Blog Post 10

The last time that I truly got immersed in a book would have to be The Great Gatsby, which I read while I was in high school. It was one of the few books that I read during high school that kept my attention for the whole book. I think the characters were so interesting and complicated that I wanted to know how they would handle the situations they were in. Also, I think it creates a glamorous world that readers get sucked into because it is more of a fantasy than a relatable world. However, I believe all the themes of the book are interesting too, because it deals with so many different aspects of American life. The Great Gatsby was the last time that I truly got immersed in a book because I believe the characters, however disturbed they are, are relatable on some level to the readers of the book. I think the fact that I was reading this in high school made me not want to read it, but it was truly one of the few books from high school that I actually enjoyed and therefore had a deep reading experience. I don’t know if I will find this again in a book, because a lot of the reading I do nowadays is assigned to me for school, and therefore I don’t get much choice in what I get to read. If there was more choice involved I’m sure I would be able to find a book I enjoyed. 

post 12

Throughout the first volume of Maus I found many parts of the story that evoked an extreme amount of pathos. One part I found was on page 159. This is towards the very end of the first volume. On the very last page there is a large picture drawn very dark. It is a picture of Auschwitz. Vladek states “we knew everything. And here we were”. I think this part of the story is very powerful because it shows a loss in the hope everyone once harbored. As they got moved into a smaller house and eventually the ghetto , they were constantly told it would get better. Now that they are in Auschwitz,  they know that it won’t get better, and some may even die here. They lost everything, all of their possessions and jobs, but the most powerful oppression was the loss of hope. I think this can really apply to people’s ethos. 

Blog Post #9

“Every technology is an expression of human will” (page 44)

I believe that this quote is very important to Nicholas Carr’s argument in the book The Shallows. His whole argument is how we think, read, and remember and I think this quote does a decent job of explaining the point that Carr is trying to plant into our heads. I do not feel like he is in any way trying to convince us to not use the internet, I think he is just trying to inform us what the front of the book says, What the Internet is Doing to our Brains. This goes back to when we talked in class about how we read short articles to learn about big topics, which I admit that I do, but I do not feel like it is right to do that all the time because we miss a lot of information about that topic. This goes the same when Carr talks about when the typewriter was invented and how it changed our writing style. I feel as though the internet does not necessarily change our brains, but instead it in a way alters it to do different things than ever before the internet.

Blog Post #15

This summer I plan to work a ton at Buffalo Wild Wings and the Iowa State Fair, go to California with my dad, go to a friends lake house, and babysit 3 of my cousins for a month. I think it is safe to say that I will have an interesting time, but I think the best part of my summer will be spending time with my family. I have found myself missing my grandma a lot this year being up at school and I am really excited to do activities with her, even if it is something as easy as taking her to the grocery store. Lately she has been showing more and more signs of Alzheimer’s and I hope that she never forgets who I am. She is the only grandparent I have left who is not deceased. I regretted not spending more time with my other grandma before she died and I am not going to make the same mistake again. This year when I have been receiving letters from my grandma it breaks my heart to know that I do not see her as much as I used to. Studies show that when people are happy, they have a thirty five percent lower death risk and I want to prove that right by doing things with her that I used to when I was a little younger, such as going to the senior center and playing BINGO. I guess you could say I am scared of losing her, just like everyone else is with their family.

Blog Post #12

After finishing the first volume of Maus, I think that Art Spiegelman does a great job of using pathos at the very end of the first volume on pages 158-159 during the scene when Vladek breaks the news to Art that he burned the notebooks of his past wife, Anja. Spiegelman makes Vladek seem like such a bad person during this scene, when in reality he could have had a good reason for getting rid of them. I guess that is something we will never know. I believe that by using the words destroyed and murderer Spiegelman does a great job of getting the audience of this book to feel sorry for him due to the fact that he never got a chance to get to know his own mother. When I read through this, I honestly thought that Vladek was trying to hide something from Art, but then came to decide that he probably did it to get rid of those horrible memories he had about the Holocaust. In addition, I think that Vladek still misses Anja more than he shows to his family around him. As we discussed in class, this is also the reason that he treats Mala so badly and in his head he sees her more of a housekeeper than his own wife. Last semester in Psychology, I learned about how different type of people deal with depression in strange ways and I think that this situation relates well. On the outside, Vladek is just an old man, but on the inside he is a very depressed man who I believe to constantly have flashbacks of his hard times, and could potentially believe that he should have died in the war with the love of his life and in a way is holding that against himself.

Blog Post 13

I would definitely say that Maus was the most interesting and fun text to read, however I also really enjoyed Eating Animals. The Shallows on the other hand, not so much. Maus was unique in that it was a comic book but also a non-fiction piece, which I think added a different twist than most holocaust novels, as well as other novels in general. Maus is similar to Eating Animals in that each display the art of storytelling. Spiegelman tells his father’s story while making the argument that his father is not the only survivor but so is he, while Safran Foer tells many stories throughout his novel to argue why eating animals is unethical. I did not see many similarities between Maus and The Shallows however. Art made it easier to find an argument while, although Carr’s was evident, Carr seemed to beat around the bush. Once again I think that the storytelling in Maus and in Eating Animals is what helped make their arguments stronger. Spiegelman’s graphic text showed the story while Safran Foer simply told stories. Also, both authors used a significant amount of ethos and pathos throughout their novels, helping keep the reader interested and connected, while Carr used mostly logos, boring the reader more than anything else.