Category: Senior Literary

Overview

Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson  is about a girl tortured by an eating disorder and being the only one that could have stopped the death of her childhood best friend.  It begins with the basics of a disordered thought process- calories over nutrition, the thoughts of anorexia.  In the chapters that pass, you see the hurtles she goes through coping with her eating disorder.  The way that this is control for her, she explains so much through her story from top to bottom with anorexia, and her best friend, who at recently died of bulimia in the story.  It is pain meant to be read, and meant to be scoured through.

Diction

I found this book exponentially helpful in sweeping through all the point of views of a story centered around an eating disorder.  Little details of input memory stories showed the pain enthralled family, the stressful doctors offices and appointments.   For me, i read it with that purpose, to be able to gaze through a kaleidoscope of views and not only the sicknesses thoughts.  People with that mindset need to see other peoples pain because they are so enthralled in control and number hypnotization.  It distracts from everything- but this book brings the point of view back to a centerfold of perspective.  That is what makes this story so memorable and well done for me.

Appeal Factor(s)

The writing and structure is beautiful.  The imagery spiked my obsession with Laurie Halse Anderson- who never disappoints with that factor.  A quote I will never forget it is:

Why? You want to know why?

Step into a tanning booth and fry yourself for two or three days. After your skin bubbles and peels off, roll in coarse salt, then pull on long underwear woven from spun glass and razor wire. Over that goes your regular clothes, as long as they are tight.

Smoke gunpowder and go to school to jump through hoops, sit up and beg, and roll over on command. Listen to the whispers that curl into your head at night, calling you ugly and fat and stupid and bitch and whore and worst of all, “a disappointment.” Puke and starve and cut and drink because you don’t want to feel any of this. Puke and starve and drink and cut because you need the anesthetic and it works. For a while. But then the anesthetic turns into poison and by then it’s too late because you are mainlining it now, straight into your soul. It is rotting you and you can’t stop.

Look in a mirror and find a ghost. Hear every heartbeat scream that everysinglething is wrong with you.

“Why?” is the wrong question.

Ask “Why not? “

If this is not appealing enough for you, then i do not know what would be.  It is the most personal thing I’ve read that i never knew was so loud at one point in my life.  It is a book like this, a book that scares you, that makes you learn.  It’s like a metaphor to a lesson in life.  Overall this book is one of the most personal things I could fear and love at the same time and i could not recommend a book more strongly.

Not-so-appealing Factor(s)

It may be too emotionally conflicting for you, in some parts the description becomes very graphic.  Which is exactly what a topic like this needs, but some people would not appreciate out of the sheer discomfort of what they see through it.  I, personally, am am very emotionally in touch person, and so i cried and laughed and related wherever needed in the book.  There is a difference in just emotionally in touch and just out right discomfort- this is a disclaimer to those that may not like to read sad things, or things too vulnerable.

The Overview:

The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is a 2006 novel about a young German boy named Bruno growing up during the Holocaust by John Boyne. He faces difficult changes for a nine-year-old and when he makes a new friend, Shmuel, a boy on the other side of an electric fence, he doesn’t understand what is happening to him.

The Diction:

I found this book to be a very good read, but only to some. The way the book is written is very Junie B Jones-esque and written from Bruno’s perspective, but not his point of view. What I mean is, because the main protagonist is a child, although the book is not in first-person, it is written in a childlike way, using his diction as the story’s diction. For example, the new house that Bruno moves into is referred to as “Out-With”, because that is how Bruno hears his sister say it. It might fly over the head of some, like me, that the place is actually called Auschwitz. But the book reads “Out-With” because Bruno is mispronouncing it.

A Potential Turn-off:

Something that might not appeal to a potential reader is the fact that Bruno is a child, a German child growing up during the Holocaust at that; therefore, he will behave as such. He lies at times to get out of trouble, and he gets into petty disagreements with his sister. He can also be a little self-absorbed, and he can definitely be ignorant. These qualities might put the reader off if they are used to older protagonists and subconsciously compare Bruno to those protagonists. The conclusion might lead the reader to think badly of Bruno, because, yes, it’s true: an older main character with these traits could be considered a nuisance.

For me, though, I excuse Bruno from the category of “Nuisance” because of his young age. Simply put, he doesn’t know any better, and any child of his age would most likely behave the same. In my book, that makes him a more realistic character. Unlike so many other child characters, Bruno isn’t horribly misbehaved or unbelievably angelic; he is a good mix of the two. It’s really up to the reader to determine how to feel about Bruno’s character.

An Appealing Factor:

Something else interesting is the little insinuations that Bruno doesn’t understand but the reader might. At one point, a German officer makes an insulting joke about another officer, and Bruno can’t understand why his sister is laughing.  Small things like this make the book a better read. Either way, the story takes place over a time period of at least a year, so naturally Bruno experiences character growth. He tries to be as truthful as possible and he becomes more considerate towards Shmuel, even going so far as to sneak him food. He learns to ignore his sister’s antics, and overall, grows the way a normal child would.

My Rating: Eight out of ten stars.

I thought this book was utterly charming, and I highly recommend it.

Overview:

The article “How to Believe You Can Do Anything” by Brian Kim acts as a motivational guide for reaching the peak of true belief in the goals you’ve set for yourself. Our mothers, fathers, and teachers tell us all the time that we just have to believe in ourselves in order to accomplish something, but they never tell us how. This is the exact issue the article addresses. It dives in with rudimentary quotes we’ve heard our entire lives and boldly asks the question ‘How do you believe?’ The article answers this question with seven in-depth steps. From stating what your specific goal is to surround yourself with people who want to attain the same goal, these steps conquer every aspect of truly believing and succeeding.

Diction:

Readers get to enjoy a step-by-step model without the boring rigidness of a How-to guide. I found this article very easy to read because it felt personal and freely structured. It wasn’t doused in fancy, ostentatious words or phrases. The tone was overall down-to-earth and enjoyable. It does contain some content that may be sensitive for readers like religion and profanity but nothing of the extreme. There are a lot of lines in bold that contain ideas being repeated throughout the article. The author uses repetition to attempt to drill the most important aspects of each step into the reader’s brain.

 Potential Turn-off:

This article contains a lot of repetition, which didn’t deter me from reading. If you’re the type of reader who just loathes repetition, use caution in choosing to read this article. There’s also a metaphorical touch to this article. Self-belief is implicated a lot. That being said, if you don’t like or necessarily agree with the basic idea of believing is the key to success, you may have a hard time leveling with this piece because that belief is the floor plan of the article.

Appealing Aspects:

What I found most interesting about this article was the thorough explanations of each step. They all contained supporting evidence, factual and opinionated. I think that is what made the article feel more personal. The author chose to include his inputs on certain things, specifically stating how he feels about the subject. A great idea this article mentions is that our beliefs are not our own. They’ve been passed down through books, oral storytelling, or environment. However, the author provides a way to counteract that, which is specification of your goal—meaning getting down to the very core of it. This article also stirs a lot of questions in the readers—mainly reflective ones. Throughout the article, I found myself questioning my own process of achieving goals. The question ‘why?’ resonated with me the most. If anything makes me question myself, I consider it a good read.

So, that leaves me to ask. What is your main goal you’re struggling to achieve? Do you wholeheartedly believe you can achieve it? If you hesitated to answer either of those questions, give “How to Believe You Can Do Anything” a read. I bet you’ll be able to answer those questions afterwards. If you would like to read the article, click here.

The Open Curtain by Brian Evenson is about a teenager who finds himself interested in the Mormon religion. When he is asked to write an essay for class, he stumbles across a series of articles about a murder committed by a Mormon. Shortly after reading about this, he and his half-brother get caught in a web of secrecy of a violent murder.

This book accurately captures a dark story of a Mormon teen. We are able to see his mind deteriorating throughout the book as he starts to form into the murderer himself. When the story starts off, Rudd is just a normal teenager but he was described as “troubled”. His dad died at an early age. We see him being troubled in the early parts of the book when he is looking at his “dead father’s dead things”. I found this really helpful in realizing that he wasn’t healthy in his own mind. Apparently his father was obsessed with murder as well, and that helped speed the process up as to realizing why exactly Rudd turned out the way he did.

The story is split up into specific sections. The first section being particularly in Rudd’s point of view in which he describes all that is happening around him. His half- brother is talked about often and we see him forming into his half- brother’s personality. His half brother is scary and controlling and he doesn’t believe in fear. He steps out and takes every conflict head- on and likes to challenge things. The writer of this book caught this in a way that it was easy to understand that Rudd had a need for validation and he liked to mimic other people. The second section was of Lyndi, one we didn’t really get much of an explanation for. We can see that Lyndi has importance in the development of Rudd’s character because he really is incapable of love but he is also capable of brainwashing those around him to think that he is. Incorporating Lyndi was the perfect way of showing that. The last section was Hooper, the murderer himself. The author included Hooper to show how much Rudd thought of himself as Hooper and how his personality slowly changed to match him.

This book was very dark and mysterious. I loved how well it brought me into the happenings of the story and I felt my own mind being confused throughout the book when Rudd was confused by his thoughts. I felt as though the book was meant to encompass me and amerce me into feeling and thinking in an uncomfortable way. I wanted to quit reading it, and be away from the story itself but the way that the story builds on itself made me want to continue reading. The authors need to show family, pain, loss, and the need to belong was well incorporate through the book. I think that the darkness of this book showed an overall view on the concept of the dark age of Mormon religion.

When I decided to read The Perks of Being a Wallflower, by Stephen Chbosky, for the first time, I knew going into it that it would be a hard book to fully absorb due to the level of reality and blunt, teenage, mentally ill mentality that it expresses through the main character’s point of view, in the format of letters written to an unknown targeted audience. The book explores the narrator’s transition into adolescence and young adulthood during early high school years. The book focuses mainly on the life of one teen and shows the struggle of growing up and living through high school years under the pressure of mental illness, peer pressure, and finding yourself in a mentality far away from anyone else.

One of the main, most looked over conflicts in the book is Charlie’s, the narrator’s, devolving and dissasociated mental state in the letters, compared to how he appears to his friends and classmates, most of whom overlook him entirely or take him to be in a stable mindset. Since the narrator had been so overlooked throughout his life, even by family, he was never able to feel like he fit into any community, but after meeting Sam and Patrick, he realized that being a wallflower might not be such a bad thing after all. With his newly found acquaintances, Charlie explores his adolescence and personality in a way that he never had before. He was able to attend parties, experience his first real kiss, and deconstruct what it means to be a true high schooler, all while feeling very distant in his emotions. While realizing that this feeling of distance might not be normal, the narrator experiments and explores his boundaries, human connection, and even a first love. Slowly, Charlie becomes okay with being not okay, and over time, develops a sense of belonging with his new friends while he accepts that he might never be above average. In my experience, most teenagers can relate to the narrator, in that everyone, at some point in their lives, feels like they do not belong, and that feeling is much stronger with some than with others. Teenagers can relate not only because we, as teenagers, sometimes do not belong, but we have to learn to be content with ourselves as people and the things that we cannot change, including out mindset, loves, and hopes, which was one of Charlie’s biggest mental obstacles throughout his high school years.

To me, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, as a whole, is even more than an extremely powerful book. I personally believe that every person, teenagers and adults alike, should have the opportunity to read this book at some point throughout their lives, because everyone will undoubtedly take something away from this book, even if it’s only to write letters to themselves sometimes, or to put their emotions, troubles, loves, and grievances onto paper as a means to express themselves and let their feelings flow freely to someone who will never judge.

What are all the places on the body you can wear a ring?

The question may seem completely random, which it is. The statement is simply an interesting question I formulated brought from the simple topic, rings. If I were given the topic “rings,” I would have no idea where to begin with in general, however after reading this article, I’ve approached the topic with a completely different mindset. I’ve personally found great success so far in the process. This is a perfect example to deliver for my suggestion of a great read for all writers, as well as students who have a difficult time with figuring out the perfect attention catching sentence.

The article, “How to Write Interesting Content for a ‘Boring’ Topic,” written by Pratik Dholakiya is a phenomenal and interesting read that shakes the concept of a such thing as a “boring topic”. Based on the initial read of the title, I expected a somewhat to do list fashioned article; however, it was nothing of my expectations. Dholakiya states that a topic is not the issue of building a good read, it is the use of the “right questions” being used to make the content interesting.

In my opinion, I believe the article is very beneficial, especially for me being a writing student who deal with writing essays every week. It becomes very frustrating searching for the perfect sentence to begin a work, and even though this article focuses on “titles for blogging and article writing”, I believe it is beneficial to all writing. As I said previously, this would be very beneficial for all students.

Prati Dholakiya did a wonderful job with providing the information in an interesting manner while also remaining on topic. He in no way drifts from the purpose of the article itself, which is more than likely a bonus for readers who enjoy a writer being blunt and straight to the point. He brings forth great topics and explains each of his points as well as providing facts of data behind his suggestions from recent views of other topics that may be seen as uninteresting or extremely vague.

The article is not to be mistaken as a step by step guide to what to do when there is a feeling of being stuck with content the writer does not find interesting, so if the reader is looking to find a step by step guide then they will be disappointed. Dholakiya simply gives off clearly suggestions and advice to improve the view point of a topic. The article also shows places the writer in the eyes of a reader approaching a work of a writer, and the things that people normally pay attention to being things relating to themselves.

If I was forced to bring forth any negative comments, it would only be that I wish there were more examples brought from the author. However, in the writing world, wanting more from a passage is commonly when in the right context, a very good thing.

To read this work click here.

Lord of the Flies is a book that is a perfect example of pure taboo. No parent wants to have the thought that their kids are dead or stranded on an island with no supervision of a guardian or adult. In the book about twenty-five twelve year old boys from Britain ended up on an island because of a plane crash. The book features main characters such as: Jack, Ralph, Simon, Piggy, Roger, Sam, Eric, etc.

The book is a perfect example of society. Ralph is the character that shows respect to people and respects order. He represents the government of society, could be looked at as a controlling person. He made sure that all of the little ones in the tribe who were six and up would get food. He was respected by most in the tribe. Piggy could represent a secretary. He was the brains of the tribe and the right hand man of Ralph. He was bullied by others because he was different and because of his weight, asthma, and inability to do physical activity. I personally look at Simon as someone who is just a citizen. He’s the guy who stays back and is affected by everything that happens. Simon is quiet and observes. He values his time alone and doesn’t try to bother anybody. Sam and Eric can represent businesses that are controlled by the government. Sam and Eric are twin brothers that always finish each other’s sentences or speak at the same time who is in charge of keeping the fire ablaze. They do what they are told by Ralph.

Jack could represent an anarchist. He does not respect what Ralph is doing on the island and he wants to be free, hunt, and take power over the island. Jack is an alpha and a leader. Roger represents the court. In society, many people dread court, even hate court. Court can be completely unfair and gives out punishments. In the book, Roger is a bully that likes to give unfair punishments to other people.

I love this book because it has so many different ways that it could represent. It has some aspects of religion in it, it represents society, it is all a book that can relate to taboo. It can also be looked at as a dog eat dog world kind of thing. In the book, it’s Jack versus Ralph. The government versus the anarchist. Jack does not stop causing trouble. Jack wants to be in control. This book could represent something like a social experiment. If you put a group of kids on an island who have to fend for them self and have absolutely no parental supervision.

I highly recommend this book. It can give the reader a whole different look on society or maybe a whole different perspective from me. It can give the reader a roller coaster of emotions. Lord of the Flies may be one of the best books I have ever read and I highly recommend people to read it.