You Shall Know Our Velocity

I think that the most symbolic thing that I get from You Shall Know Our Velocity isn’t just one specific moment. It is the whole idea of just picking up everything and going on a spur of the moment trip with a best friend. As long as I can remember this has been a dream of mine. At the beginning of the semester when I heard that the theme for our class was travel I was very excited because I really do love to travel and am very lucky for some of the traveling opportunities that I have had. I have been all over the United States from New York to Los Angeles. I have been to Mexico on several occasions. I have also been lucky enough to go overseas to England, Poland, and Israel. The trips that I have been on help me relate to some of the things that Hand and Will experienced on their trip. Many times in this book they have had a very hard time communicating because of the language barrier. They have been misunderstood and it does make getting around and getting things done a lot harder. This is probably a very common problem for a lot of travelers who visit foreign speaking countries including me. There has been a couple times when I just chose something off a foreign menu at a restaurant not sure what I might get just like Will and Hand did. Traveling can also mess with you fatigue and when you need to sleep. It seems like there were several occasions in this book when both Will and Hand wanted to get more things done in the day but were so tired that they were forced to sleep. When I visited Poland we left during the day and landed during the day so I went quiet a lot of time without sleep. I am very envious though of the opportunity that Will was given, because of the money he received, to take an adventure like this. Even though his reason was to give it all the money away this is a great way to do it. When I put his trip in perspective I think of Will as the guy who gives out the Publishers Clearinghouse prizes but these winners don’t have to enter to win. Like I said earlier that going on an around the world trip like Will and Hand are doing has always been a dream of mine and reading this book get me excited to maybe have the opportunity has well. The unfortunate part about their trip is that Will seems to be not enjoying a lot of the aspects. This is because he is still in mourning of his best friends death as well as getting beat up. I don’t know if he feels guilty that he gets to be in all these places and his best friend is dead but it makes me upset as well. It also feels like Will is starting to real dislike Hand. Will is always talking about how much he hates the things he does and then it seems like Hand doesn’t even notice how much Will really doesn’t like him. Overall this book has been really great and has made me think a lot about what I would do if I were in Will’s situation and if going on this trip was the right situation. I hope that in the end Will will somehow find peace in the fact that he has done so much by giving these poverty stricken people money and will also find some way to move on from his friends death.

Blog about Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name

Blog about Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name
My initial reaction to reading this book is that I honestly was not going to enjoy it that much. Reading the back cover it seemed like it was kind of a chick’s book that was about a girls problems with her mother, nothing that really interested me. My opinion changed when I started reading it though. It was a really complicated situation that Clarissa had been put in that really messed up her life. Having to deal with the disappearance of her mother at such a young age with so many questions so little answers had to be very tough. To add to the toughness having a mentally handicapped brother that needed so much special care made her life very difficult. Over the years she did try and investigate where she had gone but she had no luck. Then when her father died she found out that he was not her real dad and that is when she really went to find out the truth about her mother and biological father. The things that she figured out when she visited Lapland were totally unexpected and that is one of the reasons this book is so interesting and definitely leaves you wanting to read more. The strange thing is though that at the end of the book the similarities between Clarissa and her mother’s actions are very similar. Clarissa found out that she was the child of a rape. Her mother was raped while protesting a dame while she was married to another man. After she was born her mother had to leave him because he could not have him raising a child that she was so ashamed of. Clarissa was also raped as a teenager while visiting a camp so she can relate to how her mother felt and how devastating such a thing is. Later Clarissa actually tracks down her mother who is living in a hut taking care of dogs. When she finally finds her and asks her why she did the things she did she says because she was not happy and she knew that that life she had been living was not the life for her. She really did not feel bad at all for leaving her children or husband, she did what she had to do. This surprised me because it seems like an awful thing to just vanish like she had done. Finding her mother though changed Clarissa perspective of her own life and in the end of the book she did something very similar to what her mother had done by leaving her fiancé and just traveling away from it all. This also surprised me because I did not think that after all the pain she had gone through she would do the same thing to someone else. This book was very interesting and unique and I really did enjoy reading it because it had a lot of twists and turns that made it a good read.

Blog about my Narrative Sequence Paper
For my narrative Sequence paper I would like to do option one. I am not surer of the exact pages I would like to pick yet but I want it to be in the vicinity of the ending of the book. I might do when she finally finds her mother and when they confront each other. There is a lot of deep things that some of the stuff her mother said might have meant like when she says that she didn’t have anything to say to her and she didn’t feel any obligation. You want to look deep into those words and think of all of the reasons why she said that and meant that. There might still be some gaps but most of them have been filled in. She also traces a flower in the mirror while saying that. You wonder what this flower represents and why she would do that at such a weird time. She also says if she wanted to talk to them she would have written a letter which kind of hints at she wanted to write a letter many times but she just never did. She also says that no decisions were made for her which probably means that she did not choose to have Clarissa as a child and there was nothing she could do about it though. Then she just drops it and never mentions it again. There is another part later when she tells her mother that her father had died, and at the time it didn’t seem to faze her but she was awoken in the middle of the night and Clarissa tries to confront her but all she can say to her is she has no idea what she has been through then she wants to talk but she just gets angry at Clarissa. You wonder why didn’t she want to share some of her feelings with her. Why didn’t she want any part in her daughter’s life. The last section that I might use in my paper is the very last part of the book when Clarissa is contemplating staying her or going back to her fiancé Pankaj. She thought that if she returned to Pankaj that he would not leave her just because duty demanded him to stay there because she was wounded and she could not do that. It makes you wonder why she was with Pankaj for all these years if all of a sudden she could just leave him like that. It also makes you wonder how she could do that to him when her mother did it to her. I think that I have some good ideas of which pages to close read into and could make a paper out of any of my choices.

Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name

Overall so far I have not thought that this books is to terrible. Right now it is pretty much just setting up the history of who the main character is, and what her family is like. In the book it switches off from present time to her talking about her future. I am very interested about if she is going to find her mom in Finland and what is going to happen, and if she will find her real father. Some gaps that I have found so far in the book is when they are talking about like native people from Finland I was unaware of thier culture. I am also unaware of growing up with only one parent. I also am a man and this story is told through the womens perspective which is very different from books that I usually read. Another gap is growing up with a sibling that has a mental problem. I would imagine that this would be very difficult and in the book it seems like she is very caring and does a very good job. I think that it is very interesting how she has just abandoned her boyfriend and everybody back at home to escape to Finland in search of her mother or father. This almost resembles how her mother just left her family without telling anybody or without any sign at all. Although not a book that I would pick out to read on my own I am kind of glad that we are reading it because it is not boring and it keeps me wanting to know what is going to happen.

Reading Blog

Over the years my attitude and overall feeling of reading has completely changed. When I was younger in elementary school I would read nonstop. I would read a lot of different book series. I would also read every night before I went to bed. I think one of the reasons that I read so much was because of my parents really encouraging me to read and I was much more obedient so I listened to him. Reading before bed really changed when I got my first television in my room. This is when my reading habits started to diminish. Instead of reading books before bed I started watching TV and it has been that way ever since. Over the years the genre of what I like to read has changed too. I used to really like mysteries and adventurous types of stories. Now I really enjoy any reading that has to do with sports. My favorite types of books are sports novels that have a lot of humor in them, or very humorous. I also enjoy books relating to the Mafia for some reason. Some things that I gain from reading these texts weather it is a book or a magazine is knowledge of a subject that I enjoy learning about and can discuss with others. If I read something about a subject that I do not enjoy it seems like I don’t retain the knowledge as much and so it doesn’t stick with me as long. Some things that I do now to help me read is go to the library and sit up in a desk without any distractions. It is hard for me to read laying down in a bed because eventually I will end up drifting off and falling asleep. I also prefer reading alone because for some reason having somebody else read to me can be distracting or if they have a really soothing voice it also might make me fall asleep. In college my approach to reading really changed as well. Like I said before after elementary school I stopped reading nearly as much as I used to but now since college has started I have realized that there is a lot of reading that needs to be done. To get what needs to be read, read I set out a god amount of time in my day just for reading so I can get it all done. Reading has taught me many things in my life. It has taught me life lessons, it has taught me good from bad, it has taught me a lot of history about what has gone on before my time. Without me reading what I have read I do not think that I would have as much knowledge in some things than I do today. In high school we were probably assigned to read four or five books every year. Honestly most of these books that we were assigned to read did not catch my interest at all. They were a lot of the time slow and boring. One of my favorite of those books was Pride and Prejudice. This book taught me a lot about discipline and integrity and a lot about hard work. Overall reading has been a major influence in my life and I will continue to read for the rest of it. My goal is to start reading more novels as well as the newspaper. I will also continue to read Sports Illustrated and a lot of sports articles that I thoroughly enjoy.