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A place for Writing 12 students to read each other's writing, to critique, to suggest, to improve.
About Me
- Brad
- Former adult teacher who loves island beaches. Happy homebody and family man; once devoted dog owner, now without Tashi, my Tibetan Terrier. I prefer the absurdity of the imagination to the absurdity of imagining nothing.
9 comments:
I’m reading the Border Trilogy by Cormac McCarthy, but kind of backwards. I read The Crossing, the middle book of the trilogy, after my wife found it on a bookshelf at her office, and loved it. The beauty and despair and incredible hardships of the frontier life were brought to life through McCarthy’s description of a journey across a forbidding landscape, filled with Indians, desperate men, innocent (and murdered) homesteaders—the works! Sometimes gory, sometimes profound and always disturbing in some indefinable way, McCarthy’s prose is mesmerizing.
For my vacation I plan on reading the first and third books of the trilogy, All the Pretty Horses and Cities of the Plain.
Here’s a taste of McCarthy describing a train:
“It came boring out of the east like some ribald satellite of the coming sun howling and bellowing in the distance and the long light of the headlamp running through the tangled mesquite brakes and creating out of the night the endless fenceline down the straight right of way and sucking it back again wire and post mile on mile into the darkness after where the boilersmoke disbanded slowly along the faint new horizon and the sound came lagging and he stood still holding his hat in his hands in the passing ground-shudder watching it till it was gone.” (99 word sentence; from All the Pretty Horses, Page 4)
-Book review of For One More Day:
What would you do if you had a chance to go back in life and change the mistakes, would you do it? Or would you just walk away?
In Mitch Albom’s book, For One More Day, Charley Benetto, the main character, decides to kill himself after he fails to be a father and a husband to his family.
After he decides to end his life, he goes back to his hometown, Papperville Beach. But while he’s on his way, he gets a car accident. From then on, he sees his dead mother, “Poesy,” and while he’s with his mom, he now regrets that he takes his mother for granted.
Albom takes the readers to understand the meaning of a mother and a new meaning of unconditional love.
-135 words.
Book Review:
“The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim” by Jonathan Coe
Max has “seventy-four friends on Facebook but nobody to talk to.”
This is the story about a socially inept man, who is not only a misfit in society, but also in his own family. Even from childhood, his own connection with his father was sadly lacking, which left him wholly unprepared in building any meaningful relationships with his now estranged wife and daughter.
In one episode, Max returns home from a long trip and describes what he feared the most: “I stared at the screen in shock. Not a single friend had sent me a message or posted anything on my wall in the last month. If the evidence was to be believed, in other words, not one of those seventy people had thought of me once during my absence. My stomach felt suddenly hollow. My eyes started to sting: I could feel tears coming. This was worse than I could possibly have imagined. There was only one thing left: e-mail.”
Albeit, this story was written as a satire on the modern-day difficulties of making meaningful connections in the technological world of social networking, I found myself most impressed with how the author was able to create a character in Max so realistic that you can’t help but sympathize with him and find yourself rooting for this “underdog”, as you journey with him through one bumbling episode after another,in his attempts to establish any semblance of “real” personal relationships.
-251 words
If you are in favor of Sherlock Holmes’s fictional series, you may like to read Amanda Quick’s The River Knows. The only difference is that Holmes’ fiction was focus on intricacy and suspension, while this one was romantic suspense. Imagine you are living in Victorian era, walking on the foggy London street, what running beside you is murky water of Thames; in the clop-clop carriage, someone is peeking at you behind the curtain. What is going to happen next? Now you get some idea of what this book is about: murder, conspiracy, scandal, dangerous liaison, and romance. I found it somehow suits Hollywood style. May be it should be filmed into movie.
May be because the setting of this book (Victorian Age), the written style is kind of fussy and gingerbread. However, it suits the background of the story. For example, I found in this book, the author extremely likes to use alliteration. Here are some examples from the beginning chapters:
She did not dare to turn any of the lamps….
Through the window to illuminate the tiny parlor,….
This small space had been her home for nearly two years.
The squeaks of the hinges sounded like small screams in the deathly silence.
It will be boring if I point out other poetic devices from this book. It is up to you to find out.
Another thing which may catch your attention is the name of the author. Actually, her real name is Jayne Ann Krentz; Amanda Quick is one of her seven pen names, which is only for historical romance fiction. There is also the specific pen name for contemporary fiction or futuristic fiction-- the romance must be involved, of course. It is pity that I don't know any of her other works; otherwise I may have comments about why she chose different pen names. As the best seller of New York Times, her name might be popular to you. Anyway, this book can be a good choice to kill your time, if you have to.
A book is called “Change or Die” by a senior writer at Fast Company magazine. It’s a 2007 personal growth/ business leadership book that finds distinct similarities between three different but miraculous “negative to positive” change in 1) Heart patients 2) Hardcore convicts and 3) Disgruntled factory workers.
The title of the book is based on the “scare tactic” heart patients, who are refusing to change their unhealthy habits like smoking or fatty foods, are usually told by their doctors, “either you change your habits or you’re going to die.” This usually works against the patient as he feels fear and hopelessness and continues the bad habits.
I am half way through this book and find it fascinating to read about how change works and that society is going about it the wrong way.
Book Review:
“The Pearl” by John Steinbeck
John Steinbeck (1902-1968). American novelist, story writer, and playwright. “The Pearl” is a novel by John Steinbeck
What happens when a poor fisherman finds a pearl of extraordinary beauty and value it so much particularly when he lives in such an impoverished state? Be careful of what you wish – it’s well if it can make you happy, but there are things you find brings sorrow and pain.
This is a novel about a poor uneducated family man, who is not ambitious and lived a simple life in a small town in Tijuana, Mexico with his wife and son. Kino, the father is the main character, Juana is his wife who is uneducated, plain housewife and very submissive and Coyotito, their baby who is one year old.
There were antagonistic neighbourhoods and the quack greedy doctor against them.
I was so surprised when I was reading one of the chapters that, Kino and his family were resting inside their makeshift house while their baby Coyotito was on his cradle, a scorpion fell on his shoulder. Kino and Juana were so afraid that their baby might die because of this poisonous scorpion. They didn’t know how take the scorpion out from the baby, suddenly Kino grabbed and killed it, but before he got the scorpion, Coyotito was bitten by the scorpion already. Kino pressed the baby’s shoulder and sucked the venom for several times and spit it out from his mouth so that the venom would not go through the baby’s system. This family and some of the neighborhood were alerted because Coyotito was crying and in pain. They all went to the adjacent town where the quack greedy doctor was stationed. Upon reaching the doctor’s place, the doctor could sense from a far that this family has no means of paying him back, the doctor told his households to tell Kino’s family and friends that the doctor was not around, but they knew that the doctor was there hiding from them. They were so angry when they left the place without treating his baby.
As I go along reading the chapters, I found that the writer’s irony was instead that Kino should look for another doctor, Kino and his family went to the sea close to their place and took her family for boating. He wished to find to find a pearl so that he could have a means to pay the doctor. While Kino was watching the sea, he saw a shining thing under the ocean, so he dived to the deepest part of the sea and got a grayish, huge, shining pearl. Upon obtaining it, his mind starts to dream of many beautiful things for his family. They went back home. Kino, who is a simple person, became a bit proud and showed the shining pearl to the neighbourhood especially to those who undermined him until the whole village got to know about the pearl. Even the quack, greedy doctor who lived in another town came to see it and was salivating about the pearl and became very friendly to him. He invited Kino to treat the baby, but Kino said “my baby is well now, no need for treatment,”
Other people in the neighbourhood were also chasing Kino about that pearl, until one night a burglar came to their house to get the pearl, but Kino won the fight, and he killed the burglar. Then someone burned Kino’s house, so they went to his brother’s house, but still there was no peace until they ran to the jungle like a fugitive. But even in the jungle they were hunted by the people who were interested of his pearl. Kino again encountered an abnormal life there as the people were looking after them even inside the jungle. While living and staying in the jungle, he encountered another thief; he was able to grab the thief’s gun, and another thief that he both killed.
They were so exhausted about these encounters and the wife told Kino that “I preferred a peaceful life and house instead of having this pearl”. While Kino and family were walking beside the cliff near the ocean, Kino decided to throw the shining pearl back to the ocean and said, “you do not belong to me, and you belong to the ocean”.
Be careful of what you wish for-- the old saying certainly applies here. In the end, what does the pearl bring him besides heartache and sorrow? As one of the quotes stated by the writer, "And, as with all retold tales that are in people's hearts, there are only good and bad things and black and white things and good and evil things and no in-between. If this story is a parable, perhaps everyone takes his own meaning from it and reads his own life into it."
811 words---
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