Reading Wishlist

Books I want to read : Eleanor & Park - Rainbow Rowell Will Grayson, Will Grayson - John Green Silver Lining's Playbook - I Am the Messenger - Markus Zusak The Art of Racing In the Rain- Garth Stein The Divergent Series- Veronica Roth Dan Brown's books Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close - Johnathon Safran Foer Salem's Lot, The Shining & Doctor Sleep, 11/22/63 - Stephen King The Road - Cormac McCarthy Gone Girl- Gillian Flynn Slaughterhouse 5 - Kurt Vonnegut Tom Sawyer & Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain Jane Eyre Wuthering Heights Dracula - Bram Stoker Room - Emma Donoghue Hollow City - Ransom Riggs Les Miserables - Victor Hugo Finish the Gone series - Michael Grant Finish The House of Night Series- Pc & Kristin Cast Finish Pretty Little Liars Series - Sara Shepard Finish Mortal Instruments Series - Cassandra Clare The "Classics" list on my Kindle Rereads- Harry Potter Series - Jk Rowling To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee In Cold Blood - Truman Capote Twilight Series - Stephanie Meyer The Fault in our Stars - John Green The Hunger Games Series & Gregor the Overlander Series - Suzanne Collins All of the Jerri Spinelli books I own Peter Pan - JM Barrie 13 Reasons Why - Jay Asher The Percy jackson Series - Rick Riordon the Perks of Being a Wallfower - Stephen Chobosky (SP?) Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger The Outsiders - (Blanking on the author) So many more I can't wrap my brain around it!

Book Talk

Book 3 Review

The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris is a truly captivating novel. Almost all of the characters from this book really stick with you, particularly the psychotic psychologist, Dr. Hannibal Lecter. Hannibal’s behavior towards the protagonist, Clarice Starling, is the heart of the story. The relationship he develops with her is not exactly one of friendship, but the fact that he and she rely on each other when they are such opposites in terms of good and evil leaves the reader dumbstruck. Hannibal looks to Clarice’s visits as a way to escape from the bore of his endless days in a prison cell. In helping her to find out who and where Buffalo Bill is he manipulates her into a game of cat and mouse. Saying, "quid pro quo. I tell you things, you tell me things" (Harris). He even manages to manipulate the reader, you know he’s a murderer but you find yourself drawn to the passages where Jack sends Clarice on another trip to Hannibal’s brightly lit cell. He is absolutely entranced by her. He gives her as little information as possible every visit as way to keep her coming back to him. You don’t read about this in the book, but in the movie adaptation they show you a drawing that Hannibal has done of Clarice, perfectly detailed and almost creepy in its accuracy. He plays with her, talks about how “he’d give her Jame Gumb tomorrow”(Harris). He is absolutely psychotic.

Harris truly developed the characters he wrote about to the point where they’re almost alive. What makes Hannibal Lecter such a dynamic character though is that he is simply brilliant. He is almost brilliant to a fault, and it’s believable that his genius ended up turning him into the vicious serial killer he became. You don’t truly realize just how evil he is until his escape from the cell in the museum. He uses his cunning to trick the police into thinking he’s dead, when he actually carved a mask out of a slain guard’s face and pretended to be the guard, seriously injured to the point of disfiguration.

 If you contrast the evilness of Dr. Lecter with that of Jame Gumb (a.k.a. Buffalo Bill, the serial killer Clarice had to enlist Hannibal to help her find,) you can really see what true evil is. Not only does he murder, but Hannibal manipulates people, gets pure pleasure out of toying with the thoughts and feelings of those around him. Whereas Mr. Gumb is murdering women for one sole purpose; he believes he was meant to be a woman, and lacks the intelligence to get what he craves out of life in an appropriate way. Jame Gumb became the evil person that he is because of his weak mental capacity, and circumstance. You can tell by the way he talks, "It rubs the lotion on it's skin. It does this whenever it is told" (Harris). Hannibal, however, is the pure essence of evilness. He is evil because he loves being evil, loves hurting people, loves manipulating everyone around him.

The Silence of the Lambs is a beautifully crafted novel, filled with dynamic characters and vividly realistic moments throughout its plot. Thomas Harris take you on a ride through his story, leaves you questioning good and evil, and wondering what it means to be filled with so much darkness and evil that you become the villain that Hannibal Lecter is. Though the plot could have been moved along a little faster, I really enjoyed this book. If you like mystery and thriller and books that leave you thinking, this is just the one to pick up. If you do read it though, by its end, you won’t be able to muster anything more than silence.

Heroes and Villains

In The Silence of the Lambs I’m reading about one of the most infamous villains to date, Hannibal Lecter. He is the quintessential villain, whose story you could piece into the pattern of a villain archetype’s journey. But Hannibal Lecter is different, because not only is he a vicious and cunning serial killer, but he also happens to be very likable. I believe that because of this, The Silence of the Lambs has made a lasting impact on readers everywhere. Thomas Harris plays with the reader, makes them impatient for more passages featuring the ever fascinating “Hannibal the Cannibal”. He’s devilish but interesting, psychotic but extremely intelligent. He is probably one of the most faceted and developed characters I have ever read about.

The relationship that Clarice the protagonist, and Dr. Lecter is very strange, but their relationship greatly contributes to the major success of the novel. Clarice is again, the typical hero, haunted by a troubling childhood, but uses her strife as motivation to help others. All she wants to do is become a successful agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. As only a trainee, she is faced with the dangerous task of getting information about “Buffalo Bill” –current serial murderer extraordinaire- from someone who knows a lot about the business of killing innocent people, Dr. Hannibal Lecter. Hannibal’s likableness comes into play when Clarice Starling first visits him. He may be evil, but he helps her. This is one of the only books I have read that features a villain and a hero successfully working together. Because of this, the book is very dynamic, and a great read for anyone looking for a thrill.

Blog Post 6

In my opinion, keeping classic school novels in school curriculum is not "readicide". Reading stories written by the likes of Shakespeare and F. Scott Fitzgerald can be very beneficial for every student or person alike. However, I do think the fact that schools do not include more modern novels or texts when planning out classes can be somewhat harmful.

Students learn better when they relate to things, and a senior in high school could have a pretty hard time relating to the characters from Hamlet. However, you tell a student buy a copy of The Hunger Games, a book with mature themes and concepts that can definitely be analyzed in an English class AND one that was written within this decade, they will probably be more willing and excited to read.

I don’t think that the classics should be completely eliminated from school lesson plans though. They may be older novels, but the ideas behind them and the lessons they teach you can be universal for all ages and times. I mean I personally got a TON out of reading The Catcher in the Rye, even though it was written several years before I was born.

It’s important that not only schools, but students as well recognize the benefits to include modern and classic text within their current curriculum. As the years go by writing styles change, history is being made, and people’s outlooks on the world are completely different than those of the past. It’s important to see that change, and compare it to how it was different decades and centuries ago. Writing and reading will never go out of style, so it’s silly to think that past novels will ever be killing themselves off because people always read them. I mean, if they were worthy in the past, whose to say they won’t be in the present and future?

Post 8 Truth in a Memoir

Readers do need clear lines between different genres of books. Readers are picky, they come to enjoy a certain style of writing, and they generally read books that fall into that style. Writers however, like to have freedom in the creative process of piecing together a novel. They straddle the lines between two different genres, because they grow wary of writing the same type of book over and over again. This can be a problem for readers, who usually stick within a certain genre because if they buy a book claiming to be "fantasy" they want that book to be made of a "fantasy" story. Novelists run into a particulary sticky genre clash when writing memoirs. In my opinion, if you want to write a memoir you need to be as truthful as possible. When you add false details, you can no longer classify your work as non-fiction. If you want more detail or excitement, don't label it a memoir, make it a fictional story with realisitic elements. Change more than a few things, change names and places while keeping the core of the story the same. And if it makes you feel better, when it's published write on the cover "Inspired by true events".  You can't expect readers to be happy if they find out what they thought was true was in fact falsified. Staying within the genres in place is really the most sensible thing to do.

Book 2 Project

Post 5: The Book Thief Adaptation

In making the film adaptation of The Book Thief, the director no doubt ran in to challenging decisions, and roadblocks, as there is so much material and not all of it can be included. A big challenge was probably how to incorporate death as a narrator into the movie. In the book, death is a very ambiguous character, with no real description. His narration is also almost forgetful at some points, but his often sarcastic sidenotes remind you of his presence, I'd imagine that including those sidenotes and quick narrations would be pretty tricky to manuever in the adaptation process, as well as how to develop death as a character to be seen in the film.

There are so many important scenes and events in the novel that would definitely have to be in the film if it hopes to be a successful adaptation. First, they would have to include how Leisel's Papa discovered her hidden book, and instead of repremanding her for stealing, saw that she wanted to learn and took the oppurtunity to teach Leisel to read through their night reading sessions and their lessons in the basement. I think it would also be neccessary to include Leisel staying over in the Mayor's Wife's library, and how her and Ilsa's friendship was ruined by tough circumstances, but eventually salvaged by a mutual love for books and hope for better times. Most importantly though, at least in my opinion, is Leisel's relationship with Max. The film must show just how big of an impact Max has on Leisel, how keeping the secret of his existence affects her, as well as when she discovers that Max has been taken prisoner.

Since there is so much detail in The Book Thief, there are some things that can be left out. A portion of the book that may not be quite so important is when Leisel reads to Frau Holtzapfel towards the end of the story. Its overall significance is to move the story along, but it doesn't really impact Leisel's story as other parts do. Another part that the film could do without would be Leisel's early school years. They develop Leisel's character, but not quite as much as other events do, and ultimately could be left out or not as developed as they are in the book. For instance, the fact that Leisel beat up a boy in the schoolyard doen't really affect the overall plot.