Capitao Sarcasmo
faolan
Like you mentioned, if you expand "philosophy" to mean any book that prompts you to think and question what you'd otherwise take for granted, you encompass a lot of what otherwise is just labeled "fiction." I'm tempted to say that a lot can't be stressed enough -- often enough, an author writes a novel specifically to make potential readers think meaningfully about a topic. By the time I read White Oleander, for example, I actually ended up kinda of grateful for the rigorous coursework I'd done in English Honors, because I'm not sure I'd have quite gotten everything that was going on if I hadn't had the training and practice. *shrug*
And lately, I've been revisiting old favorites from that kind of angle, actually... I hadn't read Julie of the Wolves or Island of the Blue Dolphins since... eh. A long, long time ago. Kind of interesting to go through them again from a new perspective (figured I'd pick up My Side of the Mountain later this afternoon).
What do they talk about? I'm not into english literature, the last book I red besides The Old Man and the Sea was Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. It's not even close to a fiction and it wasn't made to think about a specifical point (I think) but it made me think a lot. I introspect so much in everything I do, like watching movies, playing games and reading book, some facts there made me feel deeply sad.
Ah... well, I suppose they'd be classified as "young adult" novels; Julie of the Wolves is by Jean Craighead George, and is about an Eskimo girl named Julie who runs away from her home in Northern Alaska at... I think she's 13 or 14. Anyway, she becomes lost on the tundra and befriends a wolf pack, and with their help finds her way back to civilization. There's more to it, of course -- she'd been raised by her father in a traditional village until her aunt took her to Fairbanks so she could go to school, so there's the conflict between traditional and modern ways of life. They receive the news that her father had gone missing while out at sea in his kayak, so her idealized memories of him become sort of like a standard she sets for herself, or maybe more like a kind of inner compass -- her decisions often reflect what she believes he would have done in her place, that sort of thing. And when she returns to civilization... it's pretty jarring. It kind of raises the question of what "civilization" actually is, and what we do with it. Actually, I've read several of that author's books, and it's pretty much her main focus. xd
Island of the Blue Dolphins is fascinating partly because it happens to be true. Or at least, it has a basis in fact: in 1835, Spanish missionaries evacuated the remnants of a small native population from San Nicholas Island, which is sixty-some miles (IIRC) off the California coast. 18 years later, in 1853, missionaries once again visited the island, and found a woman there, living alone. They took her back to the mainland (along with her dog), but there was no one at the mission who could understand her language, and she only lived another couple months, so there's very little that's really known about her life on the island (and unfortunately, that particular island belongs to the navy -- it's used for training and weapons testing, things like that -- so it'd be a miracle if there's any archaeological information still there). The author, Scott O'Dell, is really just guessing at the kinds of things that she might have experienced, which is why it's a novel and not a biography.
I'm not sure whether either of the two books is still taught in school these days, but I think I first read them in third or fourth grade. I know when my fifth-grade class read Julie, I practically knew it by heart already, along with about half the other girls in my class! whee
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