Babbling about history (but then aren't they all)

I had my first meeting with the writing tutor to help me with my paper for class. I now know the proper name for it, it's a Bibliographic Essay that we have to write. The tutor was really nice, she was older too, her first degree was in Chemistry and she's studying modern England, so she loved me when I told her I was English. And we got to gush and be excitied together about history. It was actually fun. Now I have to spend the weekend actually writing my paper. Which may be hard as every time I sit at the computer Floyd crwals into my lap. It's hard to type with a 20 pound cat on your lap!

But I feel happy and productive, I even got car tabs today. All before I'm normally awake. Not bad.

HG Wells

HG Wells just has yet to disappoint me. I picked up Babes in the Darkling Wood at the book fair written in 1940. I was surprised he was still alive, I think he must have been 75 when he wrote it. It was a novel about modern young lovers dealing with the trials and tribulations of a world about to go into war, again. At such an age you would expect him to have a hard time writing about youth, but no, he did it perfectly, in my opinion.

The book was written as a series of dialogs mainly. And often not so much dialogs but characters kinda each preaching their own ideas and philosophies. He was trying to capture the spirit of the age, with the emergence of psychology, and the ideals of communism failing, and Britain trying to pacify Hitler, and the horrors of war, and the state of modern education. And more generally about relationships between people, and sex and life. Whereas in most moralizing books it seems like people just go on from the author's point of view, whereas in this book, he argues against his views, and everything gets all turned around. But in the end he does see some hope for humanity. It really is a book looking at the the future of humanity, and it's own inherent values. It's almost more philosophy than fiction, but the story is nice too, and the character development and changes that take place in a year when war is declared is quite impressive. I found it to be a really interesting glimpse into the world at the time. And the people really resonated with people today, for example, the main character in the throes of love heartbroken at the forced separation between him and his love goes off and has meaningless sex with one of his female friends. There's also a wonderful tirade towards the beginning of the book, about Christian morals and how they affect a country, it was written about England in 1940, but it seems just as true about America today.

Of course one of the funniest parts to me was when they kept using the term Victorian derivatively. As that's how I think of Mr. Wells.