Honors English 1a Blog Reflection

Throughout the course of the trimester, my biggest struggle was just with coming up with topics to blog about.  I wasn’t always sure how to answer questions on the prompt page, and I was afraid that if I came up with a topic of my own then I wouldn’t have a good blog post, or it wouldn’t be long enough.  As time went on, I tried to become more comfortable with the idea of the blog, and move more away from topics already set in stone.  Instead, I morphed together different prompts based on what I felt went with the novel I had read or was currently reading.  By the end of the trimester, sometimes I didn’t even look at the paper, preferring to blog about whatever was most prominent in what I was reading.

My greatest strength with blogging was describing whatever I was reading well, I think, so I didn’t confuse people who hadn’t read the book.  Most of the time, I tried to put myself in the shoes of someone who hadn’t read the book and read the post from their perspective before publishing it.  If anything was confusing, I included a better description of what was going on and read it over again.

The quality of my writing has grown over the trimester in many ways, one of which being my ability to sound more like myself while writing.  As seen in my blog post "Doomed", my tone was very robotic and had little authentic voice.  This is best shown from this quote in the beginning of the post, which says, “The book I just finished reading is Doomed, by Tracy Deebs.  The main character of the novel is named Pandora.  Her father has been gone for ten years, and her mother consistently warns her to have nothing to do with him- to not open any mail, any message, any gift, or ever talk to or see him.  But on Pandora's 17th birthday… Pandora opens an email sent to her by her father, since her nature at the beginning of the novel is very curious and prone to temptation.”  Yes, I described Pandora’s qualities, but I didn’t try to relate to anything about me or that I know, or to even get into detail besides basic description.

As I got further into the trimester, my writing had more of a voice and I began to sound like a real, unique person.  Although my writing style in the blog posts developed a very laidback tone, it still gave the readers more of a chance to learn about me instead of just having an objective summary.  This can be seen in a quote from my blog post “Ender’s Game", where I wrote, “Science Fiction has always been my favorite genre to read and write, and I thought the concept of the story's plot was so exciting.  It intrigued me that in the beginning of the story Ender is only six years old- just a little kid, and the idea of six year olds training for battle is such an anomaly in our time that it hooked me in and held me there.”  Here you can see more about my personality, my likes and dislikes, and how I relate the book to what I know.  I still describe what the novel is like, but instead of through and objective point of view it can be heard through mine as if I were speaking.

Ender's Shadow

This is the sequel to Ender's Game.  I haven't read it yet, at least not in the sense that I've picked up an actual copy of the book, but I did read the prologue, which was shown as a sneak peek in the back of my copy of Ender's Game.  In the first book, Ender is shown training an intelligent, younger boy named Bean, who seems to be almost exactly like Ender was in the beginning- bright, rebellious, and with ideas other people haven't thought of.  The prologue of Ender's Shadow seems to center around Bean's early childhood, so I think that instead of focusing on Ender, the nest novel will focus on Bean.  It will be interesting to see his perspective on Battle School, the place where bright kids train for war.
I thought it was really cool to see in the prologue how different Ender's and Bean's situations were before Battle School.  While Ender lived in a home with his family, and seemed to be a bit wealthier, Bean had no home.  He lived by himself in the streets, finding food whenever he could, and spent most of his life close to death.  Until he was four, he didn't even have a name, and it was given to him by a nine year old girl that held some control in the streets.  Yet, both Ender and Bean saw the world so similarly, in ways other people did not.  Ender never seemed to pay attention in class, yet knew evekrkything, and Bean was poorly off even for a street urchin, but is portrayed to use the same basic logic even at age four in the same way Ender is by the quote, "But finally he realized:...He had understood it from the start.  The reason all these kids handled everything so stupidly was because they were stupid.  They were stupid and he was smart.  So why was he starving to death while these kids were still alive?  That was when he decided to act."

Ender's Game

What interested me and made me want to pick up this book:
I feel a little guilty saying it since I like to consider myself well-read, but I had never even heard of this book before the movie came out.  I haven't seen the movie yet and won't until at least when I'm done reading the book, but lots of my friends saw it, and I kept hearing so many good things about it.  It became as well known and as much talked about as "Frozen" has more recently.
Once I heard the basic plot of the movie, I couldn't wait to get my hands on the book, mainly because I'm just a nerd like that and if given a choice between a movie and a book I will almost inevitably choose the book.  I'm really just not into movies.
Science Fiction has always been my favorite genre to read and write, and I thought the concept of the story's plot was so exciting.  It intrigued me that in the beginning of the story Ender is only six years old- just a little kid, and the idea of six year olds training for battle is such an anomaly in our time that it hooked me in and held me there.
Another thing I feel guilty about is saying how much the cover drew me in.  But I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing to get drawn in by the cover of a book, especially if there are so many other good things about it.
This, of course, is a movie poster and not a book cover, but the picture of the boy in a flash suit (what they where to train for battle) is the same, and so is the font and color of the text.  This is easily one of the coolest covers I have ever seen on a book.