2017 Reading: The Remains of the Day

#28 A book set during wartime

While this book is actually set AFTER wartime, most of the action, in the form of the butler's flashbacks, are from before and during the war. So it totally counts. I think.

It amazes me that this man has so little sense of self, so little ambition in life other than to be a great butler. He doesn't even want to be a good MAN, just a good butler. He throws away, and even doesn't seem to have in the first place, a sense of his own morals but merely adapts to those of his employer and then take them as scripture. No original thought has crossed his mind and he has no thoughts or opinions of his own, but will defend those of his master until his dying day, even though he doesn't understand any of it. Even then, he counts himself as being part of this great change merely because the silver was clean or the drinks were brought in a timely manner to the men who were ACTUALLY making the decisions about the fate of Great Britain and the like. He might as well have not even been there.

But this gives him a purpose that keeps him going and will likely keep him going until he drops dead with a tray in his hand while he apologizes for the mess on his way down.

2016 Reading: Never Let Me Go

#7 A romance set in the future

I got the suggestion for this as my romance set in the future by someone from GoodReads, but when I began reading it, I noticed that it is in no way set in the future. It's actually set in the past. But it's a past that was more advanced than ours and therefore made it more advanced than our future, but with a lot of similarities.  I don't know how else to describe it. I'm going to go ahead and count it anyway.

I had never heard anything about this book before so I didn't know what to expect. I ended up really liking the book despite the fact that the main characters seemed to have no idea what they were doing. With anything. No one spoke their mind or were unique in any way. And I know that they turned out to be clones, but the whole point of the special school was to prove that they could be their own people yet they just followed orders even when they knew that they would end up dying from the "donations." They accepted that that's all they were good for instead of fighting back.

Also, the point of the school was to give the children the greatest possible life they could ever hope for despite their clone status and the fact that their whole purpose was to die for the sake of "real people." I don't think I agree with that. I think that would be a cruel reminder of what they were never be able to sustain. They were treated nicely and shown a world, but kept away from it because they could never live in it. They are destined to die and they can do nothing about it. They CHOOSE not to do anything about it. They just lay down and take it.