#1 Seriously...I'm Kidding

I decided to take a break from Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. I received a lot of books for Christmas, and this one looked too good to wait to read. I finished Seriously...I'm Kidding, by Ellen DeGeneres, in a day. It was very fast read. It was extremely entertaining and wonderfully hilarious. I know DeGeneres is a funny talk show host, but she had me laughing out loud with this book-- and books never make me laugh. Not even the confused sideways glances from my mother could distract me from the book. I was hooked and laughing out loud after simply reading the back cover. It really helps to give the reader a great sense of what kind of book this will be, and as to the kind of writer DeGeneres is. Usually the back of a book cover is where one can find praise from famous people or groups about the book. Well, DeGeneres took a very different approach and decided to praise the reader. Here are some examples of what she said:

"That is a beautiful blouse you're wearing. It goes so nicely with this book"- Ellen DeGeneres

"I love the way you're holding this book. It's like you were born to buy it and hold it forever."-Ellen DeGeneres

"You know what I love most about you? That we get each other. And also your eyes."- Ellen DeGeneres

"You're my favorite reader. Ever, of all time. Shhh...don't tell the other readers."-Ellen DeGeneres

DeGeneres wrote this book in hopes of communicating with a broad audience. I believe she succeeded, and I would recommend this book to anyone who likes DeGeneres, or likes to laugh in general. I liked that each chapter was about a different topic such as the importance of honesty, how to be a supermodel, common courtesy, family, the secrets of life, writing books, dreams, and gambling tips, to name a few. She often connected these topics with personal anecdotes from her life, opinions, or serious pieces of advice. This allowed DeGeneres to appeal to different audiences. Despite the changing topics, I found it all to be very interesting and I could relate most of what she was saying to some part of my life. A lot of what DeGeneres wrote was downright funny, but she balanced the humor nicely with valid life tips and genuine advice she gave with hopes of making the reader happier, or at least the knowledge they need to do so.

The chapters were also short which was nice because the end of every chapter seemed like a good place to stop, if the reader needed to, since there wasn't a continuing story line. I feel like the shorter chapters made the reading feel really fast, and allowed DeGeneres to cover a wide range of topics, as mentioned before, which I absolutely loved. Her writing cracked me up, and I will have to add her two other books to my "to-read" list!

#1 Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (maybe you saw the movie) is by Jonathan Safran Foer. This story is about a boy named Oskar Schell, who's father, Thomas Schell, was recently killed in the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. One day, while searching through his father's closet, he knocks over a vase. Inside the vase is a small envelope with the word "Black" written on it, and a small key inside. Oskar and his father loved to play games, especially ones with clues. Oskar knows that his father must have left this as some sort of clue for him, but he has no idea what it means. He is determined to figure out who or what Black is, and what the key is for. He began this journey, and so far he determined that "Black" must be someone's name. But there are many "Blacks" in Manhattan, so now Oskar has to figure out what he will do next. I am excited to see where his father's game will take him.
The case of Oskar and his key is the main story line. However, there has been one section so far that doesn't connect to Oskar's story at all. This section was a letter, written in 1963, addressed "To my unborn child". In this letter, the speaker explains how he became silent. He started losing the ability to say certain words. It started with him not being able to say the name, "Anna" (I do not know who that is). He starts losing other words, little by little, until he can't speak at all. He has the words YES and NO tattooed on the palms of his hands, and carries a book around with him, that he uses to write in so he can communicate. In this letter he tells his unborn son how me met his mother, and then the chapter ends. The letter was not signed, so I don't know who wrote the letter. This left me quite confused, but really interested to learn how it will tie into Oskar's story.
Oskar greatly admired his father, and the two were very close. Oskar's father would take him on adventures and tell fantastic bedtime stories. It is clear that Oskar is grieving the loss of his father, and he talks a lot about having "heavy boots". Certain things, like homeless people and his moms friend, Ron, give him "heavy boots". But other things like, touching his father's clothes and inventing things in his head, make his boots feel lighter. This is an interesting way to describe what I believe is the grief and sorrow that weighs him down. Foer was smart to describe it this way because it helps the reader better understand Oskar. Oskar is young, only nine years old, so his heavy boots are his way of expressing the grief that he is battling. This really helps me empathize with him, and to better feel the weight of this burden he constantly feels.
 Foer does a terrific job of creating Oskar's character for the reader. Oskar is a very interesting character, and there is a lot to know about him. I know he often has heavy boots, he bruises himself when he thinks too much about his father, he is seeing a therapist, he only wears white clothes (I'm interested to figure out why that is), he is very intelligent ( he takes French classes for fun), he is extremely curious and has a thirst for knowledge,and he can be very animated, chatty, and out going (he wrote letters to Stephen Hawking and Ringo Starr). Oskar is an interesting character, and I can't wait to see where his journey takes him.

#1 Paper Towns

My twelve year old sister has been raving about The Fault in Our Stars. I figured this John Green guy must be a pretty incredible author, because she went on and on about what a great book it is, but how sad it is. She was enthralled by the characters he created. She even told me she cried at one part, which I thought was very strange for her, but was a hint that Green must be a powerful, convincing writer. However, since my sister is holding the book captive, I decided to read a different Green book I found on my shelf, and, a short while back I finished Paper Towns.

Paper Towns is a story about Quentin (usually referred to as Q) and his neighbor and childhood friend, Margo Roth Spiegelman. Though Margo has always been a love interest of Q’s, he has been “friend-zoned”. After all, they come from two completely different worlds: Q is a video gaming band geek and Margo is the popular high school goddess. But as the reader and Q soon discover, she is a puzzle and a mystery that is very difficult to solve.

In the beginning, Q accompanies her on a wild night of reckless revenge and pranks that could have only been dreamed up by a high school senior. After that night, however, Margo goes missing. Her family and peers know she has run away before--this is part of the mystery that shrouds the real Margo-- but this time is different. When she doesn't return after a few days, her friends begin to wonder if she will come back. Q enlists the support of his friends Radar, Ben, and Lacey, and the team embarks on a journey to find Margo. Throughout their investigation, they discover clues and secrets about Margo that no one ever knew.
This was a quick read for me, but I really enjoyed this book. There was a clear sense of forward momentum. I felt like the story was always leading me somewhere, and I was excited to see what would happen next. The story never stagnated, or slowed down to a point that bored me. This was a fun story, filled with crazy high school antics. Even though for me, some of the pranks seem beyond my reach and a bit unrealistic, the relationships between characters seemed very real. I especially liked reading the dialog between Q and his therapist parents. The way he analyzed them and called them out whenever they started using psychological tactics was very entertaining. As someone who has two psychologist parents, I could relate to Q, and Green portrayed their relationship truthfully and authentically. Green did make the seniors seem like seniors-- with them staying out late, keg standing at parties, stressing about prom, and often disregarding authority (sounds like senioritis to me)--but it wasn’t all negative. I also really appreciate that there was a real message and some wholesome substance to it as well. The title “Paper Towns” ends up carrying a double meaning, one of which I think serves the purpose of explaining how Margo was so tired of the superficiality and lack of sincerity at school and at home. She understands that there is so much to life than one’s social standing in high school, and that is a valuable message.

#1 Between Shades of Gray

I finished Where Do I Go? and, to be honest, I was disappointed with the ending. I like stories with happy endings, but this story had a fairly negative ending. Philip annoyed me for the entire book. He was never appreciative or supportive of anything Gabby did. He was so insensitive to her emotions, and often put his job before his family. When Gabby went to visit her mother, she found out that she was really in no condition to be living on her own. So Gabby brought her mother and her mother’s dog back with her to her home in Chicago. Gabby was only doing what she thought would be the best and safest decision. She had to take take of her mother! However, Philip was furious. He demanded that Gabby find a shelter for her mother in a week, or else he would push her mother out. Gabby tried, but was unsuccessful. Philip was fed up with Gabby “ruining everything”, so (spoiler) when Gabby returned home from work, she found that Philip had changed the locks to their condo, moved all of her belongings out, and he had left with their two sons. I thought this was a pretty lame move. The only silver lining was that Gabby felt like she found her calling and a new kind of family at the Manna House, which is where she ends up. I was so disappointed that Philip and Gabby couldn't work out their issues, and that Philip ran away from his problems.

Anyway, I have moved on. I just finished another book, Between Shades of Gray. This is NOT to be confused with that other book about shades of gray-- this is completely different. This is a historical fiction heart wrenching story of a girl named Lina and her family’s journey after they are forced from their home by the NKVD. In Russian, the NKVD stands for the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs. In other words, it was the precursor to the KGB, and served as a secret police under the direction of Joseph Stalin. When Lina's father is separated from her, her brother, and her mother, Lina is determined to find a way to contact him so that, no matter what prison or work camp they end up in, he will be able to find his family. Lina is a talented artist and uses whatever materials she can find to draw pictures detailing the places the NKVD takes them. Some of these drawings she is able to mail, but others she must pass along, hoping they will eventually reach her father’s hands.

One cool technique the author uses is the element of flashbacks. She will connect something in Lina’s life, to a scene or some event that occurred before they were taken. Often these are memories of her father, or other happy memories with her family. These flashbacks juxtapose sharply with Lina’s current wretched living conditions in the work camps, but they help to provide more information about the characters and their relationships. I think the flashback is a very cool writing tool, and maybe I will try to apply it to my own writing.

#1 Where Do I Go?

Since I last posted, I finished Outliers. Though some disagree with Gladwell, I thought what he had to say was very interesting and, at the least, gave me a new perspective on success, and somethings to think about. But moving on.

Since we have started our fiction unit, I figured now would be a good time to start reading a fiction novel, and I am glad I did. The non fiction material I have been reading is great, but I forgot how much fun reading fiction is. I have been reading fiction for AP English, but after Hard Times, The Things They Carried, Heart of Darkness, and The Sun Also Rises, I was ready for something a little lighter and much more palatable. So I chose a book off my bookshelf my mom got for me last Christmas that I hadn't read yet.

Now I am reading Where Do I Go? by Neta Jackson. In this story, the main character, Gabrielle “Gabby” Fairbanks has just moved to Chicago (woo!) with her husband Philip. Almost immediately, the tension between Gabby and Philip becomes clear. Philip is very stressed at work. They moved to Chicago for his work, and he is stressed with the challenge of pleasing his new business partner and getting their architectural firm off the ground. For him, everything is about appearance and making sure everything is perfect. On the other hand, Gabby is having a difficult time adjusting to this new life, feeling confined to their downtown high-rise. With their two sons away at boarding school and Philip completely absorbed by work, Gabby feels very much alone. She is at a point where she is searching for something to do. She feels as if she is losing herself, and she desperately wants to find some way to do something meaningful with her time. After Gabby meets a homeless woman, Lucy, her journey begins. She gets involved with Mana House, a homeless shelter, and is quickly hired onto the staff after learning they need a program director. Gabby couldn’t be more thrilled. She is making new friends, helping others, putting her skills to use, and even reconnecting to her long-lost faith. But Philip is just not happy, and I really wish he was. When Gabby initially tells him she is applying for a job at the homeless shelter, he is furious! He says that she should be making connections with people in the city, just not those kind of people, because that will not help his business. He also tells her that she can only work part-time because he needs Gabby to be available for business dinners or other outings with his partner, the Fenchels. Philip seems too controlling and ungrateful,and I don’t think I like him very much.

I really like the story, and can’t wait to see how this all unfolds, but there are a couple of things Jackson does that bother me. For one, she always talks about race when describing a person. Even after the reader knows a character’s ethnicity, it keeps coming up. Now that I think about it, I guess it is really Gabby describing them, and this would make more sense because it gives the reader information about her character. For example, when Gabby first meets Josh and Edesa she writes “A young couple with a baby in a stroller turned the corner by the Laundromat and walked briskly toward me. He was white, she was black Interesting. That would raise a few eyebrows back in Petersburg...Was Josh the baby’s father? He seemed so fair...The mother was definitely black, and the baby...hard to tell”(23). It is like Gabby has never seen a biracial couple before. Three or four references are made to the fact that the receptionist at Mana House is Asian, and the doorman at Gabby’s condo is specifically African American. I am just wondering why there are all the racial descriptions, and if they are necessary. If they were used one time, like when Gabby first meets these people, I would understand that. But it seems that Gabby uses race as the identifying feature for the people she doesn't know very well.

Also, something that really annoys me is how Jackson writes her comparisons. Again, I guess I can’t really attack the author because this is Gabby’s story, and her feelings, but nonetheless, I think the similes are absurd. Here are just a few examples:

“my face heated up like a hot flash”(115)

“He took me away from a job I enjoyed back in Petersburg, left our boys in the academy there, and hung me in a penthouse like a pair of panties on a clothesline”(88)

“Running barefoot in the sand a couple of days ago, sending the gulls fluttering like dancing girls with gauzy white scarves”(58)

“The choir looked like a ten-bean soup packet, all sorts of colors and shapes”(54)

“The, like a dog coming out of the water and shaking off every last drop, I mentally shook myself and got out of the bathroom”(49)

There are many more like these, and most of the time I don’t take them seriously, I just crack up because they sound too ridiculous!

#1 Outliers

I started reading Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. Gladwell is also the author of Blink and The Tipping Point (a book I had been meaning to read... but forgot about it). He is also, if you remember, the person who was speaking in the very loud video in the class next door a few days ago!

This book was highly recommended to me (rather it was forced into my hands before I could respond) by my best friend. She claims it is one of the most influential books she has ever read, so naturally, I was intrigued. She said he is a fantastic writer, and he blew her mind.

I have to say, so far I agree.

Outliers is a book about success. But it's not a How To Be Successful, or Success For Dummies, or Get Successful Quick kind of book. Rather, it is a compilation of research and entertaining analysis of successful figures, and why they became successful. These "outliers" are people who are classed differently from the main population of people, and are statistically differentiated. They are involved in special cases and situations that have allowed them to accomplish extraordinary things because they lie outside of a typical population sample.

From the very beginning, Gladwell destroyed all of my preconceived notions of how one becomes successful. He claimed, and has continued to prove across various cases, that success is less about natural talent or hard work, and much more about being around in just the right circumstance at just the right time.

Malcolm Gladwell

I will try to summarize one of his first examples he uses to illustrate this idea. He explains how success in hockey is not based on individual merit, but rather a series of circumstantial chain reactions. He presents the reader with a roster of the Medicine Hat Tigers team (The Tigers are one of the top teams in the Canadian Hockey League), and it is fairly easy to notice that all of the players are fairly close in age, between 16 and 20. But, more interesting than relative age, are the months these top hockey players were born in. Of the 25 players, only 8 of them were born outside of January, February, or March. This pattern is consistent across multiple Canadian hockey leagues and, believe it or not, there is a reason for this. This is because “the eligibility cutoff for age class hockey is January 1”(24) Gladwell goes on to explain that, “A boy who turns ten on January 2, then, could be playing alongside someone who doesn't turn ten until the end of the year--and at that age, in preadolescence, a twelve month gap in age represents an enormous difference in physical maturity”(24). From this point on, the players with early birthdays will always be one step ahead. They are bigger, stronger, and faster. This allows them to join better teams, get that extra training, and get recruited for more competitive traveling leagues. These advantages add up, and what was once just a physical difference between players, quickly becomes a large difference in skill level, all because of where they were in relation to the eligibility cutoff.

That was a great way for Gladwell to start off his book. I was shocked and hooked, and eager to learn more right away. Everything he writes about I find genuinely interesting. It amazes me that people are able to notice these strange trends, then study them and find that there is some reasoning behind it all.

As with the hockey players, Gladwell goes on to examine successful figures such as Bill Joy (revolutionized computer programming), The Beatles (biggest name in the British Invasion), and Bill Gates (heard of that company, Microsoft?), to name just a few, and explains how each of them came to be so successful. I wish I could just copy down all of these sections so you could read them here because it is so cool to read how it really wasn’t all about talent or intellect. Their successes were largely due to having been raised in an environment perfectly cultivated at just the right time for them to burst into the music scene, or a science field.

Gladwell is insightful, and this book is challenging me to view success in a new way entirely.

From Part 1, Opportunity, I especially liked when he wrote, “Their world-their culture and generation and family history-gave them the greatest opportunities”(Gladwell 158).

I just started the second of three parts, entitled Legacy. So far this section has only discussed the legacy of family feuds in the Appalachians, but I am interested to learn what Gladwell has to say about bloodlines and family histories of success.

I would recommend this book to anyone really. It is intriguing to learn the truth about success, and to uncover this huge mystery. Gladwell writes in an accessible manner- he doesn't use lofty psychoanalytical terms- he is just straightforward. The examples and the cases he studies are the best. After I learn about one person I am always excited to see who he will talk about next! I don’t think I've been this excited about a book in a long time. So yes, I would say I am happy with my friend’s recommendation.

#2 In a Sunburned Country

Since I last posted, I finished the book. I think if was great how Bryson started to talk about some of the more unfortunate events that occurred. For most if the book he is just raving about how wonderful Australia is, how delightful the people are, and occasionally conveys his confusion about Australian history, politics, and sports. But in this last section he describes parts of his trip that were not so great. His waiters were rude, he got terribly sunburned, stuck in a torrential rainstorm, and struggled to find a hotel room.

Overalls this was an interesting book and I learned a lot about Australia. However, I am still thinking about what his point was. It seems like he loved Australia and wants to share all of its mysteries, but why? I've concluded that his main purpose is to entertain the reader, but secondly is to simply keep people informed. He often writes that big news in Australia never gets much coverage. He also stresses the point that the country is teeming with all kinds of species:rare, unidentified, prehistoric, poisonous, endangered, even ones that are still unknown to the world. I think I ultimately Bryson wants to convey the idea that Australia should not be overlooked; it is a thriving country rich in history, full of mystery, and teeming with life. Truly a very interesting place, to say the least.

As to why Bryson had to spend an entire book telling me that, I wish there was some variance. The structure and even the plot became predictable. It became a bit monotonous after a while of him waking up, driving through miles of arid desert, finding some roadside attraction, making it to the next town, spend the evening in a bar, and crashing for the night in some hotel. Then the next day would be more or less the same. The things he did and saw were interesting, I just wish he could have switched up the way in which he presented them.