CONNECTING WITH ROMEO AND JULIET.

        Romeo and Juliet is a very old play. My first impression was "what is this? I don't understand what thy is saying." The majority of the people that I talked to about this book said that Shakespeare is kind of hard to understand and that I would probably have trouble with it. This wasn't necessarily the case though. I had heard that this play has a bunch of humor in it, so I thought if I could find the humor in the book then I would be able to relate it more to modern times because there was a lot of sexual references in the book which many people find humorous today. Which is why I said, easier to relate to. If you can connect concepts of books/plays to something that's connected with you, the plot becomes a whole lot easier to understand than it did in the beginning. I think I could relate to Benvolio because he's there to help a friend in need even if he doesn't want the help.
        First off, I must say that even before starting this book.. I went onto Sparknotes and printed out the summaries for each scene because I wanted to make sure that I understood it fully. I read the Sparknotes summary before I read the scene that we're suppose to read because then I already have some understanding of what the plot is about and I can concentrate more on the language, and hidden meanings within the text. One night this past week, I only had about ten minutes to read the part in the book because I had other extracurriculars taking up my time. I had to speed read the part in the play and even though I read the summary of it, I still didn't understand most of what was going on. This is why reading in class as well helps me. Especially because in class we also talk about what we should be annotating for and we take pauses in the reading to analyze what's going on so nobody gets to lost. We should continue doing this process for the rest of the book because when I'm reading it sometimes I come up with different meanings of what's going on then what other kids in class comprehended it to mean.

WRAPPING UP GREAT EXPECTATIONS

        I believe that the overall theme that Dickens' wanted us to convey was that the things you need should come before the things that you want. Such as the people you love and care for you are the things you need because if you didn't have anyone like that then you would become a very angry and judgemental person. The things you want are things such as wanting to be a gentlemen and be higher up in the social class, or also wanting someone to marry. Mostly just being able to put the people before other things. The things that you want don't have feeling but people do, and if you hurt someone you're going to regret it. I can easily relate this to people who work wanting to get a promotion or something and they'd do anything to get it.. even if it involves hurting people in the process. This relates to Great Expectations because the main character is wanting to go higher up while he was hurting his own family to get there.

GREAT EXPECTATIONS THOUGHTS ON READING

        Great Expectations was the one book that I wasn't looking forward to starting at all. My sister, was in Honors English last year and she had to read A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens and she said that the book was horrible and it was really hard to get through. Then realizing that this book was by the exact same author, I began to dread the moment of opening to the first page. Very surprisingly though, I found myself intrigued by the entire book itself. I enjoyed the plot until the unrealistic parts began to happen. I mean, how can three unrelated characters(Estella, Molly, and Magwitch) all have significant parts in the book(unrelated) and then all end up being connected in the end? That brought my overall rating of the book down. I wasn't used to Dickens' writing style, which made it hard to get through and really time consuming but I really liked the way that he scattered small hints throughout the novel about little things about the characters.
        I wasn't ever looking forward to reading this book. I mean, I like the book but I never liked it enough to come home and jump right into it. Since, during the week I'm busy after school until about nine o'clock or so. I didn't ever get to do my reading till pretty late at night which is fine with me because I'd rather read in the night. I always jumped onto the fouton/couch thing in my room, grab a blanket and get reading. For the first half of the novel, I placed annotations right away after I found something useful. After I got done reading a chapter I would read the summary on Sparknotes and see if I understood it properly or not. Oh by the way, I printed out all of the chapter summaries off of Sparknotes before even starting the book because in case I ever had to read while I was not at ome then i would be able to have the summaries with me.