Category: Books

Last week’s episode of Lost added another book to my list of Lost books. Fortunately, Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time is one I’ve read several times. In the episode “Not in Portland,” the book was being read by the Other who fell for “the old-wookie-in-handcuffs gag” while guarding the prison where Carl was getting a malenky bit of the old Clockwork Orange treatment.

Putting aside the verbal reference to Star Wars and the visual reference to A Clockwork Orange, we’re left with A Brief History of Time, yet another book suggesting that the island may exist outside the normal time stream of the rest of the world. The other books that suggest this are (links go to my posts on these books): A Wrinkle in Time, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” The Wizard of Oz, The Third Policeman, and Alice in Wonderland. When the Chronicles of Narnia appears I think the deal will be sealed.

A Brief History of Time is a wonderful and highly readable explanation of quantum mechanics, black holes, the big bang, relativity and the nature of time itself, which makes me wonder if we Lost fans should be wondering about the nature of time on a certain island in the Pacific. In the chapter, “The Arrow of Time,” Hawking writes:

The discovery that the speed light appeared the same to every observer, no matter how he was moving, led to the theory of relativity – and in that one had to abandon the idea that there was a unique absolute time. Instead, each observer would have his own measure of time as recorded by a clock that he carried: clocks carried by different observers would not necessarily agree.

Now, Hawking isn’t arguing that that there are different time streams here on Earth, but then Lost is fiction, probably science fiction, which often begins with the question, “What if?” The fact that the Others seem to know so much about everyone suggests to me that somehow they are able to connect with a future in which everything about the Oceanic 815 survivors has become history.

What if there was a wormhole or timewarp or some kind of flux in the space-time continuum in the south Pacific? What if it could be manipulated? What if people from the future were trying to change humanity in order to save their world?

How might they do this? I bet it has something to do with the hatch. They lost contact with the outside when “the sky went purple.” Does this mean they lost their wormhole or timewarp or whatever they were using to communicate with the future? The ability to connect with the future would explain how they are able to know so much, as well as do things like send that bus down the road at the exact moment that Juliet’s husband was stepping into the street.

According to Lostpedia, the Other is shown reading a page from the chapter “Black Holes Ain’t So Black” (h/t to Joshmeister, who offers some other interesting details about this).� In that chapter, Hawking describes the nature of event horizons surrounding black holes and argues that despite black holes having the reputation of being places from which nothing can escape, they do appear to emit particles, and over time, eventually shrink away.

Perhaps, whatever the hatch was doing was preventing some kind of black hole like time warp on the island from evaporating. Could it be that the Others have lost, not their contact with the outer world, but with the future? In that case, they would also be truly lost, just like the survivors of Oceanic 815.

Perhaps, when the hatch imploded, Desmond got a glimpse of (or spent quite a bit of time wandering through) the future. Is that why he knows things will happen before they happen?

I’ve wondered about this parallel universe/alternate time stream idea since I began reading the Lost books and really thinking about the show. Brian at Lost…and Gone Forever adds some fuel to that fire in his analysis of “Not in Portland”:

The company that was courting Juliet wasn’t Hanso or Dharma – it was “Mittelos Bioscience”.

[…]

As many astute readers have already put together, “Mittelos” is an anagram for “Lost Time”.

[…]

Of all the scenes that they could have shown during the one hour recap before this week’s episode, which basically summed up two and a half years worth of Lost – they included the scene of Sayid and Hurley on the beach, listening to the radio, with Sayid saying “It could be coming from anywhere”, followed by Hurley saying “…or any time.”

That one really struck me as well. The first time I saw it, I noted it, and placing such a minor scene in recap seems like a pretty big hint.

Brian concludes:

If the series ended with us finding out that either a) only days had passed since Flight 815 crashed – with the rescue crew showing up or b) many years had passed and grown-up Walt and Grandpa Michael showing up to rescue everyone – I would not be in the least bit surprised, and we would all look back and think “Hey, they were hinting at it all along.”

There’s something else, too. A commenter on my blog mentioned a scene in which the big dipper is shown backwards in the sky. That’s a phenomenon that is not supposed to happen for 50,000 years. I don’t know which episode shows that, and I don’t have time to run it down, but if anyone has more info on that, I’d love to know. Perhaps the island exists in a different time altogether or maybe it hovers between planes on the spacetime continuum (or exists in a gap between branes – see my post on Universe in a Nutshell, also by Hawking).

“Not in Portland” really brings up many of the time continuum ideas that the show has been toying with since season 1, but with Lost, it sometimes seems that when we can see the big picture, the details get fuzzy. As we zero in on characters, plot elements and theories, however, it suddenly becomes impossible to see the whole thing.

I think of it as Lost’s own little version of the uncertainty principle (also explained in A Brief History of Time). The fascinating thing is that this is exactly what happens at the beginning of each show. We see the word LOST on screen, but it’s out of focus. As it flies toward the viewer, it comes into sharp focus, but all we can see are parts of the O and S, the big picture having left the frame.

Click here for all of my posts on the Lost books.

Update: Click here for the new Lost Book Club index page. I am no longer updating this page.

Last May, I started writing about the books that appear on ABC’s Lost.

Here’s a list of what I’ve read with links to the posts about the books:

• Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. (Blume)
• The Turn of the Screw (James)
• “An Occurence at Owl Creek Bridge” (Bierce)
• A Wrinkle in Time (L’Engle)
• Lancelot (Walker)
• Heart of Darkness (Conrad)
• Lord of the Flies (Golding)
• Bad Twin (Troup)
• The Wizard of Oz (Baum)
• Watership Down (Adams)
• The Third Policeman (O’Brien)
• Alice in Wonderland (Carroll)
• The Epic of Gilgamesh
• To Kill a Mockingbird (Lee)
• A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens)
• The Brothers Karamazov (Dostoevsky)
• A Brief History of Time (Hawking)
• Of Mice and Men (Steinbeck)
• Stranger in a Strange Land (Heinlein)
• Carrie (King)
• Catch-22 (Heller)

Here’s what I still need to read (or skim over again before writing about):

• Our Mutual Friend (Dickens)
• On Writing (King)
• Laughter in the Dark (Nabokov)
• The Fountainhead (Rand)
• Evil Under the Sun (Christie)

I will update this post as I read and review the Lost books, and as other books appear.

Back in May, my wife and I decided to read all the books referenced on Lost. I finally finished The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky.

I started reading this at Chuy’s during the Green Chile Festival, which is in September. It’s a long book. I also read a number of other books while reading Brothers Karamazov, which naturally slowed me down, but I think it’s good that I spent so much time with it because I really got to know the characters. Anyway, it was originally serialized in the 1870s so its original readers spent even more time with it than me.

When season 3 of Lost began back in October, I was on page 186. I summarized it then as follows:

Dostoevsky’s book is dense, rich and beautiful, full of the kind of compelling characters that keep me engaged in a story that at this point is only now beginning. The book tells the story of the relationship between an old man and his three sons, each of whom represents a different psychological/spiritual type.

The father, Fyodor Pavlovich, is a drunken self-proclaimed buffoon. He delights in making a public ass of himself. He is a lecher, scoundrel and liar who is thoroughly unlikeable, despite the fact that some of the scandalous things he says are truly funny.

Oldest brother, Dmitri is passionate and ruled by emotion. He behavior is much like that of his father, except that Dmitri has a working conscience buried deep inside. He despises his father and seems to love his brothers. Ivan, the middle brother, is a rationalist and intellectual. He is an atheist who wrestles with issues of faith. The youngest brother, Aloysha is the central character in the book. Aloysha is sweet and gentle, a deeply religious and good-hearted soul whose faith guides him in all things. There is also an illegitimate brother – Smerdyakov – who is dark and brooding, but I haven’t learned much about him yet.

Each brother has varying degrees of conflict with each other and with their father, Fyodor. I think – based on the back of the book – that one of them will kill Fyodor. I don’t know for sure, but my money is on Dmitri.

Well, it turns out I was right about Fyodor, and wrong about Dmitri even though he was convicted, it seems clear (though with enough uncertainty to make it interesting) that Semerdyakov was actually the killer.

The greatest connection between Lost and The Brothers Karamazov, however, is that both are stories of people who are lost (in the figurative sense) and both explore the line that divides faith and reason. Brothers Karamazov is at heart a philosophical novel that wrestles with the idea of faith and the consequences if living without it.

Alyosha is at all times kind, decent, humble and driven by compassion and love. Ivan rails against the church and ultimately it is his pronouncements against God that lead Smerdykov to believe that “everything is permitted,” a belief that ultimately destroys his family. Through it all, though, we see Alyosha living a life ruled by love and compassion, and it is his example that we should take away from the novel, the admonition to be our best selves, to strive for perfect human kindness.

It’s a beautiful and moving book, with characters drawn so real that it’s hard to believe I don’t actually know them.

Regarding Lost, this is all a bit dated. The book was given to Henry Gale (now Ben) while he was being held in the hatch (way back in season 2). It served the purpose of bringing up the conversation about Hemingway feeling like he could never be as great as Dostoevsky, which made Locke wonder if would always play second fiddle to Jack. Tension ensued, which as we know from watching season 3 is probably exactly what Henry/Ben wanted.

When I related it to Lost in my last post on the subject, I said this about how the characters in Brothers Karamazov resemble certain characters on Lost:

• Dmitri and Sawyer are both passionate and ruled by their emotions especially lust and greed; both use women, and each possesses a deeply buried conscience.
• Ivan and Jack are both rationalists, both men of science.
• Alyosha and Locke are both men of faith, both good-hearted.

I admit, not having read the book in its entirety (yet), that there may be deeper parallels. I particularly wonder if Alyosha has a crisis of faith as Locke did when he stopped pushing the button in the hatch. I also see that Kate could as easily be the Dmitri character as Sawyer; likewise Mr. Eko resembles Alyosha in many ways, though not as closely as Locke.

I don’t see a Fyodor character yet except in that Jack, Locke (and Kate if we go that way) have major conflicts with their fathers. Sawyer’s father hasn’t really come into play except his “spiritual father” – the con man who destroyed his family – from whom he took his name and trade. Interestingly this “father” is the man that Sawyer went to Australia to kill. Kate also killed her father.

Now that I’ve finished the book and seen the first six episodes of season 3, some comparisons seem a bit clearer. I stand by the Alyosha/Lock, Ivan/Jack, and Sawyer/Dmitri comparisons, especially the last now that we’ve seen Sawyer’s deeply buried moral side. Like Dimitri, he’s a bastard who wants to be good, though his darker instincts often get the better of him.

Once again, above all else, we find a book on the island that explores the issues and themes central to the show. Quite frankly, as Lost got farther away, I stopped reading Brothers Karamazov for insight into the show and just enjoyed it for its penetrating insight into the human character.

Click here for more of my Lost book reviews.

Check out this interview with Lost’s creators transcribed on Lost…And Gone Forever.

Season three of Lost began with an episode called “A Tale of Two Cities,” the two “cities” being, I have assumed, the suburban neighborhood inhabited by the Others and the beach camp where the survivors live. It was a clever title for an episode that gave us our first look into the world of the others while continuing the Dickens references that cropped up throughout the season two finale.

I read A Tale of Two Cities (probably excerpted or abridged or both) back in eighth grade and only have dim memories of the story. It was the best of times and the worst of times, and some guy went to the guillotine doing a far better thing than he had ever done.

Memories come flooding back like a flashback to my life before the island (helped by a quick trip over to SparkNotes), and I recall that the doomed man a scoundrel throughout his life willingly chose to die in place of another man. He made his choice because they loved the same woman and he knew that the other guy was the better man. Or something. The whole ruse worked, of course, because the two men looked very nearly alike.

So, as usual, what does A Tale of Two Cities have to do with Lost?

A Tale of Two Cities focuses on the reinvention of the self, moving from the selfish to the selfless and from the scoundrel to the hero. Interestingly, this is the trajectory that nearly every character on Lost experiences.

The other observation relates to the idea of the two men looking alike. We’ve seen this throughout Lost characters looking very much like other characters even when they are unrelated. Ben told Jack that it was no coincidence that Juliet looked a lot like his ex-wife. Who also looks like Desmond’s love, Penny. There is also the book Bad Twin, which obsessively twins both people and ideas.

I suspect that if I reread A Tale of Two Cities, I’d probably find it there two too. I mean, two cities. Come on. If that ain’t twinning I don’t know what is!

Finally, the most compelling connection, and the one that didn’t play out fully on Lost until the end of this first mini-season, is the self-sacrifice angle. Sawyer, the resident scoundrel, has finally learned to think of someone else first. In fact, he seems completely willing to sacrifice himself to save Kate. Is this a far better thing that he does now than he has ever done before?

Here’s a link to a fascinating post at Quigley that explores the mythological references in Lost. Really interesting thoughts about the spiritual nature of the “polar” bears.

Click here for the rest of the Lost Book Club entries.

I actually read To Kill a Mockingbird earlier this year (post here) so I’m not rereading it, and yes, I know it was the movie not the book that was referenced in last week’s episode “The Cost of Living,” but either way, I thought I’d post my thoughts on how it intersects with Lost.

The mention is brief. Juliet wheels a TV up to the aquarium where Jack is being held prisoner and tells him she’s going to show him a movie: To Kill a Mockingbird. She then goes on to explain to Jack why he needs to save Ben who is a great man and will die if Jack doesn’t operate, but on the TV screen there is no To Kill a Mockingbird. Instead we see Juliet holding signs telling Jack that Ben is a dangerous liar and asking him to botch the surgery and kill Ben.

Part of me suspects that this is yet another one of the cons psychological tests that the others perform on the survivors. Still, why To Kill a Mockingbird? Briefly, it’s about two children who watch their father Atticus Finch stand up to the prejudices in their small southern town by defending a black man who is accused of raping a white woman. The events leading up to and surrounding the trial effectively bring an end to the youthful innocence of the two kids.

In the book, Atticus tells his son Jem that it is a sin to kill mockingbirds because they are themselves harmless and innocent creatures. Throughout the book we see a variety of ‘mockingbirds’ – innocent people destroyed (or almost destroyed) by evil: Tom Robinson, Boo Radley, Jem and Scout Finch.

This keeps bringing me back to the whole question of whether or not the others are good people. Is it possible that Juliet is evil and Ben is as good as he claims to be, just an innocent mockingbird who only beats the crap out of people like Sawyer when he has to? Of course the book also reminds us that everyone carries the capacity for both good and evil.

Which brings us to prejudice, the central problem in To Kill a Mockingbird. Are the writers asking us to reconsider any prejudices that we viewers may harbor against the others? Should we take Atticus’s advice to Scout and not judge a man until we’ve walked around in his skin for a little while? Or at least enjoyed an episode featuring his flashbacks?

As with the blacks and whites of Maycomb County there are tensions between the survivors and the others, tensions that may stem mainly from a lack of understanding. Is the conflict between the survivors and the others based mainly on mutual fear and ignorance?

Jack, like Atticus, is a professional man who must decide to take on an unpopular case. When Atticus chose to defend a black man – and really defend him – he made a very unpopular decision that turned many of his own people (the white folk of Maycomb County) against him, but his belief in the constitution and the equality of all men gave him no choice but to do the right thing, despite this being a dangerous decision for him and his children.

Will Jack follow the path of Atticus Finch and save the life of the man who is holding him prisoner, or will Jack betray his Hippocratic oath and kill Ben for Juliet? Apparently, we’ll find out more in tonight’s episode, “I Do.”

I think Jack will operate and save Ben. He’s too principled not to. I don’t think he’ll kill this mockingbird.

Now the big question is who is the island’s Boo Radley? Who is hidden away from sight, feared and misunderstood by all, but secretly coming out of the basement as it were to help the survivors and save them from evil? Could it be the smoke monster? I wonder if the visions – that always seem to help the survivors find what they need, be it inner peace or clean water – might be the smoke monster.

I wonder if the smoke monster also protects the survivors by showing up out of nowhere, just like Boo Radley, to open up a can of whupass when needed such as that opened up on Mr Eko who turned out to be not quite as good as he appeared.

Smoke monster as Boo Radley? It may be a reach, but why not?

Check out these blogs for some good Lost analysis: Lost…and Gone Forever and The Joshmeister’s Lost Blog and Podcast.

Click here for all of my Lost Book Club posts.

I’m still working on The Brothers Karamazov. I’m reading other books simultaneously so it’s slow going. I’m about halfway through it, but I haven’t run into anything that I would need to add or change from my earlier post on the subject. I did run into this quote in “From the Talks and Homilies of the Elder Zosima”:

For all is like an ocean, all flows and connects; touch it in one place and it ehoes at the other end of the world.

I’d say that nails Lost pretty well.

I wasn’t too surprised by last week’s episode (“The Cost of Living“) which ended with the end of Mr Eko. The suggestion that this would happen was planted pretty well last season by the reference to The Epic of Gilgamesh in which Mr Eko becomes Enkidu to Locke’s Gilgamesh. Now, having lost his spiritual ally, Locke, like Gilgamesh, is about to set off to the other side of the world island searching for answers. I guess I wasn’t too far off on that one.

I wasn’t sure if I was going to continue this Lost Book Club thing into season three, but when the season began with the Others engaged in a book club meeting, I thought, well, maybe that’s a sign. Of course, I could just be “mistaking coincidence for fate” again.

But then, the books that have appeared so far this season comprise an interesting list:

• A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens referenced by the title of the season opener: “A Tale of Two Cities”
• Carrie by Stephen King also referenced in “A Tale of Two Cities”
• Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck referenced in “Every Man for Himself”
• On Writing by Stephen King referenced (apparently through the white rabbit with the number 8 stenciled on it) in “Every Man for Himself” (And what’s up the rabbit thing? We’ve now got Of Mice and Men (“Tell me about the rabbits, George”), this white rabbit thing from On Writing, Alice in Wonderland, Watership Down, and a season one episode called “White Rabbit.”)
• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee referenced in “The Cost of Living” (Ok, it was the movie not the book, but I’m still going with it.)

Now, I’m still working on Karamazov and haven’t even touched Our Mutual Friend, but I’ve enjoyed the books I’ve discovered so far and I since I’ve already read Of Mice and Men, To Kill a Mockingbird, and A Tale of Two Cities, and intended to read On Writing anyway, that only leaves Carrie.

What the hell, I’m in, but I’m not rereading anything unless I bloody well feel like it.

Over the next few days I’ll post on the three books that I have read and so continue with this little literary adventure.

And, finally, I found another blogger plumbing the depths of literature to better understand Lost. Check out Reading Sawyer.