Sunday, October 6, 2013

30 Day Challenge - Day 6

Day 06 - A book that makes you sad.

I first read Lord of the Flies when I was in Grade 7, back in the day when Grade 7 was the last year of elementary/grade school. I was 12. Unlike The Catcher in the Rye which I found the most incredible tripe, something about this book got under my skin and has stayed with me 'til this day, nearly 45 years later. I have reread the book a few times over the years and it always leaves me sad. Mr. Wallace, the teacher that brought us the book would be proud that it has stuck with me for all this time.

Lord of the Flies is the tale of a group of British schoolboys stranded on a deserted island during an unidentified wartime. What begins as a grand adventure decays into something horrific as this bunch of boys goes evolves/devolves from civilised and living by rules they've been taught since babyhood, into chaos and barbarism. There is friendship and there is hostility, there are boys being boys and boys being made to think of things and do things that we would never want our children to do or think about. There is violence as only children can be violent and when it escalates into what we would probably term adult violence, it's frightening and all too real.

And that's why this book makes me sad. The veneer of civilisation is very thin in places and when one reads this book, one can see how so many terrible things can be done by humankind if care is not taken.

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