This was really well done. I read it in 2017/18 as a teenager and thought it was wonderful, but I don't think I got why. I know I'll understand it better when I'm even older, but now, six years later, I think I can appreciate it on so many more levels. It's asking deep questions about what it means to live well, to be truly happy, to be truly virtuous (and if those are the same thing). John is raised on Shakespeare (I understood the Shakespeare references!!) and then thrust into a world that prioritizes pleasure and mindlessness over self-control and intentional choice. What happens then, what he chooses to do, is tragic and terrible. I found it very hard to read this time. But he chose it.

Do I agree with all the philosophical conclusions here? (Do I even know what all those philosophical conclusions are?) I don't think so, but that is certainly not the point. Rather, I feel challenged to think about them more. To try to live well myself. (I'll be singing while I do it.)

Everyone should read this. If you have a working knowledge of Shakespeare and a grounding in the western philosophical and religious tradition, that'll help. It's good either way.

"Yes, 'Everybody's happy nowadays.' But wouldn't you like to be free to be happy in some other way? In your own way, for example; not in everybody else's way."

Happiness is a hard master, particularly other people's happiness. A much harder master, if one isn't conditioned to accept it unconditionally, than truth.

"Are you quite sure that the Edmund in that pneumatic chair hasn't been just as heavily punished as the Edmund who's wounded and bleeding to death? The gods are just. Haven't they used his pleasant vices as an instrument to degrade him?"

"I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin."
"In fact," said Mustapha Mond, "you're claiming the right to be unhappy."
"All right then," said the Savage defiantly, "I'm claiming the right to be unhappy."