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"   Some time ago the BBC released a list of 100 books, classic and otherwise, and along with it a claim that most people have read only six of them. A former English major, I tallied up my own number, expecting that I had at least half of them on my bookshelf. To my literary dismay, I&amp;#039;d only knocked down 36 of the 100. Feeling demoralized and humbled, I recently printed out the list, determined to conquer them all. But, before I could get to any number of the novels I hadn&amp;#039;t read, I had to revisit one I had: Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. So much was lost on me when i first read it way back in high school, probably because a) it was an abridged version and b) I was an antsy teenager. Thus I recently picked up a new copy, ready to try and finally appreciate and contextualize Huxley&amp;#039;s satiric vision of a &amp;quot;utopian&amp;quot; future where humans are genetically bred and pharmaceutically anesthetized to passively serve a ruling order. It only took the first page for me to realize what I&amp;#039;d missed before. The second paragraph, describing the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre, had me gasping in awe: The enormous room on the ground floor faced towards the north. Cold for all the summer beyond the panes, for all the tropical heat of the room itself, a harsh thin light glared through the windows, hungrily seeking some draped lay figure, some pallid shape of academic goose-flesh, but finding only the glass and nickel and bleakly shining porcelain of a laboratory. Wintriness responded to wintriness. The overalls of the workers were white, their hands gloved with a pale corpse-coloured rubber. The light was frozen, dead, a ghost. Only from the yellow barrels of the microscopes did it borrow a certain rich and living substance, lying along the polished tubes like butter, streak after luscious streak in long recession down the work tables. &amp;quot;Wintriness responded to wintriness.&amp;quot; Chills! It feels like I&amp;#039;m reading the book for the first time, and, though it&amp;#039;s not getting my number up, I&amp;#039;m ok with that.  \u2014Seth Plattner, Assistant Editor Photo: Amazon.com "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/books/news/a2588/brave-new-world-revisited-2144/>