Book # 1 One Flow Over The Cuckoo's Nest

Ok Let's get this party started. First book of the year is going to be One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Everyone has seen the movie, and nearly everyone has read the book. Not me this is a first. I'm about 70 pages in and here's some info for you.

• Author : Ken Kesey (once was a volunteer subject for government drug testing. Arrested for marijuana possession in 1965.
• The book is fiction/novel of rebellion first published in 1962.
• The setting of the novel is the Psychiatric ward of a hospital in Oregon. 272 pages.
• Novel is told through the eyes of Chief Broom, a deaf, dumb 6 foot 7 Indian,so all you kids trying to watch the movie instead of reading the book, look out for this one.

So there's all these patients. The chronics and the acutes milling around the Cuckoo's nest. Their very lives run by the dials controlled by the motherly hand of Nurse Ratched, and her henchmen the Negro Boys. Then one day ex-con gambler Randle McMurphy comes strolling in and decides to shake things up a bit. I'm just now getting to the part of the book where the exposition of life around the ward has been explained and McMurphy has bet the other patients he can shake up old Nurse Ratched and get the best of her.

So far one of my favorite parts has been when McMurphy has squared off with Harding, an intellectual patient who so far has run things on the ward. Harding breaks it down to Randle that all the patients are just rabbits, they have always been rabbits. Inadequate ones at that, and it up to the wolf -- Ratched -- to basically keep them in check. See, I liked this because it conjured up some imagery of how the hierarchy is structured in the ward. A hierarchy that McMurphy tries to convince the patients is bullshit. McMurphy starts off by saying the ward is a pecking party to which Harding explains they are rabbits. A light should be going off here telling us that Kesey is saying they are all just treated like animals either way.

Some quotes thus far:

• "Failures, we are--feeble, stunted weak little creatures in a weak little race. Rabbits, sans whambam; a pathetic notion.
• "...That's the first thing that got me about this place, that there wasn't anybody laughing. I haven't heard a real laugh since I came through that door, do you know that? Man when you lose your laugh you lose your footing.