Green, J. (n.d.). The Fault in our Stars.

What is my favorite part of this book (and why I ultimately recommend it to everyone)?

So my answer to this first hit me when actually Augustus, the male love interest of the main character (who is 17) casually makes a reference to Waiting For Godot in passing conversational. The main character is incredibly well made and well written (so are the majority of youths in this novel--a stark contrast to the adults...but that's for another time, let's focus on Hazel). Hazel has ideas that are bigger than her and she actively thinks about them. Hazel has premature wisdom.  Her mind rarely succumbs to futility.  She ponders the metaphysical, as well as why scrambled eggs have been relegated to breakfast.  Frequently, her monologue includes hyperaware things that we should all stop and consider, like:    
 -"Funerals, I had decided, are for the living."    
 - "suffice it to say that the existence of broccoli does not in any way affect the taste of chocolate" (in response to          the sentiment Without pain, how could we know joy?)    
 - "I was thinking about the word handle and all the unholdable things that get handled."
Funny enough, the first connection I made from this is the dialogue and back and forth that wakes part on Gilmore Girls, the television show. I was turned off by how unrealistically quick, witty, and well educated this supposedly average high school girl was. Perhaps, I only allow it within text. Hmm
Well. I'm almost done and ready to cry--i've been preparing this whole book.
This is an amazingly well told tale of many relatable human emotions and feelings.

Huxley, A. (1946). Brave new world. New York: Harper & Bros.
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
So, i'm quite upset because I left my book in my CT's room over the weekend and I had carefully highlighted and made notes in the margins of things to discuss, so i'm going off script. 

What kind of person do you feel the author is? What makes you feel this way?
     I know it's a very popular (and boring) method of teaching literature to teach first through a biographical lens by explaining the life and times of the text's author before jumping into a book--this is great for shakespeare is you want to bore students to death before they even start reading. This can be useful for certain historical pieces, adapting the theory of New Historical Criticism, though i suppose it's still all about how you teach it. I digress, I have honestly never researched Huxley before, nor do I know anything about his life despite his best works. just speculating here, but I would assume that perhaps in his late 1800s/early 1900s lifespan that he was perhaps negatively influenced by some sort of technological aspect. The Model T automobile obviously played a role in Brave New World. While I'm unsure if it was negative, experiencing a medical or scientific mishap, or he was simply just fascination at the changing of the times after the industrial revolution and the automation that came with it, he definitely felt some type of way. 
     I might also speculate about his love life, because why not? the character of Lenina Crowe is intriguingly unorthodox: she defies her culture’s conventions by dating one man exclusively, is drawn to Bernard, and is violently enthralled with John. Lenina is unable to share Bernard’s troubles or to understand John's value system. Lenina exclusively relates through sex alone. Another similar female character (John's mother i believe), Linda also is seen as morally tainted because of promiscuity. While this can easily be read with a feminist lens, putting Huxley in the fedora-friend-zone group, perhaps Huxley was simply painting the mentality of his time period-the religions and customs that oppressed women in the early 1900s. 
     I would also venture to assume that Huxley was a well-read scholar. All of this not based on the incredibly complex and, i'm assuming purposefully choppy narration and dialogue that help to mimic the characters' disconnectedness and feeling of neutrality, but specifically the detail of John very heavy-handedly being known for his ability to recite Shakespeare quotes by heart. This supposedly demonstrating that the western philosophies of that era are what equate to correct and just living according the Huxley. Perhaps he was just finding a way to make known all the Shakespeare he had memorized over the years himself--typical English guys.

Huxley, A. (1946). Brave new world. New York: Harper & Bros.
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley:

What do you feel is the most important word, phrase, passage, or paragraph in this work? Explain why it is important. 

     So, it may not be the most important, but this week I want to share some of my favorite little quotes and shocking lines. "He put away the soma bottle, and taking our a packer of sex-hormone chewing-gum, stuffed a plug into his cheek and walked slowly away towards the hangers, ruminating." So I can't remember, nor clearly tell what this novel's full take on sexuality is. I'm inclined to think that because it is such and open and rampant part of Huxley's society that, along with the class separation and everything else, Huxley is attempting to paint promiscuity in a negative light. This is disheartening to me as I feel the opposite. I feel that modern society has most definitely evolved to include a large amount of material in this text, but perhaps not all of it is bad. Obviously the government's usage of sex is troublesome--the orgies to maintain control and blindness, but whether Huxley was truly anti-sex is tbd. 
     It would interesting having this conversation with the right, mature class. The great thing when teaching topics that tend to divide the class is that as a teacher, you never really have to fully weigh down on a specific side--you can let the students battle it out after prodding them. It would definitely be difficult to teach this text without spending a fair amount of time on the issue of sex/society's pleasure. But I assume that you can teach this entirely with a Marxist lens or something of the like, but at the risk of overteaching I would still want to introduce the different lens and interpretations; Brave New World is just so dense and able to be unpacked from so many different angles.
     The sex-hormone chewing-gum slays me. While it's not marketed or called the same thing, we definitely sell similar products nowadays. Caffeine chewing gum, "Horny Goat Weed", whatever else you can find at the nearest convenience store. It would be fun to focus on the little details of their society, like these products and drugs, and start off having the class find and compare them to things in their own life. I like the idea of ending the process by having students create their own dystopian product, with a short ad campaign or poster to present to the class.