After you have read a few chapters, it is time to take a moment to start noticing things.
Before you start writing take 10 minutes and do our NOTICE AND FOCUS strategy. Make a list of your observations on a sheet of paper. Then go through your list, look for patterns or connections. Start asking questions and posing possible interpretations or ideas (at this point, they just might be predictions). Free write, list, do what works for you. Then look at your ideas; pick one you can really sink your teeth into, and then start your blog! Keep focused on that one idea and develop it with connections to the specifics in the text.
Ethan Schalekamp
ReplyDeleteWhy We Get Fat and What to Do About It
What if everything that we've been told about healthy diet and lifestyle, along with guidelines for preventing chronic disease and obesity, were completely and utterly wrong? What would you do? Could you accept it? For over forty years, the medical community has been telling the overwhelming number of obese individuals in Western societies to eat as little saturated fat and cholesterol as possible, limit meat, and eat more plant foods as well as exercise more and eat less in general. This all sounds totally sensible, even to me, but the history and science contradict this paradigm. Taubes addresses the idea of applying the law of thermodynamics to the human body (calories in vs calories out) right away in the first chapter of his book. If a person's body composition was determined entirely by the number of calories they ate and the number of calories they expend, why is it that impoverished people all over the world, throughout history have experienced such high rates of obesity? Taubes lists several examples; "...malnutrition is a serious problem on the island, but so is obesity...The average caloric intake of these women is estimated at less than two thousand calories a day." (Taubes 26).
Taubes couldn't have written his book any more informatively than he did. Personally, I've researched the history science, and nature of this subject in much greater depth than some would consider normal, but so far, Taubes is the first person to tie things together. For example, his explanation of why diets so often fail: people try to eat less and move more to try to lose fat. By nature, moving more will make one hungrier, and eating less adds to hunger even more while actually promoting accumulation of adipose tissue. I think that If I were to give this book to anyone who believes these fundamentals, they would be shocked or they would immediately dismiss it. This would be understandable, we've been trying to do these things for forty plus years. The medical community has done little about it and they have avoided accepting it. The few chapters that follow the first give you just about all the historical and scientific evidence you need to justify questioning your understanding of adiposity.
I predict that within the next decade, the ideas Taubes describes, at least about weight loss, will become wide spread. The rates of chronic disease will reach unprecedented levels and the medical community will be forced to re assess their points of view. Little science is truly needed to support Taubes' arguments though, simply looking back at our own history is enough to understand that it displays some level of validity. I look forward to seeing how he approaches the finer details throughout the rest of his book.
Lesley Yan Santos
ReplyDeleteHate List by Jennifer Brown
pg 1-144 (up until "Part Two")
At Garvin High school, you are either popular of unpopular. Anyone in between often goes unnoticed/unacknowledged and unspoken to. Valerie Leftman and her boyfriend Nick Levil had always been part of the unpopular group and due to all the bullying, they created a Hate List of all the people they despised. On May 2, 2008, Nick unexpectedly open fired in the school cafeteria (the Commons) targeting people on the supposed list. After accidentally shooting Valerie in the leg, Nick turns the gun on himself and ends his own life.
The format of this book is very unique as it switches between the past and the present. Whenever a news report written by "Angela Dash" appears, the book talks about Valerie in the present tense and how she is struggling to cope with everything on her first day back to school (since the shooting). Although some kids believe her to be a hero for stopping the shooting (by jumping in front of Nick and hence getting shot in the leg), others believe her to be a murderer for helping to write the infamous Hate List that influenced the whole shooting.
Understandably, she is also very confused emotionally, partially due to the fact that she still loves Nick even after what he did. According to her, Nick "was good" and those who talked smack about him "didn't know him the way she did". Being one of these people, Valerie's mom feels the need to tell her daughter "I told you so" at every moment she gets. This is interesting as immediately after the shooting, Valerie's mom took the liberty to completely clear the house of anything related to Nick as if she could just erase the memory from their lives. However, with all the buzz about the shooting and the daily reminders from other people, this is hardly possible. I however strongly disapprove of Valerie's choice to give up college simply because she is afraid of being judged.
The book also gives "flashbacks" to the day of the shooting (May 2, 2008), giving the time and a particular quote that was said that day. Multiple time before the shooting, Nick gave hints to his plan saying things such as, "Got a lot to do today" (Brown 62). I find it particularly interesting how oblivious she was to Nick's plan despite his hints. During the shooting, after Christy Bruter (the first victim of the shooting) gets shot, Valerie runs after her boyfriend to tell her to stop. When she does so, Nick turns to her with "an inhumane sort of smile" and says "Don't you remember our plan?" (Brown 104). Reading through her point of views, it is clear to me that she didn't make any actual plan with Nick they just seemed to talk an awful lot about death and getting rid of those whom they hated (or so she says). This however does bring to question who Jeremy (a friend Nick used to hang out and do drugs with) was and whether or not he had any part in planning the shooting.
I find the layout of this book very interesting (and at time hard to follow) as it gives you an idea of what happened vs. the aftermath as well as Valerie's point of view vs. the general public/the media. Reading it from Valerie's shoes however, does make you want to believe her and show sympathy for her.
Gideon Schmidt
ReplyDeleteKill Devil Hill; Discovering the Secret of the Wright Brothers by Harry Combs
I haven’t gotten too far into this book yet. Since it is a piece of fairly well known history, I decided to focus less on the book itself and more on the author and his style of writing. So far I’ve only gotten through the prologue, but it provides such a profound view into the author’s thoughts that I realized that it would be as good a stopping point as any for me to get the blog entry out there.
The prologue is written by the author as he’s flying a Learjet (a small private jet) 45000 feet above the North Atlantic Ocean, on a trip between Goose Bay, Newfoundland and Reykjavik, Iceland. As he’s flying over the southern tip of Greenland, it hits him. “I fly at 550 miles an hour nine miles above the earth. What in the hell holds us up? What makes this mass of metal fly? How did we capture this miracle? Who gave it to us? Where did it all start?”
Later on in the book I will find the answers to these questions. Due to the airfoil shape of the wing, air flowing over the top decreases in pressure and the plane is “sucked” up into the sky. The Wright Brothers were the first to find that out when they were the first to fly a powered airplane on December 17, 1903. But that’s beside the point that the author is trying to convey.
The author is trying to convey the miracle of flight. For many Americans, airplanes are a normal part of life. Approximately eighty percent of Americans have been on a plane at least once, and the remaining twenty percent know well what they are. But as your aircraft screams down the runway, what percent of people are thinking about the miracle of physics occurring within thirty yards of them, on the wings of their aircraft? Even those who are not yet asleep and do know are often mesmerized by the acceleration of the monstrous hunk of metal they’re sitting in, and whatever happens to be flashing by. This impression he tries to give is only partially complete in his book, and I haven’t added much more to it. Clearly this book is more than just history, it’s the tale of an explainable miracle that goes often unnoticed. While the Wright Brothers’ story is well known, this book looks like one that will, while explaining their accomplishment, show the incredibility and the power of the gravity-defying feat that goes unnoticed often today; the miracle of flight.
Kitchen Confidential | Anthony Bourdain
ReplyDeleteEmil Friedman
When I saw Ethan’s glowing recommendation of Anthony Bourdain’s “Kitchen Confidential” on the Power of Books blog, I knew I had found the next book for me. While I don’t have an interest in actually becoming a chef or anything, I love the “behind-the-scenes” genre of books. As I pass through the beginning of the book, I’m able to make a reasonably fair judgement about the author’s writing style. Anthony Bourdain is a restaurant chef (and TV personality), and not a professional writer. This was very apparent to me in both positive and negative ways.
I have a true appreciation for witty, sarcastic writing, and Bourdain’s personality bleeds onto the paper (err, iPad screen) in this fashion. He’s quick to judge and classify different people: for example, the Friday and Saturday night dinner crowd is usually made up of annoying, stupid tourists, according to Bourdain, while the weekday crowd is comprised of people who are worth actually going above and beyond for. On well-done steaks, Bourdain classifies the typical customer who prefers this temperature as “some rube who prefers to eat his meat or fish incinerated into a flavorless, leathery hunk of carbon, who won’t be able to tell if what he’s eating is food or flotsam.” And don’t even get him started on vegans. Which brings me to my next point: pretentiousness.
Maybe it’s Bourdain's spending more than a few pages describing what specific foods he will or won’t eat in a restaurant. (Mussels? No thanks. Fish? Depends on the day of the week.) Maybe it’s his writing things like, “To me, life without veal stock, pork fat, sausage, organ meat, demi-glace, or even stinky cheese is a life not worth living.” Maybe it’s just me. But there is something about Bourdain’s overall writing style that oozes an annoying pretentiousness and over-the-top pompousness. So far, I’ve decided that this is a purposeful component of the book...but Anthony’s close to crossing that line.
(CONTINUED BELOW)
(CONTINUED FROM ABOVE)
ReplyDeleteOne thing I do like about Bourdain’s writing style is his honesty about the restaurant industry. He makes no qualms about classifying restaurant cooks as “on the fringes of society”; he’s perfectly comfortable nonchalantly discussing the excessive drinking that restaurant chefs do on a daily basis (“really hammered, every night!” declares Bourdain). He’s very clear from the get-go that, despite his current success, he started out as a pretty terrible student doing stereotypical “bad teenager” things. To this end, I would say that Bourdain is humbly honest regarding his beginnings and his industry.
Finally, from a strictly conventional point of view, Bourdain’s book is riddled with little grammatical quirks that make the reader think the book needs another pass through the editing department. He uses hyphens, dashes, and parentheses too much. Like, way too much. I usually don’t care much about these kinds of things, but Bourdain’s way of writing results in long, run-on sentences that can actually be difficult to keep track of at times. An example: “A simple pasta pomodoro made with love, a clumsily thrown-together tuna casserole, roast beef with Yorkshire pudding, all of this is pure exotica to me, even when I’ve been neck-deep all day in filet mignon and herb-infused oils and all the bits of business we do to distinguish restaurant food from what you get at home (my mother-in-law would always apologize before serving dinner when I was in attendance, saying, ‘This must seem pretty ordinary for a chef...’).” Grammatically correct? Sure. But the critical side of me wants to chalk monstrosities like this up to an obviously amature writer who needed a few more meetings with his editor before going to press.
Despite all of this, I am looking forward to continuing “Kitchen Confidential.” I do, in fact, like how much insight and knowledge Bourdain has about the “nooks-and-crannies” of the industry. And now that the book is finally moving towards his professional career, I can’t wait to learn more about Bourdain’s path from dishwasher to food celebrity, which I hope to address in my “middle of the book” blog entry.
True Colors
ReplyDeleteBy Kristin Hannah
The Id, the Ego and the Superego. The best ways to describe the Grey sisters, who right now, are not in the best place as far as sisterly relations go. Vivi Ann would be the Id. The immature dreamer who jumps into everything without even thinking. She is just like her deceased mother, and is now taking care of her parents’ ranch with her father and is making money at rodeos along with teaching young girls to horseback ride. She could be described as the “favorite” since her father always agrees with her and everything comes easy for her. She has always got the attention of boys, but her immaturity kicks in and she eventually gets bored with them. She goes out with her sisters one night and meets a Native American from Texas, Dallas (Ironically), who kisses her and she instantly feels a connection. The problem being that she is currently dating Luke and in their little town in Washington state they are probably as famous as Brad Pitt and Angela Jolie. In their small town, outsiders such as Native Americans are also looked down upon. The next day Luke proposes to her and she rejects him, but as word spreads about her and Dallas she tells her father that she and Luke are engages in a desperate attempt to save her reputation.
Winona is the Superego. She is the successful lawyer who can’t seem to get her fathers approval on anything she does despite her achievements. She is always making a huge effort to support the ranch that is in some serious debt, but her father rejects all of her ideas. She has always lived in the shadow of her sister, as she was never good with horses, and is nothing like Vivi Ann. She has always envied Vivi Ann but becomes enraged with jealousy when she starts dating Luke, and especially after hearing about their “engagement”. She knows that as her sister, she should be honest with Vivi Ann but she just waits for the day they break up as Luke is clearly more in love with Vivi than Vivi is with Luke. Unfortunately for her it becomes too late, which no doubt will cause some tension later in the novel. She also doesn’t tell Vivi Ann that she hired a new employee to help around the ranch, so Vivi is in for a big surprise when she wakes up to find Dallas in her barn.
Finally, Aurora is the Ego. She is the level headed, married, mother of two, who is the voice of reason for her sisters. She is the one Winona confides in when she is upset with Vivi Ann. She encourages Winona to tell Vivi Ann the truth, knowing that Vivi wouldn’t care and that it is what would be best for everyone. She manages to stay neutral in family fights and tries to make everyone happy. Although her kindness and loyalty may pose to be a problem for her in the future, as she is great at keeping promises and secrets, so she knows everything about her sisters that Winona and Vivi Ann don’t want to tell each other.
Noah Rohde
ReplyDelete10.6.13
White
Taipei, by Tao Lin
Ambien, Marijuana, Percocet, Tylenol 3, alcohol. These drugs are only the beginning for Paul, a 26 year old budding author, who begins a downward spiral into the world of drug and alcohol addiction. When you are first introduced to our character, he is walking towards a party with his then girlfriend, Michelle, and is also “traveling through the universe” and trying not to walk into the oncoming traffic. As the two enter the party, the author makes a note that the two are already extremely inebriated and “other,” which is not clarified. Fast forward about a month and Paul, with a different girlfriend, Laura, are attempting to reach Paul’s apartment after a night of drinking and marijuana use. Upon reaching his apartment, the two take several unknown prescription medication and pass out, or so Paul thinks. Paul and Laura spend possible two hours almost comatose in Pauls bed and talking to themselves, each other, and nobody, all at the same time.
The affected minds of Paul and Laura are extremely unsettling. I can not understand why some would do this to themselves. If they were battling cancer and this was their only release I could understand. That is not the case though for either of them. So far, all that the reader could gleam from Paul's life is that he feels like his life has been unfulfilling and he takes massive amounts of illicit drugs.
Another passage that stuck out to me as weird was an conversation/flashback of his school career after waking up after his night with Laura. In his head he went over every year. One specific line explained how he thought of others. “Paul mechanically committed to always brushing his teeth and adjusted his view of Chris to include him, with Barry and 90 to 95 percent of people he’d meet, as separate and unknowable” (Lin 38). What happened to Paul was that his friend told him breathe was terrible and defriended himself from Paul. The weird part is that Paul thinks of 90 to 95 percent of people as separate and unknowable. Why does he think that? Does his interactions with his peers at a young age have any influence to his drug use later in life? The only discernible outcome was that so far, Paul has a very difficult time with talking to people he does not know.
Alanna Deery
ReplyDeleteHounded
Matt Ziselmen
This quarter I decided to read something unusual and uplifting; something fun for English class. I chose Hounded, a recently released book with great reviews about lessons in life, a man's thoughts on these lessons and the dogs that teach him these lessons.
The book is a memoir that begins with the author explaining what his earlier life was like and going on to start the first chapter. I really appreciate when an author does this because there is no mystery and no puzzle to solve regarding the authors beginnings. The first thing I noticed at the start of the book is his vivid use of descriptive words. I was pleasantly surprised to find lines such as “My first intake of air feels like the first bite of a Granny Smith apple: crisp and sharp.” And “…a breeze winds through the trees, raining desiccated leaves of yellow and rust upon our heads.” Such lines drew me into the book with phrases that meshed to make beautiful captivating scenes.
The author is a very comical and makes the book very enjoyable through such comedy. However, it can also be quite serious and include good writing at the same time which is quite tricky to do in my past reading experience. The seriousness comes from such real life experiences the author shares with us often throughout the story (the story more about him than the dogs). He lost both his parents by age 26, had several dead-end jobs, suffered depression yet finally met his wife, had a daughter and acquired his three dachshunds that have given him hope. Then I began to acquire a new “lesson” for each chapter.
The lessons are crafted from experiences the author has with his dachshunds that present obstacles, understandings and a special way of seeing things. The lessons so far are ‘Try new things. Within reason’ ‘Be polite. You’ll make someone’s day’ ‘Listen, especially when there’s nothing to hear’ and ‘When the answer is staring you right in the face, stare right back’. These are all good life lessons that benefit the reader, something that I personally like to find in a book. I also love the fact that the lessons allow for many small stories within a story. It is a collection of plots, conflicts and resolutions that begin to mean more and more once you get to know the author. I decided to read this book because I thought it would be a fun unusual read, I kept reading because it was well written and I am truly learning from it.
The Prisoner of Cell 25
ReplyDeleteRichard Paul Evans
Larger Goal in Mind
As I was doing my notice and focus and thinking about events in the book, everything in the book was very cliche-like until I got about 120 pages in. Until this part in the book, it was essentially a smaller kid who got bullied. However, he had electric powers and shocked some of the bigger kids. He met a girl who had similar powers, and they liked each other. This is pretty basic stuff that we have all read before multiple times. However, once you get into the book it takes a little bit of a darker twist and becomes more complex. After the protagonist(Michael Vey) and his best friend, Ostin, got ice cream with Michael's mom, a man with sunglasses in a dark suit kidnapped his mom and would have kidnapped Michael as well if Ostin hadn't shown up from the bathroom. This man was "very interested in Michael and his powers." He said he was there to "reunite him with the others." This scared Michael, but his mom sort of seemed to know what the man was talking about. Then the man had one of his apprentices zap his mom and another one make Michael very dizzy and almost knocked him out.
I do not understand why these people were so secretive to Michael and his Mom. The man seemed to be trying to scare Michael, as he mentioned his friend Taylor. The man obviously had some sort of goal in mind, otherwise he would not have kidnapped Michael's mom. My guess is he did that as a bribe to Michael, and I think he might use her to threaten Michael in the future. An example could be the man telling Michael to do something, and telling him that if he doesn't do it then he will kill his mom.
The most important part of this, however, is that this has to be part of some sort of larger goal that the man had in mind. He seemed to be very organized and knowing of what to say. I think this could be foreshadowing future events in the book. Perhaps this man is from an organization and they want to use the electric children to achieve some sort of goal, or maybe he is the reason they are electric and he just wants to study them and see why they are electric.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteMolly Nealon
ReplyDeletePaper Towns
John Green
“The way I figure it, everyone gets a miracle. Like, I will probably never be struck by lightning, or win a Nobel Prize, or become a dictator of a small nation in the Pacific Islands, or contract terminal ear cancer, or spontaneously combust. But if you consider all the unlikely things together, at least one of them will probably happen to each of us… But my miracle was different. My miracle was this: out of all the houses in all the subdivisions in all of Florida, I ended up living next door to Margo Roth Spiegelman.” That is the opening to the prologue of Paper Towns by John Green.
Right off the bat you know the narrator (his name is later revealed to be Quentin Jacobsen, or, for short, Q) is, to put it mildly, a little obsessed with Margo. Which is why it’s so incredible to him that when she decides to go on an all-night adventure around Orlando, she chooses him as her partner-in-crime. They visit not only the houses of Margo’s now-ex boyfriend and best friend, but also break into Sea World (it was the only one left on Margo’s list of places to break into) and visit the top of the SunTrust building in downtown Orlando, which they’re also not supposed to do, as, at that point in the night it is well after midnight.
This scene stood out to me as I began reading Paper Towns, as Margo seems to have quite an interesting perspective on the small little community that the two high school seniors live in. You see, from the conference room of the SunTrust building, you can not only see all the way across Orlando, but you also have a perfect view of their own suburbs and houses. You can basically see their whole world just by standing at the top of this skyscraper:
““It’s beautiful,” I said.
Margo scoffed. “Really? You seriously think so?”
“I mean, well, maybe not,” I said, although it was. … It’s all here--my whole world, and I could see it just by walking around a building.
…
Before I had the chance to say anything, her eyes went back to the view and she started talking. “Here’s what’s not beautiful about it: from here, you can’t see the rust of the cracked paint or whatever, but you can tell what the place really is. You see how fake it all is. It’s not even hard enough to be made out of plastic. It’s a paper town… All those paper people living in their paper houses, burning the future to stay warm… I’ve lived here for eighteen years and I have never once in my life come across anyone who cares about anything that matters.”” (Gre 57)
To me, this was an important scene because it shows just how differently Margo sees things than most people. While most people seeing this would react as Q had, thinking it was incredible that you could see everything that they knew all from one place, Margo sees it as almost a barrier to her. That everything is fake, and structured to last temporarily, and fake places raise fake people and what’s even the point if nothing’s even real anyways? This kind of takes Q by surprise, as it would most people, but I think what John Green intended was for you to listen with your own mind, not the one that that paper town made you to have, and when you do, you realize that she’s actually very right. So right it’s scary, almost.
“Soul-Mates”? I don't think so...
ReplyDeleteAnjuli Smith
Blood Promise
Richelle Mead
Blood Promise is the fourth book in a series by Richelle Mead. At this point in the series, Rose, a dhampir (vampire-human hybrid) is going on a quest to search for her “soul-mate,” Dimitri, who was unwillingly turned into a Strigoi (bad, immortal vampires). She left behind her best friend, Lissa (who is a good, mortal vampire called a moroi), but is able to check in on her periodically through a one-way mental bond. Rose has travelled to Siberia (Dimitri’s hometown) to find him, but instead coincidentally (very stereotypical, right?) ends up running into his family. Where I just stopped, she has told his family about his “death” (in their eyes he is dead), and have just held a memorial service for him, but Rose is going to continue her search.
One thing that really stood out to me, was how much the author emphasized the connection between Rose and Dimitri. She goes as far as using the cliché and trite term “soul-mate” on page 74 when Rose is having a flashback to Dimitri. Rose recalls, “I’d realized then just how strong our connection was, how perfectly we understood each other. I’d been skeptical about people being soul mates in the past, but at that moment, I knew it was true” (Mead 74). I think it’s ridiculous how much this is emphasized, as they have known each other for maybe a year. Rose describes Dimitri as “the man [she] loves, the man with whom [she’d] been so perfectly in sync that it was hard to know where [she] ended and he began” (Mead 12). It is true, that they understand each other which is what I think she means by being perfectly in sync, but I do believe that the author stresses their “true love” way too much.
Both Rose and Dimitri are guardians and Rose, more than her other classmates, understands the concept of self-sacrifice that goes along with the role of guardian. There is a saying in the guardian world: “They come first.” This means that the guardians must put their moroi charge before themselves, no matter what. Rose understands this, as she had traveled around protecting Lissa for about two years after they ran away from the St. Vladimir’s Academy, and is one of the few dhampirs her age who understand the gravity of what the saying truly means. Dimitri also, being a more experienced guardian understands this and it gives him and Rose a certain connection.
However, there are many other guardians in this world who also understand the gravity of the situation. I believe that if any of them had been Rose’s trainer and had gotten to know her, they could’ve been Rose’s so called “soul mate.” It is really the situation that leads to this and anyone who was placed in this situation would’ve gotten close to Rose and they would’ve fallen in love and she’d say they were her soul mate. I don’t believe there is one person in the world who goes perfectly with her or with anyone. There might be a few people more compatible with you than others but no one person is perfectly matched with you in this world. It’s just not possible, and it’s too coincidental for that supposed one person to be the first person Rose is strongly interested in. However, seeing as this is a stereotypical young adult book, and the author is trying to sell books towards an audience that has just experienced their first love, I’m predicting that Rose will find Dimitri and a convenient loophole to change him back into a dhampir and they’ll live happily ever after (with a few deaths on the side).
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteJulia Wagner
ReplyDelete“The Face on the Milk Carton”
Caroline B. Cooney
This quarter I decided to read an interesting book called “The Face on the Milk Carton” by Caroline B. Cooney. The main character, Janie Johnson is a 15 year old sophomore in high school. One day when Janie was eating lunch and her and her friends were talking about the missing girl picture on the back of their milk cartons. When Janie looked at the picture, she immediately recognized the girl as herself. Janie is positive that this girl is herself which leads her to believe that, somehow, she was kidnapped when she was a kid. Because she recently discovered that she might have been kidnapped, there is a lot of confusion for Janie and she is second guessing her past and everything that her parents have told her.
Janie’s next door neighbor, Reeve, is a senior at Janie’s school. He is not a very good student and never does his homework, mainly getting D’s and F’s which is very unlike his siblings. He has two sisters and one brother who were all excellent students and are attending colleges like Cornell, Princeton, and Stanford. All of Reeve’s bad grades are a disappointment to his parents and they mortify his siblings. Because of this, Reeve never really speaks to his family and almost always eats dinner at Janie’s house. He is basically invisible to his family and is very lost right now.
As I have been reading and getting to know more about these two characters I’m seeing how similar they themselves and their feelings are. They both are in obviously different situations but the outcome is the same. They feel muddled and adrift. Janie feels as though she is insane because she thinks that she was kidnapped, yet all the evidence she has found so far proves that she was. Reeve can’t get his family’s attention and love because he is a failure in their eyes.
In the fifth chapter Janie and Reeve kiss and I think that they feel a connection because of their similar emotions. They both feel like they have no family to attach to and so they use each other to feel secure again. As I read on I will keep focusing on their relationship and how it changes depending on what is happening to their emotions and what’s happening in their independent lives.
Veronica Liu
ReplyDeleteBattle Royale
This quarter, I read the book Battle Royale by Koushun Takami and translated by Yuji Oniki. I had heard of this title before, as Suzanne Collins, the author of series The Hunger Games, took inspiration from this book. My friend recommended this book to me as I was playing the video game Dangan Rompa, a murder mystery game with similar themes.
The book opens with four documents that helped define the setting of the book. First, there is a quote from George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, then a “pro wrestling fan’s rant in an alternate world”, a list of the character’s names, and lastly, a top secret government memo. The George Orwell quote sets a dark tone of the rest of the book, by talking about how horrible it is to be surrounded by an atmosphere of suspicion and hatred. The wrestler fan explains that a battle royale is a wrestling term for when multiple people are thrown together in a free for all match, and the contestants strategically group up and defeat each other, but also backstab their allies in order to win. From these and the list of the character’s names, where I learned that the characters are all eighth grade classmates, I assumed that the rest of the story would focus on the social interactions of characters. I also assume that the paranoia of being backstabbed while in the battle royale is the distrust that the Orwell quote is talking about.
The government memo was more plot-based, and introduces the setting. In Battle Royale, Japan is run by the authoritarian Republic of Greater East Asia. There, every year 47 classes are chosen to participate in the Program, where each individual class is forced to fight their classmates to the death. The government states that it is a research experiment, but it is actually to keep the people from revolting.
The story starts with the protagonist Shuya and his classmates going on a class field trip. Shuya introduces his classmates to the reader by mentioning how they are perceived by the class and what cliques they fit into. Interestingly enough, not only are there the typical high school popular girls and jocks, but there are also male and female gang and thug members. While on the bus, his best friend’s crush, Noriko comes to talk to them, and it seems like an ordinary high-school field trip- until they are gassed and taken to a deserted island. When they wake up they are given instructions about the Program. During the briefing, a girl is killed for whispering, and Shuya’s best friend is killed for getting angry. They are then released onto the island with survival packs that also include random weapons in each one. For his now deceased friend, Shuya teams up with Noriko during the Program.
This book is becomes much more violent and graphic than the Hunger Games quickly into the book, and unlike Collins, Takami’s characters do not have a chance to mentally prepare themselves before they are forced to participate. The students, driven by fear and suspicion, act exactly the way the government wants them to and start killing each other. I initially thought there would be drama between Noriko, Shuya and Shuya’s best friend, because of the romantic hints on the bus ride. However, Shuya’s friend died so early on in the story that I don’t think this is possible. An interesting thing about the plot that I noted is the symbolism in the graphic for the book. On it, there is the silhouette of two students, , who seem to be standing together as a team against the open space. However, the negative space separating the two silhouettes is actually the shape of a gun. In reality, while the two children may seem to be working together, the gun suggests they are quite the opposite, and may just be looking for the right opportunity to kill each other. I predict that the rest of this story will be about these types of tense, half-trusting friendships, and I am curious to see what will happen to the friendships that formed before the Program started, and how willing the characters will be to kill their friends.
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