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Blog 10
Uncharted Books
A farm is taken over by its overworked, mistreated animals. With flaming idealism and stirring slogans, they set out to create a paradise of progress, justice, and equality. Thus the stage is set for one of the most telling satiric fables ever penned –a razor-edged fairy tale for grown-ups that records the evolution from revolution against tyranny to a totalitarianism just as terrible.
Animal Farm is a popular book that is read in schools normally, my mom read it when she was in high school. For some reason though I was never assigned to read Animal Farm while in high school, so I decided to pick it up and give it a go. I ended up finishing the book in less than a day, I liked it that much. I think reading it now with a bit of an understanding of life, society and government the main themes shown through a bit more than they would have when I was younger.
The author beautifully portrays the way a revolution is started to stop what is happening and going full circle comes to the same point it started from. Just the face of power is changed. This book tells how the ruling class makes fool of the working class, uses their energies and resources for their own pleasure. What happens behind the closed doors of power. How the working class is being brain washed that they are happy and satisfied and free despite of the obvious slavery they have been undergoing.
As it is already a very popular book read in schools, I would continue on with the trend because it is an impactful story. Although the characters are animals, the hold so much humanity that is easily stripped away by their peers and don’t even understand what is happening to them. I think if I were to do a bit more research into communist ideology and even Orwell that I would learn a lot more about the book.
Blog 9
Uncharted Books
So to start off this is a book I have read in high school, it is my favorite book from high school and I just read it again a couple days ago.
At the dawn of the next world war, a plane crashes on an uncharted island, stranding a group of schoolboys. At first, with no adult supervision, their freedom is something to celebrate; this far from civilization the boys can do anything they want. Anything. They attempt to forge their own society, failing, however, in the face of terror, sin and evil. And as order collapses, as strange howls echo in the night, as terror begins its reign, the hope of adventure seems as far from reality as the hope of being rescued. Labeled a parable, an allegory, a myth, a morality tale, a parody, a political treatise, even a vision of the apocalypse, Lord of the Flies is perhaps our most memorable novel about “the end of innocence, the darkness of man’s heart.”
This book is so true to what happens in the world today. When people tried to govern themselves (and started the whole process with goodwill inside), but blinded with egotism and lust for power, tragedy and destruction in society are inevitable. Human nature is corrupt, it only takes a trivial thing to make its nature controlled by nothing but malice. This book represents a perfect allegory for humanity. Culture fails repeatedly and no matter how hard we can repress it, nothing will ever stop the drive to become savages.
This book is very much a teacher’s dream, with beautiful writing, good characters, lots of symbolism and underlying messages. I loved this book the first time I read and I still love it now. I would gladly teach this book in a classroom. It’s a fun and quick read for a book, on of the shorter ones I have read for my blog so far, and it is easy to teach because it basically a staple in high school english classes.
Blog 8
Uncharted Books
A graphic novel that tells three interloping stories, American Born Chinese is a story of identity, racism, friendship and acceptance. Yang tells three stories that eventually blend into one, which follows Jin Wang the only American-Chinese boy in his school, Danny and his cousin Chinese cousin Chin-Kee, and the Monkey King’s quest to join the ranks of the gods. Each story is different on the surface but in their bare essence all portray the same message of trying to find a place to belong.
These stories explore the sense of identity and belonging in the community. Jin being a Chinese-American in a predominantly white town is faced with the crisis of assimilating to a white America or staying true to his identity. As a kid this is not an easy thing to go through alone, all that anyone wants is to fit in and have friends. Danny has a similar situation but for different reasons, his cousin Chin-Kee. Danny has transferred to three schools in three years because of the embarrassment he feels when his cousin Chin-Kee, the most stereotypical depiction of a Chinese man, comes to visit him and in turn embarrasses Danny at his schools. Danny although not Chinese is embarrassed of his relation to Chin-Kee and wants nothing to do with him. The Monkey King rose amongst the ranks of deities but all he wanted was to be accepted as a god. However, his nature of being a monkey demotes him to less than the other deities. The Monkey King masters the disciplines of kung fu to prove his title as a god, but when faced by Tze-Yo-Tzuh he is bounded under a mountain of rock for 500 years.
Each of these characters try to change things about themselves to fit in with their peers, but in doing so lost themselves. When Jin tries to look and act more white to impress a girl he loses some of his closest friends after being rejected, not to mention everything that made him Chinese. Whenever Danny flees from his problems that Chin-Kee caused he loses the experience of high school from the shame and embarrassment of his cousin just because he is Chinese in a white town. The Monkey King earned the freedom of the monkeys, but when studying the disciplines of kung fu lost all interactions with his family and changed his outward appearance to look less like a monkey.
Although I am not Chinese, have went through racial inequality, or heard of the Monkey King story before, this story is something that anyone can connect with. As much as it revolves around the racial disparity, it is more about the value of being true to oneself and being comfortable in your own skin. I would gladly teach this book in a classroom, it was a fun read and something that I believe many people could easily connect with.
An except that I found from The Vector on American Born Chinese and Gene Luen Yang stands out so much and encapsulates the story so well, “Yang adeptly addresses issues such as discrimination, racial self-loathing, and assimilation with humor, crafting a work that is equal parts visually engaging, entertaining, and thought-provoking. Although the novel focuses on the first generation Chinese-American experience, the novel’s messages of yearning to belong and struggling to maintain appearances possess a universality that anyone can connect to. Though published over a decade ago, the novel also addresses issues of identity and appearance that remain relevant in contemporary discussions of race, such as the discussion about code-switching sparked by films like BlacKkKlansman. For its humor, relevance, and ease of readability (it is a very quick read), American Born Chinese should definitely be added to your 2019 reading list.” I agree with everything that Siri Uppulari has to say about the book and this is that everyone should read at some point.
Blog 7
Uncharted Book
In The Refugees Nguyen gives voice to hopes and expectations of people forced to leave one country for another, and the rifts in identity, loyalties, romantic relationships, and family ties that accompany relocation. From the culture shock of a young Vietnamese man relocated to bohemian San Fransisco, to the heartache of a woman whose dementia-suffering husband starts to confuse her with a former lover, the stories vividly capture the emotions and numerous hardships of migration.
A collection of eight different stories, The Refugees is a creative collection of shared experiences of a country devastated by war. The captivating writing invites you to meet the characters, not just in the present but their past as well. We are greeted by the ghost, their families, the culture, Vietnam, and the implications of the war on their lives. The stories aren’t connected by common characters but by common experiences of the characters who survived the war in Vietnam and found their way to America. That is not the focus of every story, not just being in America as refugees: but about the universal themes of finding one’s identity, coming to terms with the past and family dynamics.
On the page before the title page Nguyen quotes from two sources in his Preface, Roberto Bolano’s introduction to Antwerp “I wrote this book for the ghosts, who, because they’re outside of time, are the only ones with time.” And a small piece of James Fenton’s poem A German Requiem ”It is not your memories which haunt you. It is not what you have written down. It is what you have forgotten, what you must forget. What you must go on forgetting all your life.” These two quotes really do set the tone and atmosphere for these eight stories. A promise of a better life, the ghosts left behind, but who never really leave, the memories, the struggles to feel accepted and part of this new life.
Viet Thanh Nguyen was born in Vietnam and came to the United States as a refugee in 1975. He grew up in some rougher parts of California during his childhood, but would eventually go to college and become a University professor at the University of Southern California. An accomplished writer with numerous books, including The Sympathizer which won The Pulitzer Prize in 2016 and many other awards.
I would gladly use this book in a classroom. It covers an important topic, the Vietnam War, but in an indirect way that doesn’t shout at you preaching against war. It also tackles other important topics such as, immigration, culture, government ideology, and family dynamics. The characters are very different, but still relatable in so many different ways. Each and every one of them is human like the reader, the only difference being that their path to America was indefinitely more difficult than any American-born reader.
Blog 6
Uncharted Books
The Metamorphosis is a story about George Samsa, a young man that one morning awakes as a giant insect in his own bed. The story follows the struggles of George and his family as they have to deal with this new affliction that has come to terrorize the family. A rather short short story with only around 40 pages, Franz Kafka beautifully writes a story about the struggles of human existence.
The problem of alienation is explored to depth in the novel- Gregor may have transformed to something unusual at the core he is still the same however he faces problem of acceptance by society due to his transformed appearance, which ridicules his being- his existence- as if he is thrown into the hell of nothingness without any notice. The feebleness of his existence disintegrates his being into nothingness, under the sheer pressure of the society- the ‘Other’. The author robs Gregor-the protagonist- of every sense of his inauthentic existence by stealing off all assumptions of his life, now he is striped down to the very core of his existence.
Gregor Samsa can make us ponder our own character, our identity, about the smoothness of what we take to be steady and fixed, and about the dangers and supernatural occurrences of our own metamorphosis. Kafka gives us that how the conventions of normal society are twisted because of our incompetence to look past the surface to the individual inside.
This novella is much different than a lot of things I have read before, more focused into a philosophical ideology on existentialism. Kafka uses Gregor to show the existence of an individual determining his own development and fate once he becomes less than a human at the expense for his past. I am unsure whether I would be able to use this book in a classroom, I definitely believe that it is a good book but I would need to do a lot of research into existentialism and Franz Kafka’s ideology.
