The Martian Chronicles – Ray Bradbury

The early culture of space sci-fi was built on a foundation which portrayed Martians as beastly killers attacking Earthlings with no remorse. However, in Bradbury’s 1950 novel, Martian Chronicles, we have a chance to think about what really might happen. How would humans feel if Martians came to colonize Earth? Would we defend ourselves? Would we welcome the aliens with open arms and help them make a home here? Another viewpoint Bradbury explores is the human pioneering spirit. He writes about humans exploring and settling on Mars much like the US Western Expansion through the 19th century. He reveals that humans are determined to take what they want and to make the land and culture adjust to themselves, rather than adapt to the new settings.

The first few chapters had a humorous tone. The humans sent the explorers to Mars, but the first three crews were killed in defense. In a dream, a woman saw the first rocket coming, and she talked to the captain of the rocket in her sleep. Her jealous husband overheard the conversation and resolved to keep his wife away from the mysterious visitors. He made sure she stayed at home while he went for a casual walk with his hunting gun (which shot shells full of bees!). The chapter ends with two shots in the distance and the wife solemnly welcoming her husband back home.

The second crew found themselves in a frenzy of Martian paranoia. Martians had used telepathy to brainwash each other. Many didn’t care that the humans arrived and found it more of an annoyance. They sent the captain and his crew here and there until finally a smart Martian welcomes them and sends them into a room to wait for him to return. The crew was dumbfounded, how could the the aliens not acknowledge that they have actually traveled through space? This was a major accomplishment! The crew met many Martians in the room they entered and soon realized that each of the Martians was delusional. The smart Martian was a psychologist, he returned and conducted interviews with the humans and determined that only the Captain was real and the other crew members were holograms to trick those who met him. The psychologist then asked the Captain to take him to the rocket as he suspected this was also a hologram, and then he could prove that the space travel was fake. After exploring the rocket, the psychologist knew it was the best mental projection he had ever seen. The Captain’s brainwashing telepathy was unlike he had ever seen before. He knew if the simply shot the Captain the rocket and crew would disappear- but it didn’t. It was the best projection he had ever seen. Even when dead, the Captain’s brain power still made him see the rocket and crew! So he shot each crew member, and he still saw it all in front of him. The only other explanation he could think of was he, himself, was projecting the imagery, so he took his own life in an attempt to stop the delusion.

The third rocket’s crew landed in a small town on Mars. Each crew member strangely recognized the village as their own hometown. Each also happened to see a deceased loved one they recognized in their fake hometown. The friends and family they met explained that they didn’t know how they got there, but they had died on Earth and showed up there. They tried their best to make it more like home with the houses and shops familiar to them from their past life. This Captain was very leery of it all, but dropped his guard when his brother showed up and took him to visit their parents. They had a wonderful meal and the captain held his mother close and danced in the living room with her for hours. At bedtime, the two brothers lay in the same room, when the Captain had a quick thought that it might be a trick… He decided to sneak back to the ship to wait for the others. The Captain crept across the floor toward the door when the brother suddenly killed him. The following morning, the entire town of Martians held a service to bury all the dead human explorers.

Further into the book, similarities between the real pioneers and the characters in MC are more apparent. A character resembling Johnny Appleseed saw a need for oxygen production in the early days of humanity on the red planet, so he devotes himself to the task. A husband and wife build a business selling hotdogs at an intersection of two major roads. Priests believe the Martians need saved so they join the adventure and send missionaries to the planet. Bradbury said Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath was a major influence on the Chronicles and with the mass migration the states saw in the 1930s, one can find many parallels between the two works. The Martian Chronicles was a very imaginative work 70 years ago, and can still captivate audience today, making for a very enjoyable book.

The venture, Mars One, plans to turn The Martian Chronicles into reality with a mission to create the first permanent human settlement on Mars.  You can find out more here.

Lord of the Flies – William Golding

William Golding’s 1954 Nobel Prize-winning novel, Lord of the Flies, resonates as a cornerstone of required reading in schools over the last fifty years. While it plays out well as a captivating story, it also serves to teach young students about using symbolism in writing.

In the midst of a war, a group of young boys are marooned on a desert island after the air transport taking them from the war zone makes a crash landing. Ralph and Piggy find each other trying to be brave, but don’t see any of the other passengers. Piggy annoys Ralph but he decides he might be helpful, in some ways, on an island with no adults. They find a large conch shell and Ralph blows it because Piggy has asthma and shallow breaths won’t make the shell bellow. Soon, a large group of children gather around the boy with the conch and they begin a meeting in which Ralph is elected leader over another confident boy named Jack, who develops a strong jealousy toward the chosen leader. Ralph assigns Jack and his choir boys as hunters to try to capture meat and food. Others are assigned to build a fire for a rescue signal, and others are to build shelters.

Nothing seems to go right. While Ralph and Piggy have the right ideas, most of the young boys are looking for adventure and fun, and half of them are ‘littl’uns,’ too small to be much help in any way. The boys used Piggy’s glasses to light the first fire, which burned a large section of the forest, and seemed to have also killed one of the young boys. The first shelter the group built was pretty good, but the second had fewer helpers, and only a couple of the boys helped put up the third, so each one was progressively worse. Jack’s jealousy kept building and when Ralph was angry about all of the boys hunting instead of minding the fire, Jack started trying to talk the boys into choosing himself for leader, which was unsuccessful. A few days later, Jack saw his chance when most of the boys were expressing their fears- ghosts, monsters and beasts. Jack offered to keep them safe, besides, weren’t the boys all tired of all the rules Ralph was trying to push on them?

Two tribes formed and by luring with roasted pig along with the fear of violence to keep them, Jack pulled most of the boys to his side of the island. In their first hunt as a new tribe, they killed a big female pig with small piglets suckling. They put her head on a stake as an offering to the much feared beast nobody had actually seen. Simon, one of the boys sleeping near the pig’s head became entranced in his thoughts, projecting his own voice into the fly-covered head. The Lord of the Flies told him that the fear they felt was close, in fact, it was inside each of them. Simon ran away to escape the head, finding another secret the boys needed to know about. He ran back to Jack’s tribe and they saw him in the darkness as a beast. Their fears came alive and they beat the boy to death before realizing he was just a boy from their camp.

In a couple of night raids, Jack’s tribe had first stolen fire and then they stole Piggy’s glasses taking all of the power through the ability to make fire. The four remaining boys of the original group, Sam, Eric, Ralph and Piggy walked together to the boys fort to ask for the glasses back because Piggy was practically blind without them. A fight escalated, and an accident happened. Not really an accident, the wild tribe hoped to cause damage, but it seemed they really didn’t understand the falling rock would kill Piggy. Sam and Eric were captured and forced into the new tribe, and Ralph became a hunted boy. Throughout the next day, Jack’s tribe systematically hunted Ralph, spreading through the island and walking it together, being sure not to miss the hiding boy. They also started a fire to flush Ralph out. At the last moment, Ralph ran and darted out of the forest toward the beach, where he found a sailor who had come ashore to check on the fire. He took the boys onto their warship, the boys were rescued.

Symbolism as explained by Golding:  Ralph projected the ideal society with rules and order. Piggy served as his brain trust, no power, but good ideas if they were heeded. Jack represented the opposite end of society- evils, lack of morals, acting on emotions. The large female pig symbolized sex and desire. The head on the stick, or the Lord of the Flies, represented subconscious thought, or what some psychologists term the Id. At the end of the story, the sailor stumbled upon the boys fighting a battle to the death. While they were then safe from themselves, the sailor would be taking them on a ship in war time, to essentially fight an adult battle to the death, a sort of transfer of boys to men fighting.

The Quick and the Dead – Louis L’Amour

The day finally came when the McKaskel family set out upon the Santa Fe Trail. Duncan, his wife, Sarah, and their son, Tom, had only known the city life back East. Both parents were educated and Tom was eager for adventure just like any teenage boy would be. Little did they know how much adventure they would find.

All of the education they gained in life would not be enough to secure their survival on the dire trail. Within the first week, the horses were stolen. Surely they would have had to turn back if the hero, Con Villain, hadn’t shown up. He was only passing through, but that pretty woman, Sarah, sure made a great cup of coffee.

The McKaskels weren’t sure what to make of Con. Was he just waiting for the right moment to rob the family himself? Little by little, Con earned their trust. First of all, he never had to follow Duncan to the outlaw’s town to retrieve the horses. He especially didn’t have to shoot the man in the barn aiming to shoot Duncan in the back. Con didn’t even have to stay with the McKaskels when the Indians came to visit. But he did all of those things, and the McKaskels slowly began believing he was on their side.

With his help, the family gained a different knowledge. They learned things that had not been written in the books they read. The horse thieves followed them on the trail and Con always helped the McKaskels stay a step ahead. One night, they were split up by the outlaws and Sarah figured they might not ever see Con again. If it were true, would the family make it on their own? Would they overcome the struggles of the trail or would they become like the thousands of unmarked graves on the dangerous route?

A classic Western, The Quick and the Dead has been made into movies and is one of Louis L’Amour’s most popular works. The suspense keeps the pages turning to find out if the family survives, if Indians attack, if outlaws return, and if Con Villain would be their savior, or a wolf in a sheep’s skin, which provided a great read.

Exile and the Kingdom – Albert Camus

Albert Camus, the Nobel Award-winning author from Algeria, explores isolation and intense revelations with a series of six short stories in Exile and the Kingdom. Each of the stories has a character who seems to be lost or isolated from their society and each of them finds a way to connect with themselves or those around them in the muck of what is playing out around them.

The first story is ‘The Adulterous Woman,’ in which a wife accompanies her long-time husband to rebuild his dry-goods business after a war. She contemplated why they were still together after so many years- was it because he loved her or because she needed to feel loved? A stop in a foreign desert town helps the woman finally finds an answer, but perhaps not the one she had been looking for.

‘The Renegade’ is the second story. A young man from the outskirts of the Catholic Kingdom joins the church to become the greatest missionary. His hubris broke himself from order of the church to go to a an area forbidden to Christians, a desert land of other gods and deities. He believed his strength would hold out, but after torturous days and nights, he falls to the dark side and must make a decision to defend his God.

The next story, called ‘The Silent Men,’ is about a shop of coopers who return to barrel-making after several weeks of striking for higher wages. Mixed feelings spread throughout the shop: the boss was sour that his workers walked out on him, and the workers were upset that the boss was not so understanding of their situation. Ugly words from the boss did not help the resolution. The main character, Yvars, lived each day to come home to his wife and a glass of anisette enjoying the sunset over the sea. That was his kingdom. While at work, he felt undervalued, but could understand the boss’s view. A tragedy occurs to the boss’s family on the first day back to work, but it still could not overpower the silence in the shop, and Yvars ends up watching the sunset in reflection that night.

The fourth story, ‘The Guest,’ is a tale about a school teacher living alone on the top of a mesa. As the first big snow fell over the plateau that winter, he knew the small group of students would have struggles surviving the winter. That afternoon, he watched two men ride horses up the mesa and welcomed an old acquaintance, a lawman, transporting a prisoner. The lawman quickly delivered the prisoner to the objecting teacher and left to continue preparing for his duties back in the city. The teacher was to continue the transport to a city a small distance away. The prisoner had killed his cousin to help feed his family. The family had hidden the man and it took a while for the law to catch up. A war was forming at their home and the lawmen could not take care of all of their duties themselves. The teacher disagreed with the transport and hurt the lawman’s feelings when he said he would take the prisoner but had no intentions of delivering him to the prison in the other city. The lawman left and the teacher and prisoner spent a night together in the schoolhouse. Several thoughts went through the teacher’s mind throughout the night: Did he need his gun? Did he lock it up? Would he continue the transport? What will happen if he released the prisoner? The next day he contemplated whether his decisions were the best he could have made.

The fifth story was called ‘The Artist At Work.’ A man with special artistic ability was grateful for his abilities and had never asked for more. Early in his career, he knew he had talent and graciously accepted the first contract given to him. There were no major complaints and he soon found love. The years passed, the family grew, and the artist’s work also grew, but he remained humble. Many friends and followers visited the house daily  and at all hours, and the artist was grateful for these friends and critics. An architect he was friends with from childhood came often and gave him honest opinions of art and life. As the years went by, the artist’s fame waned and he realized he needed to rekindle the creativity. Weeks went by and he turned to alcohol, then women, and his work continued to fall behind. Finally, he builds himself a loft to paint in and he believes this will bring everything back, but a change this simple may not be enough to bring an artist back to relevance.

The final story, ‘The Growing Stone,’ is about an engineer who is hired to construct a jetty to protect a small village on a large river delta in South America. The man is touted as a hero before he even proposes a plan. The man meets many of the locals and joins in a Christian festival that follows many of the local customs and seems to be a mix of the new and old religions. The following day, he joins the judge and chief of police to watch a parade, in which his new friend, a chef, has volunteered to carry a large stone on his head to show his gratitude to Jesus for saving him from a sinking ship. After the parade has finished, the engineer has not seen the chef, so he runs to the street and finds him struggling to carry the stone. The engineer takes the stone and quickly walks it to the church himself, but he does not stop there. He continues on to the chef’s hut and drops the stone onto the floor inside. The struggles between new and old were all around in this story, and as the engineer drops the stone, he shows his respect for the people and their ways instead of taking the stone to the church where it was intended to be taken.

Each of the stories were entertaining alone, but altogether they form a great theme of realization and reverence. Characters come to respect their own callings and others around them. Much like his more popular work, The Stranger, the internal struggles of the characters are apparent and central. This is nice read for thinking and personal self-reflection.

Once There Was a War – John Steinbeck

The Nobel Award-winning author, John Steinbeck, often created themes of domestic economic struggle with such titles as East of Eden, Cannery Row, and Grapes of Wrath, but at the very center of his career, he took his pen to the European Theater of World War II as a war correspondent. Later in life, Steinbeck looked back at his time during the war and compiled several of the newspaper pieces he wrote into a book called Once There Was a War.

Steinbeck’s introduction started by saying the most famous war was mostly forgotten by the men who fought it. He explains that the trauma, the urgency, the peril was experienced and acted on with instincts of war, and a fighter might not remember exactly how many barrels of the enemy guns were trained at them as they ran across fields. But, perhaps, they also might forget at times due to the fear that gripped them as each step the soldier took was escaping death, while many of their comrades were not so lucky.

Steinbeck also adds that during times of war, much of the media is censored. Partly because the soldier’s missions are treated as top-secret: any news the enemy might receive of an upcoming attack or position of the allies could put many men in danger. Somewhat tongue-in-cheek, Steinbeck adds that any news of less successful missions might reflect on commanding officers, so to protect their egos (and the correspondents), the failures and the officers names were often struck from the record by censorship. With America’s values of freedom of speech, someone today might think that the censorship then was unfair, but the correspondents did their best to follow the rules. Nobody wanted to lose a chance of a nice job in journalism after the war, and more importantly, none of them wanted to be blamed for losing the war.

Steinbeck joined the war in 1943 and spent about a year in the action. Through the book, the reader gets a first-hand account of sailing from the US to England on a troopship, life at a bomber squadron in England, life in Tunisia and missions to Italy. The correspondent’s accounts give the reader the ups and downs, the little-known pieces of war life, that is likely unknown to someone living 75 years after the event.

My favorite pieces in the book were about a private named Big Train Mulligan. Big Train was a driver in the army. He was a smart man and the soldier life suited him. He would do anything that was asked of him, but he also decided he loved his position as a driver in England better than any other option. He loved it enough that he seemed to always mess up details when he was in line for a promotion, but not quite enough to lose the job. That was the kind of guy he was. He could have gone far in the army; he could have been an officer and led many men. But Big Train wasn’t interested in being responsible for other men, he just wanted to do his job. He drove officers to and from appointments and waited for them in the car until they required a ride to the next place. Big Train somehow always attracted women as he waited at the cars and he kept a big address book where he wrote each woman’s information into. When he drove the officers to stay overnight in a cramped house with tattered sheets and stiff beds, Big Train always had a woman from his book nearby where he would stay in a soft and comfortable bed and have a home-cooked meal. The women would stop at the car and talk to Big Train and he would reach into the officer’s belongings and pull out a pack of cigarettes, or occasionally chocolate for them. The ladies loved the guy for this. When the officers returned from meetings to find their personal cigarettes or chocolates missing, Big Train would just explain that the woman was there and it seemed like the gentlemanly thing to do to offer her whatever he could find, and the officer agreed so no feelings were hurt.

Whether you’re a fan of WWII, Steinbeck, or just want a good book to read, this one fits the bill. There was a nice range of emotion- fear, disgust, sadness, joy- this has it all. As we lose many WWII veterans to time, it is nice that we have these accounts Steinbeck has left us. Stories like these and from the veterans I’ve spoken to always send a chill down my spine and remind me of the enormous amount of respect these men and women have earned.
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Breakfast at Tiffany’s – Truman Capote

This morning, I read Breakfast at Tiffany’s, a novella by Truman Capote. I read In Cold Blood several years ago, and find some similarities in the characterization, but little else as the narrative follows a fictional relationship between two people in New York. It was a nice, short read. The characters were pitiful, but that just makes you love them more.

The narrator, a young writer, is pleased with finally finding a home of his own in a brownstone apartment in New York. A neighbor has moved in, a young woman named Holly Golightly, who spends days sleeping and nights entertaining older gentlemen. Holly is a character if there ever was one, a self-described nut who ran a way from her Texas home at fourteen. She had married the horse doctor who had taken her in, but ran away because she never felt at home. She went to Hollywood and was on the verge of becoming a star when she ran again to New York. She went on many dates and flirted money right out of the pockets of wealthy older gentlemen. Holly ended up with a Brazilian diplomat, preparing to marry him and move to Rio when her world came crashing down as she was arrested for involvement with a notorious gangster. The gangster, Sally Tomato, was visited by Holly every Thursday, she unknowingly delivered coded messages to him because she thought the ‘weather reports’ were a cute game. Pregnant and shattered by the news of the diplomats decision to leave her, she decided to take the flight to Brazil anyway and leave it all behind, facing indictment for fleeing the prosecution.

The two central characters, the narrator and Holly Golightly, were polar opposites. The narrator was proud to have a place to call home and Holly was never able to find a home to settle in. This freedom and stability issue was continuous throughout the text. One Christmas, they exchanged gifts. Holly gave the man an elaborate birdcage, a home for avian, while he gave her a medal of St. Christopher, the patron saint of safe travel. At the end of the book, Holly sent a post card stating she had found a home in Buenos Aires. The narrator had spent much of his time traveling the world, so now their roles were reversed.

The Stranger – Albert Camus

The main character of The Stranger is a young Frenchman, Meursault, who lives on his own, working a trivial job. The story opens with news of his mother’s passing. She lived nearly 80 Kilometers away at the elderly home he had sent her to live as he had little income to support her living at home with him. He was disconnected from his mother; the time they spent when they lived together was uneventful, each having nothing to say and wishing to be elsewhere. At the viewing and funeral, Meursault had not wished to see his mothers body, and had not cried, which gave the appearance of indifference. Upon returning home, he began an affair with Marie, a woman who used to be his coworker. He thought she was incredibly beautiful, but as she asked him for marriage, he again showed indifference to their future.

Meursault’s friend Raymond lived across the hall in their building. He was involved with a woman who cheated him and asked Meursault for help in writing a letter to her to have some cathartic revenge. The woman returned to Raymond’s apartment and he beat her. The woman’s brother was an Arabic man who began keeping a threatening eye on Raymond.

One day, Meursault, Marie and Raymond went to Raymond’s friend’s beach house. After a day of swimming and eating, the men went for a walk on the beach and ran into the woman’s brother and his friend. A fight ensued. Raymond was cut with a knife and went to the doctor. Later that day, Meursault was still on the beach and was suffering from the heat. He considered going up the stairs to the beach home, or back to a cold spring (where they last saw the men who fought them) to cool off. He started walking to the spring and found the Arabic man there. The blistering heat got to Meursault and as the Arab’s knife flashed a ray of the sun into his eyes, Meursault began shooting him.

The second half of the book relates the time leading up to Meursault’s trial for killing the man. He was seemingly indifferent the entire time. His lack of desire to fight for himself and prove his innocence led Meursualt to being charged with the crime and sentenced to the guillotine.

The book had a sense of indifference throughout. Meursault did not care much that his mother died. He did not care whether he married Marie or not. He did not really seem to care whether he was found guilty of murder or not. In the end, he was resigned to the fact that we are all born, we all live a meaningless life, and we all must die. The melancholy of triviality that lasted throughout the book ended in his final realization: Meursault was finally happy.

The Great Train Robbery – Michael Chrichton

Author of the world-famous Jurassic Park, Michael Chrichton penned the novel The Great Train Robbery, a true story about an infamous 1855 heist. This was a major event in England for several reasons. Firstly, the trains were a new technology in Victorian England, and nobody had thought to make such a daring robbery on a train line. Secondly, the plan was well thought out and spanned a period of over a year in preparations. Finally, it took nearly another year of detective work to track down the mastermind of the event.

Chrichton did his research well on this event and presented a narrative of the event from the perspective of the criminals, in a style similar to what Capote had done in the Kansas crime novel, In Cold Blood. The leader, Edward Pierce, was continually described as ‘the red bearded man.’ He had the appearance of a gentleman and few suspected him to be a criminal, as most believed Victorian criminals were of the lower class. Pierce created a master plan to rob the London train heading to the coast with a load of gold intended to pay troops in the Crimean War. While he collected information, he also rounded up necessary men and women to aid the heist. As he hired the men he needed, he told none of them of the impending robbery details, just what their particular job would be. He hired Robert Agar as a lockpicker early in the preparations and left him in the dark as they worked together to bring the plan together.

The robbery entailed robbing the trains on-the-go. In a special guarded and locked car sat two state-of-the-art Stubb’s safes, which had two locks apiece, requiring four keys to get in. The four keys seemed to be the most difficult part of the preparations. Two were locked in a cupboard in a guarded office, and the two others were each held by managers of the bank who were employed to supply the gold shipments. One man was seduced by a young prostitute to obtain the key, the other was burglarized at home during the night, the key found hidden in his wine cellar. The other two keys in the guarded office took an elaborate scheme. Pierce hired a boy to act as a thief, who ran into the office and broke a ceiling window in a failed attempt to escape. Pierce’s cab driver, a large brute with a noticeable white scar on his forehead, acted as a policeman to chase the boy and take him away safely without any real repercussions. Later that night, a man Pierce had hired for his climbing ability and agility climbed through the broken window and into the room to unlock the door. Agar then waited until the guard went to the bathroom and ran into the unlocked room and made wax copies of the keys, returning to his hiding place on the platform before the guard returned. Several months later, after careful planning, Agar and Pierce were ready for the big day. Agar was disguised as a corpse in a coffin to be loaded into the guarded car. Agar had met the guard a few months before as he practiced unlocking the safes and the guard had been paid off and was believed to be no threat to the operation. Pierce boarded the train in the second-class cars and had one all to himself. During the route, he climbed onto the roof of the speeding train and walked across to the guarded car, where he unlocked the door from the outside. The gold was bagged and thrown off the train to Pierce’s cab driver. Bags of lead shot replaced the weight of the gold and the safes were locked up again, and everyone returned to their original places as well. The train delivered the safes to a ferry crossing the English Channel, then they were transported to Paris to pay the troops. It was in Paris the guards discovered that something was amiss. The train blamed the Parisian government, the ferry blamed the train, and the British and French governments blamed each other. After such careful planning, nearly everything went according to plan.

Over a year later, a lady friend of Agar’s was caught robbing a drunk man and when begging and bribing didn’t get her out of police custody, she gave up information on Agar’s involvement in the robbery. Agar was apprehended, which led police to the train guard and then to Pierce. The trial was a national event, however, it was overshadowed by the Indian uprising against British troops on the Indian peninsula. Pierce was cool, calm and collected the entire trial, explaining in detail his plan and the execution of the robbery. After the sentencing, Pierce was taken into a police cab to be taken to jail. The guards woke up and reported that they don’t remember anything but a large man with a white scar on his forehead beating them. Pierce, his mistress (who was involved in the robbery) and the cab driver made a clean escape and were never heard from again.

Rating: 9/10

A Wrinkle in Time – Madeline L’Engle

A Wrinkle in Time is another great fantasy work, focusing on a fair mixture of science and religion. L’Engle explores topics which focus on ideas that many young adults can struggle with on their way to adulthood.

Meg Murray is a young teen who struggles a lot with school. Many of her classmates consider her an idiot, but when it comes down to it, she does very well at math and science (with two scientists as parents, it’s easy to see why). Her father has been missing for a couple of years after leaving on a science mission with the government. Her mother continues her chemistry experiments at home, patiently awaiting her husband’s return. Meg also has younger twin brothers who do fair in school and get along well with their peers, so they have a hard time understanding why it’s all so difficult for Meg. The youngest member of the Murray family is Charles Wallace. He was late in developing speech, and many people in their town believed he would be dumb, but he was actually very mature for a five-year-old. He had a very impressive vocabulary, along with a nearly sixth sense of mind-reading as he always knew what Meg was thinking.

As Meg and Charles Wallace were walking through the woods to their new neighbor’s home, they befriended Calvin, an older boy who was a star athlete and student. Calvin also had some extra perception capabilities, like Charles Wallace. Together, they met the ‘witch’ neighbors and were soon whisked away to find their father. The witches revealed their dad was on a distant planet trying to save the universe from an evil darkness that was taking over stars and planets. Mr. Murray was not the first to battle evil, as the witches explained, others like Jesus, the Buddha, famous artists and scientists also had fought against the evil forces.

As the book explains, they use a form of travel called ‘tessering’ which gets them from planet to planet and into other galaxies in the universe. Soon, they land on the target planet, Camazotz, where they found a society that was completely conformed to do every task at the same time. Citizens were exterminated or retrained when they ‘fell out of line’ or caught an illness. Charles Wallace, in his naivety, decided to challenge the man who was explaining the order and conformity to the group, and he became hypnotized. The new Charles Wallace led the other two children to their father and Meg used a special gift to free him. Charles Wallace then led the crew to ‘IT’ to try to have them hypnotized and join the society as well. He was a completely different and untrustworthy person at that point. Mr. Murray tessered Meg and Calvin to another planet to escape, leaving little Charles Wallace to IT.

The group had tessered to another planet in Camazotz’ solar system. There, Meg was nursed to health and found a true belief, and goodness and love were sent back to Camazotz to untrap Charles Wallace so he could return home. The conformity of Camazotz and IT were essentially short-circuited by this emotion as they had little free will or capability of truly understanding love.

As mentioned before, important topics in the book focused on young adults gaining a better understanding of the world. L’Engle emphasized the importance of the perseverance of good over evil frequently in the book. She also stressed the fight against conformity and importance of free will as the children explored Camazotz.

This was a fun and quick read. I generally enjoy sci-fi, and those of course were my favorite parts of this book. I liked how they explained ‘tessering’ and traveling at hyperspeed. L’Engle did a great job of describing the emotions and physical feeling of tessering through Meg’s character.

Rating: ********8/10

On The Road – Jack Kerouak

On The Road, “Yass, Yass, egad, whoopee!” as Dean would have said. The book that shot Kerouak into notoriety also catapulted the ‘Beat Generation’. What is Beat? Beat is not knowing but seeking, not just living but experiencing, not just observation but immersion, it is IT! Kerouak’s characters felt like getting out and living life to the fullest. It is driving or hitchhiking across the US in a couple of days just to say hi to a friend, endless drunken parties or going just to go. While they seemed to have wonderful carefree lives, they also had periphery lives that included aunts, parents, grandparents, and multiple wives and kids they had to neglect to fulfill their longing of seeking. When he had enough of one wife, Dean would leave her with child and head to the other coast to live with his other wife and kids, and spending every dime to get there. A constant life of spinning wheels.

“What’s your road, man?- holy road, madman road, rainbow road, guppy road, any road. It’s an anywhere road for anybody anyhow.”

The main character, Sal Paradise, started the series of journeys in 1947. He left New Jersey to visit friends in San Francisco with the intentions of meeting a friend and finishing his novel. He hitched to Denver, stayed a few days, and then went to the West coast. He stayed with a friend, Remi, and guarded a camp for shipmen in San Francisco. He carried a gun and was supposed to keep the sailors quiet and sober instead of joining the fun, which was not his cup of tea. Eventually, he moved on to Los Angeles where he met a nice Mexican woman and joined her village to pick cotton. Her family was not accepting of Sal so he moved on and went back to New Jersey.

“I wasn’t scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost.” 

The next year, Sal had finished his book and his friend, Dean, came from Denver to New Jersey to pick him up and drive west. They went south to New Orleans, across Texas and up to Denver. In New Orleans, they stayed with a friend, ‘Old Bull Lee’ (said to be a character based on William S. Burroughs). Lee was wise but a heavy experimenter of drugs, spending most of the day in a haze of heroin. When he was alert in the mornings, Lee kept the crew entertained and tried to convince Sal to stay with him and forget his friends, who lacked much ambition. When the time came, Sal joined his friends and continued on to Denver. Upon arriving, Dean left Sal and his ex-wife, Mary Lou, to meet up with his wife Camille. For nearly a week Dean was gone, and in the meantime, Mary Lou left with another guy. After Dean’s return, he was solemn and careless of Sal, so Sal decided to buy a bus ticket back to New York.

“I realized these were all the snapshots, which our children would look at someday with wonder, thinking that their parents had lived smooth, well-ordered, stabilized-within-the-photo lives and got up in the morning to walk proudly on the sidewalks of life, never dreaming the raggedy madness and riot of our actual lives, or actual night, the hell of it, the senseless nightmare road.”

The following spring in 1949, Sal packed up from New York and went to meet Dean in San Francisco. Dean had had part of his thumb amputated after an infection caused by hitting Camille. He was starting to show his age, he went from a bright beacon for Sal to a load of childish nonsense, but Sal stuck with him. Together, they left for Denver. Few friends were left there and they spent a few days digging the jazz joints. One night, Dean stole car after car for drunk kicks and the next morning they found out the last car they drove back to the where they were staying was a detective’s car. They quickly left Denver and headed to New York.

“As the cabby drove us up the infinitely dark Alameda Boulevard along which I had walked many and many a lost night the previous months of the summer, singing and moaning and eating the stars and dropping the juices of my heart drop by drop on the hot tar, Dean suddenly drove up behind us in the stolen convertible and began tooting and tooting and crowding us over and screaming.”

The final trip in the story saw Sal planning to go to Mexico City, via Denver. While in Denver, Dean came from NYC to drive them. With plans to get a Mexican divorce from Camille, Dean then intended to join his new love, Inez, in New York. After the long journey, Sal stayed in the hospital with dysentery for several days and Dean left Sal in Mexico to go home because he accomplished his own goal of the divorce. At that point, Sal realized how unsympathetic and shallow Dean’s life and friendship was.

Here’s a quick sketch of my image of the book: