Neither thumbs up nor thumbs down for Lord of the Flies by William Golding. Literature.
Beautifully written. Didn’t care. See, if you tell me: “There’s this princess who’s tired of being a princess so she runs away to become a dragon’s chief cook and librarian” and I’ll say “natch”; tell me that a group of boys is stranded on an island with nothing to eat but fruit without succumbing to kwashiorkor and I’m like, “No effing way. Jack might be a stupid megalomaniac, but you bet I’d be on his side too, if Ralph can’t bother himself to learn how to catch a pig.” Aaaand that’s why I shouldn’t read books like this.
Strange things happened at midday. The glittering sea rose up, moved apart in planes of blatant impossibility; the coral reef and the few, stunted palms that clung to the more elevated parts would float up into the sky, would quiver, be plucked apart, run like raindrops on a wire or be repeated as in an odd succession of mirrors. Sometimes land loomed where there was no land and flicked out like a bubble as the children watched. Piggy discounted all this learnedly as a “mirage”; and since no boy could reach even the reef over the stretch of water where the snapping sharks waited, they grew accustomed to these mysteries and ignored them, just as they ignored the miraculous, throbbing stars. At midday the illusions merged into the sky and there the sun gazed down like an angry eye. Then, at the end of the afternoon; the mirage subsided and the horizon became level and blue and clipped as the sun declined. That was another time of comparative coolness but menaced by the coming of the dark. When the sun sank, darkness dropped on the island like an extinguisher and soon the shelters were full of restlessness, under the remote stars.
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