So far I have re-read Charlotte's Web and The Giver.
I didn't write about Charlotte's Web because it made me cry a lot and I had just written another entry about crying a lot and I didn't want to worry anyone.
Synopsis: A piglet, Wilbur, very much enjoys life and throws himself down into piles of hay in absolute hysterics (Wilbur is a bit of a dandy) when faced with the reality that death is inevitable meets an older spider who fully understands and embraces life's natural cycles. Life, death, detailed (almost oddly pornographic) scenes of spiders eating flies, bacon. crycrycry.
Last night I finished reading The Giver by Lois Lowry. I had read this when I was younger and it has been on my bookshelf since then. I had never been tempted to pick it up again because for some reason I remembered it having a Jewish theme (I blame the rabbi-looking guy on the cover and the prominence of a character named Asher).
The Giver is actually about an alternate community where everything is controlled down to the point it is in black and white. People live in assigned family units, do assigned jobs, they have no knowledge of life outside or before the community. They live in what they call "The Sameness". One person in the community is designated the Receiver of Memory and he hold all memories of the outside world from colors, to weather (they have none of either in the community) to death and war and pain and love. The main character, 12 year old Jonah, is designated to become the next Receiver and begins to inherit the knowledge from The Giver.
It's a warm up book to Brave New World and 1984 and all that good stuff.
Message that ultimately maintaining "sameness" eliminates humanity and allows people to do appallingly inhumane things without batting an eye.
Plus they make you take a pill to get rid of "The Stirrings" that start around the age of 12. That is no life I'd want to live.
This book made me cry like nobodys business at the very end.
ReplyDeleteDo you think they die at the end? I remember it being unclear and having long discussions about it (in 6th grade of couse..)
I remember that I thought they died at the end when I read the book as a kid, but in re-reading it I think they make it.
ReplyDeleteI was sobbing nonetheless.
We discuss the book in my class on July 16th. I will report back with the consensus of the class.
In response to the above comment a quote from Lois Lowry's Newbery Medal acceptance speech:
ReplyDelete"Those of you who hoped that I would stand here tonight and reveal the "true" ending, the "right" interpretation of the ending, will be disappointed. There isn't one. There's a right one for each of us, and it depends on our own beliefs, our own hopes.
Let me tell you a few endings which are the right endings for a few children out of the many who have written to me.
From a sixth grader: "I think that when they were traveling they were traveling in a circle. When they came to 'Elsewhere' it was their old community, but they had accepted the memories and all the feelings that go along with it. "
From another: "Jonas was kind of like Jesus because he took the pain for everyone else in the community so they wouldn't have to suffer. And, at the very end of the book, when Jonas and Gabe reached the place that they knew as Elsewhere, you described Elsewhere as if it were Heaven."
And one more: "A lot of people I know would hate that ending, but not me. I loved it. Mainly because I got to make the book happy. I decided they made it. They made it to the past. I decided the past was our world, and the future was their world. It was parallel worlds."
Finally, from one seventh-grade boy: "I was really surprised that they just died at the end. That was a bummer. You could of made them stay alive, I thought."
Very few find it a bummer. Most of the young readers who have written to me have perceived the magic of the circular journey. The truth that we go out and come back, and that what we come back to is changed, and so are we. Perhaps I have been traveling in a circle, too. Things come together and become complete."