Reading Log

This week I found a copy of the Hunger Games in the etymolgy library and read the first 100 pages.  One of my goals for the quarter is to finish the Hunger Games before I go and see the movie.  Its very hard to keep myself away from the movie theatre when everybody else is talking about it and going to see it but I think I will be able to wait till I finish the book.  So far I have really enjoyed the book and I find the storyline very interesting to me.  Hopefully I will be able to finish the book in a week or two so I can see the movie sometime soon.   

Exercise #3

Book Reviews:
Black Boy White School, Curve ball, Last Dance: Behind the scenes of the Final Four

Contents of a book review
1.) It starts off with a hook in the intro that usually describes the main character and explains the problem that will be addressed in the story
2.) Reviews usually include some partial quotes from the book
3.) Talks about the deeper messages and themes of the book
4.) Talks about the author
5.) Conclusion ends by trying to persuade readers that this is a good book to read

Note 1

My anthology theme is summer and I got this passage from Holes by Louis Sachar.

There is no lake at Camp Green Lake.  There once was a very large lake here, the largest lake in Texas.  That was over a hundred years ago.  Now it is just a dry flat wasteland.  There used to be a town of Green Lake as well.  The town shriveled and dried up along with the lake, and the people who lived there.  During the summer the daytime temperature hovers around ninety-five degrees in the shade- if you can find any shade.  Theres not much shade in a bid dry lake.  The only trees are two old oaks on the eastern edge of the "lake"....

 In the book Holes by Louis Sachar, the author has a straightforward and common diction while also having a choppy almost jerky sentence structure and voice.  The desert setting is described by the author as "just a dry flat wasteland."  Sachar illustrates the barrenness of the desert  "the town shriveled and dried up along with the lake, and the people who lived there."  In this passage Sachar is very straightforward while describing the setting, he even estimates an average temperature to describe the heat "the daytime temperature hovers around ninety-five degrees in the shade."  Sachar's structure of utilizing short sentences gives a feel as if the whole first chapter is just spilling out facts to describe the setting.

Exercise 2

Rule #2 "Cruddy time on a cruddy street" paints a gloomy even crusty town.

Rule #1 Barry comes across as a bitter woman with the constant negative and degrading word diction saying "Roberta was writing the cruddy book of her cruddy life."Rule #4 She informs the reader that she lives “in the cruddiest part of a cruddled-out town in a cruddy state.”
Drop the World had a very good post

Exercise 1

In the excerpt from Cruddy, Lynda Barry diction is plain, repetitive and straightforward.  "Once upon a cruddy time on a cruddy street on the side of a cruddy hill..." the repetitive use of cruddy creates a negative feel for the place she is describing. "...which bubbles up very weird smells that evil genie themselves up through the cruddy dark rain..." in this passage Barry chooses to use vocab that is very elementary, the adjectives suchas weird and dark are very plain. The description of the setting and the characters is also straightforward and gives no feel of poetecism.

Reading Goals

1.) Try to finish reading atleast three books this quarter

2.) Read the Hunger Games before I see the movie

3.) Try to read a book catogorized as literary fiction

Anthology Theme

I think for my anthology project this semester I am going to focus on the theme of summer.  Summer is probably my favorite season and I there are a lot of movies and literature about the season.

I already have a few ideas I could use in my project.  There a ton of different poems about summer on the poetry foundation website.  I am also thinking about using a scene from the sandlot, which is a great summertime movie.