One Blog To Rule Them All

            For my final I decided to read The Dead & The Gone and The World We Live In, which are the sister book and sequel to Life As We Knew It respectively. First of all, let me just say that I really enjoyed reading all three of these books and that they are a super-fast read even if they are a normal length book. Now, from this point on there are countless spoilers, so if you are planning on ever reading either of these books, which I suggest you do, then don’t read the rest of this blog.

            The first thing that I would like to talk about is the point of views that the stories are told from. Both Life As We Knew It and The World We Live In are told from the first person point of view of Miranda. The twist on this first person point of view is that the story is supposed to be told as if you are reading out of her countless diaries that tell the story of how her family lived before, during, and after the apocalypse. The point of view that The Dead & The Gone is told from is similar to how Blindness is told, in third person, but following one character. In this case the person that was followed was a 17 year old boy named Alex.

            The next thing that I want to talk about is the deaths that occur in each of the books. In Life As We Knew It there weren’t all that many deaths. There was only Mrs. Nesbitt, Peter, Miranda’s friend, and her friend’s mother. Mrs. Nesbitt and Peter were the only deaths in the book that could be considered close to the main characters. In The Dead & The Gone there were more deaths which were the implied deaths of the parents, the oldest sister, Alex’s friend, the store owner, and then just the mounds of bodies that he passes every day that Miranda doesn’t have to until The World We Live In. At the end of The World We Live In there were the additional deaths of the new character of Charlie and Alex’s younger sister. With the death of Julie, that leaves Alex to be the only surviving character from The Dead & The Gone while most of the characters from Life As We Knew It are still alive at the end of The World We Live In.

            The last thing that I want to talk about how the characters get the necessary resources to survive in each of the books. In Life As We Knew It the characters survived with a combination of wilderness skills and handouts. The handouts were all of the food that they ate excluding the amount that they bought at the very beginning of the book. As for wilderness skills, they were able to chop wood, boil snow, and other skills like these. In The Dead & The Gone the characters also relied on handouts but then relied on scavenging. The handouts were also given to them by family and government that that helped sustain them for part of their food, or all of their food in the beginning of the story. What they did to survive for the rest of the book was Alex went out body surfing with Kevin to search for anything valuable on the dead bodies to resell to a store for food and other necessary goods that they needed to survive. These two strategies for getting the necessary resources to survive in this post-apocalyptic world combine in The World We Live In. The still receive handouts from the government through the city hall once a week. They also still gather wood like they did in the middle of Life As We Knew It but they add fishing to that list as well for a little bit. As for scavenging, Miranda does this with several people throughout the book to get any supplies that are left in any of the houses. The most important scavenge of the book was when Miranda and Alex go out together and they find a massive food stash that helps replenish their food supplies.

            I really enjoyed reading all three of these books. I managed to read the second two books over winter break in just 4 days. Reading all of these books helps give the reader an idea of how a situation can be completely different if it is viewed from a different angle. All of these books talked about the same event that happened, but each had their own spin on the events and had their own sort of flavor to them. I would definitely recommend reading The Dead & The Gone and The World We Live In to anyone who enjoyed reading Life As We Knew It, they are all truly great books that you will not be able to put down.

A True Dystopia

            Since all of my other blogs have been pretty serious and have been basically short essays, I figure I can take this one to be a little less serious. This class has probably been my favorite class that I have ever taken. I mean how can any other class compete with a class addenda that is basically just read good books, talk about them, and watch related movies? Oh, and you can’t forget all of the other things like how we are an anarchist commune or how we worship the alpaca gods. At times I wish I had taken this class second semester because it would have been a great way to end off the year, but if I had taken it then instead of now, I wouldn’t have been able to have the amazing classmates that I have! And let’s not forget the great teacher that we all have as well. This class would just not be the same with any other teacher besides Mrs. Saunders. I’m going to miss you all second semester!

DDystopian, double D for a double dose of Alpacas.

Blind Organization

            The part of the book that I want to talk about is when the group of blind men took control over the food supply and basically the rest of the institute as a result. Although this group did some pretty terrible things, and cause the rest of institute to go into mayhem because of it, they also did some pretty good things as well. While the food deliveries stopped coming to the institute, the group was able to stretch out the supplies. Also, earlier in the book, the supplies were not distributed fairly; some ate more than their share while some did not have anything to eat at all. When the group took over, everyone got the same amount of supplies and no one was left out. So even though the group did some pretty terrible things, they also helped out the institute.

            Now, while this real world example may shock basically everyone, just hear me out on this one. The Nazi party also did some extremely terrible things, but they also did benefit the world in some ways. I don’t really need to go into detail about the bad things that they did, everyone knows about those. One thing that they did that was positive though was German engineering. So much of the world around us would not be possible without the engineering advancements that were created by the Germans. Another thing is that the Nazis had a pretty decent plan for the world in terms of dividing up the work fairly amongst everyone, a representative counsel for the world, and plenty of other things. The problem with the Nazi party was how they went about achieving this vision, by creating a world war and the holocaust, as well as that the vision only involved a “master race” instead of everybody.

It's Got Electrolytes!

            Satire is the comedy of poking fun at something in society often in an attempt to highlight what’s wrong and to change it. These problems that are pointed out are often extremely over exaggerated. Satire is a funny alternative to more depressing ways of finding out what’s wrong such as seeing it in the news or watching a documentary.

            The movie that we watched was Idiocracy. The point that the movie is trying to address is actually the opening to the movie. The problem that the movie is about is that society is constantly declining intelligence level. It talks about how society used to reward people for being smarter than others, but how in the past century the opposite has become true. It was after this point that the movie started to over exaggerate everything by just a little bit. It said that smart families basically never have any kids and that low intelligence families have something around five hundred. When the movie then jumps several hundred years into the future, the population’s average intelligence is extremely low and the two people from the present who had average intelligence are now the smartest people alive by a long shot. Now, while these examples from the movie may be blown way out of proportion, they do have a valid point. Society is on a downfall because everyone is allowed to live, even if they don’t contribute to society in anyway. Although it may sound terrible, a new plague may be what the world needs in order to reset the balance.

Double Meaning

            A while ago we talked about the words in The Handmaid’s Tale that had multiple meanings or at least meant something different from how we normally use them. Some of these words were “angels” and “is”. An angel is something that isn’t always brought up in every day conversation, but when it is people usually think of white robed people with wings on a cloud. In The Handmaid’s Tale however it was used as the title for the soldiers. This difference isn’t too crazy though because angles can also be thought of as “the warriors of god” and the soldiers can be thought of as protecting their religion and their interpretation of the word of god. The word “is” is a different situation however. How we would use it is if something is a matter of fact. An example is “the dog is in the living room”; there is no speculation, the dog just simply is in the living room. In the book however, the word “is” becomes something like a hope that everything is okay. The narrator uses the word “is” to talk about the people from earlier in her life when things were more like how they are today; the reason that she does this is because she has no way of knowing what their actual life is like in current times so she creates her own reality for them.

            This double meaning of words or altered meaning of words can also be seen other places such as the double speak in 1984 or even our own lives. To use my own life as an example, the words “depressed” and “sad” are very similar in meaning, but I give them my own special meanings. To me, sadness is a reaction to external stimulus. An example of this would be finding out that the reason my grandfather died before my parents met was not because of an illness of anything of that nature but instead because he committed suicide. And then to me, depression is a reaction to internal stimulus. An example of this would be how I expect myself to be superman in order to meet expectations and then beat myself up mentally and physically when I make even the tiniest mistake.

            Now, to end this blog on some sort of short conclusion instead of the previous paragraph. All of these examples show that words can be interpreted differently depending on the situation, the reader, and the writer. I am sure that everyone has their own versions of words that mean something slightly different to them than to the average person.