One book. One week. One foot in the grave.

This marks my blog's first graphic novel! I had a class in high school where I had an entire graphic novel unit, which left me for a great appreciation for the medium, so I was excited to jump back into it. In that sense, it's fitting that I'm reading one of the most popular modern graphic novels, Maus by Art Spiegelman. This novel has transcended traditional attitudes about graphic novels ("they're just picture books!" cry the elitists) and has been integrated into many school curricula. I know my own brother read it in his middle school holocaust unit and enjoyed it very much. The word "enjoyed" might sound odd in the context of a book about the holocaust, but that enjoyment seems to come from the emotional resonance that arises from the personal testimony of the author's father. The story is told through the perspective of the author/illustrator's father, a jewish holocaust survivor named Vladek, as a series of stories he relates...

Anthem is the first novel so far where I have to admit that I held some sort of bias before going into the book. While I haven't read it before, I have some staunch opinions about the book's author, Ayn Rand. For those who are unfamiliar, Ayn Rand is considered a prolific author for her books Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead . She is famous for the highly individualistic messaging in her novels and rejects any forms of collectivism, attitudes which were inspired by her growing up in Soviet Russia. The situations she presents in her works have made her a staple reading for modern libertarians and conservatives, two groups whose values oppose mine. Rand was also publicly homophobic, arguing that homosexuals were immoral and shouldn't receive equal employment rights under the law. Suffice to say, we have very different views of the world, and I didn't want to get my opinions down without acknowledging that. Walking in with knowledge of Rand's political philosophy...

There have been multiple periods in history where man had to wonder if the convenience of technology had superseded his own wellbeing-when we made machines that could mine coal, the coal miners were out of work, and we questioned if automation could hurt more than help. In 2018, we face the same question, this time with many aspects of the food service industry. Is replacing human cashiers with kiosks detrimental to our society as a whole? Are we, like the old adage goes, just replacing unskilled labor? Or could this continue to happen for any number of jobs we couldn't imagine? These are the questions posed by Player Piano, Kurt Vonnegut's first novel. In this novel, machines have replaced nearly every form of work, leaving the elite class as simply those who can create more of them. Those without a job get assigned to the reeks and wrecks (essentially manual labor), the army, or remain jobless. This doesn't mean many people are left unemployed: the government sets up...

This week I read Aldous Huxley's Brave New World . Published in 1932, this novel is set in a jarring utopia inspired by Ford manufacturing in which a stringent caste system dictates the lives of all citizens. People are no longer born and raised in a familial setting, but grown through artificial means, potentially in batches of thousands of twins, in amounts that perfectly satisfy the necessary working needs of each caste. The story follows young John, who was raised apart from this civilization and is now in his early adulthood. The world he grew up in (a society similar to the Native Americans in New Mexico at the time the book was written) valued religion, domestic partnerships, and individualism, concepts the new world has discarded. The novel largely consists of his antagonistic relationship with the new world. This novel is often compared to the book I read last week, 1984 . Both were written around the same time and center around the workings of a frightening futuristic ...