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