English 1000

This is a book that I am reading for sociology, and as the title suggests, it’s about racism in today’s society.  All in all, it’s a really easy book to get through, although some of the parts just make me feel very uncomfortable.  There are so many facts on race that don’t beat around the truth at all that it really does make you feel uncomfortable reading them when you have heard the same things so many times before, and it never made you feel that way.  There are also many quotes from people who have had horrible racial experiences and the way that they make you feel when reading them is awful and makes you question how anyone could ever do that to anothere person.

I’m reading this for my Classical Mythology class, and it is definently the hardest thing we have read this semester.  The other books have been over subjects that I had some sort of background of, which is not the case with this book.  It’s written as a Greek tragedy, which is a style of a playwright that I have never read before.  It also uses much more serious language, and I don’t know what a lot of it means because it’s a lot of old translated Greek words.  Also, the way Greek tragedies were supposed to be read/watched is with the person who is reading/watching it to have some previous background on the story, and I have never even heard of this before.

I love reading the Odyssey because of how it is written in dactylic hexameter, which I think makes it so much more interesting to read because you really have to pay attention to when the sentences end and begin since there could be a capitalized word in the middle of a sentence and you have to remember if it’s a new sentence or not.  I just think that it makes it more interesting.  Also, The Odyssey is a classic, so how could you not like it?  It’s got adventure, love, suspense, really the whole shebang!

This has got to be the thickest book, and the hardest one to get through I have read so far this year.  It took me 2 hours to get through a hundred pages or so, and that hardly ever happens because I like to think of myself as a somewhat fast reader.  The author isn’t bad by any means, he just likes to throw a lot of information into each paragraph and that is why it takes such a long time to get through.  You almost have to stop after every other page just to give your brain some time to cool off so it doesn’t go in overload.  The book is mainly about two men during the Depression and how they influence others around them and what their influence on the government is, so right off the bat it was obvious to me that it wasn’t  going to be very exciting, and I was right.

Compared to the other chapters in this book, I would have to say that this has been the easiest to get through so far.  Most of the chapters in this book basically just throw terms at you and hope that you understand them, but this chapter has been more like an arguement, which makes it a lot more interesting.  It also makes it easier for me to pay attention and helps keep me from daydreaming about all the other things I could be doing and that is when I end up not absorbing any of the material.  So kudos to this chapter.

This article was very difficult to get through for two reasons.  It was written in 1962, so the author makes references that were fine back then, but don’t make much sense considering it’s 2008.  Also, the article was written for sociologists, which I am not at all and have no intention to be.  Also, Blumer delivers his ideas in a very matter of fact way, which means that if you don’t know the terminology, you have little to no chance to understand what is going on.  All in all, a majority of this article went strait over my head and didn’t really have anything to do with what we are studying in the class at the moment, which is poverty and inequality.

This week I have been reading Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery.  I actually love reading older books like this because of the writing style and the language that is used.  I also love how it is kind of a challenge to understand some of what the author is saying becasue they are writing in the style that was used back then, but this makes it very interesting.

            This week I had to read Amusing the Millions, by John Kasson, which is a book about Coney Island at the turn of the century.  The main point of the book is to look at how New York society changed from modest and proper to carefree and relaxed and how the rest of the country viewed this change.  This book really made me think about what it would be like to live back then, and how completely different it seems from today’s style of living.  Back then a swimsuit for a woman consisted of a full outfit, socks and all, and today’s swimsuits have about as much fabric as one of those socks.  It just seems strange how life can change so dramtically in just 100 years.