Legend of the Mermaid - Blog for English 493

Edgar Allan Poe -- Blog Post #14 "The Purrloined Letter," "The Haunted Palace", & "Fairy-land" Edgar Allan Poe's work has long been used as standard reading for the seventh and eighth grade. Though he's mostly know for his work Gothic horror, I've always been fond of his detective short stories revolving around C. Auguste Dupin. Though I've read several of his works, I didn't really appreciate them until I began reading them as an adult since they had advanced vocabulary and the use of Latin and French, at least in the detective series of short stories, was a common occurrence. Nevertheless, it's great that Poe is taught in classrooms nationwide and definitely think higher grades should still take a look at his work as I found it more understandable the older I became. Mostly because my lexicon of words grew as well so reading it felt less heavy and more forgiving. What I chose to read this week was "The Purrloined Let...

Wiesel's Night -- Blog Post #13 Wiesel's Night is a non-fiction autobiographical account of Elie Wiesel's time in the Auschwitz and Buchenwald's concentration camps. Admittedly, I do no read non-fiction novels very often. This book and Krakauer's Into the Wild surprised me in its content. Not only was it engaging and inciteful, it was more compelling due to being based on true events. Wiesel's in particular was a translation of his account. The loss of his family members and the degradation of his humanity while being imprisoned in these camps being the heaviest reading to bare. As Wiesel described his father, mother, and younger sister with such care, that they felt real - certainly because they were real. I think I'd personally teach this in a classroom. This topic, though graphic and mature, is just as important as other historical talking points that can be analyzed and discussed like slave narratives and national documents. Much like The Diary of An...

Krakauer's Into The Wild -- Blog Post #12 Krakauer's Into the Wild's style was not something I've read previously. Where each chapter is a location and everything is piece together and the movement of the book is a swift back and forth between the life of McCandless, his journey Alaska and the author's personal musings and understandings of the events that transpired as well as their own stories meshed in at the end. The characters were dynamic - particularly the turmoil between Chris and his parents Walt and Billie and his close relationship with his sister Carine. The fact that this was a true story made it harder for me to read, because this was someone's brother and son, and not a fictitious character re-imagined in a world that centered around them and their conflicts. Still, Chris had conflicts of his own which he dealt with in his own way and with his own wayward philosophy. The parallels the other drummed up not only with himself but with several othe...

Eldrich's The Round House -- Blog Post #11 Eldrich's The Round House was a very interesting read. The evolution of Joe, a boy that's barely thirteen into a new Joe after his mother's attack came after several harsh events that shaped the outcome of his choices. The raw aspects of the book, including the open sexual conversations and cursing make this a mature book despite the protagonist being only thirteen. Though those at thirteen have likely learned similar language or spoken in a similar fashion as the characters in the book so they probably relate to it. I thought the most interesting relationships were between Joe and his mother, his father, Mooshum, his friends, and his aunt Sonja. The events involving the priest, Mooshum's sleep stories, and Sonja's striptease for Mooshum seemed to shape after Joe the most other than the final moments in the end where Cappy and Joe murder Linden. From a teaching perspective, I can see how this would be meaningful and ...

Summary // Have No Shame is a historical and coming of age fiction novel published in April 2013. It won the Reader’s Favorite Book Award Gold Medal. Though considered a historical fiction novel, it also contains psychological suspense, romance, and graphic violence. Have No Shame takes place in rural Forrest Town, Arkansas and covers roughly ten months in the life of Allison Tillson, an eighteen-year-old recent high school graduate. The book begins with the main character, Allison, though often referred as Pixie throughout the novel, finds the body of a deceased African American man in the river near her home. She’s horrified and disgusted by the discovery and begins looking at her town in a new light. Suddenly her father is scarier, her fiancé Jimmy Lee, whom she’s been dating for two years, begins to reveal his true colors, and her mother isn’t the meek house wife that Pixie had always thought she was. A couple days later, Jimmy Lee, one of his friends, Corky, and Pixie’s older...

Tovani's I Read It, But I Don't Get It Response -- Blog Post #10 Tovani's book I Read It, But I Don't Get It addressed an obvious problem when it comes to studying and learning - reading comprehension. The book addresses the matter, stating that there is no concise or single answer to the issue but offers strategies to combat it. To have students learn instead of spitting out facts they received from the teacher. That reading was more than just skimming and reading the beginning and ends of a book to fake your way through an assignment. It is understanding what's being read and having an inner interactive dialogue. What I liked most was that Tovani split up these inner voices - calling them the reciting voice, the conversation voice, the interacting voice, and the distracting voice. All of which readers have experienced during the process of reading. Leigha's example of a distracting voice was something I could relate to and understand. She was trying to mak...