Believe what comes next

Recently I had one of the most coincidental and interesting moments of my life. My best friend Caroline invited me to a cotillion dance, which is new for me, but as I got to the party I began to get more and more confident. So, in that confidence I was walking around a lot in my athletic shoes. The dress was tailgating attire so I was wearing LSU and athletic clothes. Another friend of mine and I decided we were tired of walking around, screaming, and trying to hear others while they were screaming, so we took a break in the bathroom, and on our way there I had a little discomfort on the bottom of my foot. We were then in the bathroom standing in front of the mirrors when I lifted up my foot and checked on the bottom sole of my shoe. Stuck inside the sole was a pinky ring, and first of all my friend and I had a hard time really grasping that this object had gotten into my shoe, and so, we start to kind of laugh, "OMG, I stole a ring with my shoe!" So we're just kind of messing around and we tried it on, by the way, the ring didn't even fit, but anyways, a group of girls come into the bathroom and one of them was drying her hands and screams, "OMG, my pinky ring is gone!!" This is when my friend and I look at each other and just are in complete disbelief. Then, we ask the girl if the ring was hers and what do you know, "OMG, YES, where did you find it, I've had it for like three years." Now my friend and I are like, "No way," "What just happened?"And even though I'd probably been walking on it for half an hour, the girl got her ring back,  and I'm guessing she made sure that she thanked god that night that the ring got stuck in my shoe.

The Tragedy Paper, Elizabeth Laban
8/20-90 minutes, 8/21- 60 minutes
Total- 150 minutes, 90-212


This past week I finished the book, The Tragedy Paper, and as the book says in the title, it includes tragic features, and these tragic features help the main character write the inevitable "Tragedy Paper." The "Tragedy Paper" is a yearlong 15 page paper on tragedy that is assigned to all seniors. To help the main character with the paper, an albino outcast gives him a gift, multiple voice recording telling the albino's own journey with tragedy. As the albino takes the main character through the voice recording, meaningful features become revealed about "magnitude," and "purpose." Words that can define real tragedy, the albino's tragedy.

So, what's the purpose? Why write a book on an awful tragedy that led to a man's blindness? First, it's mind captivating, but it's also the author's own kind of tragedy paper, kind of like a picture that's taken with two mirrors and the reflection continues on and on. It shows the effect of tragedy in every way, relationships, personal struggles, happiness, etc. But it also shows the after, the struggle to overcome the tragedy, and the author Elizabeth Laban did fantastic and she put a tremendous amount of meaning within each page. Overall, this book may have changed aspects of my life positively, even though the book is fiction.

The Tragedy Paper, Elizabeth LaBan

8/18, 145 minutes, pgs. 1-90

Personal Zine,

8/12, 10 minutes

            The tragedy paper is a book that includes voice recordings to tell a story including the main character, a lot like the book 13 Reasons Why, which is also a great book. Both of the books have characters that aren’t included into the book by presence, but those characters are included in the book by items, the voice recordings. Usually, the main character played a part in the voice-recorded stories, and the character on the voice recorder had to tell the story from their own point of view to show why they did something.

            There are also many differences; the main character’s part in each of the voice-recorded stories is very different. In 13 Reason’s Why, the main character was part of the voice-recorded story in a positive way, and in The Tragedy Paper, apparently the character telling the story tried to kill the main character. Another difference was that the end of the story in 13 Reason’s Why was already decided because the girl committed suicide and left all of the voice recordings. The end to the story in The Tragedy Story still goes on and develops. 

The Knife of Never Letting Go

The Knife of Never Letting Go

The Knife of Never Letting Go was full of surprising features. I liked how the book was not just a copy of the hunger games; it was full of new interesting features. Some of those features included how the characters had noise. The author’s way of putting the noise into the book was really weird and odd at first. I mean, the men of Prentisstown were thinking a bunch of really gory, kind of insane things. But it’s also a factor that set the book apart.

This book also has some similar aspects compared to other books. The main character was too pure, or too coward to kill a person, and that’s a feature that is very popular with books. Although it’s a characteristic I’ve experienced in other novels, it’s a characteristic that I personally love to read about. Another thing was that the dog died, if this was not a schoolbook, I would’ve stopped reading right then and there. The animal companion always dies! I don’t want to read about a talented and awesome pet dying anymore! So all in all there were aspects of Knife of Never Letting Go that I liked, and there were some that I didn’t like.