FINAL BLOG

The Lucky One

            Nicholas Sparks wrote this story that takes a look into the life of a man named Logan Thibault, although the perspective changes through three different people, Logan, Beth, the woman he falls in love with, and Clayton, Beth’s ex-husband. He is a marine who was based in Iraq for the duration of his term. One day when he was out he found a picture of a beautiful woman on the ground in the dirt. He brushed it off and saw on the back of the photo it said “Keep safe –E.” He put the photo up on the bulletin board at their base to see if anyone would claim it. A while went by and no one seemed to claim the picture. He took it down and kept the picture in his pocket just in case he heard of someone looking for it. Time went by and he started to have steaks of luck. First it just started simple with him winning continuous games of poker, but then he started surviving things like attacks and car bombing in Iraq which was very uncommon. He started to feel like the picture had something to do with it. He felt like he owed this woman in the picture something. So when he got back to the U.S. he decided he was going to find this woman, and that is what he set off to do.

            Nicholas Sparks writes in a way that keeps you informed, captivated, and never bored. The chapters throughout this book read smoothly and go by quickly. They transition perfectly from when one of the characters is finished with their perspective and it picks right up with the next person’s perspective. The writing style was intriguing. Each chapter would be titled with one of the character’s names, Thibault, Beth, or Clayton. They would take a look into that character’s lives and each chapter is written so well it would be hard to stop reading.

            Apart from the main three characters there was a forth character that help a strong roll and that was Beth and Clayton’s son Ben. You can’t help but fall in love with him. He is a sweet polite little boy and along with that he was extremely smart. Ben was severely misunderstood by his father Clayton. He would rather learn and play chess or the piano than play sports and his father is hard on him because of it. When Logan comes into the picture Ben loves him and it is wonderful to see how happy Logan makes him. “…she’d heard Ben race through the house to his bedroom, only to clatter out the front door again. When she peeked out the window, she realized that Ben had retrieved his baseball from his room to play catch with Logan in the yard” (Sparks 101). This quote shows how Logan is always there for Ben and even though Ben isn’t exactly an athlete Logan is patient with him unlike his father Clayton.

            A wonderful aspect of this book is the weather throughout it. This book takes place in North Carolina where it is said to rain constantly. The weather contributes a great deal to the things that take place in the novel and it can be the fuel of the story at times. For almost a month in the novel it is a torrential down pour for almost a month straight. The whole town floods and no one can drive anywhere. “Beth could barely see through the windshield even with the wipers at full speed. The gutters were beginning to flood, and as she drove toward town she saw jagged eddies of water making their way to the river” (Sparks 223).

            This novel is one that becomes impossible to put down. It is so easy to fall in love with the characters and it just leaves the reader wanting to read more. This novel deserves five stars. Nicholas Sparks is an amazing author and his style couldn’t be created by anyone else. The Lucky One is filled with so much beauty and love, but also excitement and anger. This book is a fantastic recommendation. The ending is something that is not seen coming and will surprise anyone that read this amazing book.

Readicide

I do think that the schools today need to keep some of the literary novels we are made to read like To Kill a Mockingbird or The Glass Castle. But schools should also try and create some room to have more current novels that teenagers these days read, like Twilight. If we had to read Twilight I really think students would get much more into the reading and maybe actually read the book. There are way too many students in school these days that don’t even read the book. They will just spark note it and they can still get a good grade on the test. We need to have more books that students will really enjoy reading, and it may even make students want to read more.

I personally do not think there is really any difference between literary fiction and genre fiction. I have enjoyed almost all of the books we have to read in school. But that could be because I have a much wider variety of books that I like and not all students have that. Some kids always want to stick to one kind of genre like comedy or romance. So being forced to read a book set in the 18 or 1900s could cause many students to hate reading.

I think a book being extremely popular alone should show it is probably a good book. Just because I book is extremely popular does not mean it is less artistic. Yes there are some books out there that are not considered as artistic as the literary novels we are made to read in school, but you cannot look at a book and assume it is less artistic just because it is very popular. I personally believe The Harry Potter series are some of the best books I have ever read. It amazes me that J.K. Roweling could get that artistic and imagine an entire different world like she did.

I still believe that book critics should decide what writing is good and what isn’t. If someone has spent their life studying books and writing and has made a career out of it than they are going to know better than someone like me. Someone who has gone to college and studied all of the different types of writing and knows how to look at something and decide whether it is good or bad should be able to decide whether a book is good or bad. But there should always multiple opinions to keep everything fair so that no one is being biased.

The Help Trailer

Adapting My Book

When trying to adapt the book The Help I could see how it would be difficult. A challenge a filmmaker may have would be showing how hot it always is in Mississippi. Throughout the book the characters are always talking about how bad the heat it, and there are always comments made about how the heat is affecting so many things. Also another challenge they may have would be casting someone to play Miss Skeeter. I think this may be difficult because her physical appearance is described so much in the book. She is described as too tall, too thin, and ugly. Her hair is frizzy and she has never dated anyone. I think this may be a hard character to capture and it may be hard to cast someone as Miss Skeeter.

                One scene I believe is essential to keep in the movie would be when Minny has to go and work for Miss Celia. I think this is essential because up to this point you are always wondering why Miss Hilly and Miss Elizabeth and all of the other ladies never include Miss Celia in any of the things they do because they hate her. Well you find out that Miss Celia married Miss Hilly’s ex-boyfriend from college. But Miss Celia doesn’t realize that is why she hates her and she is just desperate to find friends. Another scene I feel is essential would be when Miss Skeeter introduces us to Constantine. Constantine was Miss Skeeter’s family’s maid for 29 years. She raised Miss Skeeter, and it shows you how much Miss Skeeter looks up to her and how much she loved her. But she comes back from college and finds out that her mother fired her. But she hasn’t found out why yet and she still has not come in contact with her. The last scene I think would be essential to keep in the movie would be when Miss Hilly finds Miss Skeeter’s satchel with all of her notes in it about the Jim Crow laws and with Miss Hilly’s newsletter. Miss Skeeter wrote mean things about Hilly’s newsletter and she finds it in the satchel. Hilly doesn’t tell Skeeter, and you can tell Hilly starts thinking of a way she is going to deal with this so that Sketter knows she should never do something like that again.

                One scene I believe should be deleted would be when one night Skeeter comes home and her brother is there with his new girlfriend. They talk for a minute but it never comes up again in the book and it has to relevance to the story. The only thing that happens is that Skeeter’s mother thinks that her brother and his girlfriend will get married one day. Another scene I think should be deleted would be when Skeeter is driving to her date and she has to take the truck with a large tractor attached to it. In the book they make sort of a big deal about it and about her having to drive a car with a tractor attached to it but really it has nothing to do with what happens on the date or anything that happens for the rest of the night.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

            In the book The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo one of the main characters is a women name Lisbeth Salander. She is looked at as an outcast; people didn’t accept her because of the way she looked and dressed. “Armansky’s star researcher was a pale, anorexic young woman who had hair as short as a fuse, and a pierced nose and eyebrows. She had a wasp tattoo about an inch long on her neck, a tattooed loop around the biceps of her left arm and another around her left ankle” (Larsson 41). She lives by her own rules and doesn’t listen to anyone. She works for a private investigator who sends her on cases to find out as much information about people that she can. She has a photographic memory and she can hack into computers. No matter whose computer it is, she is able to get on any computer and read all of the information it contains. An idea that I had would be to create a website advertising The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo but taking a main focus on computer hackers. The website would start out with giving information about computer hackers. Do people really know the risk of putting all of their information online? Do people think about the personal things they are putting on facebook? In the book it talks about how Lisbeth only needed a little bit of information from the person to hack into all of their personal information. “If the individual owned a computer with an Internet connection, an email address, and maybe even a personal website, which nearly everyone did who came under her special type of research, she could sooner or later find out their innermost secrets” (Larsson 391). This website would give information about how easy it is to hack into someone else’s computer and find out everything about them. Having this website would bring in a different type of audience because it is all about computer hackers. Maybe more of a guy’s audience would look at the website and then see how much it has to do with the book. Then when they normally wouldn’t have read the book they could see it is all about a computer hacker and that might urge them to read the book more. When normally they wouldn’t have given the book a chance, seeing it has something they are interested in could cause them to rethink and pick up the book.

            I think this idea will work because it is a really interesting topic. People need to be aware of the things that can happen when you put your information online. In the book Lisbeth finds out information about people that she could have never found anywhere else. She is always solving every case that Armasky gives her. This idea could really bring a different type of person in to read the book.

Why I read

There are many reasons why I love to read. I didn’t start actually sitting down and reading book until about the 7^th grade. The first book I got into was Harry Potter. I absolutely loved it. I never realized I could be sucked into a novel like how I was. I never wanted to put the book down. I always wanted to know what was going to happen next.  Then when I finished the book I had an over whelming feel of accomplishment. It felt really good to be able to say I just read a 300 paged book. Then it made me go on to all of the other Harry Potter books and I finished all of them within a few weeks and it felt great. I also love to read because I love all of the different plots and story lines of books. It takes you into another world, into the world the characters are in. Sometimes it acts an escape from the real world almost. I also feel like I am getting smarter while I read because when I read new books I am always introduced to new words or things that I didn’t know the meaning of before. I usually only read books that were recommended from friends or family because they are always good and from experience if I try to pick a random book it doesn’t end up being good. Or I look at the best seller list to get ideas for books I could read. Books are great, and that is why I love to read.