"I'll Give You the Sun" Blog 4

           Of all the book choices on the list, I chose this book because it had good reviews, and I really liked the title. I found books that looked good and had interesting titles and looked into them. “I’ll Give You the Sun” had the best reviews so I chose it. The title sounds really beautiful to me, which is what drew me to it initially, because you’d have to really, really love somebody to give them the sun.

            I didn’t have many connections to the book, but one thing I could connect to was when Noah saw his sister change so much just to fit in with the wrong crowd. I’ve seen some of my close friends completely betray who they were and their morals just to fit in with the “in crowd.” I can understand how much this upset Noah because he really loves and cares about his sister.

            I would recommend this book to people who have experienced family tragedies, like losing a family member. This book is about a family who loses their mother, and how they cope with it, and maybe it could help comfort them. I also might recommend it to someone who is artistic, because it’s also about how the twins use their art to cope and they pour their emotions into their art.

"I'll Give You the Sun" Blog 3

            “The very moment I put hammer to chisel with the intention of finding NoahandJude, my mind goes to the day Noah almost drowned.

            Mom had just died. I was at the sewing machine with Grandma Sweetwine, one of her very first visits. I was working on the seam of a dress, when it’s like the room shook me, that’s the only way I can describe it. Grandma said: Go, only it was more like a tornado blowing the world at me. I flew out of my chair, out of the window, slid all the way down the bluff, my feet touching the sand as Noah hit the water. He didn’t come up. I knew he wasn’t going to. I’ve never been scared like that before, not even when Mom died. There was boiling liquid in my veins.

            I ram the chisel with the hammer, watch a corner of the stone break off, watching myself rush into the surf that winter day. I swam fast as a shark despite my clothes, then started diving down where he sank, gripping armful after armful of water, trying to think about currents and riptides and maelstroms and everything Dad had ever taught me. I let the rip take me, dove down again, up and down, until there was Noah floating faceup, alive, but not conscious. I dragged him to shore, swimming one-armed, sinking more every stroke with the weight of him, both our lives pounding inside me, and then on the beach, I beat his sternum with shaking hands, blew breath after terrified breath into his cold clammy mouth, and when he revived, the second I knew he was okay, I slapped him as hard as I could across the face.

            Because how could he have done this?

How could he have chosen to leave me here all alone?

            He told me he hadn’t been trying to kill himself, but I didn’t believe him.”

            I chose this passage from the book from when Jude was carving a stone sculpture of her and Noah together. Her instructor, Guillermo, had told her that she would find in the rock, what she could find in her heart. So, to put emotion into her work, she recalled the story of the only time in her life when she had been in the world without Noah. This was when he had drowned and almost died. She was terrified because, since they are twins, they had always been there for each other, and she didn’t want to lose him.

            When Jude talks about how it was one of her grandmother’s “very first visits,” she means one of her very first visits from the dead. Her grandmother’s ghost visited her after she died, and it was one the first times that had happened.

            Noah was trying to kill himself because everything had seemed to go wrong. His mother had died, his family was torn up and he loved a boy he didn’t think would ever love him back.

"I'll Give You the Sun" Blog 2

               When Jude was younger, all she wanted was to be loved and accepted by her peers. She just wanted to fit in with everyone else, but this changes as she gets older. When she’s older, after her mother has died, she wants to redeem herself from what she’s done. When her and her brother applied to art school, she threw his application away, and only sent her own. Her dead mother is very mad at her for this, and Jude wants to admit what she’s done to her brother and father, but is scared to. She has so much guilt, and she wants to be free from it.

                When Noah was younger, he just wanted to make his art, and have his sister back. His sister had changed so much in order to fit in and he missed how she used to be. When Noah got older, for a while, he wanted to fit in, but eventually, what he really wanted was to be with Brian and for his family to heal after the loss of his mother.

                What Oscar wants the most is to learn to control his impulses. He is clean from drugs but his behavior is still very impulsive and irresponsible. He wants to have a relationship with Jude, but he is scared that he won’t be able to handle a relationship. He seeks to find stability and to put his life back together.

                Noah and Jude’s father just wants to understand what had happened with their mother. Before she died, she had him move out and live in an apartment, but didn’t tell him the true reason why. And, Noah had told him that she had been driving to his apartment to tell him she wanted him to move back in and for the family to be together again, when she had gotten into a car accident. This was a lie but Noah wanted to protect his father from the truth, that she wanted a divorce. Their father just couldn’t cope with her death, and he didn’t understand why she would be coming to ask him to move back in. It didn’t make sense.

                What Brian wants, is a baseball scholarship. He’s worried if his baseball team finds out he is gay, that they will bully him and kick him off the team, and he won’t get a scholarship. He really just wants to not have to worry. He would like to just be accepted as he is, but he doesn’t think it’s possible, so he wants to make sure nobody ever knows about him being gay, and he does everything he can to hide it.

                Some themes that are beginning to appear in the book are the importance of family and mending relationships, overcoming a painful past, learning to forgive oneself, and the power guilt and regret can have over a person.

                The book structure is pretty interesting. Every other chapter switches between Noah and Jude telling the story. Noah tells the story from when he and Jude were 13 and 14. Jude tells the story when they are 16. Since the chapters alternate, the book goes back and forth like this, it goes from the past to present and back to the past. It’s a bit strange, but it’s cool to see how the story lays out that way. 

"I'll Give You the Sun" Blog 1

                The major characters in "I'll Give you the Sun" are Noah, Jude, their mom and dad, Guillermo, Oscar and Brian. Noah and Jude are twins who have always been very close, but as they're getting older, they begin to resent each other. Both twins are artistic. Noah paints and Jude sculpts, but their mother took more of an interest in Noah's paintings, and neglected Jude. Their father seemed to favor Jude, and they always spent time together. Both twins were very jealous of the other. Jealous of how they each got more attention from one parent, and both were jealous of each other's artistic abilities because they worried the other twin was better than them. It makes me wonder why they never just confronted each other about these problems? They never confront the issues, they’re just passive aggressive and secretly do thigs to  mess with or sabotage the other. It reminds me on a book I read once called "Crossing". The main character, Xing, is having lots of problems dealing with his past, but never confronted the issues. He just let it eat him up on the inside, and it created a lot of issues.

Another main character, Guillermo comes in later, after Jude and Noah’s mother had died. He is a sculptor, and he sculpts with stone. Jude wants to sculpt her mother in stone because all her clay sculptures were destroyed, she claimed it was by her dead mother. She believes her mother is very mad at her, because Jude got into the art school, but not Noah, and her mother thinks Noah deserves to be in the school more. Guillermo is a very depressed character, and Jude barely convinced him to teach her. Oscar is a college student who Guillermo had found years before, and he had drug addictions. Guillermo gave him a place to live, but in return made Oscar go to therapy to deal with his drug addictions. Jude becomes interested in Oscar. Brian is a boy who moved into a house on Noah’s street. Brian and Noah become best friends, but Noah secretly likes him. Later in the book, I found out Brian likes Noah back, but is terrified of anyone finding out about it. It reminds me of “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” where Patrick is gay, but is so afraid of people knowing because he doesn’t want to get bullied, so he hides it.

Final Blog Post!

         

 

           This picture represents how my love of reading is blooming and increasing. 

          I enjoy reading because I can get lost in the story and unlike in a movie, I can imagine everything how I want it, like the setting, and how the character's look and sound. I also like that it engages my brain more than watching a TV screen does and it's more interesting to me. The way that I make time for reading by first, going to a place where it's quiet and I won't be distracted. Then I put my phone away, (chuck it across the room so I'll be to lazy to go get it if I want it) because it's a distraction and I'll be tempted to get on my phone instead of reading. Then I'm ready to read. Sometimes it's hard to get started because reading doesn't sound very appealing to me at first, but once I actually start reading I end up enjoying it. My biggest obstacle I face to make time for reading is that I'm practically addicted to my phone and I need to get it far away from me so I can focus, which is why I have to force myself to throw it across the room once I've gotten comfortable enough to not want to get up. The best reading experience I've had this year was that I pushed myself to read books that weren't necessarily geared towards teenagers. I read If I Stay, which is kind of a teenage girl book, and I didn't like it all that much. So I read The Book Thief and The Road, and I realized it is much more interesting to read books that aren't all about teen romance. The last time I got "lost in a book" was last week while reading the book. It was peaceful and relaxing because I could tune out everything else and just read the book. But then it got sort of stressful when the intensity of the book picked up, which was really engaging and interesting. It is important to me to be able to pick my own books because I like being able to read things that are interesting to me. I also like having class books that we read though, because I get the chance to read things I normally would not have found to read, and I always like the books we read in class. I like how we have one class book per semester and the rest we can choose for ourselves because I get some freedom to choose what I want, and I also get introduced to new books. Goals I have for future reading are to read a lot more, and to keep reading a good variety of different kinds of books and genres. 

          This picture describes how I feel about blogging. Cows are boring and you can't really play with them or ride them. I mean, cows are nice and whatever, and we get milk from cows. Also, hamburgers. So even though blogging is boring, I gain knowledge from it. I hope this makes as much sense to everyone else as it does in my head, but it probably doesn't.

          The best part of blogging was getting to read about other people's books and letting people learn about mine. The worst part was that it was hard to talk about the book without spoiling anything, and I just did not particularly enjoy blogging. The value in making my reading life and thoughts public online is that I get to talk about my thoughts on books, but in real life I don't get that opportunity very often outside of English class. For next year, I think blogging should follow prompts more, because for me at least, I struggled sometimes to find what to write about specifically.

          

          This picture represents my freshman year. It has been stressful, and upsetting, and while some people really enjoy school, I am not one of those people. This year wasn't completely dreadful though. I have made some of my best friends this year, and I have had a lot of fun outside of school. This just hasn't been the best year for me. Obviously.

          This year, I have learned to relax a bit more about my grades, because I realized stressing over my grades, will not change my grades. So I've grown as a student by learning that I can work hard and do my best without always having to be so apprehensive about my grades. As a person, I've learned that it is important to have morals, and to not give into "peer pressure". I already knew this, but it was strongly reaffirmed this year. I've seen some of my own friends make terrible decisions just to be accepted by other people, but it's never worth it in the end. A positive experience I had this year was that I was able to stand up for a girl who was being bullied by some other girls. A group of girls were making fun of her and I couldn't believe no one was saying anything so I went up and stuck up for her. She thanked me for it and I was really glad I had made the decision to do that. I know other people witnessing it were reluctant to speak up because they were afraid of making enemies with those other girls, but I realized that I don't need to be afraid of people like that. A challenge I've faced this year is learning to make the right friends. I've made some really good friendships, and some that didn't work out so great. But I'm learning how to choose the right friends from the friendships that didn't work out. I learned to be friends with people who make you a better person, and who you can rely on. For my sophomore year, I hope to enjoy the school year more than I did this year. I also hope to make more friends and get good grades. I also want to participate in more extracurricular activities because I wasn't that involved this year.

May 4th Blog Post

          As I've been finishing up reading The Road, I was trying to figure out the theme of it. It seems like there could be a few different ones. The book shows a close father and son relationship, and how much they loved each other. So I think part of it, at least, could be about family and love. The father and son go through really hard times and dangerous situations, so it shows how their love keeps them strong and keeps them going. Especially for the father. All he cares about in the world is keeping his son safe and alive. There is nothing he wouldn't do for his son, and that is an important part of the book. This book also kind of explores human's capacity for evil, which could be part of why the author wanted to write this. It kind of reminds me of American Horror Story in that way because that show also shows the dark parts of human nature. In this book, there are very disturbing and evil things that the father and son run into. Since the world is in a post-apocalyptic state, there is no order to the world, so anything goes and there are no police to stop the "bad guys". The book includes cannibalism, slavery, and other disturbing things. I'm probably convincing anyone reading this to not read the book, but it is a very good book, it's just very dark. These are just two of the possible themes I had come up with for this book. It's definitely not like many of the popular books out there, but I wanted something a bit out-of-the-ordinary to read, and I think I accomplished that.

Column Response Blog Assignment

          I will be answering the assignment questions about the column "In a Word, a Slice of Perspective".
          1. When people are reading this column, I believe that the author wants the reader to feel a little sad because of all the unfair things people experience in life. Also, she probably wants the reader to feel ungrateful and self-reflective. The article made me realize that I am not very grateful for the things I have. I tend to complain a lot when there are so many people who have much worse things happening to them, so I should be more grateful for all that I do have and not focus so much on the things that I don't. I think that is what the author wants people to think about.
          2. I think the author wants the audience to remember that people should be grateful for what they are given, and not take their lives for granted. Even the author's disabled sister who has a lot she could complain about, said that compared to some of her mentally ill friends who had been abandoned by their families, she had a lot.
          3. The purpose of this column is to be an eye-opener for people. It was written to remind people of just how fortunate they are, and how more time should be spent being grateful, than complaining about your problems in life.
          4. The author uses short, abrupt sentences to get ideas to stick in your mind. For example, after her sister said that she had a lot compared to some people, the author said "She does. So many of us do". Using that sentence structure, the idea pops out and sticks in the readers mind more than it would have if she had put those words in front of a longer sentence where there is more information to be processed. The author uses elevated diction in her column to be more descriptive and create a better impact with her writing. An example of this is where she says, "the death count rises as inexorably as the sun." Using the word "inexorably" instead of a word like "unstoppable", she creates a stronger impact. Also, using elevated diction can make the author look more intelligent and credible.
          5. This column is very valuable in today's society. There are so many people out there that do nothing but complain when they have so much to be grateful for. Hopefully, this column can make a difference by showing people just how fortunate they truly are. This is definitely something people need to be reminded of, myself included. I once heard a story about a woman who really wanted children, but she was not married, and it didn't seem like her dream would ever come true. She was a teacher and she took her frustration and anger out on the kids she taught by being cruel to them and all the kids were afraid of her. When she got old, she was in the hospital, and she finally realized how foolish she had been. She might never have had kids of her own, but she was a school teacher, and she had lots of kids around her all the time. She could have been grateful that she at least had that, and that her life was actually pretty good, but she focused on what she didn't have, and it ruined her life.
 

The Road

At the beginning of The Road, it was difficult to understand what the point of the book really was. It just kept talking about what the boy and the Father were doing, travelling south in order to survive the winter. As I've kept reading, the story has begun to get a bit more interesting and I've been able to learn more about the story. I know that the father's wife must have died and he has dreams about her. The "apocalypse" must have happened before the boy was born, because the boy has no knowledge of how the world used to be. He didn't even know what states were until the Father explained. I also know that the world they are living in is very dangerous, and that the other survivors that are out there need to be avoided. The Father is always very anxious about running into other people, and so is the boy. I expect that at some point they will run into other people, and I want to find out what would happen if they did. So far, this book is pretty bleak, but it's gotten progressively more interesting as I've been reading. It's a very unique story and I would recommend it based on what I've read so far.

The Road

          So far, The Road is a very interesting book. It's very different from anything I've read before, which I like. It gets boring to read books that are all similar so it's nice to have something unique. The Road is about a Father and a son living in a post-apocalyptic world. Right now in the book, they are travelling south in order to survive the winter. The book is from the father's point of view, so it shows his desperation to keep his son safe and how difficult it is for him. The way the book is written is also very interesting. The book doesn't use quotation marks, which makes it seem every more post-apocalyptic. It's not too confusing though because the spoken lines are separated into paragraphs and it's pretty easy to tell if it's the father or the boy talking. I would recommend this book for anyone who likes post-apocalyptic stories and/or wants something different and unique to read.

Dover Beach

          Mrs. Phelps ran home with tears streaming down her face. She ran into her house, slammed the door, and ran into her bedroom.
          "Now that stupid poem and Mr. Montag has me all upset", Mrs. Phelps said to herself.
          Mrs. Phelps tried to stop, but she kept on crying anyway. She didn't know why she was crying.
          "I don't remember there being a rule that firemen could bring books home. I would know if there was a rule like that."
          Mrs. Phelps thought about what had happened, and came to realize that Mr. Montag had broken the law by bringing that book home.
          "I could call the cops, but what about Mildred?"
          Mrs. Phelps thought about the situation, then stopped thinking because it gave her a headache. Since she didn't like thinking about it, she just decided she would call the police. She hurried over to the phone, and she still hadn't quite stopped crying. She dialed the number and the phone began to ring.
          "Hello, I am Clara Phelps, I am reporting that there are books at the Montag residence!"
          After a brief phone call, Mrs. Phelps had calmed down quite a bit. She sat down on the couch, turned on the "family" and within minutes had already forgotten the whole situation.

Finished The Book Thief

                I finally finished reading The Book Thief, and I definitely think that it's a book everyone should read. It is the best book I've ever read, and the writing is amazing. I got very engaged in the story, and attached to the characters. Markus Zusak really does a great job bringing the reader into the story. I also thought that having the story narrated by Death was a brilliant idea. Hearing the story from a point of view like that isn't something I've seen before, and I really liked it.
               My favorite thing about the story is that it showed me how terrible war really is. Since there is always a war going on somewhere, I've never thought too much about it. This story made me realize how terrible war is, and how it tears families and loved ones apart. I think a lot of people take things like just being safe for granted. I've never had to worry about the things that Liesel had to worry about because her country was at war. So it was an eye-opener for me to be more grateful for all that I have.
               I think that The Book Thief is a very important book for people of all ages to read. I love the story and the writing, and if you haven't read it, I strongly recommend it.

The Road

          After I finish reading The Book Thief, I am planning on reading The Road. I am very close to finishing The Book Thief, and it is an amazing book that I would highly recommend to everyone. The Road is a book about a Father trying to take care of and protect his son in a post-apocalyptic world. I am pretty interested to read it, and a little apprehensive because it seems kind of scary from what I've heard about it. I have began reading it a little, and even the way the book is written seems much different from how writing is done today. For example, quotation marks aren't used at all from what I can tell. I think this is a really cool way to convey the apocalyptic idea because not only is the world and society broken down, but the writing is also kind of broken down since things like quotation marks aren't used, and the sentences are all pretty short, making the writing seem broken up. This book is written by Cormac McCarthy, and it was a #1 national bestseller. It's also a movie now, which I plan to watch after I read the book.