Post #1

1. The book that I enjoyed the most reading over the summer was "The Stranger" for several reasons. The first being that I was able to relate to the character and some of his opinions. Meursault spends a lot of time in the book just thinking about people and I found that very interesting. I also enjoyed the book a lot because Meursault spends a lot of time analyzing his environment and at the time I was reading it I was hiking in the Eagle Cap wilderness so while Meursault was having trouble feeling emotions towards his environment I was experiencing nature in a way that I never had before. These contrasts made me have a more emotional connection to the story being told as well as because I was hiking I didn't have any electronics so I had a lot of time to think about the story. Overall it was my favorite book from the summer because it allowed for me to think about more than just the literal interpretation and I was able to connect it with what I was experiencing.
2. The book that I enjoyed the least was "Their Eyes Were Watching God" mainly because I didn't feel a connection to the story and the way some of the characters talked irked me. I was able to make some connections to the story, but on a deep emotional level I was unable to, and this made me dislike the story because I didn't care what happened to the characters. When Janie faced hard times with her husbands I felt a lack of emotion that made it more like reading for an assignment rather than reading because I truly enjoyed the story. The reason that really made me dislike the book though was the grammar that some of the characters used while talking. Normally I don't mind poor grammar and misspellings because I know I do it all the time, but the way they talk just made me annoyed to the point where I didn't want to connect with the characters, which also lead to me not caring about what happened to them. Besides that I thought that Tea Cake's fate was very interesting and I thought that that part of the story was very creative and interesting to read.

3. If I were to write an essay on "We" my focus would be on the word choice by Yevgeny Zamyatin in the novel. More specifically, the author often uses words that draw emotion out in a society where emotions don't play a major role. And the author's word choice reflects well what is going on in the story, for example when D-503 begins to feel more and more emotions his vocabulary serves as a good contrast to what he is feeling and what he felt previously. As well as the real world application of ideas in the "We" such as the operation in the end can be related the movies such as "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" in which memory deletion is readily available to the general public and if the government wanted to abuse the power they could and people wouldn't be able to realize it because they could delete the memory of it. This is especially scary because as the human brain is studied more and more and especially the more memory is studied the greater the possibility of ideas such as these becoming a reality.