Hello!

-
Hello and welcome to blog!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Escapism in Coraline

-
This week I read Neil Gaiman's children's novel, Coraline.  I had previously seen and loved the movie but never sat down to read the book. The thing that struck me about this novel is the same thing that struck me in the film; not the fact that it's pretty scary for a children's book, something Gaiman is now known for, but the sadness of how ignored by her parents Coraline feels. It's incredibly relevant to many people and it just hits you in such a way that you can't shake it. The entire novel then turns into a form of escapism. Coraline uses this alternate world or dimension as a form of escapism from her seemingly uncaring parents. Why else would she just blindly accept another mother and father with buttons for eyes if not for the fact that they are everything she wishes her parents and world to be like? I certainly can't chalk it up to her being a child as Coraline seems to be pretty smart. Despite all of the adventure and horror in this novel, it's...
Read more

Harry Potter and Its House System

-
This week I both re-read J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and read for the first time the short Prequel snippet provided to us (which only increased my frustration out Rowling as a Prequel is the only thing I ever asked for out of her - I couldn't care less about any of the other spinoffs produced). I admit, I've been a fan of Harry Potter since I saw the first film when I was four years old with my father, so it would be easy for me to talk about many different things. However, I'm going to focus on the house system inside of Hogwarts. It's not something I thought very much about prior to it being brought up in class, which is why I find it so interesting now. It does indeed seem to be just an easy way to establish very base character traits within characters without actually having to state those character traits, which I find to be very smart, considering you still have a vast variety of characters amongst each house so it doesn't feel...
Read more

'The Distance of the Moon' Was a Weird Read

-
I chose to read Italo Calvino's short story, The Distance of the Moon', for our Literary Speculation section and it was....bizarre. Surely not the weirdest thing I've ever read but it certainly turned into something I wasn't expecting. It starts with someone older telling one of those "back in my day" sorts of stories about how the moon used to be right upon them and starts to go into the finer details of exactly how that worked. This lore is what hooked me in. It started to get a bit weird when they went into this "milk" that the moon apparently produces and how they would harvest it. That didn't throw me off completely, though, as it was still giving part into the lore of the moon and these people's relationship with it. This is also when the story started to shift more into a weird love triangle revolving around the narrator, his deaf cousin, and a married woman, and this is where it lost me. What began as a story about a people and their ...
Read more