Lord of the Flies 3

If you were stranded on a deserted island, what would you do? If this question was commonly said back when William Golding wrote Lord of the Flies, I think he might have been playing off of it. He used this imagined situation as a way to show the two sides of everyone, as I talked about in an earlier post.

He uses three main aspects or the story to get his point across: Ralph, Jack, and the Beast. Ralph represents the realistic point of view at which we look at this island question. For example, we might think that the first thing to do is to find food or water of shelter or make arrangements to be rescued. Jack represents the more crazy and savage side of us, in which we would enjoys our time and think about impossible things we might do on this island, simply because we can. The beast represents this inevitable end and darkness that we would come to on this island. It could possibly be anywhere as well. Golding could be saying that when these two sides of us compete with each other and the more adventurous side wins, we reach this darkness.

There are even more complicated little symbolisms that other characters represent in the story. I am still fuzzy on what the character Simon represents, however Piggy is very obvious. He represent the intellectual side of us. This also says that the intellectual side cannot survive without the reality (since Piggy stayed with Ralph), which makes sense, for what would be the point of knowing things if you could not apply it to the world.

SPOILER ALERT: Then Piggy dies. Right after the destruction of the conch shell. It reads, “... the conch exploded into a thousand white fragments and ceased to exist. Piggy, saying nothing, with no time for even a grunt, traveled through the air sideways from the rock... the body of Piggy was gone” (Golding 255-256). I figured out the the conch probably represents civilization and order, since it is used to call meetings in the group of boys. So I guess Golding is saying that intelligence and intellectuals can only exist with order. In the wild, both order, intelligence and reality disappears.

I enjoyed the book overall, though it ended a lot faster than I thought it would, and I think the climax was only a few pages before the end. I hope you enjoyed reading this post and hopefully got something out of it. Next book: A Thousand Splendid Suns.

Lord of the Flies 2

I don’t know if William Golding meant for this, but I can’t stop paying attention to one thing while I read this book: the characters Jack and Ralph. I think about them as if they are the same person and each boy represents a different side of that person. Jack represents the adventurous and risk taking side and Ralph represents the more realistic side. For example, while Jack is busy exploring or hunting pigs, Ralph is focused on keeping the fire lit to make sure a nearby boat would spot them. In the last few pages of what I have read so far Jack says, “‘Let’s have a fort.’ ‘There’s no food here,’ said Ralph, ‘ and no shelter. Not much fresh water’”(Golding 148).

This is another scenario that I really saw the two sides come out in both characters. Even though Ralph is a young boy, he no longer becomes amused by forts and exploration, he only displays frustration from not being rescued from the island.

I looked up the meanings of each of the names and I found that (in most sources) Ralph means strength and Jack means rebellion. This expands my original meanings a little bit (though Jack’s makes more sense to me). As I was trying to figure out the purpose of having both boys represent something, I realized that it could be showing the state of the boys in comparison to civilization. I predict that the group of boys will end up following Jack more often than Ralph simply because he is more adventurous. As Jack becomes in charge, it will represent how they are drifting from civilization and becoming more savage-like.

Anyway, the book is still rising to the climax and I have a feeling that it is about to get really creepy/weird. I don’t really know what’s going on with this man that fell from a plane with a parachute. I think he is dead? And he will probably contribute to making this book really messed up. Well, I will find out as I continue reading, I guess!

Lord of the Flies 1

            So far this book has nothing to do with flies and I doubt it will. Never the less, it probably has some significance symbolically and I should keep a note on that as I read. Any way, what this book is actually about: a bunch of boys aged elementary school and tweens that apparently crash landed on an island (or were dropped onto an island after their plane malfunctioned or was shot down?) without any adults. That's pretty much all I know... There will probably be struggles with power and survival throughout the group of boys later in the story. There are two current boys who are very good candidates to lead the group, and though they are getting along now, they probably won’t around the middle of the book.

The only other really extraordinary aspect about the author (William Golding) besides the fact that he is an award winning author, is that he fought in the Navy during WWII. This probably means that Golding knows a little bit about surviving and death and power ranks, and that he will probably convey this situation very well.

            Hopefully this book stays interesting and we’ll see what happens! I should be writing my next post soon!

Riding the Bus with my Sister 3

I have two things that I want to talk about Riding the Bus with my Sister. (By the way... Its a VERY good book, and I recommend it to all).

1) I finally found out what it is actually about.

Almost the entire time I was reading, I knew that the book was about a woman going on an adventure with her sister and becoming closer to her. But as I learned more and more about their childhood, I realized it was more than that. When they were younger, as it says in the book, their parents divorced (Actually I’m not sure if the physically divorced... at least not right away). After a while, their mom started to date again (they were living with their mom). She just kept dating and finally she started dating a man who drank and smoked so much, no one else could handle it. After a while, the kids decided they needed an escape. Their brother went to live with their dad, their older sister was old enough to fend for herself, Rachel (the author) was sent to boarding school, and Beth was left there because... (I don’t really know why... They just figured that she would be taken care of). The man and their mom disappeared with Beth, and they had apparently gotten married. After three months of not knowing where Beth was and if she was safe, she had run away and made it to a phone to call their dad for a rescue. The man had abused their mom and hurt Beth.

This whole situation left Beth understandably miserable for a while but eventually she was back to her normal flamboyant self. Near the end of the book (during a flashback) Rachel says, “When I go home for the holidays I watch Beth sleeping and wish I could forget things the way she seems to” (Simon 222). Since the situation, Rachel plunged herself into her work, made no time to have fun or be with others or even think about things. She was never truly able to recover, and this is what I realized the book is actually about: one sister helping another sister recover after all this time. Beth does not really realize that she is helping her sister; she is too busy riding her buses and obsessing over drivers. Never the less, through the whole the whole experience with her sister and the buses, Rachel learns how to recover, and this leads me into the second thing I wanted to talk about.

2) I figured out what Rachel Simon learned.

I suspected that she would learn something from this whole experience, otherwise she would not have written the book, but I did not know what the lesson was. It was most clear for me in this passage: “I wish I had the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know that difference. I wish I could learn the language of Maybe It’s Good Enough... I don’t want to think, ‘I wish she’d behave a little more appropriately today.’ I wish I could change”(Simon 229). All through her childhood, Rachel became frustrated with her sister because she did not (and did not want to) change as fast as everyone else. She realizes that by the end of the year, she is in the same situation she was last year: fulfilling her duties at work and the deal with her sister to ride the buses and visit. She is not getting any more out of life than last year. At this moment she realizes that she needs to change. She needs to let go of all of her work and enjoy life. She needs to be open to new things and forgive.

That's all.

Thanks for reading :)

Next Book: Lord of the Flies

Riding the Bus with my Sister 2

“‘Shakespeare says all the world’s a stage and everybody’s an actor, and that’s very true in the microcosm of the world that’s a bus. And a lot of the riders on this run are playing, like Robert Frost says, in the winter of their lives, and they’re like an open history book. Actually it's better, because you don’t get feelings in a history book. Every day right here in this seat, I have history riding with me” (Simon 39).

“‘What do you do when your a bus driver? You spend time with people and you sit and you think. I've thought all kinds of things in this seat’” (Simon 87).

“...if you fly above the world like a hawk and look down, you will see that there are no boundaries between countries, and that might make you think that there are no boundaries between people. Yet there are boundaries between people,trust me, Beth: invisible lines that separate what you want from what they can give, borders you need to respect” (Simon 93).

Riding the Bus with my Sister has been a very enjoyable book so far. Every few pages, a bus driver (or other character) is giving me a new outlook on life. Even though most of the quotes are probably not word for word what that person said in real life, Rachel Simon gets the point across that she learned something on her time riding the buses.

In the last quote, Simon is just talking to us, rather than having a bus driver talk. The quote is what she wanted to tell her sister Beth something at the time. Simon knew exactly what she wanted to teach during this book, but I found it interesting that she didn’t know what she was learning. Her sister (and the experience) are teaching her to rethink the way she sees everything. We look at Beth as if she does not act “normal” in our society, yet so far through the book, I have learned that she is clear with her persistence and knows what she cares about.

I’m not quite sure what is going to happen in the second half of the book, since she is just retelling stories about her sister and her riding the bus, but it is very enjoyable and I can’t wait to get back to reading!

Riding the Bus with my Sister 1

I will try to make this post short, since all of my others have been fairly lengthy. I have read five pages into Riding the Bus with my Sister, by Rachel Simon, and I have found something that will probably bug me throughout the entire book. It is written in present tense. I know that is a stupid thing to be annoyed about though, and I will probably get over it, because I can sense that this is going to be a good book.

It is a memoir about herself and her sister named Beth, who has mental retardation. Beth rides buses everyday. And not just to get places, she rides dozens of buses everyday; she has made hundreds of friends that she has memorized everything about. She has memorized the train schedules; who gets on and off where and even the exact time every morning that they get on. That is pretty awesome.

At the time this book was written, Rachel Simon was a busy college professor, and I am assuming the book will be about her adventure on the buses, because she has just been invited by her sister to ride them with her. She will most likely from her experience learn many lessons about her life and what she is doing wrong. Hopefully I will learn them too as I read! Can’t wait to continue reading!

For more information on Rachel Simon or her books, click here, or here!

Dune 3

I finished the book, Dune, still with multiple questions that I was unable to find answers for. Examples:

I thought Paul, being the Kwisatz Haderach, could see into the past. Can he see into the the future too? If so, why the heck is he not all the wiser for it?

If the Baron wanted to take Arrakis, why did he give it to his nephew and not use it as a spice trading partner?

Whose side is the Emperor on????

You probably don’t know what the heck I am ranting about (and trust me, I don’t know either) but I have too much a heart to give away the ending to you. And you may be thinking, based on all of my posts, why you would ever read it, but I surprisingly would recommend it to you, as well as myself for a second reading. Going back with background knowledge and reading it through slower and more thoroughly, I would probably get more out of it. Specific pages and parts were actually pretty good, though the overall plot is hard to follow.

I think my main problem with reading this book is that I don’t understand war. From the last of my example questions, I think I can delve deeper into this misknowledge I have. When I think of war, I think of two sides. But that is not the case at all, and this is what Dune taught me. War is a complicated and unfair thing. There are allies and traitors and then people who just don’t want to get involved, and you have to deal with all of it whether you want to or not.

War is risky business; everyone in the book suffered from it, though my favorite character that shows this the most, in my opinion, is still Dr. Yueh. He doesn’t play a role in the second half of the book (spoiler alert! he dies) but he is basically the start of the whole thing. Without him, the Harkonnens would never have been able to attack the Atreides. Dr. Yueh was a spy sent to lead the Atreide family into a trap, yet he still was loyal to the Atreides. Why is this? Because the only reason why he agreed to work for the Harkonnens was because the other side of the deal was that his wife would be set free. The last we hear of Yueh is: “‘do not forgive me... I do not want your forgiveness. I already have enough burdens. What I have done was done without malice of hope of another’s understanding... By the time you read this, Duke Leto will be dead. Take consolation from my assurance that he did not die alone, that one we hate above all others died with him”(Herbert 188). Everything that Yueh did in the book was controlled by the drive to get his wife back/ to avenge her suspected death. Dr. Yueh was not on one side of this war. He did not care about the war. He cared only for himself. He both caused and was affected by this war, as was everyone else. And I think that is one message that Herbert was trying to get across.

In the other part of this book about Paul and the whole seeing of the future/past thing, I couldn’t help but thinking of Ender’s Game. Even though Paul is probably a young adult by the end of the book, it never really specified so I read it as if he was a tween, hence the comparison to Ender. Also, in a parallel with that, Paul was kind of forced into being something without being able to make the decision for himself. He later came to accept the fact that he had to be the Kwisatz Haderach, but this part of both books sort of give off the same theme: you are who you are, and you can’t really change that. You just have to accept it.
On a slightly specific and less important note, I just realized a piece of foreshadowing that I marked in the beginning of the book and did not really look into. It says, “Beside the painting lay a black bull’s head mounted on a polished board”(Herbert 48). This bull head is mounted in the dining hall when the family first gets to Arrakis. I researched what a bull normally symbolizes in literature and I got: rage, strength, uncontrollability, anger that has the potential for destruction. The last one is the key. This foreshadows all the events that are going to happen on Arrakis and to the Atreides. I think that the character Jessica also sensed this foreshadowing in the beginning but knew that it was inevitable.  

Thanks for listening to me talk about Dune. Stay tuned for more rambling about books. Up next: Riding the Bus with my Sister, by Rachel Simon.

Dune: Middway

Dune, so far, is both entertaining and slow. I am about halfway through the book, and it has taken me a while to get into it. It is a great world and has great characters, I will give it that, but it is like many other science fiction books that I have read. Yes, I am going to connect this book to the others, like I did in my last post, because I think it is really hard to make a science fiction book readable. By having a new world with new environments, rules, and standards, it is hard to actually tell the story without just completely writing a paper about how this made up world works.

SPOILER ALERT

Dune follows the story of a boy named Paul who is the son (and heir) of the Duke of the Atreides (a house or powerful family under the the emperor who rules over the planet system). They have just settled on Arrakis (ordered by the Emperor to take power there) and are trying to make peace with the Fremens who live there, when the Harkonnens (another house who was previously in control of this planet and wants to get rid of the Atreides) attack and take over, killing the Duke. Paul and his mother Jessica are currently trying to hide from the Harkonnens, while Paul is realizing his full potential with these powers that he sort of has.

Anyway, what I was going to say from before this spiel was about the plot. This part of the book is in a state of high action, though not really rising, and I’m not sure when it will get to the climax. I was surprised that the most climactic event so far came pretty early in the book. That is when the Harkonnens take over and basically start killing people. However, since then, the book has been on a mostly horizontal course, not really getting better or worse.

Also, I thought it was more interesting that even though the story was following Paul and the Atreides, the second chapter just cuts directly to the Harkonnens and never shows them again until they attack. The author writes in the second chapter, “‘There it is, Piter-the biggest man trap in all history. And the Duke’s headed into its jaws. Is it not a magnificent thing that I, the Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, do?’”(Herbert 14). After reading farther into it, I realized the purpose of this chapter. It was to add suspense and make the reader interested (though Frank Herbert probably realized that his beginning was slightly boring so he added this to make up for it in hopes the reader continues). We know that the Harkonnens have a plan, but we are not exactly sure what yet. So we read on.

Though there are probably many themes that Herbert is throwing at me and I am not catching, one that I did catch was the fact that everyone has something to lose and something to gain. The riskiness of everything in life controls you and your actions. This is shown through all the characters in the book, most prevalent in Dr. Yueh (I will probably go more into depth about this in my next post). Overall, Dune is entertaining, but if the book weren't so long and slow, I would probably pay more attention while reading it.

Entry One: Dune

    I’m about 20 pages into the book Dune, and its actually pretty good. I have tried numerous times to read older science fiction novels and not been able to finish them. More modern ones are probably more interesting to me because they are more accurate in my current place, you know? In the 1960’s, people probably could not even fathom the technology we have today, let alone ahead of our time period. Yet this book seems almost like fantasy, which I am also a fan of, and I don’t need to believe it is possible on earth because the setting is on a different planet. However, since it is not based in a specific earthly time period, I can’t really use that to help me in any way. I can also assume that since the author Frank Herbert served during WWII and judging by the part of the book that I have read, a war or war-like situation is going to be a main plot point, most likely between the Atreides and the Harkonnens (you would know who they are if you were reading this book, yet also keep in mind that I barely know who they are and I am reading it). Like most well written science fiction novels, it is hard for me to fully understand what exactly I am reading until I get a good way into it, the obvious reason being that it is an entirely different world, and the only reason I really understand how our earth works is because I have lived 14 years in it. I know a lot of tiny details about specific people and places in Dune, but without a full explanation of the whole world which would be awkward to put in the beginning of a book (unless of course you are JRR Tolkien) it is hard to get the whole picture. Anyway, since the only thing I have been told about this book was that it was great, and by reading the very positive response/quotes on the back of the it (which I don’t think should always be trusted), I am pretty optimistic about this one.