Jane Eyre

I've kept up my reading of Jane Eyre. The book got so much better. The plots more interesting, and the story has really taken off. Jane is now in love with her master but she knows it's wrong that it is. So, with that being said, I feel simpathy for her. It's not her fault she choose to love the wrong man. She's a really interesting character. Also, this very climatic moment just happened in the book where she actually saved her masters life. But, she finds out that there is a secret about the woman who tried to kill him...making me a little curious. Hopefully, within the next couple of pages, I will find out what is this woman's secret. I hope this doesn't spoil much! Gotta keep reading,
Allie

Jane Eyre II

This is the third blog that I am writing about Jane Eyre in. I have gotten about 70 pages further, give or take, and the book has completely changed. What started as a story about a poor little girl now transformed. As a reader, you witnessed her life at the Lowood school, read a summary of her two years of teaching there and now she is at Thornwood Hall. Jane is now a governess to a young french girl Adéle. Jane does not love this new life by any means. She almost felt trapped in the house because there is no one she can have meaningful conversations with and the house is so big and lonely. One day, Jane decided she would walk to town to deliver the letters that the housekeeper, or manager of the home, Mrs. Fairfax needed delivered. Jane walked down the lonely road then got very scared because she saw a horse and a shaggy dog approaching her. Those images reminded her of the childhood stories she would be told from her governess/servant Bessie about a horse that goes around haunting people. To Jane's relief it is just a man, so she keeps walking. It turns out the man falls on some ice so Jane goes over and helps him. He asks her where she is from and she points the way, he just nods and acts so nonchalant. It is not until Jane returns to Thornwood Hall that she sees that the dog is lying near the fireplace. That man she helped was actually Mr. Rochester, her master, she has never met him after 3 months of working at the home because he is constantly traveling. The part where I left off is when he is having an inquisition about Jane's life, capabilities, skills, knowledge and much more. On the back cover of the book, it says that this story is a love story...but I'm not feeling the love, maybe something's going to change: you never know.

Allie

Jane Eyre

I've made a little more headway in Jane Eyre. The book is good but a little on the boring side at the moment. What really overwhelms me is that the font size and the amount of pages. The book itself is not very big at all. But the font is so tiny and the pages are so compact that I'm not reading nearly as much as I am used to. I get very disappointed when I've read for an hour and have only read around 30 more pages. What really gets me upset is that Jane thought she was leaving her aunt's house for a better life but she was completely wrong. It almost seems like she is in a prison. She gets not nearly enough food, she's constantly cold and she's miserable. Her principle lady, Miss. Temple was speaking to the man who "owns" the place, Mr. Brockelhurst about how the girls many times do not have edible food and he does not care at all he says that making them eat the edible food will make them stronger in life and that you cant cater to their every needs. How awful is that! I really hope I'll finish this book over Thanksgiving break. Off to more reading...

Jane Eyre

I decided I would read Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. It's a great book about a governess in the 1800s. I have gotten around 30 pages in. The language is very different and archaic. It's very wordy and sometimes I find myself reading over certain passages and sentences because they are so long and have a ton of adjectives and interruptions. So far, I have understood that the main character is named Jane Eyre. She is an orphan, her mother's brother was a man named Mr. Reed. He died when she was one and she has grown up with Mrs. Reed and her three children, Jane's cousins. Jane hates her life at the house and she hates all her cousins. She feels like an outcast and wants to get out. In the first scene, she is not allowed to be with her cousins and aunts in the drawing room so she hides in the breakfast room behind a curtain reading. Her boy cousin, John "Jack" Reed finds her and hits her because that's what he continually does, and then throws a book at her head. She gets punished and sent to the red room where Mr. Reed died and where everyone is scared to enter. She gets scared because she is only 10 and she calls for help. The nurse and servant come but so does her evil aunt. The next thing you know Jane is sick, visited by an apothecary, and is shunned from the family for nearly three months. After about three months, she is told by her evil Aunt that she will be attending school. That is where I left off. This book is very interesting and really is a classic. The copy I am reading is from 1983 and was $1.75. If I went to buy that same book now it would probably cost me 20 dollars, things really change! The type is really small so it takes me a really long time to read the pages so 30 pages seems like a little but it was a lot of reading. Until next week, Allie

End of Quarter Blog

I looked over my previous blogs for the quarter and I was actually impressed with myself. I have never had to blog before and it is an interesting way of reflecting what you are reading. I have noticed that if I really like a book, I blog tons more then I need to. I also like to blog in the morning on Fridays because that way I have a whole night to digest the reading that, I hate to say it, I do most of on Thursday nights. Last year, after a book was completed, I would make a postcard for that book. The cover was always my favorite part and I'd spend more time picking a picture and formatting a quote onto it then I did the actual writing part. It wasn't like the writing I did was bad or anything, it just was empty. I wrote what was required. I also notice that I talk more about the book then I do about my feelings about the book. Sometimes I will spend a whole blog just writing on and on about the book and maybe say "I like the book so far" with no reasons I just go on and on about what's going on and I mean there aren't strict rules for how I can or cannot blog, it's just a common trend of mine not to include my feelings.

As for my goals for next quarter. I would like to start to include more quotes and show how these specific quotes really enlightened me in some way. I don't write down many quotes because I don't read with pen and paper next to me so the quotes that I do truly love I get up to either write down or put a post-it on. My goal for the next quarter is to talk more about favorite quotes and about my feelings of the book while reading it as opposed to just writing about what's going on in the book. If someone really cared about what happens in a book, they would buy spark-notes or just read the blurb. I am done with The Alchemist, it was an okay book it's just not a book I was into at all. It included so many deeper, hidden meaning connections. It was thought provoking but I didn't like it. You never even find out the main character's name they just call him the boy the whole book. You actually only find out two peoples names the whole book and the book ends where it started--what is the whole point of the book? Maybe it's just for someone else.

The Alchemist: first week in

I just began the book The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. It's an interesting story about a shepherd boy. I haven't gotten far--but it seems sorta interesting. It's unlike anything I've read before but that seems to be a trend I have been having--starting the unknown. The book is categorized under fantasy and I only started reading it for the genre requirement. I also only started reading it because of the cover. They say not to judge a book by it's cover but I did. Oh well, Ms. Bandman said it was a good book so I'll take her word for it. It takes place in Spain not America like most books I have read. I have a poetry share today so at least I'll be able to read on the couch again! Off to more reading....Allie

Looking for Alaska: finished after two days, I guess she wasn't that hard to find!

It had a beginning and an ending, that's all. NOT. Looking for Alaska was an amazing book. I loved it so much that it was hard to put down. So much so that at one point I couldn't not continue reading. The book was set up so that it was almost divided. There was a before and there was an after. The before was all the moments before a huge prank occurred. And the whole book: it didn't have chapters, it was like this huge sequence. 186 days before, 33 days before. It was so cool. And it was funny, and you really got to see the main character's quirks. One of my favorite quotes was when the main character, Miles (Pudge) speaks of Alaska: his dream girl,

"But I lacked the courage and she had a boyfriend and I was gawky and she was gorgeous and I was hopelessly boring and she was endlessly fascinating. So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was hurricane".

He's so intense and the author does a great job writing as a teenager. I loved the whole book, and wanna know something funny? The back of the book said "Holden Caulfield lives on". That is so appropriate! If I had read this book a year ago, or even a few weeks ago I would never have been able to open my eyes to all the connections there are between the two books. Sickness! that's all I have to say. It was a book that I recommend to everyone I see now: that's how good it was.

My next book will be The Alchemist, I saw it on Ms. Bandman's shelf under one of the genre requirements I need so I picked it up. I read the blurb and it looked pretty good and asked a couple of people whether they liked it and they said they knew people who had read it and liked it so I took the plunge. So far I have read zero pages but I will! Who knows, it might just be a quick read like Looking for Alaska was.

Looking for Alaska: a new book for reading

I finished The Kite Runner on Sunday and I was so pleased with the ending. It really got to be a roller coaster ride towards the end. Your emotions will be up then down, then up, then down! You worried, then you felt happy, then you worried, and on and on. The ending was very simple but it was the kind of simple that you really like. Like the smell of rain on pavement, it's so simple but you can't help but love it. I started the book Looking for Alaska by John Green after a very annoying trip to the library. I love this book. I'm around 45 pages in and I just love the tone of the book. It's told in first person. I've read books in first person before, The Kite Runner was in first person but it wasn't anything like Looking for Alaska. For example, Miles talks about his parents leaving him at the boarding school and he says "At some point, you just pull off the Band-Aid and it hurts, but then it's over and you're relieved" (7). I thought that was sort of funny, I've heard the saying but never in this context. Another one of his thoughts was "I knew I ought to cry, but I'd lived with my parents for sixteen years, and a trial separation seemed overdue" (7). He's leaving the nest, but he doesn't even want to cry about it or anything--he'd rather compare it to couple's failed marriage steps. This new book is told by a teenager, a real life teenage. He has just turned on a new leaf and just started a new school. As a reader, you go through his first experiences with him, his crushing on the pretty girl down the hall with him. The difference between this book and other books I've read is that this particular author really left this huge door open, a garage even, for the reader to enter and join the main character--Miles--in his journey. I've never actually been this excited about a book after just reading 45 pages: hopefully the ending doesn't disappoint :).

Kite Runner: coming to a close (HUGE SPOILERS!!)

So, when I left off Amir was right in the beginning of his life in America. Right now, I'm at a point where he has gotten married but he has a dilemma. His wife can't get pregnant! It's so sad, but they're both successful adults now, which I'm happy about. One day Amir got a phone call from his dad's old best friend asking him to come see him. Amir goes, and finds his dad's old best friend Rahin Khan terribly sick. He asks Amir for one dying wish to go and fetch Hassan's son. He tells Amir of the life when Hassan lived with him and about his son. He then tells Amir that he is Hassan's brother. Hassan is beyond freaking out and is so angry because he feels that his life was just a lie. After a quick temper tantrum, he comes back and he decides that he will go get Hassan's son Sohrab. He is living in the slums of an orphanage. Amir treks across Afghanistan with this man Farid. None of Afghanistan is the way he remembers it. It's so sad the visuals you see him describe. They remind me of slum dog millionaire with all the poverty and orphans. It just makes me so angry and sad. It makes you want to travel across the country at that moment and take fifty kids home with you. It really does. I am really hoping that I can finish this book by next week because it's at a dramatic moment right now and I really want to finish!

Kite Runner, only 60 pages farther but tons to talk about

So far, this book has exceeded my expectations. Right now, Amir and his father are in America. His father, Baba, has been working at a gas station since they got there. This same father was once one of the richest men in Kabul with a black mustang car and a huge house. Amir is going to school and living the California life except he can't escape his memories of Hassan. America is an open door of opportunities but it still isn't able to get rid of Amir's memories of Hassan. When Baba mentions Hassan, Amir feels like

"a pair steel hands closed around [his] windpipe at the sound of Hassan's name. [He] rolled down the window. waited for the steel hands to loosen their grip" (134).

That quote was so extremely visual for me and it made a huge metaphorical connection. Amir's grief after what happen makes him feel like there is steel hands trying to choke him. He can barely live with himself. Later in my reading, Amir actually is love-stricken by a girl. He is so incredibly nervous and scared to talk to her and he

"promised [him]self that [he] would talk to her before the summer was over, but schools reopened, the leaves reddened, yellowed, and fell, the rains of winter swept in and wakened Baba's joints, baby leaves sprouted once more, and [he] still hadn't had the heart, the dil, to even look her in the eye" (144).

This quote really jumped off the page for me because it can be true for anyone and it really allows you to relate to Amir. Everyone is scared to talk to someone they have a crush on--they're afraid of embarrassing themselves, not saying the right thing, and so many other things. This quote shows Amir's true nature and his relatable nature to everyone else in the world--it shows his true human nature. And I'm off to more reading...

Kite Runner 1st 100 Pages (Spoiler Alert!)

So far I'm around 100 pages into the Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini and I really like the book. Most books I read are very girl oriented and are not nearly as powerful as this book. It's a fictional recount of a boy's childhood in Afghanistan. It almost seems like it's nonfiction though because it is in first person and is immensely descriptive but since I found it in the fiction section of the library I guess not. This book is both intense and sad because you see the happiest moments of a rich Pashtun boy named Amir's life and also the saddest. He is a boy who just wants to be loved by his well-off father whom he calls Baba. One of the most traumatizing moments of any piece of literature I've ever read happened within the last couple of chapters. Amir had just won a kite running contest and his Hazara servant/best friend Hassan had just run to get his winning kite. Amir had waited for a long time for him but then grew impatient so he went looking for him. What he did find was Hassan getting beaten by a blue-eyed well off boy and his cronies. What got to be even worse was that this same blue-eyed boy, Assef, raped Hassan because he refused to give up the kite to Assef. What was most traumatizing was that Amir was there stooped behind a wall watching. He did nothing to help his best friend. This is partly because he grew up in a society where Hazaras are looked down upon and it's not socially acceptable for him to admit that Hassan is his best friend. So far in the book Amir always is looking for attention from his father. He constantly feels unloved and almost unwanted. At one point he actually thinks to himself that Baba blames him for his mother's death. His mother died in child birth and that feeling is so severe and for him to feel responsible for the death of his mother is unthinkable. Baba also always seems to treat Amir and Hassan equally and this bothers Amir because sometimes he just wants to be noticed over Hassan. So far this book is extremely interesting, sad, and it also invokes so many more emotions. It almost feels as if you know Amir personally and he's recounting the story to you over a cup of tea.

Lock and Key by Sarah Dessen

Another Sarah Dessen book I read this summer was Lock and Key. This book was just as easy as the other read but was also completely different. A similarity between this book and The Truth About Forever was that both main characters lost a parent. The main character in this book didn't have her mother die, her mother abandoned her. A mother is supposed to have unconditional love for her child so how could she leave her?! Ruby then moves into her sister's house. She's very against the idea at first and wants to run away but then ends up making friends with her neighbor Nate. They have a kindling romance and it's a kind of a character that when she finally lands the guy, you feel like your best friend just landed the guy of her dreams. This book also has a moment where Sarah Dessen includes characters from her other book, The Truth About Forever. It's very subtle and pretty insignificant but it's still a cool experience to see an author's book have a connection to another one of her books that aren't in the same series. It's sort of like a shout out to her fans that says "Hope you enjoyed that connection, thanks for reading all my books to notice!". Bottom line is that this book was really good and really addicting. It was simple yet great.

The Truth About Forever by Sarah Dessen

This summer I read multiple books. One of which was The Truth About Forever by Sarah Dessen. It was by no means a hard read and I actually loved how quick of a read it was. The plot was very sad because one of the first things you find out about the main character is that she witnessed her father die. If I had lost a parent it would be extremely devastating, but if I had seen that parent die it would've made it 100x worse. The character, Macy, found stability in her brainiac boyfriend and SAT prep. Throughout the book you see her branching out and breaking out of her shell and it's so interesting. She has a tricky romance with a guy named Wes that you find yourself rooting on and reading more just to see what would happen between them. The plot is not that eventful or powerful but I like how it wasn't. It was not a difficult summer read, it was a fun enjoyable one. Sarah Dessen captivates the teenage girl as her audience and she fails to make it boring. It was a really great read! I would recommend it to anyone looking for an easier, enjoyable read.