To Rant, Or Not To Rant

The great big "Time Machine" rant

In 6th grade, my reading teacher made us read "The Time Machine" by H G Wells. When we first got the book in late December everyone was really excited because this was our first book we were going to read as a class. I thought it'd be good and a fast read because the book was super thin and you basically can tell what it was about by looking at the title. It was obviously about time travel and in 5th grade I read "A Wrinkle in Time" which was about time travel so I thought this book would be similar to that.

Before we started the book my reading teacher was telling us how great this book was and how it's a "classic" novel. Which was weird because none of us have ever even heard of this book before.

So anyway, we didn't even start the book til like early February because we had to do a bunch of activities before we started the book.

One of the most pointless activities we had to do was make a resem'e for H G Wells. I didn't even help us at all and was super boring. My friend also found out that H G Wells had a bunch of affairs and was basically a horrible person.

When we finally started the book, the first chapter was super confusing and hard to read. The next day we had to do notes on what we read. Our "notes" was pretty much just a bunch of questions our teacher told us the answers to. There was a total of around 95 questions that we answered throughout the whole book.

One questions that I remember was "why do think H G Wells chose such original names?"

The names in the book aren't even names. The names are the time traveller, the publisher, the editor, and some other ones I can't remember. Those aren't original. If anything H G Wells was just not creative enough to think of real names.

But acording to my reading teacher the character names are just so creative and H G Wells just put so much hard working into picking those names. Okay, sure....

Two months later we finally finished the book. It was terrible.

The book is about a guy called "the time traveller" that invites some people over for dinner. When he arrives late, the time traveller tells the dinner guests why he was late and the rest of the book is just him telling us this story about him travelling through time. So according to the time traveller, that morning, he invented a time machine and went into the future. The futuristic world looks like a utopia. He later learns that there are two types of species in the future: the eloi and the morlocks. The Eloi are weak,frail and live in the utopian world. They are very unintelligiant and can't understand English. The morlocks are ape-like creatures that live underground. They care for the eloi, giving them clothes, food, and shelter. Then they eat the eloi.

So the time traveller befriends one of the eloi named Weena, who is the only okay character in the whole book. Then in the climax, the time traveller and weena go out in the woods( I don't remember why). The morlocks start attacking them so the time traveller panics and SETS A FIRE. And because they're in the woods, the fire spreads and kills the morlocks and weena. Then he travells farther into the future where all signs of life have disappeared. It's really depressing so he then he goes home. So he finishes telling his story and no one really belives him except for the narrator. The next day the narrator comes over to the time travellers house and the time traveller says he going to go back to the future to get proof that he traveled through time and never returns. The end.

Reasons I hated the book:

The time traveller is such an unlikeable character. He's so stupid. Like what did you think was going to happen when you set that fire in the woods? And he didn't even try saving weena. He just ran away. He basically murdered weena.

Weena dies. Seriously H G Wells? you're only allowed to kill off a good character if you have other good characters so the readers are still interested in the book. But you only had one decent character which you killed. That is not okay. Once Weena died I lost all hope for this book and became even more uninterested.

The book is just..... weird. The book is akwardly written and the plot was just plain insane. I'm pretty sure H G Wells was on some "medication" when he was writing this book. I mean it does make sense considering how terrible of a person he was.

The stupid ending. What happens to the time traveller? What happened to eveyone else? H G Wells probably wasn't creative enough to figure out an ending either so he was just like, "hey! Let's just leave this unresolved abrupted ending and people will think I'm so creative for doing this!"

I hope the time traveller died.

There are many more reasons but just listed the major reasons.

So anyway, once we finished the book we had a test over it. The best part of it was the essay question. The test listed ten questions that you could choose from to answer. Since everyone in my class hated "The Time Machine," we all took this as an opportunity to talk about why we hated the book. And then after we finished the test the teacher let us share our essays. My favorite one was by my friend, who answered the question "did you think the ending was satisfying or unsatisfying?" Most of us secretly insulted the time machine in our essays because we didn't our teacher to get mad but she just flat out insulted the time machine. It was so funny and true. The best part was that the teacher didn't even get mad at us.

But wait, there's more! After we read the book we watched the movie! The movie was made in like 60s so it was really low quality. They also messed up the plot. In the movie Weena doesn't die, which I liked but in movie the time traveller and her fell in love. In the book it was decribed as father-daughter realationship so it was kind of disturbing when they kissed in the movie. One scene in the movie that I remembered was when the time traveller was fighting the morlocks. It looked so fake. The best part was when a morlock coughed up blood that looked like koolaid. It looked so unrealistic and hilarious.

Wait! There's even more! My friends and I made up theories about what the time machine is really about. We think H G Wells was high when he wrote the book and the time traveller is actually a mental hopitail patient. Each of us then made up theories about what the eloi, morlocks, and other stuff was.

So in conculsion, to this VERY long rant, "The Time Machine" is a terrible book that our class bonded over the hatered of. I hope you guys enjoyed this super long rant. If I missed anything or if you want to rant about why you hate "The Time Machine" please comment.

-cornflakes :D

P. S.- this book hit 100 reads on Saturday so thank you to all my readers! :)