Hey guys! Long time no see, I know. Ever since March, I haven't been reading a lot, but I'll do a quick catch up on the few things I did read.
As I write this, I am happy to say this school year is almost over. Yay! So I decided, what's the best way to come back? Well, seeing as I'm pretty much done with school, I figured this would be the best.
It wasn't an easy year in English, and I'm not just saying it difficulty-wise, but...we read a lot of stuff I personally didn't want to read. There were a few gems here and there but...this is going to mostly be me trashing books...apologies to anyone that enjoyed any of these...
These are in reading chronological order as we went on during the year, and I'm not really including all of them, just the really prominent ones.
"Beowulf"
Rating: 5/10
Look, the thing is...this year I discovered I can't do epic poetry. I read the prose version of this, and I still had no idea what was going on. This might also sound dumb but I literally confused all the characters and I could barely remember who was who (I barely remember the name Hygelac and no clue who that was). Definitely not a bad story. I like the quests! And Beowulf, the character, wasn't too bad. The archaic language definitely ruined it for me, and the digressions definitely made me lose interest...but hey, at least there were quests.
Utopia by Thomas More
Rating: 3/10
Are you ever supposed to do something...but you don't? Yeah, that was me with reading this book. I only read like half of this, and I couldn't fully understand it either. At first, we get this story from More's perspective about meeting with the person who went to the Island of Utopia. It wasn't the worst in Part I...but Part II was very, very dry...if there's something I can't do, it's read a long list of rules disguised as a book. Also, I was completely disappointed with how Utopia was run. I was expecting something different, and in reality it was this weirdly-controlled island? Also, they use so much terminology that we really didn't need... Not my cup of tea by a long shot. At least it had a pretty cover I guess.
Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare
Rating: 7/10
Actually a good one! I like historical fiction, and I really enjoyed Shakespeare's spin on the assassination of Caesar. I also had never fully known all about the Ides of March, so I think it's a neat way to learn a bit about it, even if it's probably not 100% accurate. Brutus was definitely my favorite character, but I was kind of angry he got swayed into this entire thing, and I was really upset with his ending. One of the few things I didn't really like was the amount of buildup leading to the assassination, simply because I'm like super eager and I just wanted them to get it done? I also kind of hate reading plays so that was a downside to this...but that's just a quirk of mine. Overall, good story!
Flatland by Edward Abott
Rating: 1/10
I actually hated this book. I get that it's satire and all that stuff but I think it's the worst satire I ever read. The one thing I'll give is that it was a clever way to criticize Victorian England but that's it.
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Rating: 9/10
I can say this was one of my favorite books of the year! I always kind of wanted to read Frankenstein, and I was happy to realize I was not disappointed. I thought it was a fantastic story, and I really like the format she used of telling a story within a story. The Monster was one of the best characters and I'm highly annoyed no one ever bothered to listen or understand him, especially because he was probably the nicest character in this entire book. The only reason why I gave it a 9 was because sometimes it felt a bit slow and I never fully got into the story? Maybe that's just me being picky but still. Great book, definitely recommend it.
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
Rating: 3/10
This one...it's a long story, but basically our reading due date got moved up, and my book didn't come in until three days before the due date...yeah, it is only like 95 pages, but its writing was very dense and when you're rushing through a book, the dense writing doesn't help much. It felt dry and hard to read because of the writing, and a lot of the times, I didn't really know what was going on. However, I did like the light vs dark imagery and all the symbolism, and I like how it's told as a story to the other characters; that was really cool, and I'm sure that if I had had more time to sit down and read this, I would've liked it more.
Animal Farm by George Orwell
Rating: 10/10
I had heard this was good but it really surpassed all my expectations! This was without a doubt my favorite book of the entire school year, and that's kind of hard to say lately...It's clever, but it doesn't lose its message in the allegory, and it's honestly such a good way to read about communism and the Russian Revolution. I could tell which pig was which Russian leader and I don't know why, but I liked being able to discern that. I think the ending is very powerful because,even though I can't say I was expecting everything to fix itself and be merry...I wasn't expecting That ending. I definitely think that is one of those classics everyone should read at some point, and I do think it remains relevant across the years.
Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw
Rating: 5/10
Not the best, not the worst. I still can't really decided if I liked it or not. Eliza was kind of annoying some times, Higgings was kind of a jerk but I somehow liked him, Colonel Pickering was too good to be here, and Freddy was useless but I loved him. I felt the opening Act didn't make much sense at first, even though it later did. I didn't enjoy reading the play because it should just be acted out, but oh well. I don't really know what I was expecting but it wasn't this, hence the 5 rating.
So this pretty much wraps it up. We also read Macbeth but I didn't really feel like writing about that one, and I didn't cover the Summer books because it was enough with all of these. At least in my opinion.
Hope you enjoyed!