Brave New World
⭐ (⭐) ☆ ☆ ☆
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
A hollow relic. ⭕
I honestly don't understand the hype. What is the point of this book? Why is it still considered a classic, and why is it forced on high school students as required reading? I struggled through it, constantly asking myself what I was even supposed to take away.
I give every book at least 1 star for existing, but I gave this a courtesy second star purely for its ironic, almost accidental foresight. Huxley nailed a society obsessed with comfort, instant gratification, and shallow harmony, engineered from birth and numbed by drugs and endless distractions, in a way that eerily anticipated today's pointlessness and superficiality: endless doomscrolls, mood-management meds, cancel culture for the non-conforming, and consumerism as civic duty. Many reviews still call it disturbingly alive and more relevant than ever amid tech monopolies, dopamine-driven apps, and debates over what happiness truly costs. But foresight doesn't automatically make great literature.
Quite simply, this book is hollow. The execution is dry and essayistic, more philosophical lecture than engaging story. Its characters are flat cardboard cutouts, mere mouthpieces for ideas rather than real people with depth or emotion. The plot is paper-thin with no real tension or stakes: tour the dystopia, introduce an outsider, then just watch him collapse. The once-shocking world-building now feels overdone, unengaging, or even tame compared to our real world.
Whatever made it a classic hasn't aged well, and I can't help wondering why we still treat it as mandatory reading, as if it's some profound revelation. Brave New World may have predicted parts of our brave new world, but that doesn't make it essential. Sometimes a prophecy fulfilled just leaves nothing more than an echo. The book's own hollowness mirrors our cultural obsession with revering it as profound while living out its critique in real time. If we're already living the satire, then revering the satire feels like the ultimate hollow gesture.
