where have you buried your best days?

[smilebackwards]

Lord of the Flies by William Golding. Intense depiction of the failures of a group project (survival on deserted island). Shocked to discover this does not actually have cannibalism, although there is the strong implication that there would have been cannibalism if the events of the last chapter went differently.

White Nights by Fyodor Dostoevsky. A Russian man meets a woman waiting for her fiance to return after a year. I wanted to like this more but I just found it so rambling and repetitive.

Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein. A man raised on Mars returns to Earth and tries to understand it. I found the disconnects between Mike and humanity compelling and this did have some things to say about religion and society but it is really obviously written by a dude in the 60s and it's very sexist and explicitly homophobic.

I need to go read some more books written by women now.

Comments

[chocolatefrogs]

Never heard of those. But know to skip Stranger in a Strange Land now. :)

Enjoy!

[smilebackwards]

I was really interested in the Martian vs Earth cultural collision but then somewhere in the 300s it really one-two punched me and took a weird turn! Oh well, on to the next book :)

[spatz]

Oh gosh yes, Heinlein is terrible like that! I never read SiaSL because I didn't hear anything about it I liked, but I was briefly obsessed with The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress as a kid, which is likewise hella sexist but has enough fun plot that my adolescent ass overlooked it. (funny enough, there's also a Mike in that but it's a supercomputer who gains sentience, probably the best part of the book after... ah, throwing rocks ;) I fear to reread it in case it's worse than I remember.

[smilebackwards]

I had The Moon is A Harsh Mistress on my TBR list and then I read Stranger in a Strange Land and now I will not be reading any more Heinlein yeah. I heard it was a sci-fi classic so I just went into it blind and in the first like 300 pages I was like 'okay this is a product of it's time and I'll continue knowing that' but then it absolutely whacked me with more bullshit and I was already so far in I fell into sunk cost fallacy and now I'm bitter about it!