20th Century Novel

 All posts will be from the 20th Century Novel class. Enjoy!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Sag Harbor and the harsh reality of a summer job

 In Sag Harbor, Colson Whitehead does a great job narrating the idea of growing up, and reaching the stage of adolescence where you start to gain more responsibilities, such as being able to pay for your own things. To get this money, one must work, and Whitehead's experiences growing up that are detailed in the novel are quite similar to many teenager's experiences in the workplace. Over this past summer, I got my first summer job, and was eager to work to get my own money, as Benji does the same in the novel.  Now, looking back I don't know what I was expecting. I know I wasn't expecting sunshine and rainbows, but whatever I was expecting, I should have expected both better and worse of some certain aspects. Food service jobs? Good. People who come to buy things from food service jobs? Less good. People are who truly make the work experience bad or good, and I dealt with my fair share of bad over the summer, just as Benji does in the novel. Dirty clothes, coming home ...
Read more

Howie's murderous intentions vs. me, the reader

      First and foremost, The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker is a weird book. With its interesting way of describing mundane life in an office and excessively long footnotes, it takes a dive into the world of our main character, Howie. Howie is a sometimes relatable character, who we see delve into the most lengthy stories about the most boring things anyone could imagine. The first chapter with his shoelaces, no one would necessarily think about their shoelaces that much, heck I don't even know if I've ever had a pair of shoelaces break on my shoes in my lifetime.       I would have said Howie is completely relatable if it weren't for the footnotes. On pages 108 and 128 we see Howie's darker side, where in the first footnote on page 108, we find out Howie stabbed his best friend at the time in the neck with a pair of scissors. Why did he stab him you ask? He stabbed him over the 64 pack of crayons his friend had gotten, and wouldn't show Howie how the p...
Read more

Mental Health Represented in Books

     While reading Virginia Woolf's novel Mrs. Dalloway , I couldn't help but think about the mental health aspect of the story, and it led me to think about other stories involving such topics. First and foremost, the representation of mental health in Mrs. Dalloway  is one of the better ones I have seen, quite possibly because it was written by someone who knows what it's like to endure these feelings. If we take a look at another book that doesn't do it any justice, we can clearly see the difference between experience and wanting to make something young people will eat up and pay for. Thirteen Reasons Why , by Jay Asher is a good example of a bad thing. Jay Asher wrote about Hannah Baker, a high school freshman girl and why she commits suicide. Jay Asher has no experience with any of this, and if you read the book it's very obvious how much he doesn't know what he's talking about. Comparatively, Virginia Woolf has these experiences of mental health strugg...
Read more