The Giver
10 journalers for this copy...
I think if a book wins a Newberry it gets to be called Literature rather than Children's. Great book, we have multiple copies here so this one is available.
sending this as RABCK to harmaja via nekki2976's m-bag. My first book to Finland :-)
posting to nekki2976 for m-bag on 9/30/05
posting to nekki2976 for m-bag on 9/30/05
Received today. Reserved for Finnish m-bag.
Journal Entry 4 by potok-fan from Turku, Varsinais-Suomi / Egentliga Finland Finland on Sunday, September 10, 2006
The M-bag has arrived in Finland! KIITOS & TACK. The Turku bookcrossers will meet on Sept 19 to make plans for distributing these books all across Finland. We'll see that this book gets to harmaja.
Journal Entry 5 by potok-fan from Turku, Varsinais-Suomi / Egentliga Finland Finland on Monday, September 25, 2006
Piiku has kindly offered to take a pile of books from Turku to Helsinki, to deliver to a bookcrossing meeting. This is amongst them, and will soon be in harmaja's hands. Thank you, Piiku!
For the first time ever I have received a book via M-bag! It's a very special book for that reason, and also because it's a Newbery Medal winner I've wanted to read for a long time. Thank you, bookreadera, for registering this book and sending it on! Thank you, nekki2976, for organizing this M-bag! Thank you, Potok-fan, for being the organizer and "book-distributor" in Finland! And finally, thank you Piiku for bringing this book to me to the local meet-up yesterday!
Piiku had so many M-bag books for us, it was like Santa Claus had come for a visit! This made our meet-up extra nice - thanks, all of you, for making it possible!
Now The Giver goes to my TBR-pile, hopefully to be read sooner rather than later! (I'm currently writing a bachelor's dissertation on youth literature, which means I have a ton of YA books to read, but The Giver is a book I'm really looking towards reading!)
Piiku had so many M-bag books for us, it was like Santa Claus had come for a visit! This made our meet-up extra nice - thanks, all of you, for making it possible!
Now The Giver goes to my TBR-pile, hopefully to be read sooner rather than later! (I'm currently writing a bachelor's dissertation on youth literature, which means I have a ton of YA books to read, but The Giver is a book I'm really looking towards reading!)
I read The Giver today, when I should have been reading my study books instead. (This is very typical of me!) It was a fast read, and such an interesting book that I didn't want to stop reading until I was done.
I've read many other books by Lois Lowry, and she seems to be a very versatile children's author. Anastasia books and the one Caroline book I've read are pretty light-hearted and funny. Number the Stars is a lot more serious tale of war and persecution. The Giver is something completely different, again: it's actually a dystopian sci-fi book for young readers. It's not highly original - I've encountered similar dystopias in adult science fiction before - but it's interesting how it's still very clearly a children's book. And as children's books go, this one is pretty grim.
In a way I wish I had read The Giver already when I was younger. (I had the same feeling with Lowry's Number the Stars, by the way.) The story was at times a bit too simplistic for me to be really excited. And yet it was clever enough that I never lost interest. It really made me think about individuality and the cost of it.
The scary thing about the society described in The Giver is that it's a dystopia in tones of grey instead of all black. (This is actually literally true, but here I mean it as a metaphor.) I could see some advantages in the way things were run in Jonas's home community.
Sure, I like music and poetry and colours and sex, and wouldn't want to be denied all of those. I also like being able to choose for myself, at least from time to time. And yet, sometimes I feel our society sets too much value in individualism and freedom of choice. There's something to be said in being a part of a community as well.
We are free to make choices every day, to enforce our individuality and to try and set ourselves apart from others. This freedom of choice and the pressure of individuality has often lead to reckless consumerism, where we buy a lot of stuff in an attempt to give a boost to out personality, and waste away our precious natural resources in the process.
Jonas's world certainly isn't ideal for human beings, but it seems to be pretty ecological, from what I gathered. Everyone uses bikes to move around, everything is close by and easy to reach, and the products are not brought from far away. People are not concerned by how they look and they don't feel the need to buy a lot of stuff. In fact, I don't think they can buy anything. They exercise population control so that they can manage on the natural rerources they have. They don't seem to be killing the planet, the way we're doing now. (I realize I'm making the place sound a bit like a propaganda tale of communist China, and maybe that's a parallel built in the book itself. I'm not sure.)
I sort of liked that the families told their dreams in the morning, and that they discussed their feelings in the evening. I liked it that the kids started doing voluntary work at their community at the age of eight. They felt they were being useful, and they actually were useful for the community. Isn't there some value in that?
Even the adults were all valuable members of the community, no-one was unenmployed or felt obsolete. True - it came with a price too great to pay - but I can see why that isn't such a bad goal in itself. Not because everyone needs to be useful, but because most people like to feel useful in some way. And it seems to me a great idea to have a big party before you die of old age! Well, they really didn't die of old age - but maybe they died happily all the same.
Of course I wouldn't like to be monitored all the time, or to be killed if I made a mistake, or to be lied to about the facts of life and death. This book makes us think about our own world, doesn't it? Isn't all that already happening in our societies? Even in some Western countries people may be killed for their mistakes. We are monitored a lot of the time, and I've certainly been lied to about the facts of life and death. How close is Jonas's world to ours? There are differences, but there certainly are similarities as well.
Jonas's world seems colourless and grey, but Jonas isn't unhappy until he finds out about true feelings. When he does, he obviously rebels. And yet, if there was a way to get rid of a lot of human suffering, such as physical pain, wouldn't we be only happy to grasp it? I think most of us would. And if there was a way to get rid of the emotional pain - depression, fear of death, sense of being obsolete - well, I think many would give it a try. And therein lies the true appeal of the grey dystopia Jonas lives in, and that's why The Giver is such a scary book in many ways.
I am very happy to have had the chance to read The Giver. Thank you! Now I'm trying to find a good way to pass the book on. Maybe I'll take it to the local meet-up next month. And I'm certainly keeping my eyes open for Lowry's book called Gathering Blue, since it's sort of a sequel to The Giver. Maybe it sheds some light to the mysterious ending!
ETA: Now that I think of it a bit more, I realize that The Giver can also be read as a pretty straightforward critique of the communist / totalitarian societies and as a praise to the Western / capitalist societies. I don't know it that's the way I want to read it. Not because I'm somehow in favour of totalitarianism, but because I think there's so much wrong in our consumerist society as well. I'd like to read the book as a balanced commentary on both, and on human nature in general. Maybe someone else takes a different approach. I'm very much looking forward to hearing other comments on this book!
I've read many other books by Lois Lowry, and she seems to be a very versatile children's author. Anastasia books and the one Caroline book I've read are pretty light-hearted and funny. Number the Stars is a lot more serious tale of war and persecution. The Giver is something completely different, again: it's actually a dystopian sci-fi book for young readers. It's not highly original - I've encountered similar dystopias in adult science fiction before - but it's interesting how it's still very clearly a children's book. And as children's books go, this one is pretty grim.
In a way I wish I had read The Giver already when I was younger. (I had the same feeling with Lowry's Number the Stars, by the way.) The story was at times a bit too simplistic for me to be really excited. And yet it was clever enough that I never lost interest. It really made me think about individuality and the cost of it.
The scary thing about the society described in The Giver is that it's a dystopia in tones of grey instead of all black. (This is actually literally true, but here I mean it as a metaphor.) I could see some advantages in the way things were run in Jonas's home community.
Sure, I like music and poetry and colours and sex, and wouldn't want to be denied all of those. I also like being able to choose for myself, at least from time to time. And yet, sometimes I feel our society sets too much value in individualism and freedom of choice. There's something to be said in being a part of a community as well.
We are free to make choices every day, to enforce our individuality and to try and set ourselves apart from others. This freedom of choice and the pressure of individuality has often lead to reckless consumerism, where we buy a lot of stuff in an attempt to give a boost to out personality, and waste away our precious natural resources in the process.
Jonas's world certainly isn't ideal for human beings, but it seems to be pretty ecological, from what I gathered. Everyone uses bikes to move around, everything is close by and easy to reach, and the products are not brought from far away. People are not concerned by how they look and they don't feel the need to buy a lot of stuff. In fact, I don't think they can buy anything. They exercise population control so that they can manage on the natural rerources they have. They don't seem to be killing the planet, the way we're doing now. (I realize I'm making the place sound a bit like a propaganda tale of communist China, and maybe that's a parallel built in the book itself. I'm not sure.)
I sort of liked that the families told their dreams in the morning, and that they discussed their feelings in the evening. I liked it that the kids started doing voluntary work at their community at the age of eight. They felt they were being useful, and they actually were useful for the community. Isn't there some value in that?
Even the adults were all valuable members of the community, no-one was unenmployed or felt obsolete. True - it came with a price too great to pay - but I can see why that isn't such a bad goal in itself. Not because everyone needs to be useful, but because most people like to feel useful in some way. And it seems to me a great idea to have a big party before you die of old age! Well, they really didn't die of old age - but maybe they died happily all the same.
Of course I wouldn't like to be monitored all the time, or to be killed if I made a mistake, or to be lied to about the facts of life and death. This book makes us think about our own world, doesn't it? Isn't all that already happening in our societies? Even in some Western countries people may be killed for their mistakes. We are monitored a lot of the time, and I've certainly been lied to about the facts of life and death. How close is Jonas's world to ours? There are differences, but there certainly are similarities as well.
Jonas's world seems colourless and grey, but Jonas isn't unhappy until he finds out about true feelings. When he does, he obviously rebels. And yet, if there was a way to get rid of a lot of human suffering, such as physical pain, wouldn't we be only happy to grasp it? I think most of us would. And if there was a way to get rid of the emotional pain - depression, fear of death, sense of being obsolete - well, I think many would give it a try. And therein lies the true appeal of the grey dystopia Jonas lives in, and that's why The Giver is such a scary book in many ways.
I am very happy to have had the chance to read The Giver. Thank you! Now I'm trying to find a good way to pass the book on. Maybe I'll take it to the local meet-up next month. And I'm certainly keeping my eyes open for Lowry's book called Gathering Blue, since it's sort of a sequel to The Giver. Maybe it sheds some light to the mysterious ending!
ETA: Now that I think of it a bit more, I realize that The Giver can also be read as a pretty straightforward critique of the communist / totalitarian societies and as a praise to the Western / capitalist societies. I don't know it that's the way I want to read it. Not because I'm somehow in favour of totalitarianism, but because I think there's so much wrong in our consumerist society as well. I'd like to read the book as a balanced commentary on both, and on human nature in general. Maybe someone else takes a different approach. I'm very much looking forward to hearing other comments on this book!
I'm taking The Giver to a local mini-meetup tonight. It's likely that someone there will take interest in the book. If not, I'll take it to the big official meetup next month. I'm sure The Giver finds new readers soon! It's a popular book, and it's listed on many wish lists.
In a way I feel like starting an international book ring, because The Giver is a lightweight paperback, and well wished for, which makes an ideal ring book. But The Giver has only lately arrived in Finland, in an M-bag sent to Turku, and I kind of feel it would be silly to send the book away from Finland as soon as it has arrived here. So, let's let it travel in Finland for a while. If someone else wants to arrange a book ring later on, I welcome them to do so!
The Giver is book #36 in my "2006 Keep Them Moving" challenge, started by Guinaveve.
In a way I feel like starting an international book ring, because The Giver is a lightweight paperback, and well wished for, which makes an ideal ring book. But The Giver has only lately arrived in Finland, in an M-bag sent to Turku, and I kind of feel it would be silly to send the book away from Finland as soon as it has arrived here. So, let's let it travel in Finland for a while. If someone else wants to arrange a book ring later on, I welcome them to do so!
The Giver is book #36 in my "2006 Keep Them Moving" challenge, started by Guinaveve.
Thanks to everybody who has kept this book moving! It moved to my house yesterday at the meet-up in Helsinki and it will be waiting for some time to be read. I am not going to take it with me to Italy on Saturday. I will be reading Italian for a couple of weeks, but after that books in English will have their chance.
This is quite an extraordinary book. In fact The Giver can be read as a critique of the communist / totalitarian societies and as a praise to the Western / capitalist societies. But that's all wrong, because the capitalist societies are no better than communist societies. Where the money is all that matters, things go terribly wrong. The power seems to corrupt always almost everybody. Everything should not be valued in money.
The capitalism should be regulated by very sttrict laws and the values of societies should be changed. The change is very difficult if tv and films teach us how to get rich and famous using all means (but not work) is the most important thing of all. Tv and films teach us too, how to use violence, how fun it is to break things and fight, how it is fun to embarrass others. Many times I seated myself and children in front of tv to watch a film which was described as a family film. But alas! It did not take half an hour even before some violent scene when at least the furniture was broken. I don't understand how that can be supposed to be fun! Most Disney films are also too violent for children.
This is my # 68 (110) in
"REDUCE MOUNT TBR 2012" Challenge arranged by Dove-i-Libri.
The capitalism should be regulated by very sttrict laws and the values of societies should be changed. The change is very difficult if tv and films teach us how to get rich and famous using all means (but not work) is the most important thing of all. Tv and films teach us too, how to use violence, how fun it is to break things and fight, how it is fun to embarrass others. Many times I seated myself and children in front of tv to watch a film which was described as a family film. But alas! It did not take half an hour even before some violent scene when at least the furniture was broken. I don't understand how that can be supposed to be fun! Most Disney films are also too violent for children.
This is my # 68 (110) in
"REDUCE MOUNT TBR 2012" Challenge arranged by Dove-i-Libri.
The book will posted today as a Wishlist RABCK.
Happy reading!
This is my # 51 in
"KEEP THEM MOVING 2012" Challenge arranged by Booklady331.
Happy reading!
This is my # 51 in
"KEEP THEM MOVING 2012" Challenge arranged by Booklady331.
Journal Entry 12 by MiuM at Kaarina, Varsinais-Suomi / Egentliga Finland Finland on Thursday, June 21, 2012
Thank you for this surprise book from my wishlist! :)
Journal Entry 13 by MiuM at Kaarina, Varsinais-Suomi / Egentliga Finland Finland on Sunday, January 27, 2013
Well, this was an interesting book. A book that can make young (and older) readers to think about the way societies are built an how they might be. Harmaja already said so much of the things I felt too while reading the book that I am not going to repeat it all. However I am going to add a thing or two.
I was interested in the construction process and working of Jonas's society which really was not explained. Did they alter genes somehow so that people could not see colour, and did the people have some kind of collective consciousness (for the memories)? What was the reason for the re-organisation of the whole society? What had happened? These were among the things that were puzzling me. Of course the book was deliberately not telling all the details for the sake of the flow of the text.
Also, what does the end of the book hint? If you choose to follow your free will and feelings you will perish? The end was quite grim. (In a certain way it reminded me of the The Little Match Girl by H.C. Andersen. Although it can also be intepret that Jonas found other people and a house.. I just do not find it believable that he did..) Clearly Jonas's society had some very good qualities -no pain,no hunger, working ecology, good manners , but on the other hand people were herded like sheep - and killed if they did not follow all the rules and unity. And no music nor colours. Tough choice.
I am glad for the opportunity to read this thought-provoking book.
I was interested in the construction process and working of Jonas's society which really was not explained. Did they alter genes somehow so that people could not see colour, and did the people have some kind of collective consciousness (for the memories)? What was the reason for the re-organisation of the whole society? What had happened? These were among the things that were puzzling me. Of course the book was deliberately not telling all the details for the sake of the flow of the text.
Also, what does the end of the book hint? If you choose to follow your free will and feelings you will perish? The end was quite grim. (In a certain way it reminded me of the The Little Match Girl by H.C. Andersen. Although it can also be intepret that Jonas found other people and a house.. I just do not find it believable that he did..) Clearly Jonas's society had some very good qualities -no pain,no hunger, working ecology, good manners , but on the other hand people were herded like sheep - and killed if they did not follow all the rules and unity. And no music nor colours. Tough choice.
I am glad for the opportunity to read this thought-provoking book.
Journal Entry 14 by MiuM at Kaarina, Varsinais-Suomi / Egentliga Finland Finland on Tuesday, February 19, 2013
I am offering the book at the HEP-thread of Finnish forum, on which you offer books as RABCK.
"Jonas's world is perfect. Everything is under control. There is no war or fear of pain. There are no choices. Every person is assigned a role in the community. When Jonas turns 12 he is singled out to receive special training from The Giver. The Giver alone holds the memories of the true pain and pleasure of life. Now, it is time for Jonas to receive the truth. There is no turning back."
"Jonas's world is perfect. Everything is under control. There is no war or fear of pain. There are no choices. Every person is assigned a role in the community. When Jonas turns 12 he is singled out to receive special training from The Giver. The Giver alone holds the memories of the true pain and pleasure of life. Now, it is time for Jonas to receive the truth. There is no turning back."
Journal Entry 15 by MiuM at Kaarina, Varsinais-Suomi / Egentliga Finland Finland on Wednesday, February 20, 2013
Released 11 yrs ago (2/22/2013 UTC) at Kaarina, Varsinais-Suomi / Egentliga Finland Finland
CONTROLLED RELEASE NOTES:
The Giver travels next to Ronya.
Journal Entry 16 by Ronya at Riihimäki, Kanta-Häme / Egentliga Tavastland Finland on Tuesday, February 26, 2013
What a great book and Very thoughtprovoking indeed. I just couldn't stop reading once I started.
Journal Entry 17 by Ronya at Riihimäki, Kanta-Häme / Egentliga Tavastland Finland on Wednesday, February 19, 2014
Released 10 yrs ago (2/19/2014 UTC) at Riihimäki, Kanta-Häme / Egentliga Tavastland Finland
CONTROLLED RELEASE NOTES:
This book is now off to next reader via international Bookxcerpting.
Hope you'll enjoy it as much as I did.
Hope you'll enjoy it as much as I did.
Journal Entry 18 by mysteriousmummy at Shefford, Bedfordshire United Kingdom on Tuesday, February 25, 2014
Thank you for sending me this and the other book I requested, I especially love the moomin Jiffy bag! Looking forward to reading it if the journal entries are anything to go by.
Journal Entry 19 by mysteriousmummy at Shefford, Bedfordshire United Kingdom on Friday, May 29, 2015
I was disappointed with this book, a brilliant idea for a story although possibly a bit brave new world rip off. The characters were likeable and i realise it is a kids book but it ended up all a bit rushed as if the author was trying to get it finished in time for tea. And the less said about the end the better.
Journal Entry 20 by mysteriousmummy at -- Controlled Release, -- By post or by hand/ in person -- United Kingdom on Friday, May 29, 2015
Released 8 yrs ago (5/29/2015 UTC) at -- Controlled Release, -- By post or by hand/ in person -- United Kingdom
CONTROLLED RELEASE NOTES:
Off to a new friend
A pleasant surprise with lots of interesting goodies love those laminated little book crossing plaques will try and copy those.
Journal Entry 22 by Billbooks at Queen Street Rescue in Melbourne CBD, Victoria Australia on Saturday, April 30, 2016
Released 7 yrs ago (5/1/2016 UTC) at Queen Street Rescue in Melbourne CBD, Victoria Australia
WILD RELEASE NOTES:
Continuing my long journey
Rescued during a tidy up of the shelf at QSR and WAS destined to travel further ..... but given the number of familiar names that have read this - I might stick it on Mt TBR for another read. Read it ages ago and remember loving it! Will see if it still 'grabs' me! :)
