ok so i figured i’d do another high school reading list selection this time, and i went to the barnes and noble classics section at uh… my local barnes and noble to see if anything caught my eye and dragged me fifteen feet. ended up walkin out with the jungle – wasn’t sure i’d wanna read it, cuz from what i knew about it, there’s some pretty graphic nasty talk about how our meat used to be handled back in the day. but then i read how this book was a milestone in american history, and that because of this book the pure food and drug act was passed. so i thought i’d give it a go – make sure you read to the end to see how to get my copy of the jungle and the cliff notes for it for free so you can read it for yourself!

hearts and laserbeams book report: the jungle by upton sinclair

dude did you ever see the snl skits about debbie downer? like there’s a big group of happy people hanging out and they’re talking about cool stuff and then debbie downer pipes up with some crap like “I’ll tell you what the Pilgrims did bring: smallpox.”

seriously, that’s what this whole book is. it’s a big fat huge debbie downer. it pretty much made me wanna kill myself in a lot of parts. (not really. but it DID make me want to drink)

so basically the jungle is not all about the meatpacking industry – that’s a tiny part of it that really only takes up a couple chapters of the 400 pages. the overall story is there’s this poor lithuanian family who comes to america in the early 1900s to make a better life for themselves.

and they get crapped on over and over and over and over and over. by the end of the book, a couple of em are dead, one of em’s run off and abandoned the family, the kids are all effed up, one of the family’s a morphine-addicted ho, the list goes ON AND ON.

you just keep reading about how crappy everything is, how everything’s a swindle, everyone’s out to rip everyone else off, everything’s a lie,and holy crap guys this book was super depressing. cuz we are jerks!!!

and then i got to the last few chapters of the book and had lots and lots and lots of problems finishing the book because it was all politics. you know how i am about politics – SNORE!!! i honestly couldn’t really tell you much about it except for the fact that the main dude jurgis finds out about socialism and it solves all his problems the end!

say it with me now – WHAAAAAAAAAAAA???

so as i’m reading the cliff notes on this thing, it turns out the jungle is only partly about the meat-packing district and all the bad tuberculosis infested meat being churned out back in the day. the entire book is about how capitalism stinks, and how it effs up everyone that isn’t top dog and how it’s all corrupt, and how awesome socialism is.

and upton sinclair was a socialist! and he ran for governor in california as a socialist a couple of times!

WHAT THE EFF!!! how come i never heard about this part of the book? (if i’d have known it was all about politics i would’ve just rolled over and taken a nap instead) apparently when the book came out mr sinclair the social socialist was pretty upset because the whole socialist slant of the book was lost in the OMG WHAT THE EFF ARE THEY DOING OVER THERE IN THE MEATPACKING PLANTS!!!

so basically, here’s the book in one sentence: the jungle isn’t so much about bad meat as it is about bad politics. it’s pretty riveting though, and until i got to the last 3 chapters that were all about socialism it was pretty much a page turner!

ratings:

hearts: 3 hearts – this wasn’t my favorite book to read, it was pretty depressing and the last 3 chapters could be lovingly called “boring as all heck”

farts: 2 farts – it was actually pretty good, didn’t so much like reading about diseased meat and REALLY didn’t like reading about politics.

and there you have it! wanna check out the jungle for yourself? i’m givin away my copy along with the cliff notes to the first person to comment about this blog post! be quick, though – i post my blog on 5 different sites so the first one from any of them wins!