The Funcooker

Literature on Lost: Through the Looking Glass
Author: Lewis Carroll
Episode: Through the Looking Glass

Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871) is a work of children’s literature by Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson), generally categorized as literary nonsense. It is the sequel to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865). Although it makes no reference to the events in the earlier book, the themes and settings of Through the Looking-Glass make it a kind of mirror image of Wonderland: the first book begins outdoors, in the warm month of May, on Alice’s birthday (May 4),uses frequent changes in size as a plot device, and draws on the imagery of playing cards; the second opens indoors on a snowy, wintry night exactly six months later, on November 4 (the day before Guy Fawkes Night),uses frequent changes in time and spatial directions as a plot device, and draws on the imagery of chess. In it, there are many mirror themes, including opposites, time running backwards, and so on.

(via Wikipedia)

Literature on Lost: Manservant and Maidservant
Author: Ivy Compton-Burnett
Episode: There’s No Place Like Home

At once the strangest and most marvelous of Ivy Compton-Burnett’s fictions, Manservant and Maidservant has for its subject the domestic life of Horace Lamb, sadist, skinflint, and tyrant. But it is when Horace undergoes an altogether unforeseeable change of heart that the real difficulties begin. Is the repentant master a victim along with the former slave? And how can anyone endure the memory of the wrongs that have been done?” Says Edward Sackville-West about the book, ‘Apart from physical violence and starvation, there is no feature of the totalitarian regime which has not its counterpart in the atrocious families depicted in these novels.

(via Amazon)

(Literature, a recurring theme in Lost, is generally used as sort of a gateway into further understanding the show’s mythology. Books, more than just simple props, are placed in certain scenes by writers as fodder for the audience. They serve as clues to piecing together the greater Lost puzzle. I will post about the various books used throughout Lost.)

Literature on Lost: A Separate Reality
Author: Carlos Castaneda
Episode: He’s Our You

A Separate Reality is an allegedly non-fictional book written by anthropologist/author Carlos Castaneda in 1971 concerning the events that took place during an apprenticeship he claimed to have served with a self-proclaimed Yaqui Indian Sorcerer, Don Juan Matus, between 1968 and 1971. The authenticity of the book, along with the rest of Castaneda’s series, has been a topic of debate since they were published.

In the book Castaneda continues his description of his apprenticeship under the tutelage of Don Juan, from which he had withdrawn in 1965. As in his previous book, The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, Castaneda describes the experiences he has with Don Juan while under the influence of the psychotropic plants that Don Juan offered him, peyote (Lophophora williamsii) and a smokable mixture of what Castaneda believed to be, among other plants, dried mushroom of the genus Psilocybe. The main focus of the book centered around Don Juan’s attempts at getting Carlos to See, a practice best described as, in Castaneda’s own words, “perceiving energy directly as it flows through the universe”.

The book contains an introduction, an epilogue and two separate parts. Part One, “The Preliminaries of ‘Seeing’”, describes his re-initiation into the apprenticeship from which he withdrew in late 1965, and also describes his introduction to another brujo (sorcerer) named Don Genaro. Part Two, “The Task of ‘Seeing’”, elaborates on the mental processes involved with Seeing, and begins with Castaneda realizing that the plants are a necessary tool to arrive at Seeing.

(via Wikipedia)