MC- The Curious Incident of the Blog in the Night-time

After being completely done with the entire book, there are definitely some themes that jump out at me.  Although I had to make it through the horribly sad ending of The Man telling The Boy to carry on without him, it was at that moment where the biggest theme in my opinion was brought into it's full light.  When The Man was in the midst of dying, he tells The Boy "You have to carry the fire" (278).   The mention of carrying the fire has been brought up dozens of times throughout this novel, but it was at this moment where I fully understood it.   Carrying the fire is clearly not actually carrying a fire with you.  So, what is it?  Well, I have interpreted it as carrying your hope, morals, and will to carry on.  Especially in this insanely depressing setting of The Road, the will to carry on is extremely important.  There have been many times throughout the novel where both The Man and The Boy faced times where it seemed easi...

This blog post has been the one that I have looked forward to the least.  Deciding whether or not a book has AP merit seems difficult, especially for a high school student who has only read a handful of the esteemed books.  I don't work for college board, how would I know?  Well, after looking back to the past books read from this year, it is clear that you can gauge other books off of known AP books.  So, as I dug through the cobwebs to dust off my knowledge of Song of Solomon , Brave New World, and Handmaid's Tale  I determined that there was a clear checklist of criteria that is involved in determining a books AP merit. 1)  Does the reader have to read in between the lines to figure out important plot points. In every single novel read this year it is almost impossible to get the full experience of the book by just mindlessly reading the book.  If there is no time spent to critically analyse events, dialogue, descriptions, and bas...

The first word that pops into my mind when I think of McCarthy's style of writing in The Road  is unorthodox.  I say this because of the one big thing that he does, there aren't any chapters.  Yup, that's right.  A book with no chapters.  There are only short sections that are broken apart from each other.  To a reader who just picked up the book and started from the first page, he/she most likely would have just assumed that the sections were paragraphs.  That's what I thought at first, up until about forty pages in and there still wasn't any breaks by chapters (not the knock of version of Beats by Dre).  At times this no chapter system can seem refreshing and nice while also seeming boring and endless.  Leaving me with mixed opinions. At times, mainly during the few action scenes involved in this book, not having any chapters is very nice to the reader because there is no end in sight.  The scene will keep going until it gradua...

The first thing that I always look for when starting a new book is who are the characters.  My first instinct being to take a mental note of each character, and most importantly, what their name is.  As I read the first page of The Road , my instinct went off.  The first note of a character was when it said "he".  So far, not a problem.  There are a lot of books that leave the character's name out of the loop for a bit to try to draw the reader in and describe the character first.  As I carried on, McCarthy continued to use "he" and also "the man" and "the boy".  Only being roughly twenty pages into the book, I still thought to myself "Don't worry, McCarthy has to give me their names, I'm only a few pages in."  But to my surprise, being a quarter of the way done with the book, McCarthy has not revealed the characters names, and he won't.  Being seventy pages in with no names leads me to believe that if he hasn't to...