Age of Earthquakes Writing and Pastiche

I found it really interesting that The Age of Earthquakes was written as an email. It was representative of the message that the book was trying to convey. The novel talked about how technology has changed the world but used an email to do that so there was a sort of irony. The book says, “The natural human attention span is the length of one beatles song”. This made me think that the author used a different and intriguing layout to keep the intended audience (the people who have the attention span of one beatles song) hooked. The book isn’t the same the whole way through, with just words, like most books. I made a connection to the novel “1984” by George Orwell. The idea “ Bored people crave war. Fact. But today’s wars don’t seem to ever end. They evolve into something permanent.” is the main idea of Orwell’s novel. A permanent war keeps the people stressed just enough to keep their hate directed towards the enemy and justify the neverending control of the totalitarian government. The author might be trying to say that now that the internet has control over the world, it will always be there creating connections and conflicts. This is the ultimate purpose of the internet. I thought that the phrase, “ the true nature of voting: you dating yourself” was very interesting and it made me really think about what voting is and that perfectly describes it. I didn’t understand the last page when I first started reading, but when I finished the book, it clicked. “You are the last generation that will die :-/”. We have all shared a piece of ourselves over the internet and the internet will keep that information forever, so the memory of every single one of us will forever be preserved. (300)