Books

In English this semester, we read many wonderful books that I enjoyed. Out of the five books that we read, I enjoyed First They Killed my Father the most. This was my favorite book because it was about something that actually happened and I had never really learned about the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. I enjoy reading about memoirs of people who have survived through a tough time, such as the Holocaust, or the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. I find them interesting because they reveal the lives of other people who lived in a totally different life from mine and it left me thinking about how any person’s life can be suddenly changed in just one day because of the government around them.

I also enjoyed A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Though I did not like the ending very much, I thought the play was very well written. Like Joe said, many of the jokes Shakespeare put in the play do not apply today, but I still think that the play was humorous in ways. For example, the love between the four lovers resulted in confusion and dramatic irony.

Furthermore, I thought Inherit the Wind was a good play to read. The book really got me thinking about the theme that Drummond mentions, “the right to think.” I think this relates to a lot of people in the world today, even though this play was written decades ago. It reminds me about the places in this world that do not have this “right to think” and how the world would be different without the right to think. I find this a very interesting book and I enjoyed reading this play.

However, a book that I did not enjoy as much was Catcher in the Rye. I thought the themes of this book were interesting, such as how painful it was to grow up and become an adult. However, the thing that annoyed me the most was the character, Holden. I agree with David Zhang about the character of Holden. It bothered me that Holden dislikes everything, just like what Phoebe pointed out, and a lot of his thoughts are very unrealistic. His stubbornness seemed a little overboard and it distracted me from the overall meaning of the book. Though the book was interesting in some ways, Holden’s character made the book less enjoyable for

Lastly, My Antonia was another book that I did not particularly enjoy. This book also had riveting themes, but overall, I thought the book was too bland. There were not many conflicts in the story and climaxes. I am the type of person who does not like to read books with no major climaxes, and My Antonia was mainly about the life of Jim Burden, who lives a mostly normal life, and like Joe, I found it rather boring.

Overall, I enjoyed reading many of these novels during first semester. Many of these books had interesting themes and left me with a lot to think about.