How Reading has changed my Life

I completely disagree with this lady. She is stating the stories are better read than told to, but if that were true why have stories been told for thousands of years where reading and writing has just become a big thing lately. You could say that it is because they were not smart enough to figure out a system of writing but if that were true then how could they come up with a system of speaking. I believe it would take jsut as much intellegence to start a language as it would to begin to write a language. With reading you don't have interaction among real living people, you don't get to be with friends, you are imagining things that are not real and for some those not real characters become better friends than the real friends that they have. I just feel like her essay is extremely oppinionated which may be the reason she wrote it but for me, I would choose spoken word over letters on a paper.

Small Wonder

I am getting really tired of reading bull crap! I don't feel as though this story was worth reading. I gained nothing from it. Why do we need to know about a kid being saved by a bear and somehow it being compared to 9/11. Why did we read this? Why have we read any of this stuff in any of this class? This is a general education that I am required to take, I have no want to be here. There should not be this much work in a general education course were students are required to take expecially since I have not learned one thing besides the fact that it strengthened my dislike for Literature and why Literature is even important.

Mrs. Dalloway

This was an absolutely terrible read. I got to admit I could not finish it. I have a hard enough time reading the short works we do, that story did not interest me enough 100 pages of it. But from what I did read it was obvious that Mrs. Dalloway and Peter had some issue that I feel could really be solved if they just spoke to each other about it instead of by passing it. I could also kind of feel a theme that kept coming up and that was kind of like this fear of being oppressed. Mrs. Dalloway didn't want her husband to have too much control of her and the veteren guy didn't like the pshciatrist and thought he was trying to like control him or something.

The Story of an Hour

I do not know who the narrator is in this story. At the beginning I had the feeling that the narrator was like a dead person sitting in the coffin with people around her telling her the bad news but that is not the case. I kind of found that the narrator is someone else. I can't not figure it out. I even read it a second time to try and figure it out. And for some reason that is all I could concentrate on so I didn't get much else from the story.

A Room of One's Own

I feel like I have been saying this alot lately but yet again I do not understand why this story is literature. First off, I don't understand why she is so interested in the research of males vs females. I know it may be a little bias but I feel as though it is just life. Things are changing and there is becoming more and more chances for woman to make a difference but from thousands of years ago mens have been the hunters and the gathers and the kings of countries and the women were usually in the houses cleaning or cooking, usually the hunting and kingly stories are much more exciting then cooking and cleaning.

The Colonel Revisited

At first I didn't understand why such a story can be considered literature but after class I can see how it is considered lit. Even though I am not sure I completely agree with it. It makes sense that the reason it is considered literature is because they use the words perfectly so that they don't say too much but you find out sooooooo much about the few words they do say. I just don't feel like there was much story to it and I still don't get the point of the story.

If We Must Die

I really enjoyed "If We Must Die". I feel as though Claude McKay did a very great job at describing how the blacks were being treated but not disrespecting the whites for who they are as people. As a want-to-be football coach reading this, I get a slight adrenaline surge because I could see this being used at halftime to get my team amped if they are down and getting beaten. I feel as though even though he was describing one specific event in time, you can actually use this poem in just about any aspect of life, or even life itself if it is just beating you down. He is basically saying you only live once, and you are going to die at some point so why not give everything you have for what you are doing and go down with honor rather than go down with nothing. By far my favorite poem.

The Colonel

What in the world just happened?!! Okay, I am going to task this that is it based in Mexico due to the spanish commercial and the iron bars on the windows. I don't even know where to begin with this one on the questions I have for it. Okay, so the broken bottles are for what? and why in the world are all these people there and why in the heck does he have a HyVee sack full of human ears?!? I am so lost. Why does he talk about a poem? The Colonel kind of sounds like a jerk.

Lines Revisited

Lines was a very strange poem. Even after class, I still do not understand what it is about or the purpose of it. I realize now that it is about a guy who does not like people but loves nature. The nature is his fallback when he gets angry or mad. Even after class I still just don't understand the purpose of the poem. I feel like it was just talking about the beauty of nature but didn't really talk anything of it. I don't know, poems just confuse me I guess. I feel like I would need to read it 20 times to even start understand any of it and that is way to much work for something I don't like doing in the first place.

Lines

This poem sucked! Of course this could be because I do not like poems a whole lot but I just never understand what it is talking about. So really I don't have alot to say about this poem other than I really don't get it. I am also really trying to give this literature thing a chance because I never liked it and the poems that I don't understand make it really tough to keep giving it a chance.

A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain

This story completely lost me. I didn't know like how there was different languages in it. I felt like the whole time I was trying to figure out who was who. The old man kept telling storys of his past and I could not depict what the difference from the present in the story and the past in the story. I continued to read even though I was not understanding it hoping maybe it would clear up but it just got more confusing to me. Hopefully during class I will be able to understand it more.

A Perfect Day for Bananafish

This story was odd to me. I am not sure I get what the main point is in this story or what the author might be trying to get across. I feel like, if it was not for the begining conversation between the wife of the Seymour and her mother; the way Seymour was acting was not all that pecular till he gets on the elevator then he gets all weird. Besides acting a little goofy sometimes I would have never expected him to shoot himself. I guess it the begining conversation really foreshadowed what was going to happen because the mother was being so over bearing about her daughter being careful.

The Road not Taken, Mending Wall, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

Some poems are weird to me. I feel like most poems don't make any sense. When they do I don't feel anything from them because they don't have anything to do with me. Like the Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening. I feel as though it was kind of a pointless poems. Like someone just wanted to write about something with woods but didn't want to write a whole story. I didn't get the Mending Wall at all. That WAY over my head. The first sentence was even too much for me, I feel like the author just through some words together. And The Road not Taken I feel has some kind of meaning behind it that I am missing but can't quite desipher it.

A Good Man is Hard to Find

This story was extremely weird! I have to admit that I didn't like it at all. After I got finished, I felt like there was no point in reading it because as fast as the story started, it ended. Just seemed like there was not a lot of story that went into it. I thought it was wierd how the grandmother said they used to do everything so much better in the past and than right after she started calling the little black kid a nigger and a pickaninny and talking about plantations that now are tough to hear about.

Aristotle from Poetics Duex

After being told what Poetics actually is, I feel as though I made a bad judgement before. I took Poetics as basically just poems and maybe some song like writings but I did not understand what Poetics actually is. The entire reading now makes a little more sense. Also, earlier when I said that Aristotle only wrote stuff that was common sense, I was not trying to taking anything away from him that he is and was a brilliant mind. To come up with all that when at the time common sense was limited to what animals you shouldn't hunt because they are dangerous is a major feat. I personally, thoroughly enjoy reading Aristotle's works because even though it is common sense stuff to us now days he can make how you look at situations or ideas in a completely different way.

How to Read a Book

I did not like this reading at all. It reminded me alot of Aristotles From Poetics because it seemed like it was just describing how to do something that, for the most part, I already knew how to do. I might not be able to follow a play or a tradegy very well because they are not interesting to me, not that I don't know how to feel what the author is trying to convey or understand what the main character is feeling. I do think that alot of people don't see how some characters in stories make the decisions they make because as the reader you know more about certain events that the main character does not so you have to realize that idea when reading.

Aristotle From Poetics

One thing that I kind of like about Aristotle and is also something that I don't like about him, is that alot of his writings seem to be common sense stuff to most people today. Probably worded way better than most of us could have ever written it that way but non the less most people could probably come up with close to the same type of answers. It sounds like in this piece that he is just stating some obvious facts about poetics and tragedy that most of us already know like there needs to be a plot, characters, launguage, and thought. He words it in a way that is interesting and maybe brings up some points that most people probably never even thought about in such that a tragedy has to end with the reader feeling sympothetic or sad towards the main character or otherwise it is not quite a tragedy. I don't know if this is my bias or not because I am from the present but I can see how in the past, people like Aristotle needed to be around because common sense of that time was not quite the common sense of today in that people seemed to be less smart.

The Song of Songs

I feel like with The Song of Songs, that I would have to read it a full 9 and a half times (sarcasm) or so to really grasp the full meaning of it if there even is a full meaning. It sort of bothered me that they kept repeating a lot of the same things over and over possibly to fully get the point across but to me, it just made me lose what was going on like maybe she was searching for her lover and had people helping her and she was just telling stories to them about him to help describe him so the others could help. Or maybe it was flashbacks of actually events that happened at separate times. I am not sure. I just didn't like it that much because it was written in that Old English that is very hard to follow and half the words I did not understand what they even meant. I can deffinately see how it could be a very passionate and loving poem if only I could understand it a little better.

The Invention of Writing and the Earliest Literatures

The Invention of Writing was actually very interesting. Even though I am a physical education major, I still enjoy alot of history. You could kind of call me a random history buff if you wanted; random being the key word. This piece had alot of random histoy throughout it. Including that sweet short lesson on how to read hieroglyphs. It was also interesting to think about that the Hebrews had no other major thing like pictures or music, plays, or any of that. What they did create however was one of the most well known books in the world. It makes sense to me as well that writing in the earliest of civilizations had to be mastered by a select few because they didn't have anything like public schooling or educational system to teach anyone about these traits so from birth most children were raised with one major purpose whether that be fighting, farming, hunting, or what have you. So it was up to these select few to write down everything that had to be written and that is what they were taught to do from birth. Overall, I found this piece very interesting with all its historical value and would love reading more stuff closer to this in the future.