Lit Circle--Greasy Lake

I really enjoyed are Lit Circle...are reading was titled "Greasy Lake" by T. Goraghessan Boyle.

The story follows three young men, which they describe theirselves as typical "badass" boys with no rules.....they described themselves as "dangerous characters" when really they were just typical teenagers looking for fun...

Their night turns chatoic as they mistake a friends car at Greasy Lake and run into an actual "bad" guy.  

During our chat session each of us had different inputs as to what they felt the story meant and how they releated to it....

It was also nice to be able to ask questions, like we werent sure if he actually came across a dead body in the lake or not....

All in all it was nice to have a different pace to talk about the stories....

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

I really liked this book.  I felt Solzhenitsyn did a great job of details and way of telling his story in the era it was published....I did have a hard time telling whether the narrator or Shukhov was thinking.  Like when he talked about the poem the medical person was writing.

The characters had different names so it was easy for me to get confused on who was who. I wrote down a list of characters and their different personalities. That seemed to help me.  The vocab in the book wasnt to hard as I assumed it was to be close with uneducated prisoners??

The unjust suffering and lack of humane dignity in the book mad me sad..to think that this really happened is awful...I believe the book is important to the people of the former Soviet Union to understand what happened....

It would be interesting to know if other prisoners would or did write about their days in the labor camps.  And I cant help but wonder what happened after....did they survive, did they die, did they loose their minds in it all???

A Good Man is Hard to Find

I had to chuckle about this title when I read it, as I too believe perhaps like the grandmother that a good man is hard to find...

The story is odd to me as I struggled with trying to find meaning in such a different story.  It really had no meaning to me when I read it the first time...a family goes on vacation with their crazy grandma and all get killed by a loose psychopath. 

But I tried to figure out how the title ties into it all and realized that the grandmother talks a lot about the men of her past and how they were good.  She talks about the Edgar who brought her a watermelon everyday...she even thinks the owner is a good man for believeing in people.  

When the Misfit come along she perhaps believes that he is good to somehow inside and tries to connect with him...In reality there was no good man in him

Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been

This story was complicated to me....I thought it started out fine, I could picture and imagine Connie in my head as I read the story.  She seemed like a normal 15 year old girl worried more about her hair and apperance than picking up her room. And although she may have wanted to seem "grown up" her confrontation with Eddie in the alley makes me believe she is fearful. 

The story made me want to believe that she got raped by Arnold but as I read it again I wasnt so sure.  Oates never states he actually rapes her but by the lines of him stabbing her with again and again with no tenderness, whatever the act is its brutal.

In the end you get the feeling that whatever carefree attitude Connie had as a young teenager is taken away by Arnold...

The Lottery

I will have to admit, I didn't realize what was happening in the story till almost the end.  I reread it a second time and picked up on little details such as the boys picking up rocks and the wives standing almost cautiously behind their husbands.  I felt this story is about humanity and traditions that aren't always needing to be followed.  The title had me going at first and I think even after knowing what was going to happen, subconsciously I didn't want to believe it.  I relate to Mrs.Hutchinson as wanting to be different and going with flow, the way she was late to the lottery and made her way through the crowd.  Even at the end she was protesting for what she thought to be wrong.

A Clean, Well-Lighted Place

While reading A Clean, Well-Lighted Place I couldn't help but think of my many trips to Mexico. I'm not sure why but I could picture the waiters in my head, relating them to some of the waiters we had ourselves while down in Playa del Carmen at our small off the road resort.  I could even picture the streets near the cafe and what the setting may have looked like.  I enjoyed reading this short story and liked Hemingway's use of conversation to tell the story.  The words he used to describe the old man and the tone throughout.  From what the book stated I feel like Hemingway felt in a sense what the old man feels...possibly never finding his way.

Point of View

Except for the "Cathedral" reading, I really enjoyed the rest of the stories. I also learned a few things this week that went along with our quiz. 

I never really paid much attention before to the point of view of a story. I learned from our book that to identify a story's point of view, you describe the role the narrator plays in the events and any limits placed on his or her knowledge of the events. 

I also found unique the types of narrators. 
Participant-writes in first person
Nonparticipant-write in the third person

The list is rather long and can be defined by how much the narrator knows to other narrative points of view......

I also like the books thoughts and elements of setting. It continues to help me actively read.

A & P

This reading was probably the most enjoyable one for me this week. It was the simplest and a quick read.  I like the details the author put into the story.  From describing the box of HiHo crackers to Diet Delight peaches. I will say though that they way he describes the girls in their swimsuits seemed a little odd to me but maybe thats just the protagonist's way of thinking and getting us to relate to the situation.  I do like the ending of the story as everybody likes it when somebody gets to stand up for themselves. Even if its not the best decesion in the long run. 

Solzhenitsyn's Lecture

To be honest after having to read this lecture and reread it several times(I'm talking like five or six) I see why I became an accounting major.   I think of myself as fairly intelligent ,but to understand and comprehend what he was talking about was difficult for me.  I hope that it gets easier or I get better at this in the coming weeks. Or maybe that I will have more time to open my mind up to the possibly of the world of literature????  who knows...