Blog 2: Reading Page

Reading has always been something I had enjoyed. In fact, I was considered the bookworm out of my cousins. It's sort of why my parents encourage me to go outside and be social. The problem with my reading was that I couldn't remember all the facts when I finished. This problem kept occurring until last November. When I entered high school, I was taught to annotate, with is underline important facts about a book. Dr. D, my English teacher, set the Lord of the Flies by William Golding in front of me and told me to find everything important for future discussions. Before I thought is was a waste of time for me, but it actually helped. Not only did it help me in reading better, but in studying for tests and quizzes as well. I realized that reading the Lord of the Flies and annotating it can be helpful in other classes.

Other books appeared throughout the year, such as Absolute True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie, Purple Hibiscus by Adichie, and Macbeth by William Shakespeare. Each of these books had a different style of writing that I took an interest to. For example, ATDPTI had drawn comics that explained parts of the main character, Arnold Spirit. These comics are humorous at first, but they started to give off a sentimental feeling as the story progressed. Another example would be Macbeth, where the book is actually as a script and the lines are written in different types of poetry. Lines like "fair is foul and foul is fair" holds a deeper meaning.

I created different projects out of these books, mainly Purple Hibiscus. Purple Hibiscus is a book created by an African woman named Adichie. She writes of a girl named Kambili and her family. Kambili goes through a journey in order to realize that her father's life for her isn't the only life. My main project for this book was to track down a character and analyze him/her. The character I chose was Kambili, and I found that she was an interesting character. For example, Kambili is blinded by the desire to please her father that she considered what the world had to offer. She also fell in love with the priest in Nsukka named Papa Amadi, which I found as a huge twist. All in all, I believed that I have improved as a reader, for I have learned how to better understand the books and have improved in English class altogether.