Where’d we leave off last week? Where’d we leave off? Oh yeah: I’ve got something to say! Nothing terribly important, though.

So I’m taking a little bit of a break from The Omnivore’s Dilemma since I’m at a good breaking point with maybe another hundred pages to go. I do that sometimes. I just take a break if a book is taking forever, because I’ll enjoy it more when I come back to it after a week.

I’ve taken the opportunity to get started on the new David Sedaris book, When You Are Engulfed in Flames. It’s really good. Though why should that surprise me? Sedaris is, after all, one of my favorite writers. I’ve already read most of his other titles, including Barrel Fever, Naked, Me Talk Pretty One Day and most of Holidays on Ice (which I make it a point to only work on during the month of December…so I’ll likely finish it this year).

Sedaris writes short stories and essays, a medium that I particularly enjoy reading because of the sense of accomplishment I feel each time I finish one, rather than the daunting task of an entire novel. In fact, short story is really the only medium of fiction that I wholly enjoy. Aside from that, non-fiction is really up my alley (though my favorite book, to this day, is still Douglas Adams’ classic sci-fi novel, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy).

But it’s not just a sense of accomplishment; it’s also encouraging. I mean, as soon as I’ve finished one short story, the next one is right there waiting for me, and I read this last one fast enough that the next one shouldn’t take me too long either. As such, I tend to tear through collections of short stories, like Sedaris’, rather quickly.

However, it should be noted that, at around the three quarters mark, I start slowing down and then take some time off before finishing the whole book. But hey, that’ll be a great excuse to get back to The Omnivore’s Dilemma. And the circle of life is complete.

Who here doesn’t like a good dystopia story? I read Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World last night in a four-hour reading binge, figuring the whole time I’d stop at the end of the chapter.

I loved 1984, as much as someone can love such a terrifying novel, and expected more of the same from this dystopia story that was written fifteen years prior to Orwell’s. As a work of philosophy and ideas, it’s fascinating just to read what the new world is like—how people are conditioned from conception for their intended social castes, how embryos of would-be manual laborers are starved of oxygen to prevent full physical and mental development. As a work of fiction, though, the book annoyed the heck out of me. Huxley’s characters are largely unsympathetic, even the protagonist of the second half of the book, the Savage, whom Huxley treats like a mouthpiece for his views. “But I don’t want comfort,” the character says at one point, decrying society’s happy pills, values of empty entertainment, and uniformity. “I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.” I thought: ah, shut up, you melodramatic plot device.

But this version of the future, if not as well-written, is more plausible than the one shown in 1984. In Orwell’s world, the government controlled the people through social conditioning and fear to love Big Brother and hate their country’s enemies, whoever they were at that moment. In Huxley’s, society has conditioned itself from the lowest ranks up and there is no longer one authority controlling the new world’s agenda: everyone from children to international Controllers believes that the goal of life is only comfort and fun, and in doing so, destroys society’s ability to pursue greater meaning.

Which thought terrifies you more: a totalitarian government watching your every move or a culture of hedonism, where the answer to every problem is taking happy pills?