Blog Reflections

 This trimester, I read one book, which met my goal. I did not use Goodreads very often for suggestions of books, I found out about the books that I read, or at least started to read, through other people. My friends suggested John Dies at the End, which was funny just like they said, but the plot turned to be not my kind of story, and it was very long and seemed to drag on about the same things for a while, which I didn’t like, so I stopped reading that book and picked up The Magician’s Nephew, which was written by C.S. Lewis, an author that my sister suggested to me. The hardest part about blogging for me was reading the book. I don’t read a lot and it is sometimes hard for me to sit and focus on one thing at a time. I overcame this by telling myself “Okay, you need to read at least one book. As soon as I go home, I’m just going to binge read, and not do anything else.” And that’s what I did, I went home and read and read and read until I got into it enough to direct all my attention towards it, and I finally finished the book, The Magician’s Nephew. One strength I had with blogging is that all of the different prompt options allowed me to open up my inner self, and let the creativity and magic flow into the blog post, which I found enjoyable and I think it allowed me to use a lot of my own voice when blogging.

            This trimester, I have grown in the ability to closely analyze a text. At the beginning of the trimester, it had been so long since I had read that it took an extra amount of effort to understand what the sentences meant and it was harder for me to be able to think about what I have read. Since then, I have been able to quickly pick up on the meaning of each sentence, which has allowed me to make better connections with the text. At the beginning of the year, I compared Dave’s character to my dad’s washing machine and John’s character to sushi. This wasn’t a bad analysis, but what I based my comparisons off of were things that the story told me word for word. For example, I said: “He is also similar to my dad's washing machine because he describes himself as kinda ugly and wouldn't be most people's first choice. My dad's washing machine is really plain looking and so is David.” I did not have to dig very deep to make that conclusion; it was something that the text told me word for word. In a more recent blog post, I did a text to text comparison between John Dies at the End and Plato’s allegory of the cave. In this blog post, I talked about things that the text didn’t so obviously give me, and connected it to the allegory of the cave. For example, I said: “That special Ebin represents Dave and John, and he leaving the cave represents Dave and John taking the drug that let them see more than the world they were familiar with... They had discovered that there is a whole new world out there, and this discovery changes their lives forever.” This quote demonstrates my ability to read something and understand more than just what the words are saying. The book never said that the discovery changed their lives forever, but it was something I got from thinking about what was being said in the text. These two examples show that I have grown in my ability to analyze a text by pointing out that I used to only see what the text told me word for word, and now I have gained the ability to make my own conclusions. Links: http://joshssuperswagtasticreadingblog.blogspot.com/2013/12/john-dies-at-end-again.html http://joshssuperswagtasticreadingblog.blogspot.com/2014/01/why-john-dies-at-end-is-important-to.html

I'm blogging again and this time a different book.

I lost hope in finishing John dies at the End. I still had like 400 pages and I pretty much only read like maybe 20 pages a week because it's just really hard to focus on something for more than a few minutes at a time. But recently it was christmas, and my sister told me to buy her books by C.S. Lewis because she liked him and needed a book for when she went back to school, and I wanted CD's because I have a spectacular CD collection. So she took me to half price books so we could get each other what we wanted, only I never left the CD section so she actually had to buy her own gift from me to her. But anyways, I was at my place of residence and I was looking for a book to read because it was like 2:00 in the morning and I don't think about what I'm doing at 2:00 in the morning, I just do whatever feels right. On my bookshelf I saw The Magician's Nephew by C.S. Lewis and I was excited because it was by that one author that my sister liked and it looked tremendously shorter than John Dies at the End. So I picked it up and went back up the ladder to my bed, because my bed is a loft bed and has a ladder, which was awesome when I was ten but now I just hit my head a lot. Then I turned on my touch lamp because I am a privileged person who owns a touch lamp, and I went on a journey inside the book.

The book is pretty great, I'm only on page 31, but so far it has lit the light bulb that is my mind. There's these two kids and they're in London, which is already awesome because Britain is awesome and their accents make me giggle,  and they meet because the guy is really sad because his life sucks. Then the girl is like "well lets go on some adventures!" and they do, they adventure up in the attic and build a fort and stuff, and then they discover that they can go to other peoples apartment things through the attic, so they try to go to an abandoned apartment but they actually go into the forbidden room in the boy's apartment and then his crazy uncle finds them and tells the girl to take a ring, and she does but then she disappears which is kinda unfortunate. So then the guy yells at his uncle and his uncle rambles about magic and stuff and about how he's above rules because he's a genius, and then the boy touches the rings too so he can disappear and save the girl. And thats pretty much where I am right now.

Also my book is by the guy who wrote the book that was turned into the movie that says "FOR NARNIA!"
and I like SpongeBob a whole lot.