Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief Review

The book Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief is one of those books that most likely read in eighth grade or freshman year. I think one of the reasons it became so popular in schools is because it’s relatively new and it’s a very refreshing book. I have read this book around four or five times and every time I read it, I get another perspective on it, learn something new, or just have a good experience of a fresh breather. This book is such a good example of being a great book fro pretty much all ages. I enjoyed reading at a younger age, and I still enjoy reading it now.

The book is about a kid named Percy Jackson who is kind of like an outsider. He is a half-blood, a half mortal, half god. He gets chased down by monsters that kind of don’t like him and it kinda turns out to be inconvenient most of the time, like it would any time you’re on a school field trip and some teacher actually turns out to have bat wings and is trying to kill you. In literally the first chapter, we manage to get so much information, like his crippled teacher has a powerful sword inside of a fountain pen, Percy kind of has powers related to water, Percy is a half-blood. This book just jumps into this awesome world and manages to scoop up the reader and bring the reader on a crazy ride. I find myself being severely emotionally attached to many of the characters and I also managed to be at the edge of my seat several times during the book.

After the kid defeats a monster in a museum, he is then taken to a special camp for kids who are half-bloods. The camp is known as Camp Half-Blood. This camp allows Percy to learn who his dad is, since his mom is Sally Jackson. The camp also allows him to train in combat and enhance his skills. He then goes on to do a quest and that is basically where the book’s main plot kicks off.

I think this is an awesome book for young kids. I learned a lot about mythology because of this book, and I think that it can be beneficial for children to read it, and if anyone else knows nothing about mythology, they should read the book as well. The book is a well-written book that brings you on one adventure, but has so much put into it. You can always expect an encounter with a crazy monster attacking the kids, or some very interesting dialogue. The author does a really good job at introducing new characters and aspects of them at the perfect time. It brings up background details at the correct timing and it brings in so many different aspects of the same characters.

Some of the main characters include Grover Underwood, Percy Jackson, Annabeth Chase, Clarissa La Rue, Luke Castellan, Sally Jackson, Chiron, and Silena Beauregard. Every character has a very clever background and interesting plot.

The first book branched into a larger series, which is extremely understandable. Mythology is a very large concept and there was so much that wasn’t explained in the first book. The first book got many people into the characters that they just constantly wanted to learn more about the characters and the story in general.

Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden – A Book Review

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Memoirs of a Geisha follows the life of a Japanese girl, Chiyo, as she grows up in 1920s-onward Japan. Chiyo lives in a “tipsy” house Yoriodo and lives a very simple life. After her mother falls ill, and her father is too old to pay for the medicine on top of everything else, Chiyo’s father sells Chiyo to an okiya, where she is trained to become a geisha. Besides the unfairness of her life as it is, Sayuri must battle Hatsumomo, a cruel senior geisha who hates Sayuri from day one, and the greedy owners of the okiya, Mother and Auntie. Sayuri finds a mentor in senior geisha Mameha, and with her help, ventures a path in hopes of becoming the most successful geisha in Japan—and hopefully win the heart of Ken Iwamura, chairman of Japan’s most important electric company.

As a prelude to my review, I’d like to bring up aesthetics and morality, which we discussed in class earlier this year—basically, whether art and morality should be connected or separated. Autonomists believe they should be separated, aesthetic moralists believe they should be connected. I am an aesthetic moralist, which is important to bring up as I talk about this book.

While writing Memoirs, Golden interviewed renowned and retired geisha Mineko Iwasaki for background information on the life and customs of geisha. This led to two big problems—firstly, Golden had promised Iwasaki that she would remain anonymous, then published her as a source in the book. Because geisha have a traditional code of silence about their work, Iwasaki received a great deal of backlash, including death threats. Secondly, Golden took a few too many liberties when describing the work of geisha, namely that of mizuage and danna. Mizuage, according to Golden’s version of Japanese history, was the tradition of selling an apprentice geisha’s (maiko) virginity to the highest bidder. In Memoirs, this is treated as absolute tradition, while in reality, while bidding on a maiko’s virginity did happen, the maiko was never obligated to accept the offers, and rarely ever did. A geisha’s danna was a wealthy man served as the geisha’s patron, providing money for her expenses and such. Memoirs portrays a geisha and a danna’s relationship as a sexual one, the geisha sleeping with the danna in payment for his money—in reality, danna and geisha rarely have sexual relationships, and if they do, it is much more than ‘casual’ and is not seen as exchange for the danna’s money.

These portrayals of geisha customs have kind of contributed to the way they are seen today—aka, prostitutes. Curiously enough, in the book, there’s a part where Sayuri amusedly debunks the myth that geisha sell their bodies…in the same book where geisha sell their bodies.

In short, enjoying this book can be a little more difficult knowing the harm it does, and I argue that the book’s value gets degraded because of its presentation.

Regarding the story itself:

The first ¾ of the book is what I found to be the most capturing. Sayuri’s travel from being sold to the okiya, separated from her sister, tormented by Hatsumomo, and so forth keep great tension. I was genuinely interested on how Sayuri would do, if she would escape from the okiya, etc. It was easy to dislike Hatsumomo as much as I was supposed to. Golden has a knack for description, and I imagined everything perfectly. The little details that Golden gets right—kimono, dancing and shamisen training, even food—are told in vivid detail. The way he describes character is unique, as he almost always compares them to something else—the character Dr. Crab is named as such for the way he awkwardly bends his arms.

The characters in the book are also interesting. Mameha, Sayuri’s mentor, is kind and wise, while also being mysterious and a bit sketchy. Pumpkin, the other girl at Sayuri’s okiya, was appropriately saddening. Hatsumomo was despicable in the best way. I think Nobu was my favorite character, since I have a fondness for characters who are gruff and blunt but have their soft spots. However, as much as these characters are enjoyable, some of them could have gotten better spotlight, or better outcomes. Of particular note, Sayuri spends a great part of the novel pursuing Ken, who she always refers to as simply “the Chairman”, and we unfortunately do not get as much time with him as wanted. He’s kind for sure, but that’s as much as we can get, since Sayuri spends most of the book unable to get closer to him. Because the Chairman is seen so little, the idea that Sayuri would spend so much of her life chasing him is a bit hard to stomach.

Sayuri herself is a bit of a weak point. She’s…fine. Just fine. She doesn’t really stand out very much, the way she reacts to things do not really give a lot of characters, so on, so forth. She goes through some tough stuff, but never really grieves long about it. Things that she feels so strongly about one chapter, she never references again later. This has the unfortunate side effect of leaving some plot threads loose. Unlike The Lovely Bones, we aren’t meant to put ourselves in Sayuri’s shoes—she’s a character, not a stand-in, that we are supposed to follow. The most character she gets is in the final part of the book, which unfortunately I believe to be the book’s biggest detractor.

The last part of the book can’t be detailed without giving away pretty much everything to read the book for. In short, Sayuri makes some ill choices. It was hard to root for her reading through them, especially when she makes these choices for relatively petty goals. Most things that were built up throughout the whole book get anticlimactic and unfair ends. The final pages can be inspirational, as Sayuri, now old, looks back on her life and the things she’d overcome, but they also include revelations that further sour the book as a whole.

Memoirs has an attention-grabbing beginning and middle but unfortunately goes downhill in quality as it comes to its end. After having so much interest and faith in it at first, finishing the book left me disappointed. This, coupled with the controversies and harm the book has brought, leaves me with really mixed feelings and a reluctance to read it again.

The Lovely Bones Review

The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold – A Book Review

(This book deals with some heavy stuff, so I’ll warn about it now.)

The Lovely Bones tells a story about the rape and murder of fourteen-year-old Susie Salmon—literally three sentences in—and the results about it in her family and community. Susie narrates the story from her personal heaven, but although the story is told from her point of view, she is not the main character. The book follows a sort of ‘cast ensemble’: Susie’s sister Lindsey, her father Jack, her mother Abigail, her younger brother Buckley, her first love Ray, her classmate Ruth, her murder’s investigator Len, and her neighbor-turned-killer Mr. Harvey. The book is not a murder mystery—you know within the first few pages that Mr. Harvey is the culprit—nor is it a thriller, or a horror story. It’s a bit hard to say exactly what genre the book is, but I would just say that it’s drama.

The story does not have a happy beginning, middle, or end. I doubt this is a spoiler, but Susie does not return from the dead for the sake of a happy ending. I even hesitate to say that the ending is going to satisfy everyone, or that it’s meant to. The book does not follow the usual book outline, either—it does not go from point A to point B, and it doesn’t have a big climax to it.

The book is about healing from the loss of a child/love/sister/friend. We see how each character goes through Susie’s murder, in healthy ways and unhealthy, through union and division. It has one or two supernatural elements to it, but otherwise, the story is about as rooted in reality as it gets. Because of this, and because the story is told through Susie’s eyes as she watches her family grieve her, it’s a very personal experience. I would argue that, because Susie herself does not enact much effect on the plot, and we don’t see very much of her personality, it’s almost like watching your family deal with your death.

That being said, Susie dealing with her own murder is also a-little-too-personal-in-a-relatable-way. Through her narration, Susie laments some of the things that we fear: being separated from family, dying at a young age, watching something horrible happen and not being able to help. The question that keeps Susie from reaching ‘wide, wide heaven’ is, I think, a question we all encounter when we lose a loved one: Why?

It’s the personal attachment, not a heart-racing plot, that kept me reading. Halfway through the book, I realized that there was not going to be a ‘happy’ ending to the plot, but it wasn’t the plot that I was concerned with. When I wasn’t relating to Susie and her struggle with ‘Why’, I was imagining myself in the places of the other characters. Lindsey deals with losing her older sister (I have an older sister myself) and being left in her shadow. Jack, like Susie, keeps fighting for an answer to ‘Why’ that can’t really come. Even Abigail, who I have found most readers dislike, has a relatable experience of trying to escape from an inescapable situation. Buckley is the smallest character, but while Lindsey is older and can deal with her and her parents’ grief, Buckley does not remember Susie quite as well (being so young) and is left to watch the people he loves fall apart. Sebold herself was a rape victim in college, so I’d argue that the story comes from a personal place, which is likely why it works so well.

Even scenes revolving around the absolutely despicable Mr. Harvey are interesting to watch—for me, it was because of the knowledge that people like Mr. Harvey do exist and have done the things he has done, and the book takes a gander on why they are the way that they are. But, much like Susie’s ‘Why’, there really isn’t an answer. We find out a bit of Mr. Harvey’s backstory, but it is never enough to excuse his actions, which is realistically unsatisfactory.

The book is probably the saddest that I’ve ever read, but it’s now one of my favorites. It’s odd, because my other favorite books are so different from this, but none of them have resonated with me so much. The book is also very well-written—it’s difficult to describe, but it captures the emotions of the characters and their observations without being too personal to that specific character. Like before, the writing makes it easy to replace Susie’s family with your own family, so even with just a bit of description, you can understand how they feel perfectly.

Even if I couldn’t relate to the characters, I’d still admire them. I believe my favorite character was Grandma Lynn. You don’t see her grieving nearly as much as the other family members, but you can tell Susie’s death has affected her, or at least made her realize how detached she is from her family and daughter. Buckley’s lack of grief also makes him a calm kind of mediator compared to the rest of his family—while they may be caught up in a moment, Buckley is there as a kind of outsider-looking-in and reacts more on sympathy than empathy. I will say this: there is a scene involving Buckley towards the end of the book that is probably one of the most satisfying things I’ve ever read.

However, I will not say that every part of the book is perfect. The dialogue is not always natural. It may sound cool or sweet, but once or twice I was taken out of the moment because I asked myself, “Who on earth would say that?” Because Susie is omnipresent throughout the book, the parts where she sees something good happening to her family and reacts with joy and excitement can be a bit off-putting.

I found the Ruth’s and Ray’s parts to be the most lackluster out of the cast’s. Ruth’s story was interesting enough—I don’t count it as much of a spoiler since it happens early, but basically, Susie’s soul “touches” Ruth as it goes to heaven. So Ruth’s story mainly revolves around trying to find out if ghosts are real, and what happened to Susie, if she was ‘the one.’ But Ruth herself does not have a very strong character. I could never describe her personality right. Ray’s story is about moving on from his high school sweetheart’s death, but I’m not going to lie, it got a little annoying at some point. Ray and Susie never really dated, they kissed once and barely spoke to one another—all when they were fourteen—but Ray and Susie both act like they were each other’s true love. It’s hard to believe Ray would still be hung up about it after such a long period of time.

I can’t give specifics, but there’s also a supernatural event that occurs with Ray near the ending, and it felt very unnecessary and awkward, and honestly a little creepy. It was probably the one part of the book I wanted to skip over.

But besides that, this is probably one of my favorite books now, albeit I think it’ll take a while before I pick it up again.

Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson book review

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 Boy in the Striped Pyjamas- A Book Review

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.

Do You Believe You Can Do Anything?

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 book review

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.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower: Review

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.

A New Perspective on Writing Topics

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

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.