Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (Dover Thrift Editions)

Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions - Banesh Hoffmann, Edwin A. Abbott Before anything, this is one of those reads that I'm sure I wasn't able to get from the first viewing. In the future, I will go back to it and probably find out more things than I did until now. It's such a pleasure to know there's more to discover in so few pages, more to see about the writing, the subject, the characters.

I will not go into the specifics of this work. It's already short as it is, and it's better to taste it on your own.

What I will comment on, though, is the finesse with which Abbott presented his story. It's not everyday that you stumble over such a funny book. And the thing is, it's not funny for you to laugh out loud. It's funny because of its depth, because of its insight in the human mind. In how he portrays society, Abbott is a genius.

The world he created, it's full of Triangles and Squares and other geometrical forms that live in a 2D plan, basically. They don't know the 3D world, and have no knowledge as to how that would come to be. Abbott created a society ruled much in the same way our world is, and he tried to transfer everything we know there. How politics work, how the church is viewed, how women are made inferior, etc, etc.

It's truly a book worth the read. Sometimes, you'd think it makes no sense, and some paragraphs left me baffled, not being able to understand what he wanted to say. But come the explanation for everything he wrote, you can see how much thought he put in everything. It's worth it!