Thursday, August 11, 2011
Summertime...when the reading is relaxed.
Welcome to the AP Lit. blog for Mr. Miles' class! Keep in mind that these entries should be relaxed, but substantial. For your first entry, talk about what you read this summer--not only in terms of your AP summer reading book choice, but what else did you read, and how did it impact you? When you talk about your summer book choice, give us a sense of how you liked the book and what themes or connections began to emerge for you. Were there any stylistic elements that caught your attention?
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Unfortunately, I didn't get to read too much this summer besides the AP summer reading. However, I really enjoyed reading Cormac McCarthy's the Road. The first thing that struck me while I was reading this was an undeniable sense of loneliness and desolation. The destroyed and (mostly) abandoned world creates a detached setting that oddly made me care for the nameless father and his son. Themes of desperation drive the book's story, as much of the text describes a frantic yet futile search for food, along with numerous encounters with raiders and cannibals. Underneath this however, is the more subtle theme of hope (as cliche as that sounds) for humanity in this bleak and torn world. McCarthy's minimalist writing style also contributes to the overall feeling of the story, as no character is ever named. He even neglects the use of quotations, which normally would bother me, but as there are really only two characters with dialogue, it works quite well. The backstory of the man is explained in short flashbacks throughout the book, which help the reader connect with him and almost feel for his cause. Overall I really enjoyed the Road.
ReplyDeleteAlthough I didn't finish any books besides the Road this summer, I was able to start Joseph Heller's Catch-22, and expect to be picking away at it during the year, between the required readings of AP Lit. So far I'm enjoying it; its definitely a nice change of pace from the depressing atmosphere of the Road, and I enjoy it's paradoxes and comic irony.
This past summer, I read news articles about the issues around the world—especially articles that mentioned the riots in the Middle East. I also read articles about disease break outs, political campaigns, and financial crises. These issues affect many people at home and even in different countries. As to myself, I was sickened by the damages pictures illustrated of the fight in the Middle East and by the rising scandals of politicians, scandals only rising because they are running for president. It seemed that the general public concentrated solely on the past rather than the present, not noticing all the good that each candidate contributed to different states.
ReplyDeleteFor my summer reading book, I chose The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver. This book was very similar to Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad in terms that it not only mentions the dark wild side that man can obtain from exposing his true nature, but also pointing out the cultural arrogance of certain cultures. The book began slowly, Kingsolver detailing every character’s behavior in order to give the reader a full understanding of how each member of the family contributed to the African adventure. The book got exciting when it came to book four and when it started coming to an end, the book became dull again. The book as a whole illuminated many of the cultural arrogances that some of us choose to overlook as well as shedding light upon a man’s attitude toward the conditions of a land other than what they were used to. Some themes from the book dealt with the different religions (the village’s religion that had been around for generations vs. Christianity), guilt that the female character’s each had regarding their father or their baby sister, and the cultural arrogance of the white man’s actions towards a different cultural background. As a whole, I thought the book was a good book, touching base with African politics and corruption to corruption even in a family that was placed in a whole different type of environment.
As of now, I am currently reading Perfume by Patrick Suskind and so far, it is a fascinating story of a murderer.
This summer I began by finishing The Count of Monte Cristo by French author Alexander Dumas. The story begins with a successful but yet still innocent sailor who in one moment has his entire life unjustly taken. In the beginning of his sentencing, the main character Edmond Dantes, strongly relies on his heavy moral belief that God will serve justice to those whom deserve such. As his time imprisoned continues, Dantes reconsiders his former belief of blind faith and chooses to act with fortuitous conviction to reach his revenge and remake his own destiny. This is such a modern dilemma too. Everyday religious or not we are all faced with choice of whether to rely on a system or to take action outside of the system whether this is in our faith, government, family, or school. I think Dumas show the answer of not just being black and white or right and wrong but rather criticizes either extreme; I agree. Neither blind faith nor blunt individual action reaches the ends of justice. Many times one must work within the system to reach justice by fighting for their conviction. When Dantes became the Count of Monte Cristo, his plan for revenge ruined and even killed his enemies. Dumas criticized how this individual conviction of revenge can ruin a life through showing how the justice administered altered Dantes to a point where he forever had to be the Count of Monte Cristo. I really enjoyed this book. It was quite different from other book that I have read. I enjoyed the historical significance of the novel and it elements about revenge upon those who have done another wrong in a struggle for power.
ReplyDeleteI also read The Help by Kathryn Stockett. I don’t think this book was as high of literature as the Count of Monte Cristo and not as complex in its ideas but it served as a vivid historical and situational text with strong themes of hope, need for change, and the difficulty of love.
In the news year and especially this summer there much to read about the debt crises and how the United States should deal with the issue. As someone who now must inherit this crisis, it honestly scares me. In Time magazine I read an article about the Tea Party who believe that debt is a problem but the assertions that the country will collapse is actually misleading and untrue with their own facts and figures while many other object that without attentive aid to the problem, the country could even be at stake. As citizens it seems to difficult to ascertain what is true and untrue. How do we live in a world where now we don’t even know what the facts are? Or have we have never known what the facts are but rather now are acknowledging that we don’t?
I read a lot this summer, also including The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society by Mary Ann Schaffer and Ann Barrows, Persuasion by Jane Austen, and my AP Biology summer reading book A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson which I surprisingly found quite interesting.
Rob, although I read The Road awhile ago I too enjoyed the book. For me the most compelling aspect of the novel is blend of desperation in the post-apocalyptic horror and the hope for humanity. McCarthy makes a strong assertion of the human condition that even in the most horrific of circumstances love for another can overcome the need for one owns survival.
Well this summer I surprisingly read more nonfiction than fictional literature. Believe it or not I tried to master Stephen Hawking’s The Theory of Everything. I did manage to finish it, but not however, with the result I desired- a deeper understanding of the cosmos and the workings of deep, dark, mysterious space. It would take quite an extensive further study to really grip his theories about black holes, space time, real time, etc. and for me to really deliver his ideas with a dose of justice and clarity they deserve. I will say though that this book forced me to read with more focus. Such heavy reading required me to chew over the meat after only a few pages. I’d have to come back every hour so just to think his ideas over, even just to get a feel for what he was saying. This book stands apart from my usual choices of reading but I’m glad I dug into it. It got me thinking about my own writing, how to develop solid logic, utilize reason and rational and look at things with a scientific perspective. I’ve always been predisposed to more whimsy, books with elements of tragedy, running themes revealing the raw human condition (which is perhaps why I chose Love in the Time of Cholera for my summer reading study). I also enjoyed a biography on Bob Dylan (and yes shocker) entitled Bob Dylan by Anthony Scaduto. If there was ever a character so much larger than life, so deliciously compelling, so intensely human but completely alien, so impenetrable but essentially vulnerable, it’s Dylan. Now, I’m a hardcore Dylan fan, but this biography deepened my respect for the musician, poet, revolutionary, the isolationist. I saw bits of myself in him- the capacity to be anything, and everything but completely separate from my own will. His emotions dictated his life and his drive to be what he could never truly be were the two things that propelled him, and perhaps what allowed him to produce such lyrical genius. Scaduto has a knack for storytelling; an art I believe has been lost.
ReplyDeleteI read 100 Years of Solitude last summer when my sister recommended it. Seeing as I how enjoyed East of Eden (I use that term lightly, East of Eden changed my life and is by far my favorite book of all time) she assumed that the epic family saga genre might work for me. I of course loved Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s work. His manipulation of fantasy, whimsy and myth structured with the pillars of raw human tendency, the human condition, and the genuine emotions and vices of men allowed his writing to be bizarre at times, but still retain its credibility. So at the beginning of this summer I read Love in the Time of Cholera hoping to be enraptured with the same fervor and voice that had captured me in the first place. The story of two lovers ripped apart in youth but reunited at the end of their lives seemed hopelessly romantic. It was the idea that decay can have no such hold on the power of love, even further- on the human will. I reveled in the reality that these two older, aged individuals were no longer at the preconceived notion apex of human experience but they still had not learned all that life had to teach them. In a world where grey hair no longer has the priceless value it once had, it was refreshing to gain insight into souls cultured with just a little more vintage. It all worked simply because Marquez is a stylistic genius. Had he not developed a commanding and credible voice, the sheer story itself would collapse on itself. It wasn’t that his content was completely believable, but his stately, even hopeful tone made you want to believe it. Interestingly, he utilized a lot of circular reasoning in his syntax and sentence structure. Stylistically, he followed an almost mythic structure. I got this sense because of the variety of archetypes, and metaphors he used so subtly.
Most of what I read this summer would probably be considered nearest to escapist literature. It was nice to relax and read books solely for entertainment. Nevertheless, I also enjoyed Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer. The three major narrators all had intriguing views on the world that revealed interesting similarities and differences between the characters despite what expectations based on the descriptions of their appearances would suggest. The novel focuses on the various ways that people cope with death but it is in no way angst driven. Rather the book is driven by the curiosity it invokes in readers to find out the secrets all the characters hide. Another focus is on being alone. Some of the characters seek out solitude, while others want nothing more than to be with someone. I thought that one of the most poignant of the quotes, was, "You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness." It's a truth that is highlighted throughout the story. The book is more about the conflicting emotions that all the characters feel and how to go on living despite hardships and difficulties than about the actual plot. The author creates distinct writing patterns for each of the three narrators by varying the sentence lengths, with differently developed vocabulary, and each character had clearly different writing/narrating styles. Overall, the book opened windows into lives I could never experience through any way but literature and I enjoyed the view.
ReplyDeleteI wasn’t able to do much reading this summer, and most of the reading I did outside of my A.P. Lit book was in connection with my journalism camp, so it had a different kind of significance for me. One of the readings I was given at camp, though, struck me more than just journalistically. I read very compelling article about the power of photographs in revealing a deep level of a person’s thinking and even their future as it examines a famous photograph of a little farm girl in the depression. The subject of the photo, who’s family was being featured in a book about sharecroppers in the depression, looks directly at the camera and forms a distinct line with her slightly agape mouth. The little girl knew she was going to have the picture taken and had time to prepare the face she wanted the world to see. The piece argues that this little girl deliberately chose an expression that would reveal little, keeping her private life just that, private. It also asks the reader to contemplate whether or not the photograph foreshadows her mediocre fate. I've never thought about posed photographs with such high regard before in that they can reveal not only the identity people choose to show to the world but also some of their true identity.
ReplyDeleteI chose to read Plainsong by Kent Haruf for my summer reading assignment. I really enjoyed this book, which was surprising to me because I rarely enjoy assigned books as much as this and because it felt very escapist, while still being a very interpretive piece of literature. I found that Plainsong was very much a tale of growing up and gaining new perspectives on classic themes like life and death and human interaction. The book features the perspectives of several members of a small community in Northern Colorado. Their stories overlap to reveal the hidden struggles of very realistic and seemingly average people. Each person must cope with new realities in the course of the book, and they all experience certain situations, but understand and approach them differently. It reveals the breadth of human emotion, and the everlasting state of learning and growing that humans experience. Plainsong dives into this complex idea of understanding and development, while using simple yet elegant language and managing to tell this almost mundane story in a very intriguing manner, all together making it a great book to experience.
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ReplyDeleteThis summer I read The Road, The Cherry Orchard, and The Samurai’s Garden, along with the Denver Post and random novels by Clive Cussler, Louis L’Amour, and other various authors that I pulled off my bookshelf during the times that I had time to read during the summer. I was truly surprised by the ability of the three novels that I read for AP Literature to connect to one another and present three of the possible ways that life can be lived. The Cherry Orchard showed a general group of three characters: characters like Firs who lived in the past and refused to accept the changes that have come about in the present, characters like Lopakhin who lived in the present while at the same time only allowing the past to influence their decisions, and characters like Ranevskaya who lived in the present and refused to let the past influence their decisions. In The Cherry Orchard Checkov makes fools out of each one of the types of people, no character is able to let their style of life go and in turn they are forced to live in a dystopia where no one is ever truly happy.
In The Road, the father lives life that Checkov showed in Ranevskaya by living only in the present, and each day is a barbaric struggle for life, and the father and his boy are reduced to living a life like sequestered hermits, scrapping by and living day to day, and hiding in the present from their futures and their past. In their struggle, the boy and his father show that the present in itself is not a separate entity from the past, and the people who forget the past often forget how the events of the past led them to the present.
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The view that Gail Tsukiyama presents in The Samurai’s Garden shows what I believe is the best way that a person should live their life. In the symbol of a garden (which represents the mind and soul of each character), the characters find a balance between the past, the present, and the future. The garden represents the hopes and dreams of the characters, and as such, the garden changes along with the characters in the novel. Although some changes in the garden are sudden, like when part of Matsu’s garden is ruined by a storm, the destroyed garden still lays the ground for the next garden. Even though the characters in all the books face difficulties, the characters in The Samurai’s Garden often are more willing to take the difficulties and problems that cause their gardens to be destroyed, and then they allow themselves to be rebuilt like their gardens. In doing such, they use the problems not to make them bitter, but instead they use the problems to make themselves stronger, and harder to break the next time a problem comes about in the future. The three books showed me that the best way to live and be happy is to live in the present while at the same time having a reasonable respect for the past and knowing that all actions will someday effect the future.
ReplyDeleteMy favorite book was The Samurai’s Garden, due to the themes that were behind the novel that seemed practical in real life, and my least favorite book was The Cherry Orchard because of its satirical portrayal of every one of the types of people, each portrayal had nothing good, but instead it had all the bad things brought about by living the different lifestyles.
The other books that I read this summer were to let me relax while at the same time enjoying the book; escaping from the current reality and seeing the world through new eyes.
The sole reason that I read the newspaper was to inform me of the present. I believe that by reading the news today I can get tomorrow’s history. Because history then repeats itself, I guess that reading the paper today.
Allison and Rob when I read The Road, I thought that in the death of the old man, McCarthy shows that the journey of life, symbolized by the road, will be hard and full of troubles yet in the end we will end up with the ones that we started the journey with. In the end I think the real message was that it is not the problems in life that are the judge of a person's impact, it is the willingness to take the hard journey when their seems like there is nothing left to gain, and that causes a person to have an impact. Although the father in the novel lied to his son, in the end the boy loved his father because his father show a willingness to live until he and his son reach their goal of getting to the coast.
As much as I love to read, every summer I always find myself struggling to actually do so. This summer was different, though. During my creative writing camp at UMF, students met with different authors and were given the opportunity to purchase their signed books. Feeling a personal connection with these writers, I was urged to read and to keep reading. I found myself staying up till sunrise, not on Facebook or watching TV, but immersing myself in the beautifully written word. Of the books I bought, my favorite so far is Not That You Asked by Steve Almond. His writing is humorous and relatable as he sections his work into different chapters of his life which hold great importance to who he is today. From his obsession with Vonnegut, teenage sexual disasters, and politics, Almond weaves his lines with passion, love, wit, and morale. His own experiences forced me to dig through my past and remember what incidences shaped who I am this very moment; his theme of maturity and growth is not only evident in his memoir but in life. Although Almond is looking back on his experiences, he seems to learn about himself with the reader. He does not just tell his story. As I flew through the pages, his style fairly simplistic, I felt as if I was speaking to him one on one. It was intimate. I’m stoked to see where he chooses to take me in his next two novels.
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ReplyDeleteAs you all know (since I have mentioned this two or three times in class already), I read all the Harry Potter books this summer. They were incredibly good reads and I loved them very much. They did help me to escape with their fantasy and whimsical qualities, but summer was generally a time when I didn't need to escape. For that reason, I was able to see beyond the simple, surface ideas present in the story/stories to find a deeper connection to the concept of growing up.
I found myself able to connect with the character of Harry Potter on a more personal scale. J.K. Rowling did a marvelous job incorporating many varying aspects of childhood as well as growth into adulthood. When junior year ended, I thought it might be a good idea to look back on my life and to see what I had accomplished and who I had become. The first books showed me a good deal about who I am deep down by showing me what it means to be a kid. I think all of us still have that kid inside of us that comes out every so often. The later books displayed the struggles of high school in relationships and the emotional struggles caused by stress, doubt and fear while still creating a background of good memories that I'm sure most people can relate with. I know that Harry Potter is not of the greatest literary caliber, but I found it very enjoyable and I found myself able to connect more with the characters in those books than in anything else I've ever read. That ability to connect with literary characters extended into my Independent Study Novel from the summer.
I first read The Cherry Orchard, but it wasn't for my Independent Study. Since the play was originally written in a different language and from the background of a different culture, I found it difficult to truly understand the motives of the characters in the English translation, and the characters themselves portrayed a dynamic that I really haven't seen before. I didn't spend too much time on the play after I'd read it, but I did enjoy it while it lasted.
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ReplyDeleteMy Independent Study from the summer was Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, by Foer. It was very well done and I enjoyed it very much. The characters were very dynamic and there was purpose behind their every move. The main character, Oskar, struck a chord in me. He is so young in the novel, but he endures so much hardship and adversity that he seems to be older than most people on this earth. Much of the adversity that he tries to overcome is created in his own mind. I connected very well to this character because I often have trouble with making situations more impossible than they really are which can lead to large amounts of stress and unhappiness. Oskar struggles with circumstances that no child should have to deal with and he creates notions in his head that he knows to be absurd but make sense to him in some way. There is pain and suffering, but there is still hope in his life.
He has found something to cling to, something that he wants to live for, and that is often times the most important thing to anyone in this world. Give someone a reason to live, and they run with it to the end of time. They hold onto hope because that is what they want to do.
I found the book hard to read at some points because the character dynamics between Oskar and his grandparents were incredibly different, and sometimes difficult to endure, but each was unique. Given, this book was nothing like, say, The Road by McCarthy, but there was a lot of personal material that was sometimes difficult to deal with. The speaker changed from chapter to chapter between Oskar, his grandmother and his grandfather and all three characters said so much about themselves and about life. There was writing in the novel from all the different stages of life: childhood, growing up, beginning of adulthood, mid-life, and elderly status. Each of the three characters wrote in different ways. The literal style, the format of the words, was different from character to character. This made each person that much more real and unique while reading.
Another stylistic aspect of the book that I noticed was how Foer did not make a new line for every line of dialogue. Every statement/question/etc was separated by quotation marks (which is what made it possible to determine who was speaking), but entire conversations were held in one paragraph. Foer took many conversations with many short-answer statements being said back and forth and put each sentence together in one paragraph to say that everything was connected. That's how I felt about it, at least. Dialogue simply was not separated as much as most other novels would have it.
Foer also included photographs in the book which is different because most authors who write novels of this length and quality and depth don't use any sort of illustration. The pictures, though, connected with the story and allowed the reader to see more into the mind of the main character of Oskar Schell.
There was a lot that I enjoyed about this book, and I could keep writing for a long time about it, but my favorite part was the simply, hopeful tone that Foer adopted to end it with. After such mental and emotional struggle throughout the entire book (from both the characters and the reader), a hopeful idea at the end made for a wonderful finish and a satisfying conclusion. I would very much recommend this novel to anyone serious about literature.
I had a very good time over the summer while reading and I learned a lot. I know I wrote a whole lot in this comment, but I had a lot to say, and thank you for listening. I look forward to discussions and other things of the sort in this class all year.
Gabriel Verges
This summer I embarked to finish a massive book by Joyce Carol Oates. Blonde is a semi-biographical novel based on the life of Marilyn Monroe. Though this sounds like a hardcore superficial novel, it is actually a disturbing look at Marilyn Monroe’s struggles with drug addiction, unhealthy relationships and mental illness. This book thumped me over the head with a viewpoint of the famous actress that I had never seen. I lay awake at night thinking about Monroe’s multiple personalities as she becomes (and truly believes she is) each character she performs as. Oates’s writing was unbelievable subtle about conveying this illness and it wasn’t until page 500 (200 more to go!) that I realized that Oates had carefully embedded multiple personalities, anxiety and bipolar disorder into her character Marilyn. Oates also discusses Marilyn’s issues about growing up with a mentally unstable mother and an absent father until, at the breach of adolescence, she is put in an orphanage when her mother is unable to provide for her. Marilyn continually struggles to take care of her mother and replace her father in her romantic relationships. As if these disturbing qualities of Marilyn weren’t scary enough, Oates throws in Marilyn’s desperate desire to have a child, though her career most often took that opportunity away from her. Blonde is truly the most haunting, disturbing book I’ve read and for this reason it is my favorite. For my AP Summer Reading book I read Plainsong by Kent Haruf, which expertly examines a rural town in Colorado. What I noticed the most about this book is Haruf’s manipulation of time. He juxtaposes a more advanced city of Denver next to this almost desolate town which seems to be stuck in the past. In one scene where they perform an autopsy on a horse, they use rugged knives and any makeshift items they have to open the horse and poke around in his organs. In medicine, we have more expert tools than this. However, in this town, all the problems are the same. Pregnant teenagers, mentally unstable mothers, bullies and romantic struggles are problems that do not change with time, as Haruf demonstrates by shedding light on this town.
ReplyDeleteThis summer I read the Garden of Eden by Ernest Hemingway. After analyzing it and annotating it, I realized it conveyed many contemporary themes in society. For example, Hemingway emphasized the theme of women desiring to be held to an equivalent societal standard to that of men because of the double standards that continue to persist. In addition, the novel placed two commonplace characters in a situation that emphasized their androgynous behaviors. This served to suggest that Hemingway demonstrated that everyone possesses masculine and feminine characteristics that are apparent during different instances. In addition, I was exposed to numerous scientific papers while working in a pulmonary lab this summer. These papers that I read pertained to small and large progenitor cells that differentiated into vascular cells. These vascular cells would then treat babies with pre-mature lungs by increasing alveolar growth and expanding respiratory function. Overall, this was a great summer because I was able to attain two polar perspectives on literature after reading an interpretative fiction novel and a purely factual paper over pulmonary research. As an AP Literature student, I am looking to read a wide variety of literature and be open-minded to the various types of opinions conveyed in these pieces. This summer vacation has taught me that we need to think holisitically and scientifically in order to be adequately prepared to solve the future's most pressing issues.
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