Outside reading book choice and similarity between the Hemingway works

For my second outside reading book, I chose A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway for my author study. I chose this book for various reasons, mainly due to the fact that it is considered one of his major works.

A Farewell to Arms takes place in Italy during World War I. It portrays a story of a pair of lovers, an English nurse and an American ambulance driver. At the moment I have read up to the part where they initially meet and talk about their lives.

I am only about a tenth of the way into the book, but I have already noticed many similarities in Hemingway’s work. A common theme that I noticed between the works is a man’s importance of love. In For Whom the Bell Tolls, Hemingway shows the love between Robert Jordan and Maria to portray the importance of love to a man. As they spend time with each other they get attracted, and near the end they are attached so much that Maria refuses to leave Roberts even though she will get killed if she stays there. This portrays the power and importance of love between the lovers.

In A Farewell to Arms Henry and Catherine attracted to each other immediately and start to spend time with each other. At the part where I am, they clearly show their affection for each other and this hints at me that this love will play a great role in the story later on in the plot.

The main similarity I noticed between the two Hemingway works is love. I am sure there are more similarities, and I might write a blog in the future expanding on them.

College Applications

Early action college applications are due in less than two weeks. I think I am not the only that is getting anxious about them due in such a short amount of time. I have basically all my application done except the essays, which are the hardest part by far. In a limited amount of words, you need to convey who you are along with your knowledge of grammar and the English language.

I am not a good writer. If you have seen my writing, you probably know this. My vocabulary is limited and my grammar is often times awkward and grammatically incorrect. In addition to this, the time it takes for me to write an equal quality essay compared to my peers time is double, even more. This has put stress on me along with fear that I am not going to get into my colleges because of the lack of my writing abilities.

The common app essay is by far the most important essay for the application, since every college that you apply through the common app will read this essay. This essay needs to convey who I am. I thought about this essay for a long time over fall break, thinking about what topic I could write it about. Several candidate topics formed in my mind. One was about the shogunate Takeda Shingen and how he has affected me. Another idea was about raiding in the game World of Warcraft and how it has affected me. I decided to go with the latter, since this topic is pretty unique (I mean who writes about World of Warcraft?) and I thought it would convey pretty well who I am.

Now I got this blog out of the way, I will resume my essay writing process. I wish good luck to everyone else who are working on their applications as well.

Reflection on For Whom the Bell tolls

First things first, I need to rant about the test that we just had. That was the hardest English test I have ever taken. This class is extremely challenging and I like that, but I am worried about my grades.

So now the main topic of this blog, a reflection on For whom the bell tolls.

Overall I liked the book alot. There were some confusing scenes such as the Gaylord scene, but other than that the story progresses at a good pace and Hemingway's style of short sentences makes it an easy read. 

The topic of the story contributes to the positive experience of this book. As I was reading and my eyes were starting to close, Hemingway always threw in a combat scene or an description of Robert and Maria's interaction which made me awake to continue reading the book. This happened everytime that I got sleepy, and I wonder if Hemingway planned that.

The plethora of characters made the story interesting to read. At first it is hard to recognize who is who but after a while you start to notice their differences from each other. Out of all the characters, my favorite character was Pablo. He is one of the most bipolar character that I have encountered in fiction. At one time he is serious but the next moment he is drunk and an a**. But at the end, there is confusion but he does care about the gang and the outcome of the war.

I strongly recommend people to read this novel, a novel that is often regarded as the best war novel ever written. If you think it is irrelevant because it was written over 70 years ago, give it a try and see how much it can be related to the current society.

Class Today

Todays English class was both the best and the worst English class I have ever had. I think I will start off with the good part first. I enjoyed the discussion we had about existentialism, selfishness, and the meaning of life. Not only did I learn various facts about existentialism, it got me thinking deeply about the topic. When we usually have class discussions I am not focused as the one we had today since the topic does not appeal to me. I propose that in the future we have more class discussions about this topic, since clearly we did not finish discussing and analyzing the topic completely. Todays discussion will definitely go into my "English class that was interesting" list (the number of things on here can be counted with one hand).
Contradicting with the above paragraph, it was also the worst English class that I ever had. The reason is the Drunkard Quiz that we received at the beginning of class. I did not get to read the story since the block before where I usually complete my assignments, I was typing up the roster for National Honor Society for Mrs.Wells. Therefore I did not read the story, but I thought just like any other English quiz I could BS my way through it. Well, it didn't turn out that way. I failed this quiz (not magnet fail, actual fail aka <65%) which was kind of expected but shocking at the same time since it was my first time ever in high school failing anything. This brought my grade down 4%, which just added to the depression of the failure.
I will remember todays English class as the worst and best one of my high school career so far.

Art of War

I am time deprived right now due to college applications. I do not have much time to play video games, my main source of entertainment, which is stressing me out. Enough with the wining, now to my main topic of this blog.
The other day I was surfing the internet and came across a book that caught my attention. I heard many good things about this book but never got around to reading it. Reading the book review on Amazon, I was wanting to read the book (this happens maybe once in 20 books) and immediately bought it. It has arrived about a week ago, but I do not have the time to read it right now. You guys might be wondering, what is this amazing book that has caught attention of a book loather like Hayato? The book is Art of War written by the ancient Chinese military tactician Sun Tzu.

The translation that I bought, regarded as the best one out there

There are multiple aspects of the book that caught my attention. I have been interested in military tactics since when I was a boy and this literature is considered a classic in the field. Another reason is that my favorite general, Takeda Shingen, has been inspired by this book and adapted a slogan from it which represents his army and himself as a whole. This slogan has inspired me and has shaped who I am. This slogan served militaristic purposes but in the modern era it has a different connotation: Act accordingly to the given situation.

            Fast like the wind,

Silent like a forest,

Intrusive like the fire,

Immobile like a mountain.

Update on outside reading

For my outside reading I am currently reading "For whom the bell tolls" by Ernest Hemingway. This reading is my first book out of three on my author study of Hemingway. I am currently around page 80 of the book, where things are starting to get interesting.
Aside from popular beliefs, the book is not that hard of a read than people think it is. Even though the book was written more than 70 years ago the language is mostly the same, and it is far better than reading Shakespeare where you can't understand half of what he is saying.
The book has a slow start, but apart from that I like everything else about it. The plot is interesting since it based on Hemingway's experience during the Spanish Civil War as a news reporter. The protagonist is a dynamiter named Robert Jordan who's mission is blow up bridges behind enemy lines.
Now to the caviar of the blog (As Mr.Mullins would say) on why this book is an AP-Caliber work. As I said previously I'm only 80 pages into the book so don't bash me if I leave out something later into the book. I believe the element that makes this book AP-Caliber is its unique language. It uses specific English words to make it sound like a Spanish word with the same meaning. For example instead of saying "you" Hemingway writes "thou" which is similar to tú, the Spanish word for you. This unique form of writing, called archaism is what makes this work AP-Caliber.
To summarize, I would recommend this book to anyone, especially to people who are interested by war theme. I will probably write a blog in the future to further talk about this amazing piece of literature by Hemingway.

Expansion on today's bellringer

In our AP Senior english class today we had a interesting bellringer, "If you were to make everyone in the world read one book, what would it be?" I came up with several books while writing my journal so I thought I would share it here.

1. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close - Jonathan Safran Foer
This is the book that I wrote about today in my journal. I believe the theme for this book is universal and can benefit everyone, teaching the reader multiple lessons. This book teaches that everyone needs to go on a conquest to find himself and also the effect that terroism has on a society. Along with its appliable theme the book is a good read in general. The plot is well developed, and the printing of this book is appleaing. There are Oscar's photobook and his drawings, giving the reader a visualization of Oscar's works.

2. The Thief Lord - Cornelia Funke
This book is considered commercial fiction but I believe this book should be read by everyone in the world. Multiple themes are present in this book which can be applied to many people. The one theme that I want to focus on is the theme with Scipio and his identitiy. He hides that he is from a loyal background to the gang, being afraid that the gang might not respect him if he tells the truth. The theme presented here is ones fear of presenting his real identity to others. This can be seen in multiple situations in society today, affecting many people. This book also has a appealing plot along with the multiple themes, making the book an enjoyable read.

There were some other books I wanted to share about, but I didn't want this blog to be too long so I will write about the other books in some other blog.