Author Archives: asimmons26@gsu.edu

The Kite Runner

Posted on by

kiterunner

The book I picked is The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. The story starting in the 1970s, right before the fall of Afghanistan’s monarchy. The story follows a boy named Amir, who lived in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan. Amir is friends with Hassan, a servant boy in Amir’s house. A lot of the conflict in the first part of the book stems from the fact that Hassan is of the ethnic minority Hazara. Later the book has Amir and his father flee to the United States only for Amir to return as an adult with the intent to help Hassan.

The reason this book is challenged lies in the language and violence in the book. The book is an account of the dangers in Afghanistan during this time period. There are two characters that I remember who attempt suicide (one suicides), but this isn’t the main thing that is contested about this book. Pretty early in the book, Hassan gets raped by another boy his age. Most complaints about the text revolve around the fact that it was a homosexual rape, not that there was the rape of a child. One challenge presented to the book was that a school informed the parents of the rape but not the homosexual nature of it.

Paolo Bacigalupi and the Inconvenient Truth

Posted on by

Paolo Bacigalupi states that the popularity of dystopian literature for young adult readers stems from a desire for the truth. Bacigalupi refers to the environmental damage and the effects of global warming and how the Earth that children today will inherit will be very different than what the last generation obtained. I would have to disagree with him. While I see some truth in what he is saying, I feel that he linked it too much with his book “Ship Breaker”. While a destroyed environment can play a vital role in dystopian stories, there are plenty that don’t go in that direction, like “The Giver” for example. I think that dystopian novels are popular because they introduce young readers to grey moralities and teaching that everyone has the ability to fight for what they believe in. “The Giver” teaches the reader about grey morality, but the environment is actually doing okay outside the Community.

The (Not so) Bad Beginning

Posted on by

BadBeginning

When I was younger I was not very good at reading. I was so bad at it that my younger sister was able to learn to read before I did. I even remember early into my schooling I had to go to someplace after school where they taught me the basics. In elementary school there were classes to help children who were testing below the average testing scores to get their scores up, I was put into the one for reading. My elementary school continued to place me into these classes until after the third grade. As much as everyone tried to raise my reading level, I never really saw the point. For the most part, reading was just something boring that I was never any good at, so I never really bothered trying to do it outside whatever assignments that my teachers made me do. It wasn’t until I was assigned to read The Bad Beginning in the third grade that I realised that books could actually be interesting.
Lemony Snicket’s narration was very different from anything that I had read before. None of the children’s books I was told to read had such an expressive narrator. As far as I had known, third person narrators were void of personality, just faceless voices that described what happened to the main characters. The way that Snicket told the story of the Baudelaire orphans that was also wrapped in the story of the character Snicket just entertained me for some reason. Another thing that attracted me was the story’s focus on three children and not just one child. If I was reading a story and found that I did not care for the main character’s personality (I felt that most of them were really bland), what was the point of continuing with the rest of it. With A Series of Unfortunate Events I was given three main characters with distinct personalities, if I did not like them there were still two more to relate to (however, this was never a problem the Baudelaires). I think what appealed to me the most is how morbid the story could get at times. It did not feel like it was a book for little kids like One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish; it felt like a book for older kids.