Summer Assignment #4 (7/23)

In this post, we're supposed to be talking about what made us want to read this book and also who would we recommend it to. So the reasons I had for reading this book were not super profound and planned. I had already seen the movie and we owned it before I even knew it was on the list. When I was looking at the book list, I didn't see any books that seemed really interesting to me and then I saw this one. I enjoyed the movie when we saw it, and thought it would probably be a good book too. The fact that we already had a copy that I could write in made the reading part a lot easier to go back to and know what I was going to write in these posts.
    
     As for connections I made to the book, I made a couple. When I was in the 4th and 5th grade, all I did with my free time was read, very similar to Liesel reading anything she could get her hands on. Another I made was to the rough foster mother (referenced in one of the previous posts) who did not seem all that nice but did love Liesel and was not as mean or rough as she seemed at first.

     Who would I recommend this book to? Well I'm not entirely sure, but I guess that's the idea of a recommendation. Well, if you want a happy story (at the end, at least) that's a little different from the others, this is your book. If reading is your life (and you haven't already read it) I recommend this for you because you'll find many connections with Liesel and will like the characters.

I found a short biography/article of Markus Zusak that includes his other books here.

Summer Assignment #3 (7/23)

This hook that I thought effectively grabbed the reader's attention, is found near the beginning:

 

"***HERE IS A SMALL FACT***

You are going to die.

 

 

 

 

I am in all truthfulness attempting to be cheerful about this whole topic, though most people find themselves hindered in believing me, no matter my protestations. please, trust me. I most definitely can be cheerful. I can be amiable. Agreeable. Affable. And that's only the A's. Just don't ask me to be nice. Nice has nothing to do with me."(3)

 

 

 

     So you have read the hook and now you have made your own opinions about it already, regardless of what I write here. So I'm not going to try and persuade you that this is a good hook, only that I think it is. What I am going to do is tell you the background to the quote/hook.

 

     The speaker is Death, if you haven't read my other summer assignment posts yet, and he's very sarcastic in his narration of the story. The book really focuses on what life means and how it matters. The how it matters to the people around you part is especially well hit on by the emphasis put on it by Death. He puts this emphasis on it by throughout the story, telling the reader how each person died, but in an oddly descriptive way. No, he doesn't tell the gory details if they died from war, but his details are focused more on the victims last moments of life as opposed to their first without. He talks about how they were feeling before they died, and how peaceful they were, and often tells what they were thinking about (if they were awake). I don't want to spoil the ending, but some people die suddenly close to Liesel and it has a very almost overemphasized peacefulness part to the description of the story by Death. That is how this hook ties in with the whole book and how the last line somewhat foreshadows the conclusion.

 

 





Summer Assignment #2 (7/02)

     For this post, we have to describe what each of the main characters want. So, I'll start with the most prominent character, who I talked about in the first post. So Liesel is learning to read and that's her main focus but as the narration put it, "What was there to be angry about? What had happened in the past four or five months to culminate in such a feeling? In short, the answer traveled from Himmel Street, to the Fuhrer, to the unfindable location of her real mother, and back again. Like most misery, it started with apparent happiness." I think that this starts to get Liesel a lot more developed in the story as her deep thoughts and motives are foreshadowed in this short passage. Her foster parents, like most people in their village, want to just stay alive but still keep their morality by helping a Jewish man stay there in secret for months. The Jewish man wants, like them, to stay alive but he also enjoys the time because he reads at night with Liesel. Those are really all of the characters with clear or implied wants/fears.

      One theme I think is appearing in the book, particularly emphasized by Death being the narrator is, "Life is so short so don't worry about the small things and make something out of your life, since it can be taken away at any time." I think this is one theme because the book is about these people that have physical problems (such as starving or for the Jewish man being killed), but what the book more focuses on are the moral problems (usually relating to putting yourself in more risk of the physical problems). I think this is a good theme because we are so focused on the things that don't matter when you step back and look at your whole life. We should focus more on what really matters and less on little problems.

      I already briefly referenced how the book is structured in the first post, but I'll get a little more detailed in this one. The book is narrated by Death, portrayed as sarcastic and humorous in this book. His little side comments are found every few pages and give some information to an interesting translation (because some of the insults are in German) or give us some information that we otherwise wouldn't have about a new character's background or relationship to the story. The rest of the story is just plain narration with some dialogue but more of the story as opposed to the characters talking. This is probably on purpose so the narrator can put in some of the character's thoughts and emotions instead of the reader having to try and figure that out from dialogue (because obviously you don't just blurt out everything you think and feel to the world so it's simpler for the reader).

I found an interview transcript with the author, Markus Zusak, and I thought it was really good and talks about what he thinks of the book and how he structured it and why.

    

Summer Assignment Entry #1 (6/29)

     For my summer reading assignment, I chose to read the book The Book Thief. There is a good variety of different level/importance characters. There's the main character, Liesel Meminger, who has just moved in with foster parents (in NAZI Germany) after her brother dies and her mom can't take care of her. She has integrated pretty well into her new life, and has made friends and helps out around the house. Her main problem right now in the story is that she wants to write to her mom but Hitler took her mom away (why she can't take care of Liesel). So that's Liesel so far in the book, next is the narrator.

     The narrator is Death, but not foreboding depressing death like you might find in some stories, but a sarcastic and humorous death with multiple side comments put in along the story to show you his perspective. An example is his description of Liesel's foster-mother:

   SOME FACTS ABOUT

ROSA HUBERMANN

She was five feet, one inch tall and wore her

browny gray strands of elastic hair in a bun.

To supplement the Hubermann income, she did

the washing and ironing for five of the wealthier

households in Molching.

Her cooking was atrocious.

She possessed the unique ability to aggravate

 almost anyone she ever met.

But she did love Liesel Meminger.

(35)

 

     Liesel's foster mother is described above, but her foster dad is about the opposite. He plays the accordion and annoys Rosa, and overall gets Liesel's adoration. Their family is very poor, because he's a painter and hardly gets work and Rosa has a little money from the laundry of the rich.

 

     I had already seen the movie before I decided to read the book, and to this point in the book I think that the movie portrays the story pretty well. The only noticeable difference is in the movie it portrays her forster parents as older than in the book and doesn't have Death's commentary on the story and characters.

 

     Right now in the story Liesel is at a NAZI book burning and I predict she will take a book from the things being burned because the title of the book is The Book Thief and Death referenced that she would "strike again" (taking a book) in this chapter so I'm guessing that'll happen here.

 

     I haven't gotten into the thick of the plot yet so everything up to this point is explained so I don't have any questions yet I'll be sure to include those when I get some.

 

Below is the most popular cover of the book.

 



Innocence #3

I'm still reading Innocence and they're still running around all over the place and Addison still has basically no idea what's going on but he's just going with the flow. I think that another emerging theme is that books are good to read and stuff, but doing the real thing is much, much better and a better experience. I think this is a theme in this book because it is constantly said in different ways in Addison's thoughts. I think this theme also applies to technology.

It applies to technology because yes, technology can be a good source of information. But the problem comes when we replace our lives with technology and consider it the same. I think everyone would agree, going to the Grand Canyon or Niagra Falls or some other place would be infinitely better than seeing a bunch of pictures of them.

So how do we change our lives so that we're living our life in the present and not technology? Well, the answer is pretty simple. Just turn off your phone or your computer, and go do something. Play a game of pickup basketball. Throw a ball in the backyard. Addison lived most of his life sheltered from society because he couldn't be seen by anyone. He had to try to replace his life with books, and what is he learning while he's being chased by people and chasing people with Gwyneth?

It's not the same as a book.

It's really not. Learning how to play baseball works better in a yard than on a book or phone. The same is true of your classes. You'd learn Spanish a lot faster if it was constantly spoken to you instead of learning it out of a textbook. So put down the phone and do the real thing for awhile every day.

Innocence Dean Koontz

I'm still reading Innocence  by Dean Koontz and nothing has really been cleared up that much. He's friends now with that Goth person he met in the library, and weird stuff is happening and he really doesn't have any control in his life anymore.

I think that Dean Koontz is having this chaotic plotline to show us that we have very little control in our own lives, and what we can decide wh should put at the top priority because that's what makes us different from the next person, because most of us have a similar lifestyle: Wake up, get ready, go to work/school, come home, maybe work some more, eat, maybe go out and do something, and go back to sleep. That's not really special. What makes us who we are is what we do during all of those times. So don't just go through the motions at school or work just to look forward to something else. Look forward to everything that you're going to do so you can be a happy person.

On the characterization part of the story, I think Dean Koontz is emphasizing the point I said above with the way the characters act and how they look. For example, Addison (the main guy) always wears a hood and a mask because people are repulsed by how he looks. This can relate to us because we all have weird fears or phobias that really don't make sense but it's there anyways. An example of this is if you're scared of spiders. Now, we all know that a regular spider in your house can't really hurt you or do anything, but lots of people freak out when they see one. Addison is taken to a house with people in it and he's only met like 5 people in his life so this really freaks him out so he just looks down all the time and doesn't look at anyone that he's "meeting".

Finished Salem's Lot

So I finished Salem's Lot, and I can't say too much about it because that would spoil the book if you read it. I thought it was pretty good, but had a good ending that wrapped everything up while still one of those endings that is like a new beginning.

The good stuff that I thought was in the book was it had a pretty unpredictable plot, unlike some books or movies that I've read, and it has a lot of aspects and stories that all basically come together in the story. Another good thing Stephen King does in the book is making the characters actual people, not just heroes that can't do anything wrong, they make mistakes and mess up quite often, so I thought that was real and good.

Some bad stuff is that certain scenes were pretty predictable and one character that he didn't really make you understand was the main bad guy, which I think would have added to the story. Those are really the only things that I thought would have improved the story, but like I said, a pretty good book overall.



I started another newer book by Dean Koontz, called Innocence. It is about this guy who looks weird for some reason and makes people hate him when they see him. I know, kind of weird but we'll see what happens. He has this underground place where he lives that's attached to the sewer system so he can sneak around the city, which hasn't been named yet.

I think that Dean Koontz has done a good job so far of characterizing the main character by having it narrated from his point of view and I think this book will have very few characters due to how reclusive the main character is.

I think that having few characters will allow the author to really get the chance to show the reader what each of the characters' point of views are and what they think about other characters and will do this to help you infer what each character's reactions will be to whatever happens throughout the story.