Fishing for Metaphors

I thought I would do each review for each separate book but I didn’t want to spend too much time writing essay-like reviews. So, instead, I write mini-reviews. Hope you enjoy!

Lavina

Sometimes when you are quiet, you sort of get looked over. Pretty much you’re invisible. It’s sort of like Lavina, an important character that is mentioned briefly in Virgil’s epic poem, the Aeneid. She is the last wife to Aeneas the Trojan hero. In this novel, the author Ursula K. Le Guin attempts to give her a voice by retelling the epic poem through her perspective. Overall, it was a lovely read with a feminist streak that doesn’t victimize femininity as a lesser role:

The chief duty of a king is to perform the rites of praise and placation as they should be performed, to observe care and ceremony and so understand and make known the will of the powers that are greater than we are. It is the king who tells the farmer when to plow…In the same way, it is the mother of the family who tells the household when to rise.

-Lavina, p. 205-206

Lord of the Flies

What a poetic read. Lord of the Flies was epically horrifying, although I can’t say I entirely agree with the author’s opinion about Indians (I don’t think they are savages). However, I do agree with the author’s point of view for the most part. The author argues that society is prone to collapse into a primitive state when we fail to think sensibly. What better way to illustrate the point by putting a group of schoolboys on an island? As I was reading this book, I wondered how different the story would be if it were a group of girls. Do you think the world would be nicer? Nah…it would be just as bad. Where there are people, there will always be politics because the true nature of humans is the beast itself. It’s scary to think a beast has so much control over the mass but what is more scarier is that we allow it. The Lord of the Flies is no different from the Lord of the Corpse.

Well, that’s it for now. These are the two books I finished in February. On top of gaming, I am currently reading Persuasion by Jane Austen and Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follet but probably will drop Pillars of the Earth if I feel too uncomfortable. I haven’t gone far enough into the book, but I heard the rape scenes are quite violent and unecessary. On the other hand, if Oprah Winfrey vouched for the book then it must not be so bad because so far, I think the story is pretty interesting.