Greta is Great spelled wrong.

personal curriculum #1

This is one of my personal curriculum projects:

 In this “project” my goal was to explore different types of writing.  I changed my plans so I could do it more thoroughly and be able to at least say I learned something.  The three books that this is on are: The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama, Twilight by Stephanie Meyer, and The diary of Anne Frank by (obviously) Anne Frank.  I didn’t actually read the entire Audacity book, actually I didn’t get a fourth of the way through it.  In my opinion it was boring and wasting my time and I didn’t feel like I could gain something from it.  Twilight had a much different effect.  It became my favorite book very quickly and pulled me in so there was no way I could stop reading it.  Anne Frank I also read the whole thing and it also interested me a lot having had a grandma in Germany during WW2.  I’m not going to describe the contents of these books to you because this essay wasn’t meant for you to learn something it was meant for me to show you that I learned something.

            The first book I (partially) read was the Audacity of Hope.  This book in short bored me out of my mind.  From what I could actually pay attention to it was a book basically about Barack Obama as a senator and his political views on society.   I think the reason it bored me so much is frankly, I really don’t give a crap what Barack Obama’s ideas on politics are.  I really don’t like politics that much in general and maybe I was just being bitter about that but I thoroughly don’t think I could dislike a book more then that one.  This book I think was more for him to find interesting then anyone else.  I know this because during an ELT project I was writing mostly about my own views and realized that the only person who REALLY found them interesting enough to read a book about them would be myself.  So maybe that is why I hated the book so much, because it reminded me that I had tried to write that way and it blew up in my face.  It was a scary reminder of the fact that I can’t write for my life or at least not that way.

            The second book I read, or more like devoured, was Twilight.  This paragraph is pretty much completely biased because of the fact that I am seriously in love with this book.  Oh well.  This book amazed me in two ways.  One was obviously the amazing content and everything that happens in it, and also how much it distracted me from my real life.  Honestly, during the time I was reading this if I wasn’t actually reading it which was mostly 4 to 5 hours at a time I was thinking about getting to read it.  And getting to find out what happens next.  I am truly amazed at how an author can keep you (for lack of a better word) hooked at the same time as developing the characters so well you feel like you know everything about and what will happen to them.  This book was so elaborately written that it seemed as if it could be totally real.  Or maybe if you didn’t believe that it could be you still wished with all your heart that it was.  It was like you knew what they would do in every situation but the situations were so complicated and unexpected you were never bored.  This book really inspired me to in my own writing to do the same thing with characters and situations or at least to try it and see what I can come up with.

            The last book I chose for this project was the Diaries of Anne Frank.  This book kind of scared me in the sense that the “author” never meant anyone to read it.  It even said somewhere in the book she thought it would be really embarrassing as well as uninteresting if someone else were to read it.  I think the reason why so many people read this book was because it was so brutally honest.  You knew that nothing in it was exaggerated because why would you lie to yourself?  It also kind of spooked me because I felt guilty reading a fellow teenagers thoughts that were never meant to be seen.  I also was intrigued by it because of the fact that she is so like me and other teenagers but in an entirely different situation.  All I can really say is how amazing the honesty in this book was.

            In this essay again I say it is not meant for you to learn something (whoever you may be) but meant for me to show you that I did learn something.  I think what I learned here was as follows:  Anyone can write a book and find some way for it to be published (proven by The Audacity of Hope), but what matters is the influence it has on other people.  If the book totally occupied your mind and made you think about other realities or its characters or even just the ideas presented within it, that is what makes a good book (like Twilight).  And also that the more honest or at least if you make it seem like it is or could be true the more people want to read it (like in Anne Frank).  Some more conclusions I have drawn from these books: The Audacity of Hope- I will never ever write a book on my political views no matter how much money I am offered or how much I want to be president for the soul reason that I don’t want some 8^th grade kid trashing it after they tried to read it.  Twilight- Some people are just better at writing then others naturally, I know this because I could never come up with something as imaginative and amazing as this book.  Anne Frank-  If I ever wanted to leave someone a lot of money I should give them the rights to a diary of myself locked in an attic house for 2 and a half years with Nazi’s trying to kill me and my family.  Maybe this entire essay is entirely biased, and maybe it is really controversial, and maybe I included too many of my own opinions in it, but I still think it gets the point across of what I’ve learned.