drunken_retard's reviews
19 reviews

Brave new world is a fantastic sci-fi book. An excellent prediction. But it just is a good novel. I explain.
The book does an amazing job presenting this distopic future, it spends a lot of time explaining how it works, how the people here think and how they behave, this world also coincides with our actual world, and that was one of the objectives of the book, to predict how the future would be, turns out, Huxley predicted it almost perfectly, and this helps to comunicate the message this wants to give, its a harsh critic to the capitalism and the actual society. 
But, its just a good novel, because of the characters. They work, and I can relate to them, but they don't have enough depth so I can care very much to what happens to them. 
Another flaw that I can mention is that of the final chapters, which alter the rhythm of the novel. The events happening after John abandons the society are so fast-paced that I dont have much time to asimmilate them, its like the book is hurrying up so it can end before 300 pages. We also arent told how the state of the savage is a those moments, the events are just descrived and thats it. John also has a like a massive change in this final section of the book, a change that happens suddenly, from one moment to another.
Also, Hemholtzs, Leninas and Bernards characters finish without a conclusion, so minus points for that side too.
Despite all this flaws, its in fact a very good book, that you should read along 1984, to contrast these opposite forms of distopias. 

The myth of Sisiphus is a dense one, I personally had it difficult to read, because the author keeps mentioning other authors that I haven't read, some chapters are entirely dedicated to developing his thesis around these authors, like Dostoievski, Kafka, Chestov and other philosophers like Nietszche, so reading them first will help understanding the book in a better way. The vocabulary is also complex, so it isnt easy to read, I often found myself re-reading a chapter cause I didn't understand it, or making side notes on the book to clarify some things.
I'm not a book expert, so this was hard to read for me a lot of times, I would recommend it if you are very interested in philosophy and stories that some of the before mentioned authors have made. 
Besides that, it is a good thesis about the meaning of life, or better said, the lack of meaning in life cause of death. All the chapters go around developing the problem of absurdism and the meaningless act that is living, and when the books reaches the "answer" to this problem, it feels satisfying, and if you apply and think about it, you can extend that to your life. It's a good philosophy book.