Insurgent, Day 1

I'm baaaaaack!


So, I don't know if anyone deduced this from reading my Divergent commentaries, but for each of my demographic-conscious summer reading explorations I've scheduled my reading so that I read larger sections of book each day. The first day of reading I read for one hour, the second day I read for two hours, etc. I could outline some good, compelling reasons for structuring the reading like this, or I could just be honest and say I'm highly analytical and eccentric and tend to assign myself a ridiculous reading schedule every time I read a book (although for some reason I only use the hours-by-day system for these summer reading projects).


The point I'm trying to make is that I never get very far the day I start a new book, so today I have nothing to gripe about. Instead, please enjoy my somewhat quirky observations.


First: When I picked up the book from the library yesterday, my initial thorough examination of it included glancing at the back cover. Because the copy I got is a hardback with a dust jacket, the brief summary is on the inside front cover rather than on the back. Instead, the back says only this, in big bold all-caps lettering:


"One choice. A choice becomes a sacrifice. A sacrifice becomes a loss. A loss becomes a burden. A burden becomes a battle. One choice can destroy you."


And I know my first thought should've been something like, "Wow, man, that's intense."


Instead, it was, "Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate (dramatic pause) leads to suffering."


Star Wars. It is everywhere. You cannot escape.


Second: Another neat Hunger Games parallel popped up. Namely, both Divergent and The Hunger Games feature a character named Johanna who is introduced in the second book. The characters are vastly different (at least they seem to be; I haven't seen much of Divergent's Johanna yet), so I doubt it was intentional. It's just a bit amusing.


Third: Recently I read a book series called Across the Universe, yet another addition to the ever-widening pool of dystopian romance trilogies featuring first-person present-tense narration and written primarily for teenage girls (although, in its defense, the similarities to The Hunger Games and Divergent end there; the dystopian society unravels at the end of book one and the second and third books deal with entirely different concepts) (interestingly though, the series takes place in space and has a redheaded protagonist named Amy, and thus seems to be paying awkward amounts of homage to another popular franchise). I didn't like the series, in case anyone's wondering, and after I'm done with Divergent I intend to never dip into that particular pool again. Anyway, one of the aspects of the dystopian society present in the first book is the extreme passivity of the citizens in the society. It is ultimately revealed that the passivity is induced by a drug pumped into the water supply.


Now, among the many extras at the end of the copy of Divergent that I had was a short essay by Veronica Roth discussing the idea of utopian fiction. In it she concludes that utopian fiction wouldn't work because everybody's vision of perfection is different. She says that the dystopian society in Divergent really began in her mind as her vision of a utopian society. She then says that someone else's vision of a utopian society might be, and I'm going to misquote her because I don't have the book anymore but I'll try to get close, "somewhere where everybody gets happy drugs through the water supply".


And I immediately thought to myself, "I bet she's read Across the Universe".


The reason that I bring it up now is that Roth has now introduced the concept into her own book. Members of Amity, the peaceful faction, receive small doses of a calming drug through their bread to make them even less prone to conflict than they are naturally. So now I think there are two possibilities. One, Veronica Roth read Across the Universe and thought that a passion-soothing drug was such a gloriously creepy dystopian idea she decided to rework the concept slightly and add it to her own story, or Two, Veronica Roth has never heard of Across the Universe and the mention of "happy drugs" in her essay was referring to her future plans for her own series.


Either way, I think it's apparent that the writers of dystopian romance trilogies intended for teenage girls are starting to run out of original ideas.


In much the same way that I've run out of things to comment on.


But I should have shiny new observations to share come tomorrow.


Goodbye for now.


~Pearl Clayton