Blog Reflection

     During the past year of writing and reading blog posts about so many different books, I've learned a lot of new things, and read more books than I can remember. It was hard to maintain such a vigilant reading schedule to be able to finish one book every week, but it was rewarding in that it taught me a lot about what kinds of books I like, and what kinds of books I don't, among other things.
     I learned a lot about myself as a reader throughout this year, such as: learning that I liked sci-fi a lot, learning that I liked fantasy a little, and learning that long books can be read really fast if I put my mind to it. This will help me in my life, because I will find more enjoyment in reading than I have before this year, because now I know what books I like. I also learned that the more I like a book, the faster I finish it.
     Writing online is different from writing in a notebook, because pretty much anyone can read it without necessarily knowing you, and you wouldn't know if someone were to read it. Also, in a notebook, for me, it's harder to write down what I want to write down, only because of the limited amount of space and my bad penmanship. Online, I have an unlimited amount of space and perfect penmanship to work with, so the only thing I have to worry about is what I'm writing.
     Writing online, especially anonymously, can be liberating in that you can write whatever you want and not have to think about the consequences. There is nothing that I can mention that is necessarily limiting about writing online, although the liberation that writing online provides can be used for bad things, like cyber bullying or something along those lines.
     I think that it depends on the person whether or not they are real online or not, and where they are posting on the internet. For instance, if I'm on Facebook, I'm pretty much myself, because I know just about everyone that is friends with me on Facebook, but on a site where I know no one, I may not be myself. For me, it really depends on how many people I know, because I might feel uncomfortable acting normal in a group of strangers.
     Teenagers definitely abuse the freedom that sites such as Facebook provide us. We type things we wouldn't say to people's faces, mostly mean things. This is a bad thing, because it can make people feel really bad about themselves, and might push them over the edge. For instance, there was this Irish girl who came to America, and went to high school here, but was cyber bullied by so many people that she eventually committed suicide.
     I can't really imagine myself keeping up THIS blog, but I can imagine myself creating a new one. It would probably be about something like video games or movies.

Call Me Joe by Poul Anderson

     I recently read the book "Call Me Joe" by Poul Anderson. It is about a being named Joe on Jupiter, who is truly the mind of Ed Anglesey, a man on a space station in orbit of the planet. Ed Anglesey is crippled and does not have control over anything but his head and arms, and so he uses Joe, an experimental life form that was created to live on Jupiter, who has full use of his body.
     Ed Anglesey used Joe to escape from reality. I can relate to this in that when I play video games, I fins my own space to do as I please outside of the real world, and I don't have to think about anything else when I'm doing it. This helps me cope with real world situations, because they don't weigh down on me as much as they would if I perpetually thought about them.
     Ed doesn't exactly evolve over time throughout the book, but the reader's idea of him does. This happens throughout the narrations of someone studying why one instrument used to put Ed's mind into Joe's keeps shorting out. In the beginning, I thought that it was because Ed was scared of something on Jupiter, because the person said so. But throughout the book the ideas of Ed and what he fears and does not fear change drastically, until they are almost exactly opposite of how they started.

Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk

     I recently read the book "Fight Club" by Chuck Palahniuk. It is about a man who meets a movie projectionist named Tyler Durden, who helps him overcome insomnia and makes him much more relaxed by creating fight club, a way to let out pent up aggression through consensual violence. But things start to go wrong when Tyler pushes farther and farther into the domain of chaos and death and starts a group called Project Mayhem, where different groups commit crimes against everyone.
     This book is almost entirely nihilistic, especially around the middle, where many people are willing to die for Mr. Durden because they believe that they are not special and not individuals. Another philosophy that I am reminded of in this book is communitarianism, but only in the sense that there is no individual, there is only the whole. This seems like nihilistic communitarianism, in a way.
     The main character, who is not named in the book, is very seemingly depressed and maybe a little bit insane. From the beginning of the book, he spends all of his free time at support groups for different diseases, such as testicular cancer and brain parasites, because seeing those people so devoid of life and full of sorrow helps him to sleep. It may also be that he cries at these support groups during the time where people hug, and this helps him to let out his emotions in a safe place where no one can judge him.
     Marla Singer, another person who goes to support groups for diseases to feel better, is very rude throughout the story to the protagonist. But by the end of the story, Marla loves the main character. The relationship between the two evolves a lot throughout the story, but only from Marla's point of view. The main character, it seems, has no feelings for Marla other than possibly slight acquaintance, but not much, because from the beginning the protagonist just generally does not like Marla.

The Juvie Three by Gordon Korman

     I recently read the short novel "The Juvie Three" by Gordon Korman. It is about three children in juvie who get a second chance when a man named Douglas Healy offers them the option to live in an apartment in New York City with him. They take the chance, and all but one of them follow the rules to the letter. One night, the rebellious child who breaks the rules accidentally makes Douglas fall from the fire escape, making him slip into a coma. The children pretend that nothing happened.
     I believe that I can relate to some of this story, though not as extreme as it is, because I've done things I've regretted and then told no one about it. Though I never got away with these things, I know the sense of power one can get from holding things back from everyone and having secrets to themselves.
     Douglas Healy, the man who let them live with him in his apartment, is a very loving, empathetic man. He cares about the three children deeply, and can relate to them because he was in juvie for a period of his younger life. I think that he is the kindest character in the story, and it is sad that the bad things happen to him in the story. I think that the moral of the story is that bad things can happen to good people, and good things can happen to bad people, but the only thing to do is try and survive in an unfair world.

The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi

     I have recently been reading the novel "The Windup Girl" by Paolo Bacigalupi. It is a science fiction story set in Thailand, where the amount of work you can do is the currency. The Child Queen oversees everything, with strong influencers such as Akkarat that work behind the scenes. This book is a very powerful book that shows just how wrong the world can turn out if we continue to genetically engineer everything.

     One of the main characters, Emiko, a being similar to a human who was engineered in Japan and abandoned in Thailand, is tortured and belittled at the whorehouse where she has to work now if she doesn't want to die. She has many influencers who use different tactics to influence her. One, a farang (foreigner) named Anderson Lake, uses niceness where others treated her so poorly to influence her, though I believe that he truly does love her and want to help her. Another influencer, a woman at the whorehouse, uses pain and fear to get what she wants, which seems to just be the humiliation and torture of Emiko.

     I can relate to Emiko in that a lot of people influence me in life, but I have never been hurt or embarrassed for no reason at all just because someone hates me because of what I am.

Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare

     In William Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet", Romeo and Juliet die for their love. But is it really true love? I believe that Romeo and Juliet's love was not completely real, even if they believed it to be. Juliet wanted to rebel against her family, Romeo was lusting for a woman, and they were both immature.

    Juliet wanted to rebel because her parents were truly bad parents (Capulet to Juliet, about marrying Paris - "To go with Paris to Saint Peter's Church, / Or I will drag thee on a hurdle thither. / Out, you green sickness carrion! Out, you baggage! / You tallow face!" [3.5.159-162]), and her parents were forcing her to marry Paris without even consulting her on the matter (Capulet, on Juliet not wanting to marry Paris - "How, will she none? Doth she not count her blessed, / Unworthy as she is, that ha have wrought / So worthy a gentleman to be her bride?" [3.5.147-152]). Juliet also wanted to rebel because she knew her mother married young to her father, whom she didn't love, and subconsciously, Juliet was afraid of being unloved, or not loving the man she married, so the first person she felt a spark with who felt the spark back (Romeo) is the man that she married.

     Romeo was lusting for a woman. First, he loved Rosaline, and he was sad because she was becoming a nun, so he couldn't get married to her (Romeo, sad about Rosaline not being able to bear children - "O, she is rich in beauty, only poor / That, when she dies, with beauty dies her store." [1.1.223-224]). Then, he throws his love for Rosaline away when he sees Juliet (Romeo, when he first sees Juliet - "O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright! / It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night / As a rich jewel in an Ethiop's ear- / Beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear." [1.5.51-54]). He is jumping from woman to woman, and may not see that he is doing this, but it is happening.

     Romeo and Juliet were both rather immature. Juliet was only 13 (Capulet, on Juliet's age - "Thou knowest my daughter's of a pretty age." [1.3.11]), and Romeo was 18. They also both had strong influences, Romeo having Mercutio and Juliet having Romeo, and their influencers did not always do the right thing (Mercutio, picking a fight with Tybalt, Juliet's cousin - "Will you pluck your sword out of his pitcher by the ears? / Make haste, lest mine be about your / ears ere it be out." [3.1.81-83]).

     In conclusion, Romeo and Juliet's love was not exactly real, even if they thought it was, because Juliet wanted to get back at her parents, Romeo was a womanizer, and they bother were not too mature. Shakespeare was trying to tell people that young love, or as a matter of fact any love, can end badly, especially if someone is not ready for it.

Ubik by Philip K. Dick

     I recently read the book "Ubik" by Philip K. Dick, set in 1992 but written in 1969, a sci-fi story about a world where psychics, pre-cogs, and animators exist (basically magic people) and so do people who can nullify their powers. There are companies that make use of both kinds of people, and when Glen Runciter, the owner of a company for people who nullify powers, goes on a trip to Luna, where there is an explosion which causes Glen to die and put in cold-Pac (a freezer where people can talk to him using microphones) with his wife Ella, who died many years earlier. But in the "real world", Joe Chip, a tester for Runciter, and the crew who went with him to Luna are experiencing decay of objects to earlier forms and Glen Runciter's face on coins and bills.
     There is more than one protagonist in Ubik, but the one that is followed for the majority of the story is Joe Chip, the tester for Runciter's company. He is lazy, cynical, and can't even afford to open his own door (in this world, everything is coin-operated). In the middle of the story, he loses a loved one to decay. I can relate to him in that I have lost things that I love before. He lost a woman that he loved, while I have lost many pets to old age.
     There is one person who influences the protagonist throughout the story. It is Pat Conley, a woman who can change the past by thinking about minor details that she wants to change. She thinks that she is causing the decay using her ability, and pretends that she loses her ability so they don't suspect her of it. In one past that she creates, she is married to Joe Chip, and he vaguely remembers the feelings he had for her when she changes the past back. This is why she has such a big influence on him. She influences him to get away from the rest of the group so she can kill him, as she thought she had killed the others.