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Saad Alkhudairy abunawaf — The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster; Is Good-Enough Good Enough? Before computers, when I would answer my ringing phone, it wasn’t unusual for the response to be, ‘Oh, you’re there. I was hoping to get your machine.’ Email relieved the awkwardness of accidentally being forced to confront another human being. It wasn’t perfect but it was good-enough. Imagine a scale that runs from unacceptable to perfect. Along this scale is poor, fair, mediocre, passable, good-enough, good, better, perfect. Sears used to use a scale in its catalogue of good, better, best. They never would have considered calling them good-enough, better and best. But good-enough is the standard now. Think of the Wikis. The best that can be said about them, on their best day, is good-enough. CGI movies, good-enough, or is it that we are amazed that these things can be done at all that permits them to be considered acceptable? Is Toy Story better animation than Roadrunner? Are these things that are good-enough really good enough for you? Don’t you want more? This is the crux of the idea behind The Machine Stops by E.M Forster. In it, The Book Of The Machine is the stand-in for Wikis and other know-it-all sources. If you have a question, in this future dystopia, you turn to this Book for the answer. No matter that The Book is often wrong and always misleading, it is the source of knowledge and the guide for its people. This idea was lifted to comic heights in The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, another Book with all the answers that could not be relied on to be correct or even helpful. Are humans destined to need some kind of Book to guide their lives? Like these examples, the internet and the information explosion presents itself as an entity that appears to be expanding while it is actually shrinking. It contracts and encompasses the life around it. First impressions no longer exist. Each thought is a derivative of a learned thought, each behavior an imitation. In Forster each person lives in a controlled room. Their senses are manipulated, through the environment, to provide the Machine’s misguided definition of perfection. He uses the sense of smell as an example. People in his world are appalled and uncomfortable, it all smells so different. They prefer the stimuli in their own room, not the smell, taste or touch of the outside world or others of their own kind. Look around you. Are things so different now? How many television commercials concerned with alerting you to the intolerable aromas around you do you see each week? How far removed from actual experience do the commercials say you have to be in order to be happy? Read On.

Anand Pandey anandusj568f — Beloved is not easily accessible- the text makes you work to extract every bit of meaning and if you're not feeling up to that kind of heavy-going deconstruction, you're probably going to end up resenting it. But that caveat noted, this is probably one of the most rewarding reads I've ever embarked on. I studied it as part of a university literature class that focused on post-colonial and revolutionary literature and I know most of my classmates really disliked it- but I loved it. I thought it was just magic. Beloved is a Southern Gothic novel that tells the story of the outcast Sethe, a freed slave, attempting to reconstruct her life in the aftermath of slavery and a violent, disturbing personal tragedy. The story is told in a disjointed manner through the perspectives of a variety of characters surrounding the protagonist, including the eponymous ghost, Beloved herself. It mixes the supernatural, elements of voodoo culture and horror into a thoroughly researched history of slavery that starts in Africa and finishes in Ohio. The thread that pulls the reader through the story is an unknown sinister event lurking in Sethe's past, involving her deceased daughter, and the increasingly malevolent presence of the ghost haunting her house. It's not difficult to see why some people find the disjointed, non-linear, stream-of-consciousness delivery of the story off-putting. But if you're patient with it you'll find a narrative that not only relays a history of slavery in America, but shows (rather than simply telling) how fractured and psychologically damaged its victims were. The delivery of the narrative is designed to reflect the collective state of mind of those whose voices tell the story. I think there's also an element of Morrison's trying to argue that the story of slavery is one of such horror and violence that it simply cannot be told in ordinary language, that it has it's own vocabulary- one that's different from the words used to describe the mundane. I noticed another reviewer likened the narration to that of William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury- a comparison which is spot on. Toni Morrison wrote her masters thesis on Faulkner and the southern gothic genre, so it's not surprising that she's borrowed many of his techniques. Like Faulkner, Morrison also crafts impressionist, poetic prose, which I thought was a delight to read. As with Benjy Compson's mentally handicapped narration in The Sound and the Fury, the difficulty you experience as a reader in decoding Sethe's fractured narrative highlights the plight of the victims of slavery and the difficulty they had in making their voices heard. There's so much to discover in this book, layers upon layers that can be unpacked. If you feel like you're struggling, don't try to analyse every single clause- read on and just try to absorb the over all gist of the words, because this is the kind of book where the meaning will crystallise as you progress. My last piece of advice when reading Beloved would be to pack a box of tissues- the events depicted in the book are not for the faint-hearted. They are both disturbing and very, very sad, as you would expect of any story that attempted to chronicle such an awful part of human history.