Oryx and Crake by Margaret AtwoodWhen I started reading "Oryx and Crake", I was a little skeptical about whether or not I would enjoy reading it. The first chapter confused me with unusual words that I had never heard or seen before. Whenever I read something, it's usually a book or magazine that I intend to read or that is based on true facts about a certain topic like history or sports. This book was a surprise when I started reading it because it wasn't as hard to understand as I thought it would be and was actually quite entertaining. The symbols in this book can mean many different things based on what the reader believes as religion plays a large role in it. Margaret Atwood gives us a story of human catastrophe where everything goes well and in an instant everything falls apart. She seems to be fascinated by technology and believes that ideas that now seem impossible will one day become real. It uses environmental topics that pertain to our world today where devastation has occurred and will continue to occur in the foreseeable future. Examples such as droughts, volcanoes erupting, and the Earth's temperature rising are all pointed to by real civilization and not just a made-up compound where scientists try to improve and create new and better things. As I continued to delve into the novel I was starting to anticipate a disaster that would soon occur. The compounds seemed prone to problems with large numbers of scientists running around inventing new animals like pigs and maligns and new medicines that seemed too good to be true. Although the living conditions were different from those we live in today, people in the compounds still faced problems that we also face. Drugs, alcohol... middle of paper... pill. Since Crake had given him the shot, all the doctors had to do was take a tissue sample and create more of the vaccine so it wouldn't kill nearly all of humanity. Instead Jimmy sits and drinks alcohol without even thinking that he could make the difference between life and death. As I think about this situation I thought that Crake himself had given himself the vaccine along with Oryx, so why did he kill Oryx? If someone asked me whether or not they should read this book, I would tell them to absolutely read it but be patient because most of the action doesn't happen until the end of the story. I was struck by the humor shown by Atwood but also by the drama that affects humanity. I'll probably look into reading some of his other books to see what other novels he produced and see what he had to offer.