Sarah tagged me, so I’m therefore obligated to let you all know what I’m currently reading.

I’m in the middle of a couple books right now… I started out reading Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, which has succeeded in stoking my hatred for people. In order to cheer me up, I took a break from that and read through Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, which is much less of a downer than Rand.

Sadly, I don’t know five bloggers to tag them, but I’ll try to make an effort to find a few.

Update: Apparently, I don’t know how to follow simple directions. I was supposed to “open the book you’re currently reading on page 161 and read the fifth sentence on the page, then think of 5 bloggers to tag with”

Here we go… Atlas Shrugged.

“Next time you give a party,” he said, “stick to your own crowd. Don’t invite what you think are my friends. I don’t care to meet them socially.”

I’m not sure if I’m supposed to give an explanation, but the “he” refers to Henry Reardon, the steel industrialist, and one of the protagonists in the book. It’s the end of chapter seven, after Henry’s wife had just thrown a birthday party for him, and purposefully (and spitefully) invited the exact sort of people that she thought Henry should be socializing with, but chose not to. The crowd was made up of people who thought themselves important in society, but (in the eyes of the industrialists) really didn’t amount to anything, i.e. the authors, journalists, philosophers and politicians.

Brave New World is much more mundane.

“Do you have many twins here?”, the Savage asked rather apprehensively, as they set out on the tour of their inspection

“The Savage” is John, and the tour is of a school in this brave new world. John was born in an Indian reservation, and although he was the son of “civilized” people, he spent his life among the savages. He received special permission to leave the reservation and tour the society outside the reservation, and at every turn in thoroughly disgusted by every aspect of it. In this chapter, he is touring the education/indoctrination facilities in the new world, and his question was due to his experience of seeing identical faces on all the lower class workers (gammas, delta, and epsilons), brought about the new technology of Bokanovsky’s Process, where a fertilized egg can be split into different identical people, with the world record being 16,500 identical twins. The identical twins unnerved John, hence his question. However, since they were touring a school for alpha-pluses, there were no twins to be found.

One side note… page 161 is about two-thirds of the way through Brave New World, and a little over one-tenth of the way through Atlas Shrugged.