Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

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Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

As I first started to read ‘Oryx and Crake’, I was somewhat skeptical of whether or not I would enjoy reading it. The first chapter confused me with unusual words that I have never heard or seen before. Whenever I read something it is usually a book or magazine that I plan on reading or that is based on actual facts on a certain subject such as history or sports related. This book came as a surprise as I started to read it because it was not as hard to understand as I thought it would be and was actually quite enjoyable. The symbols in this book can mean many different things based on what the reader believes since religion plays a big part in it.

Margaret Atwood provides us with a story of human catastrophe where everything is going good and in an instance it all falls apart. She seems to be fascinated with technology and believes that ideas which seem impossible now will someday become real. She uses environmental topics that relate to our world today in which devastation has occurred and will continue to happen in the near future. Examples such as droughts, volcanoes erupting, and the Earth’s temperature rising are all pointed to actual civilization and not just a made up compound where scientists try to improve and create new and better things.

As I continued to get further into the novel I was beginning to anticipate a disaster that would soon arise. The compounds seemed prone to trouble with a big number of scientists running around inventing new animals such as pigoons and rakunks and new medicines that seemed too good to be true. While living conditions differed from what we live in today the people in the compounds still faced problems that we also face. Drugs, alcoho...

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...pill. Since he got the shot from Crake all the doctors had to do was get a tissue sample and create more of the vaccine so that it would not kill off almost all of mankind. Instead Jimmy just sits around and drinks alcohol without even thinking that he could make a difference between life and death. As I think about this situation I figured that Crake himself assumingly gave himself the vaccine along with Oryx so why did he kill Oryx?

If someone were to ask me whether or not they should read this book I would tell them to definitely read it but to be patient because most of the action does not take place until close to the end of the story. I was impressed with the humor that Atwood displays but also the drama that affects humanity. I will probably look into reading some of her other books to see what other novels she has produced and see what she had to offer.

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