Gathering Blue

Ok, so I know that I am super late in posting this blog, but what can I say... life happens. I did not get any reading done the second week of January on account of my not doing a single thing that week, for reasons that will remain unnamed in this blog. So here I am in the 4th week of January, officially one book behind and one week late in posting a blog, but I'm here (and I think I can make up that book over spring break)...

I know that I said my second book would be a non-fiction, but in the light of life circumstances, I needed an escape. I was flipping through the large stack of books on the floor in my room and I found Lois Lowry's "Gathering Blue." I had read her book "The Giver" back in junior high and I loved it, so when I heard that it had a companion, I knew that reading it was a must. I stumbled across the copy that I own in a used bookstore in Seattle, and have been meaning to read it ever since. Last week seemed to me, to be the perfect opportunity.

In "Gathering Blue" Lois Lowry creates a futuristic society, much like she does in "The Giver," but the difference in this futuristic society is that it has gone backwards in time. To be completely honest, for a little while, I felt like I was watching M. Knight Shyamalan's The Village. The story follows a young girl named Kira who is crippled and thought to be useless in the village, but has a talent for embroidery. The village elders see this talent and the young girls potential and save her from being cast out so that she can do their work.

I had a number of the same thoughts and feelings that I had when reading "The Giver." You know, sometimes I think life would be so much easier if there were people that just laid everything out for us, like in the villages Lowry created. My life would be so much simpler if someone had just said to me, "Ali, you will now go to school and prepare to do (whatever task) for the rest of your working life" or "Ali, this is so-and-so, the two of you are now mates and will raise a family." However, if this is how things were, would anyone be truly happy? Would we ever learn to think for ourselves and enjoy the beauty of life even with its mistakes?

As Utopian as a society like the one laid out in "The Giver" or "Gathering Blue" may seem, I don't think that anything like that could ever truly exist and be populated by people who are happy. There are always going to be individuals that do not fit into the perfect mold, or find themselves unhappy in the place the have been stationed. We can't just throw these individuals away. We need to learn how to love, accept and appreciate one another for the individuals that we are, and encourage one another to grow and develop our talents and find out what makes us each truly happy in life, and then respect that in one another. That would be the key to a Utopian society, but that's just my opinion, which really only matters to me...