In our book club, we are finishing up Brave New World. It has taken us a lot longer than it should have as there were some delays. For our next book, we are doing Twilight, which has me jumping for joy. I have wanted to do Twilight for a while now but did not think I would get it, considering that the book club was mostly guys. I gave it to the chair of the book club and she fell in love with it and decided to push for it. It helped that two girls recently joined us, giving us more balance in terms of gender. While I am looking forward to several weeks of Twilight I am concerned about how it will play out with certain members of the group. One of the problems with choosing books is that we not only have a wide range of reading interests but also of reading ability. For example, there are two people in the group, one of whom has since left for college, besides for me who have very strong backgrounds in science fiction and fantasy. We had a habit of going off on side tangents which no one else in the group understands. To add to this, all three of us can quote long sections of Monty Python at each other, much to the annoyance of everyone else. The ongoing process has been the chair leaning on me to lean on them to keep them in line and to keep the conversation to things that other people can understand and follow. As for reading ability. I am working on a Ph.D. in history. There is another person in the group who is a Ph.D. student in English. The chair just got her Ph.D. But then we have people in the group for whom reading books is a struggle. One such person has little interest in reading anything except for novels about modern warfare. He is particularly fond of Tom Clancy. This is life in a group full of people with Asperger Syndrome.
It is about our Tom Clancy fan that I am writing. He is dead set on us reading a Tom Clancy novel or at least something along those lines. I and others in the group have no interest in reading Tom Clancy. Besides for the fact that Clancy’s books tend to be full of right-wing cold war paranoia, they are also too long to work well for us. Every time we have voted on a book this person has dutifully posted a Clancy or something along those same lines and every time he has been voted down, much to his great frustration. I would like to help him out here so I am turning to you, my readers. Can anyone recommend a novel about modern warfare (World War II to the present) that is not Tom Clancy or a Tom Clancy clone? It should have plenty of action, but still have useful discussion material and be less than five hundred pages.
I welcome any and all suggestions.
Showing posts with label Brave New World. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Brave New World. Show all posts
Sunday, September 7, 2008
Sunday, July 27, 2008
And Now For Something Completely Different: An Asperger with a British Sense of Humor
I co-chair a book club geared to those with Asperger Syndrome or otherwise on the high end of the autism spectrum. We meet every Thursday night at eight P.M at the Barnes and Noble on the Ohio State campus. This past week we finished Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. I had read Good Omens once before, but, like most books by either Gaiman or Pratchett, it was worth reading a second time. Good Omens is a hilarious romp through the apocalypse featuring an angel and a demon who conspire together to save humanity from the forces of both Heaven and Hell. This is top of the line British humor, my favorite kind. British humor, though, is not something that can be appreciated by everyone. The reactions of the group were mixed. As I see it, British humor reflects on different elements of the Asperger mindset and, depending on the person and circumstance, can either work very well for those with Asperger Syndrome or can utterly fail.
British humor, as exemplified by Monty Python, Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett, entails manic insanity mixed with running gag references that span the cultural gambit and is usually quite dark. (For example Douglas Adams has the Earth blown to bits by aliens, building an interstellar freeway, in the first few chapters of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.) Good Omens deals with the world coming to an end next Saturday afternoon. Heaven and Hell are preparing for a final showdown in which, no matter who wins, humanity will lose. Unfortunately, due to an error on the part of a satanic nun, the anti-Christ has gone missing. Out to save the day are the unlikely pair of Aziraphale and Crowly; an angel and a demon who are in fact good friends and who rather like the Earth as it is. To those of you who are befuddled by this, not to worry; things only get more absurd as the book moves along. What keeps this all afloat is the fact that Good Omens is a satire on Paradise Lost and Revelations. It also makes fun of the Screwtape Letters, Star Wars, Doctor Who, televangelists, seventeenth century prophecies, witch-hunts, and James Bond just to name a few things.
British humor inundates the audience with strings of information, but revels in absolute absurdity. People with Asperger Syndrome are particularly suited to handling strings of information but are ill equipped to handle things that make no sense. British humor can be effective for such people if they have the necessary background to understand the references and if they can get past the fact that nothing makes any sense. One can then revel in how a given piece of British humor spits out information and how it follows its own innate logic off a cliff into perfectly “logical” absurdity. If the person with Asperger Syndrome does not pick up on the references, though, everything will backfire. All that would be left is a something that is all over the place and utterly overwhelming; in other words the sort of thing that those with Asperger Syndrome are woefully ill equipped to deal with.
The traditional assumption is that people with Asperger Syndrome have, in general, a difficult time dealing with humor. Humor is not logical and requires a certain flexibility in how one understands things. While this is particularly true in regards to British humor, British humor, because of how it uses strings of information, can, under the right circumstances, work very well for those with Asperger Syndrome.
Our next book is going to be Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. This book also fits into the model of British humor. We shall see how the group deals with this one.
British humor, as exemplified by Monty Python, Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett, entails manic insanity mixed with running gag references that span the cultural gambit and is usually quite dark. (For example Douglas Adams has the Earth blown to bits by aliens, building an interstellar freeway, in the first few chapters of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.) Good Omens deals with the world coming to an end next Saturday afternoon. Heaven and Hell are preparing for a final showdown in which, no matter who wins, humanity will lose. Unfortunately, due to an error on the part of a satanic nun, the anti-Christ has gone missing. Out to save the day are the unlikely pair of Aziraphale and Crowly; an angel and a demon who are in fact good friends and who rather like the Earth as it is. To those of you who are befuddled by this, not to worry; things only get more absurd as the book moves along. What keeps this all afloat is the fact that Good Omens is a satire on Paradise Lost and Revelations. It also makes fun of the Screwtape Letters, Star Wars, Doctor Who, televangelists, seventeenth century prophecies, witch-hunts, and James Bond just to name a few things.
British humor inundates the audience with strings of information, but revels in absolute absurdity. People with Asperger Syndrome are particularly suited to handling strings of information but are ill equipped to handle things that make no sense. British humor can be effective for such people if they have the necessary background to understand the references and if they can get past the fact that nothing makes any sense. One can then revel in how a given piece of British humor spits out information and how it follows its own innate logic off a cliff into perfectly “logical” absurdity. If the person with Asperger Syndrome does not pick up on the references, though, everything will backfire. All that would be left is a something that is all over the place and utterly overwhelming; in other words the sort of thing that those with Asperger Syndrome are woefully ill equipped to deal with.
The traditional assumption is that people with Asperger Syndrome have, in general, a difficult time dealing with humor. Humor is not logical and requires a certain flexibility in how one understands things. While this is particularly true in regards to British humor, British humor, because of how it uses strings of information, can, under the right circumstances, work very well for those with Asperger Syndrome.
Our next book is going to be Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. This book also fits into the model of British humor. We shall see how the group deals with this one.
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