Reading: City of Bones

This book is part of the Mortal Instruments series and is going to be made into a movie.  I have also heard a lot of good things about this book!  I also just noticed a pattern about reading books that are movies or are going to be movies.  The cover of the book is very shiny and eye catching which I like.  I sometimes can not help but judge a book by its cover sometimes when I pick it off the shelf.  The book starts out with a group of kids trying to get into an all ages night club.  One of the kids notices a girl in a beautiful white dress being followed by an awestruck boy.  They went into a back room which would have been normal at a club.  What was not normal about this was the body guards that showed up and guarded the door after the two went in.  The book then cuts to inside the room where the girl seduces the boy close and then the girl started to beat him up.  She had tattoos on her arm and the boy called her a shadow hunter.  The girl was named Isabelle but it was the boy who tried to gain some information before he killed the monster that looked like a boy.  That is when Clary walked in.  They called Clary a mundie which I'm not sure but probably means the same as a muggle from Harry Potter.  They were surprised that Clary could even see them.  Simon went in the room after Clary and did not see anyone so Clary pretended no one was there.  That was just a little analysis of the first chapter.  Usually books do not grab my attention for a while.  This book, however, caught my attention right away.

This makes me wish i was longboarding down my street in florida

Reading: The Lucky One

Keith went and told Beth that Thibault had a picture of her.   She was surprised and immediately went to talk to Thibault.  When Thibault admitted he had the picture that she gave to her brother she started to freak out.  She thought the was he used her was sick and wrong.  Her reaction was understandable and she was not overreacting too much.  Thibault should have told her about the photo from the beginning and he started to understand that mistake.  Everyone believed he was a sociopath.  I do not believe he was a sociopath but the whole idea was kind of crazy.  The fact that Thibault gave Ben the picture to help keep him safe made Beth a little less mad when she went to talk to Thibault.  After talking it out, Thibault and Beth made up and decided to still date.  I think this is a pretty big 180 after how mad Beth was and how weird and crazy the situation was.  Keith came to Beth's house and started to attack her.  He was acting crazy and was trying to make Beth kiss him.  Ben saw Keith trying to force his mom to date him again and ran away.  Ben had run to his tree house which takes an old collapsing bridge to cross.  On top of the impending devastation, the river below was flowing extremely fast due to the immense amount of rain that had been occurring all day.  Zeus saved Ben pulling him across the river to safety.  I was afraid that Zeus was going to be killed off by the author and I was happy he made it safely.  Keith did in fact die.  Even after the bad things Keith did, Beth only said good things about him which I think was skewing his memory.

Reading: The Lucky One

Thibault thinks that Beth's ex husband broke into his house.  Beth talked to Nana to try and figure out why.  Beth started to get scared that maybe Keith (her ex husband) would try to scare Thibault away.  I think that knowing the way Thibault feels about Beth there is no way that he would be scared away by Keith.  Thibault went to talk to Keith about breaking into his house.  Thibault had a video camera up so it saw Keith breaking in and Thibault still had the disk with the pictures that Keith took while spying on girls.  Thibault told Keith to 1. Stay out of Beth's business 2. Stay out of his business and 3. Not take his anger out on Ben.  Keith had been chasing away any guy who had tried to date Beth ever since they got a divorce.  Technically that was black mail but it was not hurting anyone it was overall helping the situation.

Keith found out that the guy who was showing Beth's picture around was Thibault.  Keith thought that Thibault had stalked her and wanted to know how he got the picture.  Keith was confused and knew that Beth probably would not like the story he heard.  After reading that I knew that something bad was going to happen.  If Beth did not think something was wrong with that there is something wrong with her.  Some may say that Thibault's trek to find Beth was romantic.  I agree somewhat but I think it is more creepy. 

Close-reading Bingo

1. "...Carrying a black Peguin paperback and a small white CVS bag...".  Weakness #8
http://stanfield6.blogspot.com/
2.  "In Nicholson Baker's work The Mezzanine, he uses elegant and intricate diction to create a formal tone." Weakness #6 http://clayballl.blogspot.com/
3.  "The girl screams to her sister “I will kill if you touch this, Julie, and if you do I swear to go I will kill you, no mercy, no take-backs private property, this means you, Julie, you” which explains how the infuriated girl feels toward her sister." Weakness #2 http://emily1212.blogspot.com/
4.  "The negative connotation of his words is straightforward, making his word choice easily believed by others. " Weakness #3http://littleduckkie3.blogspot.com/

Favorite: http://xchoosier3366.blogspot.com/

In Chapter One of The Mezzanine, Nicholson Baker's elegant and flowing elevation, journalistic and descriptive denotation, and slightly sweet musical tone convey the vivid detailing of the narrator's office. Although there is not an emotional tone to the passage, it still presents a brilliant and exact description of the building and its surroundings. His scholarly word choice is depicted through "radians of black luster that ride the undulating outer edge" and the lobby's "towering volumes of marble and glass." His denotation is evident through the descriptions of "the struts and piers" and the "black Penguin paperback and small white CVS bag" which are clearly easy to picture. The mood isn't very uplifting, but the connected words of "sunlight," "glossy," and "shine" help to emphasize the melodious sound that Baker employs.

Practice Diction Analysis

In the excerpt from JD Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, the blunt yet dull diction displays his view on life and portrays him as an angry young man.  Salinger uses words with mainly negative connotations that are easy to understand yet are somewhat hostile.  He also uses dull sarcasm like when he describes his parents as "nice".  That is a strong case that shows even though Salinger may be straight forward on some things, the verbal irony can create an interesting diction.  There is also a lot of common vernacular that makes the story a little more relateable.

Currently

The Lucky One  by Nicholas Sparks

Original Style Mapping Sentences:

1.  In Cormac McCarthy's novel The Road, the straightforward descriptions of the stripped wilderness give the text a minimalistic feel and forcing attention to the rare dialogue between the father and son. That was from Norwegian Wood and I like the imagry it shows and uses adjectives you normally would not see.

2. These diction types enforce the suggestivly imaginative connotation as he describes normal objects with a certain blunt hyberbolishness. That One Guy's Blog said this and I enjoyed the feeling given from the words especially hyberbolishness.

3.In 1984 by George Orwell, he portrays low language through his blunt diction and coarse observations giving the reader a sense of fear as well as disgust. Orwell uses vulgar descriptions such as, "The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats," which illustrates the setting of the novel. As Told by Ginger used the quote very well to help illustrate the feeling in the writing.