Dreams With Sharp Teeth: Week of 12/19/13

**Usually a reader imagines the places being described in the story. Draw a picture of the image you have from this story. What do you usually see when reading a story?
Pages read: 649-693   (Short Stories: "How's The Night Life On Cissalda?" & "Flop Sweat")


Usually when I read a story, I picture the characters in my head, the setting, or both like a movie. "Flop Sweat" featured more setting and character description than the other story I read, so this post will be on FS. Just like usual, I saw the characters and setting once they had been described and the words began to form a sort of movie in my head. FS happens to be about a talk show host for a radio show in LA. The host's name is Terri and she's interviewing a devil worshipper the particular night the story takes place during. The interview also takes place during a time when there was a string of murders in LA, all believed to be connected. So, at this point, the hostess had been described, so I had a pretty clear picture of her in my head. The devil worshipper, Michael, on the other hand, was wearing a domino mask, so the only things the reader knows about him is that he has green eyes, a soft voice, and wears all black with the mask. Also, pretty much the whole story takes place in the radio show's booth, so it wasn't hard to get an idea of what that looked like.

When the murders are first mentioned, they don't seem very important, but that soon changes when Terri begins taking calls for the show. The first call and every call after that come from a person who claims to be the killer of all the victims. At first, the people on the show don't believe him/her (the gender is not specified, as the story says the voice sounded like a male and a female at the same time), but the caller provides them with information about the murders that only the murderer would know. This information was that the victims all had the same pentagram-symbol cut into the soles of their left feet. Since it was such a simple thing to visualize, I regrettably pictured a foot with the bloody symbol cut into the sole. Along with the visualization of the foot, I also pictured a sort of map of the US. When the call by the killer was cut off by the radio show, they get even more calls from him/her, but they were strange. All the calls were coming from different parts of LA, meaning the killer was somehow in multiple places, pretty much everywhere. Because of this, a dark map of the US appeared in my head. I visualized little yellow dots appearing on the map, since I thought it was kind of like the country lighting up with the calls.

Dreams With Sharp Teeth: Week of 12/12/13

** Describe your least favorite character and explain why. Describe your favorite character and explain why.

Pages read: 563-649  (Short stories: "The Deathbird", "Mortal Dreads", & "Jeffty Is Five")

The short stories this week all seemed to have likeable characters-- even the ones that were antagonists or didn't make a very long appearance. That's exactly why it's hard for me to choose a character I disliked and to name one my favorite this week! I tried to make a list of characters from all three stories, eventually hoping to pick a favorite and least favorite from all of them. From that, I managed to count out three characters from my possible favorites: both characters from "Mortal Dreads" and a dog. The dog, that was in a short story inside the short story "The Deathbird", was called Ahbhu and was accompanied by a sad story based on the author's actual dog named Ahbhu. Of course because of this, I had to put the dog back on my favorites list. And guess who's my favorite character after all? If you thought Ahbhu, you thought right.

The main reason for Ahbhu being my favorite character is that he (and his story) actually made me pretty sad. I felt like the story was full of very genuine feeling, which was justified when I found out that Ellison's dog was of the same name and passed away the same way as the dog in the story. I also really liked the dog because of how I was able to connect to him and the story. The main character in Ahbhu's short story is the narrator, so near the end of the story when Ahbhu has to be put down in the vet's room, there was a line that really got me. He had thought, "Ahbhu looked at me and I know he was just a dog, but if he could have spoken with human tongue he could not have said more eloquently than he did with a look, don't leave me with strangers.".  This had been one of the things that made me sad, since it had reminded me of when my family had to put our dog down and I felt like a pretty horrible person when we had to because I wasn't there with her. On a more positive note, Ahbhu was a pretty awesome character since he added joy to the main character's life and the description of Ahbhu while he was alive and healthy was just really heartwarming.

The character, or rather characters, that managed to become my least favorite characters came from the story "Jeffty Is Five". John and Leona Kinzer are the parents of Jeffty, a 22-year old five-year old. He's supposed to be 22 years old, but he hasn't aged since he turned five. He's not a 22 year old stuck in a five year old's body-- he still acts the same, talks the same, but gets treated differently. Over the years of being five, the people of his neighborhood become afraid of him, the kids won't play with him (as they are afraid of him and hate him as well), and his parents have developed a pure hatred for him. Jeffty's only friend is 22-year old Donny, the narrator. One day when Donny had sent Jeffty to the movie theater to buy some movie tickets for the two of them, Jeffty gets beat to a pulp by two teenagers. This is the reason I ended up choosing the parents as my least favorite characters, because they didn't really care about Jeffty, even in his near death state. In fact, before he had been beaten, the mother had said "Sometimes I wish he had been a stillborn." This is a pretty horrible thing to say, even if she did really hate her son. The parents also end up being the reason for Jeffty's ending at the end of the story. The reader isn't told exactly what happens, but it's pretty easy to get an idea of what happens from the mother's dialogue and Donny's thoughts. And since Jeffty was a really likeable character, the fact that the parents had reacted so coldly when presented with their dying son was just pretty bad.

The Giver: Week of 12/5/13

** Describe the important ideas in this story.
Pages read: Finished

A very important and obvious idea in The Giver is the importance of memories. The book's titles is even based on memories, since the Giver's job is to release the memories to the Receiver and to keep the memories from the past away from the people in the community. Just from that, I think it's easy to tell how important memories are in this story, especially as you read on more. Further on, Jonas' perspective on things changes as he receives the memories of pain and other feelings from the Giver. It was almost like the memories almost made a totally new Jonas since he now wanted to change the way the community worked. He wanted to show them and explain to them the feelings he was feeling, the colors he was seeing, and especially the memories he was experiencing. So, memories are an important part of this book because they're a sort of part of Jonas and the memories he receives really help move the book along with an interesting flow.

An important idea in this book that kind of goes along with the importance of memories are feelings. Jonas gets new feelings like love from the memories he receives from the Giver and they really have an affect on him. Just like the memories themselves, the feelings he received from the memories also cause him to change as a person as the story goes on. When he learns about the feeling of love, he wants to experience the feeling in person with his family unit. When he asks them if they love him and they pretty much give a yes/no answer, he starts to want to make the community a bit more like the memories he was seeing. More full of feelings and color so that everyone could feel the happiness he was experiencing during the memories of love and just happiness.

Another important idea that ties in with the importance of feelings is the idea of perfection that the community has, but doesn't really achieve. The community had everything in sameness, and this was a perfect utopia in their opinion, but they didn't have anything to compare it to. Jonas, once learning of feelings, realizes that what the community has is not perfection since they don't really feel. They feel, and they discuss their feelings at dinner, but they feel very basically, not even feeling the love than Jonas really wanted. And so once Jonas realizes this, a lot of the book is spent showing how the community was trying to grasp perfection with sameness but is far away from it. It's a very important idea because it's an idea throughout a lot of the book. Before Jonas even notices that the community is not perfect, the reader can compare the community to our society and notice that their perfect sameness isn't a world we'd all like.