Dystopian books have flooded the New York Times' Best Seller List, encouraging those in the film business to cash in on the success by adapting these novels into movies. Lois Lowry’s novel, “The Giver, has attracted even more attention lately due to its own movie adaptation.

This renewed interest allows us to revisit “The Giver” and examine how it relates to our lives.

If you don’t like to read, I probably don’t like you.  Just kidding.  But really, if you don’t like to read you should probably start.  Because even though I’ve never been abroad, I have gotten a pretty good scope of the world from the items on my bookshelf, all of which are books and not weird little artsy trinkets acquired from that hip thrift store.  Anyway, a lot of you, hopefully most, have at some point read “The Giver.”  Or if you haven’t read it, you’ve maybe seen the commercials for the new movie or even seen it.  And if you haven’t accomplished any of these things, you’re probably living under a rock and definitely not reading this article. I digress. Written by Lois Lowry and awarded a Newbery Medal, “The Giver” is one of the most important books you will ever read.                 

In summary, “The Giver” is a post-apocalyptic, dystopian novel about a boy named Jonas who lives in a community devoid of emotion, knowledge, and memories of the past.  There are no significantly defining characteristics between him and his peers.  Each child grows up the same way, having the same number of siblings, the same daily meals and the same schooling. The only difference is their career assignments they receive when they turn 12. These determine what they will be doing for the rest of their uncomplicated lives.  As all good books go, Jonas is selected for an almost unheard of and extremely challenging task. He is chosen to be the Receiver of Memory. It sounds weird, and I can’t give away the rest of the book (even though you should have already read it) because it would be against my literary conscience to do so.  But in order to talk about the good stuff, I had to give you a little bit of background.       

“The Giver” is important because of this: it teaches to both young and old, just how beautiful our pain, our happiness, our sorrow and our joys truly are.  It is sometimes hard to live.  It is especially hard to be in college, to grow up and to make choices.  Courage and fortitude do not come easily, but they reside within each of us.  So, all of this is to say that life is wonderful, exciting and outstandingly vivid. 

With the overwhelming use and dependence upon social media, it is often hard to discern what is real and what is not.  I will openly admit that I am very, very guilty of using social media as a form of validation for my own life.  However, is your Instagram with 100+ likes indicative of the kind of life you live? In some ways, yes.  It shows that you are doing something presumably worth that many likes and that you have a lot of ‘friends’ to like whatever you are doing.  But in most ways, no.  It means nothing.  Your picture will be viewed and perhaps popular for a few hours, a day at most.  Your status, your tweet, your blog perhaps represent you in some small way, but do not define you.  The world of social media carries no weight; your accounts confine rather than connect.  What I am coming to grips with as I grow up and as I reread books like “The Giver” is that such things are ephemeral.  What is significant are the true feelings of happiness, love, sadness and all of the times in between.  Whether you chose to capture and post whatever you do, the memories still reside within you and that is perhaps the coolest thing about being alive.