Tuesday, September 30, 2014

Review: Liam's Promise

by Chloe

A little background on me, I’m that girl that went through school without reading many books and Spark notes was my best friend. One of my friends at school was reading a book called The Doomsday Kids: Liam’s Promise. She kept telling me how good of a book it is so I decided to read it; within pages I was hooked and continued reading. I wanted to post about this book because a newer author Karyn Langhorne Folan wrote it. Here is my review:


The Doomsday Kids: Liam’s Promise by Karyn Langhorne Folan begins with a boy in school who receives a frantic call from his mother saying, “Get to the mountain place!” With those words, eight kids embark on a terrifying journey to survive a massive nuclear blast that destroys the world they once knew. In the wreckage of their community, without food or transportation, their only hope of safety is to walk to a mountain cabin almost two hundred miles away. But the journey under gray, radioactive skies bring the kids face to face with death and danger, deprivation and disease and worst of all: the realization that life will never be the same again.

From chapter one I was drawn right in. Each page is packed with drama and the plot is full of twists, but the characters drive the story. Because there is a wide diversity of characters the book is way more interesting. The author used a lot of descriptive words, which helps the reader picture the setting and characters more clearly.  This book was so well written that I felt the pain and fear the characters were going through. I would recommend this book to teens or anyone who likes apocalyptic fiction.

FIVE STARS




The Importance of Character Development


by Charles Foster Kane

The best stories are, at their heart, about the characters they introduce and how they develop. This is true of films such as 12 Angry Men and even Star Wars. These movies are about people who feel real. Real people change.

Citizen Kane, widely regarded as the best motion picture of all time, is about just one character. However, the fatal flaw of this movie is that this character does not develop, except perhaps in the last minute of his life. The story here should have been about an idealistic young man whose ambitions eventually turn him into a cruel megalomaniac. This would have been a good story about a very depressingly realistic character. But this is not what happens in the film.

Kane is evil from the beginning, the film just shows us all of the bad things he did. He lived a terrible person and died a terrible person. This is not character development. He did not make any choices near the end of the movie that he would not have made at the beginning.

There is a difference between a change in scenery and actual development. Suppose a character is unhappy at the beginning of a story because he or she does not have something. At the end he or she is happy after getting that thing. This character has not necessarily developed. The world around that character is what has developed – if the character had that thing at the beginning of the story, he or she would have acted the same way. In Citizen Kane, the situation is somewhat reversed, but it’s still the scenery changing, not Kane himself.

While watching the film, I was never invested in Kane’s character because he never showed any good side to him. A character who began with some kind of kindness or integrity would have made me care about him before his downfall.

If you make a movie about a character pushing people away from him his whole life, what is there to draw the audience in?

Wednesday, September 24, 2014

Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!

by Jet

The ending of the classic short story of Bartleby, the Scrivener may seem a little vague. However, I believe that this exclamation- filled with feeling- is a reference to the narrator’s pity for Bartleby and perhaps a little remorse that he could not save Bartleby. Throughout the entire story the narrator has treated Bartleby with pity, a sort of holier-than-thou attitude. It is as if he sees Bartleby as an opportunity to display his goodness and improve his reputation. In paragraph 53 the narrator states:

 “Poor fellow! thought I, he means no mischief; it is plain he intends no insolence; his aspect sufficiently evinces that his eccentricities are involuntary. He is useful to me. I can get along with him. If I turn him away, chances are he will fall in with some less indulgent employer, and then he will be rudely treated, and perhaps driven forth miserably to starve. Yes. Here I can cheaply purchase a delicious self-approval. To befriend Bartleby; to humour him in his strange wilfulness, will cost me little or nothing, while I lay up in my soul what will eventually prove a sweet morsel for my conscience.”

From this, it is evident that the narrator is a little selfish and less benevolent than what his actions make him out to be because he blatantly says that he is doing this to make himself feel good. In fact, he seems to regard Bartleby as something of a charity case. This is further underscored by the narrator’s hyperbolic reaction when he finds out that Bartleby is homeless, and has been living in his office.

“For the first time in my life a feeling of overpowering stinging melancholy seized me. Before, I had never experienced aught but a not-pleasing sadness. The bond of a common humanity now drew me irresistibly to gloom. A fraternal melancholy! For both Bartleby and I were sons of Adam. I remembered the bright silks and sparkling faces I had seen that day, in gala trim, swan-like sailing down the Mississippi of Broadway; and I contrasted them with the pallid copyist, and thought to myself, Ah happiness courts the light, so we deem the world is gay; but misery hides aloof, so we deem that misery there is none. These sad fancyings-chimeras, doubtless, of a sick and silly brain- led on to other and more special thoughts, concerning the eccentricities of Bartleby. Presentiments of strange discoveries hovered round me. The scrivener’s pale form appeared to me laid out, among uncaring strangers, in its shivering winding sheet.

As the story progresses, the narrator continues to treat Bartleby in a patronising manner, which can be seen in the way he entreats Bartleby to tell him about his past, and to “comply as far as may be with the usages of this office.” When that proves unsuccessful, he dismisses Bartleby from his office but Bartleby refuses to comply. There is then a period of time in which he lets Bartleby continue to stay in his office, because “At last I see it, I feel it; to penetrate to the predestined purpose of my life. I am content. Others may have loftier parts to enact; but my mission in this world, Bartleby, is to furnish you with office-room for such period as you may see fit to remain.”

This story is kind of ridiculous.

The narrator stops putting up with Bartleby when his own reputation is at stake and only goes back to deal with him because he is afraid that his reputation will be sullied if he does not since he is the last person associated with Bartleby. This is implied from his reaction to the news that Bartleby refuses to leave the premises:

“Aghast at this torrent, I fell back before it, and would fain have locked myself in my new quarters. In vain I persisted that Bartleby was nothing to me—no more than to any one else. In vain:—I was the last person known to have any thing to do with him, and they held me to the terrible account. Fearful then of being exposed in the papers (as one person present obscurely threatened) I considered the matter, and at length said, that if the lawyer would give me a confidential interview with the scrivener, in his (the lawyer’s) own room, I would that afternoon strive my best to rid them of the nuisance they complained of.”

Finally, Bartleby is escorted to a prison and he still refuses to comply with anything anyone asks him to. In his own “mild, cadaverous” way, he is rebelling. Bartleby refuses to eat, and I believe that this is his way of silently telling the world to go fly a kite- that he will not acquiesce to humanity’s expectations. In a way, this is the ultimate rebellion: he refuses to live.

The narrator regrets being unable to keep Bartleby alive and he feels responsible for Bartleby. In accordance with his dramatic nature, he associates Bartleby’s fate with a philosophical statement about humanity and in a way, it is. It is a statement about humanity’s mortality, which is evident in this excerpt from the last paragraph:

“Dead letters! does it not sound like dead men? Conceive a man by nature and misfortune prone to a pallid hopelessness, can any business seem more fitted to heighten it than that of continually handling these dead letters and assorting them for the flames? For by the cart-load they are annually burned. Sometimes from out the folded paper the pale clerk takes a ring:—the finger it was meant for, perhaps, moulders in the grave; a bank-note sent in swiftest charity:—he whom it would relieve, nor eats nor hungers any more; pardon for those who died despairing; hope for those who died unhoping; good tidings for those who died stifled by unrelieved calamities. On errands of life, these letters speed to death.

Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!” 

Tuesday, September 23, 2014

Close Reading 'Born To Run'

HI world its me again the anti reading student, jar jar binks

today i was forced to read again so i read born to run. a book about a guy who goes for a run and hurts his foot. then through an elaborate turn of events he finds the tarahumara tribe who can run at immense speed and to extreme distances. they live in the mexico desert copper canyons an extremely hot treacherous environment.

thats where i stopped reading.

p.s. my next few blog posts will be about this book, UNFORTUNATELY i will have to read more.


sincerely, JAR JAR BINKS , THE ANTI READING STUDENT.

Wednesday, September 17, 2014

Close Up Reading

by Mandy

Hi everyone,
My name is Mandy and I want to talk to you about a book series called The Christy Miller Collection! If you have ever read the first book of the series which is Summer Promise, that when she meets her future boyfriend he is only fifteen and he can drive, what’s that all about, because in the U.S. you have to be 16 years old to drive and have a license? When I started reading the book I thought so many romantic things were going to happen, but no, nothing happened by sides the fact that he gave her a little kiss goodbye and bought her flowers before she left California on page 179 in the first book which would be the last page of the book!

On Chapter 1 in the next book, A Whisper and A Wish, page 181, Christy goes back to her best friend Paula’s house to see if she was going to visit her in California because she is moving there after staying in California with her Aunt and Uncle for the summer and where she first lived was in Wisconsin, her best friend says of course but Christy realizes while she was in the middle of talking to Paula, she was talking to her other good friend on the phone, which makes me and probably  Christy super angry and shocked that her one and only best friend did that to her, and after she got off the phone her friend tells her she is going to a party that her crush who is 18 years old and how old is she? Oh she’s 14 years old what an age different, like seriously who would want to spend all their time with someone who is 4 years older than you and you don’t even know them that well, I bet Christy feels the same way I do even though she is a fictional character the author Robin Jones Gunn made her a really emotional girl.

You want to know something about Christy she is very aware of what she want’s when she found out in Chapter 13 in the first book after a great day with her real good friend Todd at Disneyland she comes home to her house to find out her aunt asked Todd to take her to Disneyland and gave him money to go with her, she was really mad and through her shoe at him because what she really wanted was for Todd to like her, but she realized that nothing between them that day was real, now isn’t that sad?

If anyone has any comments or can relate please do I will be here to read them!

Thank you everyone,
Mandy!!!!!



My Lunches With Orson is Welles at His Most Welles-ian

by Edoardo Tarkovsky

It’s hard to say anything about the filmmaker and actor Orson Welles that hasn’t already been said. A household name throughout a good part of the twentieth century, he has been thoroughly studied and established as a name in American culture. This is what makes the prospect of a book that introduces a totally new Orson Welles so fascinating. My Lunches With Orson, a book edited by Peter Biskind, transcripts a Welles that the public has never seen before. It reveals him at his most honest and vulnerable, showing how he can be hilarious, offensive, and intelligent.

My Lunches With Orson comes in the form of transcripts of conversations between Welles and fellow director Henry Jaglom. From 1983-85, the two ate lunch together every week. The variety of topics they discuss are expansive. Some recurring topics throughout the conversations include politics, Hollywood gossip, the two directors’ disdain for producers, etc.

Throughout the book, Welles expresses his hope for potential projects that he was working on at the time such as King Lear and Don Quixote. The two talk about one of these projects continually as they try to persuade the actor Jack Nicholson to play the lead role. At one point, Jaglom explains his shock at Welles turning down Robert De Niro and Al Pacino among others to pursue Nicholson. It’s interesting to be in the middle of these conversations like a fly on the wall; it is a rare look at a director behind closed doors.

Welles’s frustrations in the last years of his life as he tries to get his films produced really comes out here. There is a strong sense of the hope and desperation that he went through as he tried to make these films near the end of his life. In many of the conversations, we see Jaglom to him about developments in the projects to keep his hope alive. It creates a lot of sympathy for this genius who was misunderstood by producers. It is sad but gripping to watch a fading star try to rejuvenate his career.


Here is a perfect book for any serious cinemaphile. My Lunches With Orson is the closest thing we have today to sitting down and talking to Orson Welles himself. This is him at his wisest and funniest. It is Welles as you’ve never seen him before. This book is essential to understanding the mystery Orson Welles.