Diego's Reading Blog

Wow, that's one heck of a book title Anyways, The Absolutely True Diary Of A Part-Time Indian  is based off of the true story of an aspiring, Native American cartoonist. The character you follow is nicknamed Junior, and it is about his struggle of trying to be someone more than himself while at the same time, fighting the opposition of discrimination and the hardships of his life. It sounds like a serious story, but the narrator, Junior, tells it in a sarcastic, comical way that made me laugh several times. The setting of the story takes place in an Indian reservation. This is basically a community of poor Native American people. One of the drawing's made by Junior in the book. It compares his shortcomings as an Indian to the opposite qualities of a white person. When Junior decides to go to an all-white school instead of the school at the reservation, he is faced with all sorts of problems. He is the only Indian in the school and at first, he finds it hard to fit i...

After reading Grendel , I was more satisfied than I thought I would be. I expected the book to be boring and disgusting. After all, in the most general terms, you could just say it was just Grendel rambling on about how stupid he thinks everything is, and then proceeding to kill whatever he wants to kill for the heck of it. But upon further inspection, Grendel  was much more than that. After I thought about it and I decided that it wasn't about killing and other peoples' stupidity, it was about a lonely being trying to cope with his feelings. The book showed Grendel constantly around humans. Most of the time, he was observing them in their mead hall from someplace near. He started doing this when he was young, and as he grew older, as he began to realize just how lonely he is in the world, so he started doing it more. Later, he began to make fun of them because of their moronic values such as when villages invaded other villages for honor, or when they hold parties in the...

So. Since I need to read two more books in the span of two more weeks and I'm a slow reader, I decided to pick up a book that wasn't 500 pages long. Sorry, Bourne Identity , but I'll have to finish you in the second semester. So instead, I'm going to read Grendel . This book... I was reluctant to start this book because I've seen the movie of the story this book is a spin-off of. Let me tell you, Beowulf  is one gory movie. Grendel as depicted in the book. Trust me, you don't want to see him in Beowulf. He looks 10000% more disgusting. Grendel  is based off of the story Beowulf , except instead of the perspective of the "heroes", it is in the perspective of the "monster", Grendel. Grendel is... a monster. I don't know how else to describe him. He didn't really describe himself at the beginning of the book, so I'm going off of the cover. He seems to be a sort of human shaped beast. It is also stated that he is much larger th...

So in the next pages I've read into The Bourne Legacy  were more focused on the nameless man, who we later find out that his last name is Bourne. Anyways, to summarize what I read very briefly... - the nameless man beats up a bunch of fisherman on their ship because he got hit in the sun don't shine - he needs to get out of town because he beat up those fisherman real good  and he doesn't want their relatives and friends to come after him - he leaves Washburn (sad) and leaves toward Zurich, where the chip found in his body suggested he go to in order to find out about his past - while gathering supplies to head to Zurich he stops by a few towns, stealing money and clothes from a rich guy and creating a fake passport - he is still confused as to how he did that If you're curious as to where Zurich is, here's a map. Bourne came to Zurich from France. I left off on the man reaching a hotel in Zurich to find that he's actually been there before and the ho...

So in the past week I've only read into 25 pages into The Bourne Identity , this includes the first chapter and the beginning of the second chapter.  Chapter 1 is... intense. I can assume that it's in the perspective of this so called "Bourne Identity" or whoever this man calls himself. However, it's hard to tell because the chapter moves so quickly and the character you follow is unnamed. He is only given a "name" until later in the chapter, but I'll get to that later. Anyways, the chapter starts off like crazy, immediately throwing down quick events left and right. All of sudden somebody is thrown off of a ship and into the crashing waves, the next moment a man is chasing him down with a loaded gun. In a flash, this portion of the chapter is over and you are greeted by a scene on the gentle coast somewhere along the Mediterranean Sea. I liked this chapter very much because of how much the two settings contradicted each other. It made the two scenes...

So I finally got my hands on a new book at the local Half Price Books and my mom insisted since I was looking for a good mystery novel ('cause why not), then Robert Ludlum's The Bourne Identity  series is the series for me. So we got the whole series for around $20 and I got to reading. Sort of... Okay, I read the 3 page introduction. So I decided to do research on this Ludlum guy. Robert Ludlum was an old guy. He was born on May 25th, 1927 and died on March 12, 2001. Surely enough, his most notable work was the Bourne Trilogy and it was later carried on by Eric Van Lustbander in the form of The Bourne Legacy . Both of which, you might already know, were turned into movies, and I have not seen either of them. I also found out that most of Ludlum's books featured one man against a powerful adversary. This leads to my first impressions of the book and where I predict it may lead. Once I read the introduction and the summary on the back cover, I immediately thought of Jame...

So I know that I finished Night Shift, but I realized that there's still one more thing I'd like to talk about that I never did in a previous post, and that thing is the short story, "Children of the Corn". "Children of the Corn" was the cover story of Night Shift (at least on my copy it was) and because of this is like to give it some recognition. After doing a little bit of research before I read the story I learned that the story has been turned into a movie. I also learned that this must've been a pretty popular movie when everyone was like, "Hey 'Children of the Corn'? I'VE SEEN THAT MOVIE'", every time they see the cover.  Anyways, let's get to the story. One of the main villains, Malachai with a crucified skeleton of a police officer in the background (as depicted from the movie) "Children of the Corn" is about a married couple, Burt and Vicky, who are constantly bickering about something. One day w...

So I just finished Night Shift, and as the first horror novel I have ever read, it was pretty great. I still enjoyed the book very much, but some of the stories, in my opinion, were not that great. Some of them were just plain ridiculous and some were boring. But I could call a quite handful of stories ones that I liked. Among these stories are "Jerusalem's Lot", "Strawberry Spring", and "Quitters, Inc.". I did dislike a few of them though, stories such as, "The Lawnmower Man", "Night Surf", and "Gray Matter". With the flaws, this book did some great things. For instance, in "Strawberry Spring" I talked about how it had great foreshadowing elements in a previous blog post. In "Battleground" it was able to turn a bizarre plot into an enjoyable story. This book had very great writing in it, and so I made a list of things that it did right. Pros: -handful of actual scary stories -writing incorporates ...

This story, "Strawberry Spring", was actually a story in Night Shift  that I read quite a while ago. 129 pages ago to be exact. I wanted to post about this story a while ago, but I couldn't get around to it because of "Battleground". Anyways, I enjoyed this story because it employed many writing elements that caught my attention. In this post I will review one of them, foreshadowing. "Strawberry Spring" is about life on a community college campus that is haunted by a serial killer dubbed "Springheel Jack". The campus is brought strawberry spring, a sort of "fake" spring. This spring brought along an occasional thick fog, and with this fog brought Springheel Jack. Every time the fog shrouded over the campus, a person was killed. It is unknown who the killer is until it is revealed in the end of the book. WARNING * SPOILER ALERT * THE KILLER IS THE NARRATOR * SPOILER ALERT * WARNING That's right the killer i...

By now, I've read a pretty large chunk into Night Shift  and my thoughts about it have gotten better since last time, though I don't think a can really call it a horror novel anymore. It might be personal preference but the stories have lost that "spine-tingling" feeling as promised by the back cover. Many of the stories, like I said last time, are very bizarre and sometimes even hard to take seriously. In spite of all this I still enjoy some of the stories, and some of them don't make me laugh but rather enrapture me. This leads me to this particular story, "The Ledge". "The Ledge" is about a tennis coach who is in quite the conflict with a man named Cressner. Norris, the tennis coach, is having an affair with Cressner's wife, and Cressner is alright with that. In fact, he offers Norris his wife along with $20,000. But there's a catch. Cressner's and Norris's wager takes place on Cressner's apartment building which is 47...

I don't know much about this movie, but  I heard it's about a rubber wheel that kills people. I dunno, don't ask. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ For this blog post, I will still be covering the book Night Shift  by Stephen King. Right now I am a little over 100 pages and honestly, the stories have been getting to be a little lackluster lately. I mean, there's been one called "The Mangler" and it was about a possessed ironing machine that enjoyed killing people. Yeah. Kinda like that movie over there ------------> Anyways, let's get on with Night Shift . After all the dumb stories about killer rats and ironing machines and whatnot, I reached a story that I knew I would enjoy at the very beginning. It's called "Battleground", and it starts on page 117. And I don't like this story because it was actually scary like it was supposed to be. I liked it because of its absolutely novel idea of conflict. In "Battleground" you follow a man na...

For my "blog book" I am reading Night Shift , by Stephen King. Night Shift  is a horror novel that contains several different short stories ranging from things like ghosts and goblins to bloodsucking vampires.  At first I was hesitant to read this book because I absolutely hate horror movies, so it only made sense that I wouldn't like a horror novel. When my sister finally convinced me to pick it up for a read I found that it was actually very enjoyable. I read the first short story "Jerusalem's Lot" and it was definitely fun to read. It had some elements that made it scary but mostly I didn't find it scary, I found it interesting to read. "Jerusalem's Lot" from Night Shift  is written in the form of a series of letters and is about a man named Charles Boone and his best friend Calvin McCann who moved to the town of Chapelwaite, the former home of Boone's cousin, Stephen. Boone was reluctant to move there at first knowing of t...

For my summer reading project, I read the book When The Emperor Was Divine  by Julie Otsuka. In this book, you follow a Japanese mother and her two children as they sent away from their homes to a filthy internment camp in the Utah desert. This is after the father of the house was taken away and sent to work for the military. You follow the perspectives of not only the mother, but also her son and her a daughter.  One thing I liked about this book was how descriptive it was. While reading I was able to picture many things very vividly in my head, from the fair neighborhood in Berkeley, California to the harsh, beating sun of the Utah internment camp. There was a plethora of expressive adjectives, many of which I had to look up in order to know what it meant. Another thing I liked about this book was that it was able to explore three different characters very thoroughly. Since the book jumps from one point of view to another, the book was able to show me more per...