Tag: books

When I set out to read the books that appear on ABC’s Lost, I started with the books that were either shown onscreen or directly referenced. I will make exceptions, however, for books I always inteded to read anyway and so it was with Robert Heinlein’s 1961 classic Stranger in a Strange Land.

I feel that I truly grok the fullness of Heinlein’s sci-fi tale about Michael Valentine Smith, a human who was raised on Mars by Martians and returned to Earth to grok the humans. Along the way Mike Smith (what a great name for a Martian) teaches humans about growing-closer through water sharing and he teaches them the importance of grokking.

Smith winds up starting a free-love cult that would have made many a hippy proud, and I can see why this book was so popular in the counterculture of the late ’60s, even lending the word grok to the hippy lexicon. Heinlein’s Smith teaches Martian ways to humans and takes the best thing humans have for creating happiness (sex, baby) and mixes them with the best of Martian culture (grokking, happiness, spiritual completion, mind reading, teleportation, immortality, cannibalism) making many an enemy among Earth’s politicians and megachurches along the way.

This is a book that requires a pretty serious suspension of disbelief, not just to swallow the Martian angle, but also the notion of humans being able to truly put aside all jealousy and selfishness in order to be happy. Most of the characters are thin and the book seems more than anything an outlet for Heinlein to ponder and argue with himself about social values, art, liberty, and religion. If you like a sort of wacky, semi-lighthearted philosophical novel with a sci-fi background, you’ll probably enjoy this. I did.

As to its status as a sci-fi classic, I suspect it makes so many of those kinds of lists not so much on its own merits as because of the way that it was picked up and embraced by the 1960s counterculture a few years after its publication. It’s one of those rare books where the author seems to have gotten ahead of the zeitgeist just enough to already be there waiting when the rest of the world caught up with him.

The connection to Lost comes in the title of the of the ninth episode of the third season, “Stranger in a Strange Land.” The episode is about Jack. The flashbacks find him in Phuket, Thailand, where he is, yes, a stranger in a strange land. On the island, Jack is still being held by the Others, but by the end of the episode, he seems to have joined them. We also learn that the tattoo Jack acquired in Phuket was gotten in violation of some mysterious taboos and says, “He walks among us, but he is not one of us.” In every way, we see Jack as stranger in strange lands.

We knew that though. The most interesting connection between Heinlein’s novel and Lost is in what it suggests about the Others. Minus the cannibalism and sex, the Others seem to have a quasi-religious cult based on attaining happiness, spiritual completion and possibly, teleportation, mind reading, projection and immortality. No wonder they seem so happy on the island.

Lost, as it it wont to do, turns the dynamic on its head, when the stranger in a strange land is not the man bringing the new and better way to live to humanity, but rather Jack, who seems to represent everything the Others are trying to escape in the real world. The question, then, becomes, will Jack drink the Kool-Aide? Based on the end of last week’s episode (“Par Avion”) it looks like he might have, making him no different from Heinlein’s Ben Caxton, the earthly cynic who joined Mike Smith’s Church of All Worlds and within forty-eight hours found a better way to live.

Of course, the title may have nothing to do with Heinlein’s book, Instead, it could be a reference to the Iron Maiden song, which is found on their Somewhere in Time album. That’s interesting enough when you consider that lately Lost has been playing up the question of whether or not the Oceanic 815 surviviors are lost somewhere in time. Some of the lyrics, which seem to tell of an Arctic explorer losing his way and dying, also bear a striking resemblance to certain issues of Lost:

Night and day I scan horizon sea and sky
My spirit wanders endlessly
Until the day will dawn and friends from home discover why
Hear me calling rescue me
Set me free, set me free
Lost in this place and leave no trace

Stranger in a strange land
Land of ice and snow
Trapped inside this prison
Lost and far from home

Strange how often a show about a tropical island has so many references to things Arctic, but there it is. The lyrics also speak of being gone for 100 years. I don’t know if we should start a Lost listening list, but the music and songs featured on the show are probably as meaningful as the books.

The last connection is biblical. “Stranger in a strange land” is a quote from that classic book about escape, Exodus 2:22: “And she bare him a son, and he called his name Gershom: for he said, I have been a stranger in a strange land.” Lost also references the Bible quite a bit, and this could be another instance of that.

So there it is: Stranger in a Strange Land, be it book, Bible or Iron Maiden tune, there are as many clues and suggestions as one cares to find.

For further reading:

• TheOrangeSlayedTheRake has a collection of interesting quotes about art and sex from Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land
• Electronic Cerebrectomy’s TV Report: A Half-Season of Lost (check out the comments for some interesting theories about Watership Down)

For an index of all my Lost book posts, click here.

John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men made its appearance on Lost in “Every Man for Himself,” the episode in which Sawyer gets conned and the Others demonstrate the truth of Jack’s season one admonition to “live together or die alone.”

Considering I’ve read it many times, taught it, and the fact that there really isn’t any mystery as to why it was included, it seems to be relatively low hanging fruit for a blog post, and yet, I’m only now getting around to it several months after its appearance. So here it is, the latest addition to my Lost book club.

Of Mice and Men is about two Depression era migrant farmhands. George is small and smart; Lennie is huge, strong, and intellectually a child. They exist in an every-man-for-himself world where no one watches out for anyone and everyone is lonely. George and Lennie are different, though, because “they got each other” and they have a dream to earn enough to buy a small place and live “offa the fat of the land.” This is something that neither can do alone, but Lennie’s strength earns them money, and George’s concern for Lennie protects him. Things go bad when Lennie accidentally kills the boss’s daughter-in-law, leaving George to shoot Lennie, at that point the only merciful option left to him.

It’s a quick and grim read, a meditation on loneliness and the practical impossibility of achieving the American dream in a society that refuses to protect the weak. It’s also one of those books that kids will read willingly since it’s short, the writing is easy, and there’s lots of profanity. Good stuff.

On to Lost. We first see Of Mice and Men in Sawyer’s flashback. He’s shown reading it in prison, a lonely every-man-for-himself kind of place if ever there was one. The prison story plays out in such a way that Sawyer gets an early release and a bunch of money, which he asks to have put in an account for his daughter whom he’s never met and may not even exist. In a way Sawyer is setting her up so that she can find her dream unlike George and Lennie.

It’s referenced on the island as well. Sawyer refers to Ben’s bunny killing and says that he might like Of Mice and Men since a puppy gets killed. Ben feigns ignorance of the novel until they reach the summit of the island where Ben shows Sawyer that he is being held on a different island, that there’s nowhere to go, and that he does need Kate. Ben then throws Of Mice and Men back in Sawyer’s face with this quote:

A guy goes nuts if he ain’t got nobody. It don’t make any difference who the guy is, so long as he’s with you. I tell ya, I tell ya, a guy gets too lonely, and he gets sick.

Sawyer doesn’t recognize the quote and Ben explains it to him, thus revealing that he has a better understanding of both literature and human nature than Sawyer, which is of course how he is able to so effectively con Sawyer throughout the episode.

Of Mice and Men doesn’t provide any clues to the great mysteries of Lost, but it serves as a nice literary allusion in an episode that revisits one of Lost’s central issues, namely the live together or die alone calculation.

Click here for the rest of my Lost book reviews

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.