I have ever read, and I am determined to embrace my right to unhappiness forever more! Last year I bought an issue of the Guardian containing an article on the realisation of Huxley's vision, written by author Margaret Atwood, and only now can I read it with comprehension. It can be read in the online archives here. Atwood's novel Surfacing is actually next on my list to read. I bought it today for a mere penny!
The other major visionary book of the 20th Century is of course Nineteen Eighty-Four, which I read a few years ago. There are however, many other works of a similar thread that I have yet to read:
Plato - The Republic
Aristotle - Nicomachean Ethics
The Bible's Book of Revelations (In the film Before Night Falls, about Cuban poet Renaldo Arenas, he is urged to read the Bible as a novel, if for no religious motive)
Thomas More - Utopia
Jonathan Swift - Gulliver's Travels
HG Wells - The Time Machine
William Morris - News from Nowhere
WH Hudson - A Crystal Age
Edward Bellamy - Looking Backwards (along with Hudson and Morris's efforts, this is considered an idealised, romantic notion)
Ray Bradbury - Fahrenheit 451 (also a film, recommended to me by Matt!)
Yevgeny Zemyatin - We
Including three predicated on environmental issues:
J.G. Ballard - The Drowned World
Rachel Carson - Silent Spring
John Christopher - The Death of Grass (out of print)
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