Lord Of The Flies

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skimom2

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Oct 9, 2013
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I'm currently teaching this to thirty fifteen year-olds. They aren't loving it. The only things they love are the related texts that are more modern - like Survivor. Stupid diluted culture!

Edit: AND AND AND. The next time one of them calls it Lord of the Rings, they are getting a detention. Haha.

The language gets them, I think. So much YA lit is written at a 5th grade level--kids often don't have the vocab. for classic books, or they can't follow through with a complex thought. It's a learned skill--they'll get it if you don't give up!

I'm a 'mean' mom: if my kids had a book project and didn't pick a book within a reasonable amount of time, I chose for them. As a result, by 7th grade the big ones got assigned (by me) Lord of the Flies, Of Mice and Men, Ethan Frome... :) Anything shorter, but still a classic. Two littlest go to a better school, so their teachers help me out now--haha!
 

ghost19

"Have I run too far to get home?"
Sep 25, 2011
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One of those very rare instances where I liked the movie more than the book. Book was very hard to read thru, seemed quite dry and uninteresting...much like myself.....
 
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AnnaRose

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Oct 26, 2013
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One of those very rare instances where I liked the movie more than the book. Book was very hard to read thru, seemed quite dry and uninteresting...much like myself.....
Did you read the book first or see the movie? I generally like whichever I saw/read first better. And which version did you watch? I haven't seen either...I suppose I'll watch both.
 
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fljoe0

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Apr 5, 2008
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One of those very rare instances where I liked the movie more than the book. Book was very hard to read thru, seemed quite dry and uninteresting...much like myself.....

Are you talking about the 1960s version? If so, I just saw a new version on blu-ray. They have fixed it up and it looks 100 times better than I've ever seen it. They fixed the audio too. See if you can find a blu-ray copy to rent or buy. They did a great job with the restoration.
 

ColbyWhitt

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Apr 24, 2014
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I agree and I think it would have been the same with females too. I'm a cynic as well.
I feel that if it would have been all girls then they wouldn't have made it as far as they have. Girls wouldn't understand and know what to do if they were put on a island by themselves. Some girls wouldn't know where to start by collecting the food and building a fire to produce smoke so that someone may see them. girls would have had each other killed the first three days they would be on the island. This is a very good and meaningful book.
 

Cory Dillard

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Apr 24, 2014
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What a great book. I think that without civilizing influences, if one is clinging by fingernails to the thin edge of survival, life would be "nasty, brutish, and short" for most people. We're at our nadir of Maslow's hierarchy of needs at that point--we're animals trying to survive. I don't think that it would be different if it was girls. There might be some difference with grown women if there were dependent children involved. In that situation, our genetic programming would likely lend itself to protection of the young. It could be better--more organization, etc--but it could also be more vicious, if women were battling to keep their own children alive instead of pooling resources for the group.
I agree. If it were all girls, I think things would be more organized but things would eventually get bad.
 

Eryk Clark

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Apr 24, 2014
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I feel that if it would have been all girls then they wouldn't have made it as far as they have. Girls wouldn't understand and know what to do if they were put on a island by themselves. Some girls wouldn't know where to start by collecting the food and building a fire to produce smoke so that someone may see them. girls would have had each other killed the first three days they would be on the island. This is a very good and meaningful book.
I agree here, because i have seen what just two girls in one household can do to each other within about two weeks. Girls would rip each other apart in a very short amount of time. The main reason for this is because most women like to in control of the situation.
 

Tiffany.

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Apr 24, 2014
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When I read it at first i didn't think i was going to like it but after I got more into the story and some of the action and I guess you could say violence started to happen I seemed to enjoy it more, it made the story interesting!

I agree with you, Robert. When I read it the first time I thought that it was a bit boring and I wasn't too interested at first, but the more I read the more I wanted to keep reading. It reminds me of some of the things I read by Stephen King, which is one of my favorite authors. I recommend reading this book to anyone who enjoys mystery books or anyone who enjoys reading. ;-D
 

admiralnarwhal

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Apr 24, 2014
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I recently read this for English class. I was completely caught off guard when the group turned and killed Simon. As morbid as it sounds I was kind of expecting Piggy's death though. The story seemed to end a little too abruptly. One second there's an intense chase all around the burning island and the next everyone is sobbing on the beach and being rescued. It was a good ending but just seemed to come out of nowhere.
 

admiralnarwhal

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Apr 24, 2014
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I loved this book when I was a kid. I loved Piggy. If it were all girls, they would not have behaved so badly. We do not have this urge for blood sport.

Maybe not at first, but eventually the evil that is a part of nearly everyone would begin to change that. The whole story is telling how that evil would make people revert back to savagery, whether by choice or not, if left alone long enough. For Jack it was more of a choice but even Ralph and Piggy found savagery at least slightly enticing once they experienced it.
 

Walter Oobleck

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Doesn't anyone think that with girls they'd bring out the caring nature that seems to be inherent in the female of the species?
 
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ghost19

"Have I run too far to get home?"
Sep 25, 2011
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Did you read the book first or see the movie? I generally like whichever I saw/read first better. And which version did you watch? I haven't seen either...I suppose I'll watch both.
I've read the book several times over the years. I saw the movie but I had read the book at least once, maybe twice before seeing the movie. I very much liked the movie, it seemed to capture the savagery better than the book did, which again, is rare. I think the first time I read it was in 8th grade or something like that, then again in college, and about ten years ago. It's hard to describe. I can see the value of the book, but it's one of those books where I find myself having to fight to keep my attention on the reading. Just seems flat for some reason....not the book GNT, I know the book itself is flat....lol:)
 

Mr Nobody

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Jul 9, 2008
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Doesn't anyone think that with girls they'd bring out the caring nature that seems to be inherent in the female of the species?

I think it'd depend on their age. Based on observation of my sister's friendships, etc, when we were kids and what I know of things my niece has gone through, girls often have it pretty rough. Perhaps even more so than boys (who, as natural individualists/competitors, either just shrug it off or have a punch-up).
Put boys in a survival situation and they'll generally form a hierarchy - as they/we do anyway. Put girls in a survival situation and all bets are off. The usual narrative would be that "girls would be more co-operative and work together", but when push came to shove and there wasn't enough to go around...that's when things would become distinctly chaotic.
 

Walter Oobleck

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Mar 6, 2013
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Maybe not at first, but eventually the evil that is a part of nearly everyone would begin to change that. The whole story is telling how that evil would make people revert back to savagery, whether by choice or not, if left alone long enough. For Jack it was more of a choice but even Ralph and Piggy found savagery at least slightly enticing once they experienced it.

There's a couple of great lines in another great story, from Steinbeck, East of Eden: I believe there are monsters born in the world to human parents. Seems to offer an idea or two for debate about evil. Here, Steinbeck suggests evil is born into the world. In another: maybe we all have in us a secret pond where evil & ugly things germinate and grow strong, Steinbeck
seems to be offering another explanation for evil...or maybe really not another option, but one that perhaps explains the actions of the boys in Lord of the Flies. In another story, one that King uses in his Hearts in Atlantis story, Ted, this old buck, has Bobby, a young man, read a couple stories. I believe Lord of the Flies is one of them and the other is A Separate Peace from John Knowles...or maybe I'm injecting this last into King's story...as it helped explain our actions, young boys growing up during the turbulence of the 60s. King's story, Hearts in Atlantis, truth be told, touched me like few stories have and his story should be included on the shelf with all of the stories in my post.

I wonder if I already posted this...posted a post like this? If ever there was a wiz there was...and so on and so forth and scooby dooby dooby. Anyway...check out all the above stories if you enjoyed Lord of the Flies. For us, like Gene and Phineas in Knowles' story, we played rough because we thought we were going to war...Vietnam. So in that sense, seems like it's legitimate to wonder if in fact evil isn't fostered in a larger sense, society as a whole. And my last connection is to Arthur C Clarke's Childhood's End and the ending of that remarkable story...taking that "society as a whole" idea and looking at lemmings...that animal that rushes headlong into the sea. There's this idea I call 'the mark of zero'...maybe a tad lame...but there is present in the above stories...and others I've read, this idea that we as a group want to disappear, we want to bury our self...or Self. Clarke's story has an ending that'd I'm sure you'd enjoy in that regard.
 
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skimom2

Just moseyin' through...
Oct 9, 2013
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I feel that if it would have been all girls then they wouldn't have made it as far as they have. Girls wouldn't understand and know what to do if they were put on a island by themselves. Some girls wouldn't know where to start by collecting the food and building a fire to produce smoke so that someone may see them. girls would have had each other killed the first three days they would be on the island. This is a very good and meaningful book.
Maybe. There are a lot of girls out there, though, that know just as much as boys about survival, and many that know more :)