Exercise 3

http://www.teenreads.com/reviews/47
http://www.teenreads.com/reviews/a-darkling-plain-book-four-of-the-hungry-city-chronicles
http://www.teenreads.com/reviews/a-web-of-air

-Intro giving background information.
-Give reactions to the book
-Pass an overall judgment with points to back it up.

Reading Post 3/25

My first goal of finishing The Well of Ascension before spring break is distant but not out of reach.  I have one week to read ~480 pages, very possible assuming I'm not too busy.  Second goal of finishing the entire Misborn series before the end of the school year is also quite distant.  After finishing The Well of Ascension there are still two more books with ~700 pages each if not more.  My last goal of reading at least 30 minutes a night didn't go well.  Some nights I was more busy than others.  My total reading in The Well of Ascension this week are from 1-114.

Note 1

The birds, who, happily for their own peace of mind and personal comfort, were in blissful ignorance of the preparations which had been making to astonish them, on the first of September, hailed it no doubt, as one of the pleasantest mornings they had seen that season. Many a young partridge who strutted complacently among the stubble, with all the finicking coxcombry of youth, and many an older one who watched his levity out of his little round eye, with the contemptuous air of a bird of wisdom and experience, alike unconscious of their approaching doom, basked in the fresh morning air with lively and blithesome feelings, and a few hours afterwards were laid low upon the earth. But we grow affecting: let us proceed.

In plain common-place matter-of-fact, then, it was a fine morning — so fine that you would scarcely have believed that the few months of an English summer had yet flown by. Hedges, fields, and trees, hill and moorland, presented to the eye their ever-varying shades of deep rich green; scarce a leaf had fallen, scarce a sprinkle of yellow mingled with the hues of summer warned you that autumn had begun. The sky was cloudless, the sun shone out bright and warm; the songs of birds, and hum of myriads of summer insects, filled the air; and the cottage gardens, crowded with flowers of every rich and beautiful tint, sparkled, in the heavy dew, like beds of glittering jewels. Everything bore the stamp of summer, and none of its beautiful colours had yet faded from the dye.

In this excerpt from Charles Dickens' airy novel The Pickwick Papers, the inchoate stages of Fall prior to a hunting trip are molded into brimming words.  Though "everything bore the stamp of summer" still, little hints of fall began to poke through the "fine morning", notifying that "Autumn had begun."  The insouciant, docile language used by Dickens carries a simplistic tone hinting that summer will soon perish, to be replaced with the full brunt of Fall.  The writer observes the "scarce sprinkle of yellow mingled with the hues of summer" verifying the fact that it was "the first of September."  The plentiful account of personification portrays an imagery sopped vision of ambling through the felicity of the nascent Autumn.

Exercise 2

(7)  Not only is a bitterness tone expressed, but also pure anger with some words and even sentences being capitalized such as "...because her little sister will NOT shut up she will NOT shut up SHE WILL NOT SHUT UP and Roberta is about to BASH her little sister's HEAD IN IF SHE DOES NOT SHUT UP."

(4)  Finally, Barry also  consistently bashed the city without giving it a single positive feature with her saying, "Once upon a cruddy time on a cruddy street on the side of a cruddy hill in the cruddiest part of a crudded-out town in a cruddy state, country, world, solar system, universe" exudes a snobbish and ungrateful tone to the readers.

(5)  The " cruddy time on a crudddy street on the side of a cruddy hill in the cruddiest part of a crudded-out town in a cruddy state, country, world, solar system, universe."


Vivr Sonar Leer

Exercise

In this excerpt from Stardust, Neil Gaiman details the town of Wall in a matter of fact, gruff manner.  The town sits "on a high jut of granite amidst a small forest woodland."  The atmosphere surrounding "grey stone, with dark slate roofs and high chimneys" whispers of the subtle monotony that the quaint town has.  "Grey and tall and stocky as the granite outcrop their town was built upon" are the inhabitants described in an unvarnished plain-dealing diction.

Anthology Theme

 

I'm thinking of covering entropy as my Anthology topic.  Busy and chaotic schedules are something no one can escape.  It's a timeless aspect of life that through the eyes of a poetic thinker could be made into something very cool.  For artifacts I'm looking into a Celtic symbol meaning "ordered chaos" and aside from that the rest is up in the air.

Reading Goals

1. Finish The Well of Ascension before spring break
2. Finish entirety of  the Mistborn series by the end of the quarter (including the stand alone).
3. Read at least 30 minutes per night.

Reading Post 3/8

Being in between books but still trying to maintain the same pace of reading is a weird situation.  Although this situation will be coming to an end shortly, The Well of Ascension is no longer checked out, now my only obstacle is making the trip out to the main library, or waiting longer and having them ship it to the Aboite Branch.  This week my reading has been a purposeless collection of filler reading.  Wikipedia articles and a couple chapters of Artemis Fowl for the nostalgia, oh and after the vocab test I read the first chapter of World War Z.   That was pretty interesting and I'll come back to that later.

I'm echoing here but this is something I wonder about all the time, and that's the vast range of articles on wikipedia; the people who writes the articles, what possesses them to write them, are the experts on the subject or just internet dwellers who do their research, or perhaps those two things are synonymous.  Regardless I'm glad they do whatever they do, otherwise I wouldn't have the ability to read this article.  In a quick summary the article covers the war tactic of "dummy tanks", inflatable or wooden mock tanks used for a couple different reasons.  They can be decoys, say you send the decoys in one direction then flank from another, used for practice battle scenarios, or intimidation.  I'm left wondering how soldiers accompanying these fakes must feel.  I can't even begin to imagine how under normal circumstances a soldier must feel, but when you're surrounded by essentially blow up toys in hopes that the enemy will be too afraid to attack must be a completely different feeling.  I'm sure this is a thought that has been conceived and brought up many times, but under what circumstances had to occur for the plan to be instilled.  To me it seems like sending a lamb to a wolf only the lamb is wearing a bulky bear costume.  Of the articles I read this provoked the most thoughts.

I don't really have much to say about Artemis Fowl, it's a series I have and still do enjoy and read a bit of it to pass the time this week.  I'll skip ahead to my thoughts on World War Z.  The text book format while still being in first person perspective is an interesting way of retelling the series of events of a zombie apocalypse.  From what I read it appeared to be a promisingly entertaining book.  Perhaps it will be something I'll come back to after finishing the Mistborn series, we'll see how things unravel.

Reading Post - Perpetually Waiting

A fortnight, if not more is how long The Well of Ascension, next book in the Mistborn series, has been checked out.  Even when it does become available I will have to wait for them to ship it to the Aboite branch unless I want to make the trek out to the Main Library.  Regardless in the meantime I must find other means of reading.  Bored with my meager collection of books and not wanting to start a whole new book I find fulfillment from the random button on wikipedia.  From abusing the random button I've learned that the scope of articles covered on wikipepdia truly knows no end.  Article genres range from pleasantly interesting to morbidly obscure, it's a gamble as to what you'll get.

One favorite article that I stumbled onto was the tale of Hugh Glass.  Hugh is a man of legend, a man who conquered the wrath a nature, a man who makes Bear Grylls appear as a feeble boy scout.  A fur trader out with his cohorts adventuring in the wilderness of South Dakota when they get a bit too close to some cubs.  The mother attacks swiping the rifle out of Hugh's hands.  Glass slays the attacker with only a hunting knife.  However he suffered great wounds as well and was left unconscious.  His friends leave him for dead assuming he's long gone.  Glass awakens a bloody mess and has little more than his determination.  Glass proceeds to crawl 200 miles to find the men who left him to die.  The story is one I find myself reflecting over during my downtime from the world.  What must Glass have been thinking during such a trek lasting over six months of nonstop crawling?  A monument now stands where the mauling is guessed to have happened.  If I ever find myself traveling west of Illinois I think it'd be a cool trip to make to see the monument giving tribute to the impossible feats of Hugh Glass.