The Grade (A) Gatsby (1/3)

New book! Yay!...yay...yah...ugh. Even though I'm not always excited by books, I'm usually not terribly bitter about them. But classics? I can't. I've attempted many times, but have not yet succeeded. I was able to enjoy some of the "later" classics like Animal Farm. When I attempted Wuthering Heights or Jane Eyre, the only thing that my brain was able to process was that the black stuff was the ink and the tan-ish white stuff was the paper. Maybe I have the not-able-to-process-what-famous-sisters-write curse. When I was told to choose a classic, I had two choices: a) read a "later" classic like 1984 that I can probably be easily interested in, or b) choose a classic I would probably not enjoy, but I'd have to read it eventually for another English class anyways. I chose B. The classic that's going to haunt me? The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Here is my copy of The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

I have read about the first ten pages of this book at least four times. I still don't know what's going on. I thought it would be better to do some background research then, which we're supposed to do anyways (there's a reason why English teachers make us do tedious things). Fitzgerald was brought up in an upper-middle class environment and went to two Catholic schools. He worked in Hollywood and made a lot of money at one point in his life, and died from heavy drinking. Although I don't want to judge, he probably lived a superficial life for at least half of his life. There might have been a point in his life where he realized money and drinking wasn't everything. If he did I think there would be a superficial setting in the book and one character realizing that there's more to life than that.

Well, I don't think this book is going to be a panacea because I probably have to do a lot of analyses in order to actually understand the book. I hope though, if I don't understand it well this time around, I'll at least understand it better the second time and go "ohhhh."

A simple remedy (but not a panacea) to a cold or just feeling cold, you can try some barley tea. It smells nice and if you put it in the fridge to make it cold, it's a great beverage when it's super hot outside.

I've Read Why the Caged Bird Sings (3/3)

So, I've finished this book. Just like I said in the last post, she included a lot of horrible things that happened in her life, except in this book she mixed a lot of problems regarding her personal family life and other topics like sexism rather than just problems regarding racism.

Yes, all of the events she included were some horrible things that a person should not have to go through (call me redundant, but they're just so horribly horrible I don't know what other word would be appropriate). But I don't think it would have sounded half as terrible to me if she didn't express her words like this. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is of Maya Angelou's life from when she was three to when she was sixteen. This book was published when she was 41, so she couldn't have possibly remembered every single detail of the exact emotions and happenings of all the events she wrote in this book (she actually might remember most stuff because she's super brilliant at memorizing but that's not the point). Her use of imagery must have stressed or exaggerated some parts. But when she was telling the readers these stories, I found myself believing every single detail she was saying. It was like a suspension of disbelief, except it was mostly true. It made me feel that way because it works both as nonfiction and fiction. If someone had told me, "This is fiction," I would have believed it. If someone had told me, "This is nonfiction," I still would have believed it. This book is someone's life reincarnated into a story. For example, there was a descriptive part in the middle of the book where she told the readers about her graduation with excitement. She narrates, "In the Store I was the person of the moment. The birthday girl. The center... My class was wearing butter-yellow pique dresses, and Momma launched out on mine. She mocked the yoke into tiny crisscrossing puckers, then shirred the rest of the bodice. Her dark fingers ducked in and out of the lemony cloth as she embroidered raised daisies around the hem" (Angelou 171). It was as descriptive as a novel but still a true story.

Of this true story of Marguerite, a strong figure of her life is Momma, her grandmother. She had been raised by Momma since she was three. Momma was a strong and influential figure to not only Marguerite but her entire community. Angelou recalls, "I saw only her power and strength. She was taller than any woman in my personal world...In church, when she was called upon to sing, she seemed to pull out plugs from behind her jaws and the huge sound would pour over the listeners and throb in the air...She was the only Negro woman in Stamps referred to once as Mrs" (Angelou 46-47). These traits of Momma are similar to other female activists, but the figure that reminded me most of Momma was Cleopatra. Just like Momma was the only woman in her area to be called Mrs., Cleopatra was one of the only female pharaohs of Egypt. They were both married at a certain point, but remained single at the end, and by doing so I think that it helped them maintain their sense of power. They were both determined to protect their sons, although they never seemed to directly shows true love for anyone. They're both people of inspiration.

Cleopatra was a significant woman leader, just like Maya Angelou's grandmother.

That felt like a short but long read. I'd feel like I absorbed a ton of interesting information, but it would only have been about five pages past where I started. It was never tedious nor hard but I felt like I had to devote a lot of time into it. I guess that part blocked me from enjoying it 100%, so it wasn't a panacea. I did enjoy it though, and it felt like it left a mark inside of me.

Oh, and by the way, I've noticed that a lot of people put fun things at the end of their blogs. Yeah, I guess I'm acting "mainstream" but I think that's better than letting readers fall asleep with only literature-related stuff. The only thing close to a panacea I've ever found was chocolate. So enjoy a chocolate truffle recipe.

I Know Why the Caged Bird Reads (2/3)

I found a couple of reasons so far why people love reading Maya Angelou's books at least a bit more than other books about racism. In most stories or accounts of oppression, they usually talk about how they struggled through the cruel treatment of the "superior race". I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings does talk about that, but also includes a great deal of her own community and personal family problems. It provides a link between her, the author, and readers who may have not gone through as terrible things as she or other oppressed groups had. After establishing the fact that she was a just a little girl like everyone else, she then informs us more about her problems besides oppression, like child abuse. That created a sort of empathy link between me and the little girl Marguerite.

She was given the name Marguerite, but it evolved to her current name Maya.

Her words are filled with so much technique that a little girl simply cannot have, but the emotions that are portrayed derive from a youngster with a lot of scars. I felt this the most when Marguertie was in St. Louis, where she was born and where her mother lived. SPOILER ALERT: She had been raised in Arkansas by her grandmother until her mother decided to take her and her brothere Bailey back one day. Marguerite only had Bailey her whole life, but when the reunited with Mother, she felt very distant from her brother. He seemed to love Mother more than Marguerite, who had no feelings for Mother. When the siblings are sent back to Arkansas, Bailey feels heartbroken while Marguerite feels nothing. She says, "We were on the train going back to Stamps...I had to console Bailey. He cried his heart out down the aisles of the coach, and pressed his little-boy body against the window pane looking for a last glimpse of Mother Dear...I cared less abotu the trip than about the fact that Bailey was unhappy, and had no more thought of our destination than if I had simple been heading for the toilet" (Angelou 88). The imagery and the way she wrote down her emotions is undoubtedly an adult's, but the emotion that was expressed was of a child saddened by a broken family. I could tell that by growing up with a strictly religious grandmother, Marguerite had been taught about the strong powers of her God all her life. To her Bailey was like God because he was the only one she could trust with anything and the person she loved the most and strongest. To have to see him love a person that she did not loved more than Marguerite broke her heart, and made her lose some of the reasons to live.

I Know Why the Caged Word Sings (1/3)

With the same teacher who complained about how every story is a rip-off of the Lord of the Rings, my Language Arts class read a portion in class of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou to learn how to annotate.

My copy of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Although it was nonfiction, which teenagers usually don't like reading, it was still interesting because it was an autobiography, laying out a narrative style of writing. I hated it whenever I had to research a person for a school project, because I felt that all biographies did was state what a person did on the surface. Someone may have inspired and helped others wholeheartedly, but whatever way the author put it felt sugar-coated, and I sometimes felt that the person acted nice only to impress readers in their biographies. Autobiographies were different. The author knows how they felt during their lives, and they can remember it in more detail than any other observer and scribe. I can learn about the person in their shoes. I can listen to a person's story from the heart, not just a portion of textbook history.

Even though this book won't be just a portion of textbook history, it's still a portion of important history. I know this book talks a lot about the oppression of African Americans in the early 1900s. As a high school student, I've heard, read, and learned a lot about oppressions of many different ethnicities, with the Civil Rights movement most discussed. If I wanted to be completely honest, I want to stop listening to teachers and presentors trying to teach me more about this subject. I don't want to hear it from them, I want to hear it from people who have experienced it, are related to or know people who have experienced it. Records and statistics about this topic are still written in my brain as "Disgustingly Horrid to Infinity and Beyond," and it's going to stay that way, so more information in that point of view isn't going to really teach me much. However, to listen to it from people who know how it feels will actually touch my heart and allow me to comprehend these events to a different level. As an ethnic minority in this country, I recall not really being able to connect when people of different ethnicites from mine tried to explain how my ethnic group feels at certain times. However, when I read stories of people from my ethnic group talk about certain events, I smile to myself, thinking "Wow, someone understands."

I'm really looking forward to this book. Hope I find a Panacea!

The Hobbit, or the Front and Back Cover Again (3/3)

I remember one day in eighth grade, my Language Arts teacher started to rant about fiction stories like Harry Potter. She was criticizing them for being a complete rip-off of the Lord of the Rings series. While I was reading The Hobbit, I was thinking, "Ugh, most of this is a cliche of fantasy stories." Then it popped. Other fantasy books are cliches from the Hobbit and other books before it! It was sort of like listening to a tape recorder after listening to music from my phone for a long time. 

I have reached ze back cover of The Hobbit!

J.R.R. Tolkien did his best to try to make Bilbo sound so normal that it seemed almost abnormal, and I can say that it worked. At the beginning, Bilbo was a lazy, small creature that just loved to eat a lot, and I'm not afraid to say that I'm exactly like that. However, I could see Bilbo slowly advancing from that. In the Vonnegut Shape of Stories, Bilbo started on the happy side. Nothing big was happening in his life, but he was content with it. When Gandalf, a wizard, came to him with a journey, Bilbo plunged straight down but was slightly intrigued by it. During the journey, Bilbo is captured by spiders but is given the chance to show his companions on the journey that he could contribute. Bilbo kills the spider and the narrator says, "Somehow the killing of a giant spider, all alone by himself in the dark without the help of the wizard or the dwarves or of anyone else, made a great difference to Mr. Baggins. He felt a different person, and much fiercer and bolder...'I will give you a name,' he said to it [his sword], 'and I shall call you Sting' " (Tolkien 144). Until that point his happiness on the Shape of Stories had been wagging slowly upwards, and finally it reached a point where his happiness was slightly higher than when he lived an ordinary life. At the end of the book, Bilbo returned to his ordinary house except had made more wild friends, had wilder thoughts, and had more chances to seek adventure. This book was a bit touching to someone like me. J. R. R. Tolkien had basically just told me by the fireplace on his rocking armchair that even a lazy potato like me can go places, learn, and have a chance to live with journeys beside me. Additionally, I connected well at the part where Bilbo named his sword, because similarly, most of my friends and I like to name our instruments. Instruments are little tools that I can press keys and manipulate to make pretty sounds, so it's something special that's worth naming. That made me think, "Wow, that Bilbo must love that sword."

I think it would have been nice to know Tolkien in person and have him read a story to me (I don't know why, but I keep imagining his voice as Morgan Freeman's). I was sort of frustrated that his voice didn't really go dramatic at parts that could have been more interesting if it had been dramatized. However, at the very climax when Bilbo encountered the dragon and the townspeople slayed the dragon, Tolkien used a good mix of narrative and dialogue in a way that actually kept my heart beating and my eyes glued to the pages.

But on top of all that, I'm glad I finished because now I can finally watch the two released movies that are 343 minutes combined!

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Stories (2/3)

So far, the Hobbit was on the lines of what I was expecting. Whenever I open up this book and read inside my head, I feel like my grandfather or an old man is sitting down and telling us a story from memory next to a fireplace. That makes it sort of like Winnie-the-Pooh episodes where there's a narrator, telling us a story about the loveable bear. Another thing I noticed was the use of dialogue. A common aspect about modern books is that whenever there's an interesting or significant event going on, characters always speak dramatically. "WHOA! What just happened?" "Is this real?" "Watch out!" Whenever our main character Bilbo Baggins have something going on, dialogue isn't used too often. However, the author portrays exactly what's happening, which way who's going, and how Bilbo feels at the moment. In other fiction books, when action happened, I felt as if I was right next to the person, running along with them and feeling the same emotions as them. For this book, I felt like I was sort of looking at all of this from the sky, next to the narrator friendly stating everything that's happening. Basically, it was easier to feel sympathy than empathy. Also, the narrator occasionally says "I," "you," or a random personal thought in parentheses, and explains a certain magical creature in the middle of an event. While Bilbo is hiding from wolves, the author says, "I will tell you what Gandalf heard, though Bilbo did not understand it...Goblins do not usually venture very far from their mountains, unless they are driven out and are looking for new homes, or are marching to war (which I am glad to say has not happened for a long time)" (Tolkien 94). This style of writing lay a fantasy feeling right off the bat, and sort of reminded me of Alice in Wonderland as well.

Although I appreciated the cozy way this was written, I was disappointed that it doesn't really keep me captured and hooked onto the story. It kept saying something along the lines of, "Something big is gonna come this way," but nothing humongous seemed to have happened yet. The story started out extremely ordinary to portray the life of an extremely ordinary hobbit born into an extraordinary, adventurous family. At first his ordinary ways prohibited Bilbo from wanting to go on an adventure, but slowly his family's wild genes start taking over him. I can start to see that he wants to be a mischievous hobbit, just like his mom. In the beginning of the book, Bilbo turns down an opportunity of adventure by saying, "We don't want any adventures here, thank you!" (Tolkien 6). Later, when he encounters trolls in his adventure, he changes attitude by attempting to steal from them. The author narrates, "Of the various burglarious proceedings he had heard of picking the trolls' pockets seemed the least difficult...Bilbo finally plucked up the courage and put his little hand in the troll's enormous pocket" (Tolkien 34). Right now it feels like I'm only getting a bite of corn, squash, and stuffing for Thanksgiving, but I expect a giant turkey to come at the end. Bilbo's happiness is rising and falling, but slowly increasing throughout his journey, so for now, I'll have to be patient and read through Bilbo's growths and changes until I the very end. After all, there should be a reason why this has been famous for the last 80 years.

The Hobbit: A Paper Journey (1/3)

I've always wanted to give The Lord of the Rings Series by J.R.R. Tolkien a try. Most people around me said that The Hobbit, or There and Back Again was the best of the series, and that it was one of the best-written books ever. A lot of people currently know about it and respect it, so I figure there would be a reason for its high reputation. I also know this book is fantasy, and being a fantasy maniac myself, I think that this is going to be some sort of elaborate version of what you would call a "fairy tale," except maybe without the princess of the knight in shining armor. This book was published in the 1930s, during the Great depression, and a popular aspect in arts and literature then was happy moods. I'm not expecting a dark, sad plot but rather some humor-mixed story with a bit of inspiration to look on the bright side of things.

My copy of the Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien

Overall, I think that the book is going to be an intriguing and satisfying read. J.R.R. Tolkien was an inspiration to many authors all over the world, so I hope that this book will inspire me as well!

Welcome!

I'm Hanna, and this blog is for my Reader's Workshop project in English. I don't always enjoy reading just for pleasure, but I'm hoping to explore and find books that can act as a panacea to that problem. I hope you enjoy it!