The Power of Perception: The Mark of Athena (SPOILERS)

I recently read the newly published The Mark of Athena, by Rick Riordan. This book is the most recent in a series of books that take place after The Percy Jackson series, which I still consider one of my favorite series'. When reading The Mark of Athena, I noticed a change from the way the books used to be. I'm not sure if it was me, not having read the series in a while and just having matured as a reader, or there was something that really was different. What I noticed was the way that I didn't connect to the books in the way that I used to. Also, many parts of it bored me. The characters just didn't seem as relatable as they used to.

What I first began to notice was the way that the characters that I'd known since The Lightning Thief didn't seem quite right. I had been excited to read a book finally from Annabeth's perspective, but was disappointed to find that her voice sounded no different than any other of Riordan's characters. What I had once considered Percy's personality now seemed to be everyone's. Also, Percy seemed not to be much like himself either. His humor seemed to be his main feature, when before his character had been so much more. Altogether, this aspect of the book left me very confused.

I was very unhappy when the book began to bore me. Maybe it was because of the change in characters, or maybe not. It just seemed as if unimportant moments dragged on forever. Also, the parts I'd been looking forward to (like Annabeth and Percy's reunion) were over in the blink of an eye. At every turn there was a new adventure, in a way that left me confused with all of the new Roman knowledge. Altogether, it was not the most gripping book.

All of my opinions left me wondering: Is something really different, or am I imagining it? This is what I believe to be the power of perception. Once I got it into my head that the characters seemed off, I inevitably ended up analyzing everything they'd do or say. I ended up really disappointed with this book. What I really want to know now is whether anyone agrees with me, so I can decide once and for all if I am just making all of this up.

Please Comment! :)

The Art of Anecdotes: The Glass Castle (Spoiler)

In the memoir, The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, she recounts the story of her crazily adventurous life through various snapshots of different moments. Where she doesn't have a little anecdote, she gives a detailed summary of what happened. The author moves forward in a quick sort of way, as she must with a book ranging from when she was three to well into adulthood. But even as she does this, she will zoom in on certain moments and really capture the feeling in them, and make the reader do the same. Maybe this uniqueness comes from  the fact that she can only remember and pinpoint little moments, but I love how the author makes me want to know more about their lives and fill in the blanks. She does this through capturing me in every single anecdote.

When Jeannette asks her dad to stop drinking as her 10th birthday present, the reader gets a little uncomfortable with her at the big favor she is asking him for. When he begins to drink again, one is deeply betrayed alongside her. I've had the experience of reading a book and caring about the characters, but I've never really related to a character the way I do to Jeannette.

I think its because of the way at times I envy the insane adventures she gets to go on. The way she describes the vast and beautiful desert is what leads me to feel that way. I also feel so badly for her when her parents do something especially out of the box, like taking her out of the hospital and taking off in the middle of the night, when she is not healed enough for it to be completely safe. When relating to that, the author gets me to do that through refraining from giving a lot of details. She lets you feel how you want to. She has people who disapprove of her parents who you can relate to, and then her own perspective, which is still forming.

The Non In Fiction: Perks of Being a Wallflower (Possible Spoilers)

The Perks of Being a Wallflower, by Stephen Chbosky, is a novel about socially unmotivated Charlie, who is learning how to live life for the first time. He has never really been a part of anything, and this book is about him getting that chance. When I first began to read this book, I could not figure out why it became so popular. It wasn't written extraordinarily, and the plot line just wasn't that interesting. Still I kept going, and it eventually dawned on me. It was just so completely real. And through this way of writing, Stephen Chbosky managed to get me hooked on the life of 16 year old Charlie.

The original things that annoyed me about the book all had to do with Charlie's character. He was pretty strange, and to be honest I was a little insulted that a 16 year old was expected to have as low an intelligence level as he seemed to have. But I came around to the letter-for-every-chapter style of writing, and the book's quirky and overall very genuine characters.

The things that hit me as being so real had to do a lot with the way Charlie's thoughts kept him locked in his head. He'd be in a very bad mood, and that would lead to him spending the whole day trying to figure out why. Another example would be the way when he wanted to block out a certain thought or feeling, he had to do something else to occupy himself, like reading until he was so tired that he couldn't possibly do anything but sleep. Although it may not always be as severe as it is with Charlie, I definitely know what it feels like to have trouble not getting lost in my thoughts.

The author also seemed to get lost in his own  thoughts at times. Sometimes I wondered  if he might even lose the reader when he left them with half-formed ideas and random pieces of information. In the end, this just made the book so much easier to relate to, because it was like you were really inside Charlie's head. In a lot of books you really have to infer how the character is feeling, but with Charlie, he'd just tell you, no matter how random it was. Charlie was so real that it made the book more real, and overall, better.

How to Effectively Pass off Blame (13 Reasons Why Spoiler Alert)

In 13 Reasons Why, by Jay Asher, the main character is one of 13 students blamed by their classmate, Hannah Baker for why she has committed suicide. The first person of the group is sent a box of 13 cassette tapes with each one centering around one person, and after listening to them all, they must mail them to the next person. I want to zero in on the idea of whether or not what Hannah did was unfair. This was originally brought to my attention by the character Marcus Cooley. He is one of the 13, and because of his guilt, he angrily says to our main character, Clay, that "Hannah  just wanted an excuse to kill herself." This infuriates Clay, but rather than making me angry, it left me wondering if maybe he was right.

These people on her list all had something to do with why she committed suicide, but their sins range from being an insincere friend to practically raping her. I have to say, she brought some of the things that happened to her on herself. Once she is relatively depressed, she shares a private and close to her heart poem written by her with a classmate. Thinking it is very good, he anonymously  publishes it in the school newspaper. He makes it onto her list of 13. He barely did anything wrong, and she knows it. She does admit it when speaking directly to him on his tape, but nonetheless, he will have to live with his guilt for a long time. I almost feel like she is intentionally ruining everyone else's life in return for the life she is losing.

Still, I feel like in a way, the tapes are her suicide note. She was never heard, and she has a right to some closure before her death. Clay is the only person on the tapes that she is not blaming, but more explaining things to. She knows that he will hear them, and she wants to give him an explanation. I think this is meant to make the reader who is relating to Clay blame Hannah less for all of the people she is hurting.Still, the reader has to try to put themselves in the other 12 people's shoes, and imagine what this would do to you if you received these tapes.

I also got to wondering if Hannah was just looking for some attention from the people that never knew the impact they had on her. I do not necessarily think that Hannah was seeking attention in the general sense, seeing as she asks them not to let the tapes be heard by anyone outside the 13. All the same, I do not think she wishes to be forgotten.

Please comment and tell what you think! :)

A Not-So-Secret Message

This post is a response to "Am I Blue?", by Bruce Coville. When I first finished reading this passage, I couldn't figure out what really caught me about it. There was something that felt very mesmerizing and heartfelt about this story to me. After thinking about it for a while I came to realize that it was the way the message was shown. I've never read a story where the message stood out so clearly. The way it was written, the plot itself almost seemed a little bit sloppy. It had an almost humorous story line to it, with a fairy godfather, and a day where anyone who is the least bit gay turns blue. The characters weren't even very intricate. Why I believe the author did this, was so that the story would not distract the reader from the message.

The message of the story was basically, lots of people are gay all over the world, and no one has the right to demean someone for being different from them. The author obviously thought this message was vital to get across, as they made no attempt to mask it within the story. He gave us a main character, Vince, who was easy to relate to, and a problem that people face all of the time. Even if you have not faced this particular issue, that by no means says that you don't know what it feels like to be singled out.

He added on to the empathy that he meant for the reader to feel by adding on some very strong examples. Melvin was a living (sort of ) reminder of the terrible things that can happen when people are homophobic. Because he was openly gay, he was killed. Then there was Vince who gets beat up because someone thinks that he was interested in "jumping his bones". These instances are there to horrify the reader into seeing the injustice of our whole situation.
  
Another thing the author highlights in this passage is hypocrisy. Coville ends up showing that the guy who beat up Vince at the beginning ends up turning blue himself when Melvin makes it blue day. He also adds on to this by showing that a very homophobic republican that Vince sees on TV is also gay.

In the end, this was a message shown via story that was very thinly veiled and was written solely to give readers a new perspective.

The Drummer Boy of Shiloh

           In the passage, "The Drummer Boy of Shiloh" by Ray Bradbury, I think there are various things preventing the protagonist, Joby, from reaching his, and the story's, resolution. Although his resolution is not exactly a perfect one, it is one that he must reach nonetheless. He must make it to a point where he is done being terrified or even bitter about the war to come. He must reach a point where he truly believes in himself, and can join in with the other soldier's "romantic dreams of battles yet unfought". 
          What I believe he has to overcome to get there is his sense of reality. He is so stuck in the real world, the world where he doesn't have a weapon and is younger than most of the other soldiers, that there is no way for him to see a possibly happy turn of events. Of course, the likelihood of a happy ending is not very good, but in order for there to be any possibility at all, he must believe that there is one.
          Another thing holding Joby back is his feeling of complete and utter isolation. As I stated before, because he is the drummer boy, he does not have a weapon, unlike the rest of the army. It is also suggested by the general that his reason for joining the army was to get away from home. This may be another thing making him feel alone, considering he never wanted to be at war in the first place. Sitting there pitying himself, he hasn't even considered that many of the soldiers may be feeling exactly as he is. It is always hard to grasp that other people can feel just how you do, and you are truly not alone. Joby just has to realize that they are all in the same situation, and that he should do whatever he can to help them get through this together.  

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

      For this book in particular I thought I would bring up the idea of dropping hints that end up transforming into more than they originally seemed. A hint that is continually shown (even in prior books in the series) is the idea that Harry is beginning to sense Voldemort's emotions. It starts innocently enough in the fourth book when Harry feels his scar hurt for no apparent reason and it worries him. This continuously happens up until the book that I am currently on in which after this has happened numerous times, he starts to be able to sense  the emotions coming from Voldemort that have caused this reaction in him. This is also not the end of this little part of the story as in Harry Potter and the Order of the Pheonix it is still not explained what connection it is between Harry and Voldemort that allows him to feel all this.
      A factor in the story that is not exactly hint dropping but is related to something being more than it originally seemed (that is also connected to the way that the protagonist is affected to those around them) is the presence that the Dursley's have all throughout the series. While they are obviously there to show Harry's past and play a little part in the story, I think that they are also there to show the basic opposite of what Harry could have turned into, yet did not. They are the formation of his character, and Dudley is almost the definition of Harry's opposite. And yet they are still there to remind us in every book where he came from. In the Order of the Pheonix, Harry and Petunia share a moment in which you can truly see where he got some of the parts of himself from, when she shows a connection to the wizarding world and they have a combined moment of worrying over what is going to happen in the future. I also feel that Harry may have gotten his temper from Uncle Vernon, as that is Vernon's most prominent trait, and this is the book in which Harry's temper and rash actions really begins to play a part in the story.