Scythe by Neal Shusterman

          For my book of choice in ELA this year, I read Scythe by Neal Shusterman. It was a dystopian story about a world where death and aging had been conquered. There was no disease, and fatal accidents would only render the people "deadish" before they were taken to a revival center, and were good as new in a couple of days. People could also turn their age back to as low as 21 at any time they liked; this was called turning a corner. The only natural killer that still existed was fire, although their security measures against it were so good that death by fire was an extremely rare occurrence. This society also had no government, it instead had an impartial data cloud called the Thunderhead that kept all of the world's information, and upheld the rules. Most of the oldest people living in this society were between 200 and 300 years old, and since death had been conquered for that long, they needed some unnatural means of death to keep the population under control. Very soon after conquering death, the society created the "Scythedom." The scythes were the "wielders of death." They were trained in all forms of martial arts, weaponry, and poisons, and were tasked with killing a certain number of people every year. They were ordered to show no bias in their kills (about 5 a week), which were called "gleanings." Scythes always wore rings, which gave them the power to grant immunity to those that they wished (also without a bias), and they were not allowed to glean other scythes except for themselves.
          As I said before, this story takes place when this society is somewhere around 300 years old. It centers around the stories of two teenagers: Citra Terenova and Rowan Damisch. These two young people are chosen to be the apprentices of Honorable Scythe Michael Faraday (all scythes named themselves after scientists when they were ordained) where they would train for one year, and whoever passed the final test would become a scythe, and the other could go back to their previous life. However this quickly changed. The scythes held a regional meeting every 4 months (their region was MidMerica), and at this first meeting, it was decided that whoever was ordained as a scythe would have to glean the other as their first act as a scythe. To keep this from happening, Scythe Faraday gleans himself, but this ends up with Citra apprenticed to H.S. Curie, and Rowan apprenticed to H.S. Goddard. They then continue to train until the end of the book where one of them is ordained as a Scythe...
          That is the main plot of this book, but there is a little more that is important to the story. Rowan and Citra were both chosen to be scythes because most of the scythes believed that scythes needed to hate killing people, and have a moral high ground. However, there were some scythes, like Scythe Goddard and his followers that believed that they should be able to kill as many as they liked, and that scythes should enjoy killing people. These two ideals create a lot of rifts in the scythedom, and it creates a lot of tension between different people in this book.
          I really enjoyed this book, and I would recommend it to others who enjoy reading fantasy. The plot was very interesting. It was very detailed, and I really liked how it showed how different groups of people reacted to different parts of society. Their reactions felt very real, and seemed like they were almost exactly how our current society would react to the aspects of this society. I also really liked the setting of this book. This society is very, very far away from what we have today, so it is hard to relate it to yourself, the setting was very relateable because it was set in the US, parts of it was set in a high school, and a lot was set in different parts of a relatively normal feeling city, with a lot of diversity of living conditions and viewpoints. Towards the end of the book, there was a part set in more Southern America, and it was very interesting to see how these two regions reacted to each other. The thing that I did not really like about this book was the characters. I did not learn enough about them at the beginning, so they were very boring for the rest of the book. They did not feel very human. They did not have very much personality. I think that if the author had spent a little more time explaining them before the main story started, and if the author had given them more characteristics they would have been more interesting. They just did not seem very human to me, because all of their personalities seemed to have only one aspect to them, instead of various ones like normal humans.
         Overall, I really enjoyed this book and I am really glad I read it. I would recommend it for anyone who likes to read fantasy and dystopian novels.

My Favorite and Least Favorite Texts This Year

          We read a lot of really interesting texts this year in ELA, and I am very excited for whatever we read next year. I enjoyed all the texts we read this year, but The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald was my favorite, and the Shakespearean poetry was my least favorite.
          I really enjoyed The Great Gatsby. I thought that it was beautifully written, and I thought it had a really interesting primary theme. I also liked how we did not know very much about the main characters for most of the book. This really interested me, and it kept me interested as I learned more about each character. I really enjoyed this book, and I really liked that we got to watch the movie after we read it. It was an interesting to see the story and characters in two different medias.
          I enjoyed all the texts we read this year, but the Shakespearean Poetry was definitely my least favorite. I read this while I was studying English Renaissance Poetry. I generally have a hard time understanding poetry, so reading Shakespearean Poetry made it a lot harder to understand, which made it a lot less fun for me to read.

Why Did F. Scott Fitzgerald Write About the Corruption of the American Dream?

          F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote book "The Great Gatsby" during the 1920s, a time that was characterised by wealth and art and fun. It is also known for the American Dream: each person is able to make as much money as inherently possible, and they can end up in any social class regardless of their birth or family.
          I think that the primary theme of "The Great Gatsby" is the corruption of the American Dream. My question is, Why would Fitzgerald write about this during this time where America was flourishing, and he himself was considered by many to have achieved or be very close to achieving the American Dream? At this point in his life, he seemed to have it all. He had one over and married Zelda, and he was very rich because of his writing. So why did he write about the corruption of the American Dream?
          I think that he seemed like he had it all together to a lot of people, but when he was in France trying to write this book, he didn't really. He had a lot of money, but his relationship with Zelda was failing, and he was a raging alchoholic. I think he was writing his failures into his book.

The Primary Theme of "The Great Gatsby"

          I think that the primary theme of "The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald is that The American Dream is an unsustainable ideal that gives people false hope and artificial happiness. I think that this theme fits all the criteria for the primary theme of  a novel. I think that it is the main message, saying that the American Dream was a corrupt ideal that would never bring real happiness, which was also a broad idea about life in the 1920s. Nick Carraway says several things throughout the book about how it is unsustainable, and keeps getting farther away, but he never really states that it is corrupt or impossible. One quote that is very important, and fits this theme very well without outright stating it is on page 134. It says "so he gave up, and only that dead dream fought on as the afternoon slipped away, trying to touch what was no longer tangible, struggling unhappily, undespairingly,  towards that lost voice across the room." This is also a point in the book where a major change seems to go through Gatsby, the protagonist. He seems to realize that the dream is corrupt, and he will never get to keep Daisy's wholehearted love.

The Climax of The Great Gatsby

          The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, is often considered the "great american novel," so of course, this book has a great climax as well. The climax of a book is the turning point of the story, and I believe that the turning point of this story is when Gatsby finally tells Tom that he and Daisy are in love with each other, and he and Tom have a big fight. I think that part of the story was leading up to this point, because eventually Tom had to find out that Daisy loved somebody else. This was also, in part, where Gatsby's dream is realized: first he wanted Daisy to love hime, and now he wants everyone to know it. Also, after this point in the story, the book begins to move very quickly towards the end, causing a sort of chain reaction where Daisy and Gatsby drive home very fast because she needed to get away from Tom, and they hit Myrtle Wilson and don't stop. After that, George Wilson finds out who's car it is, and goes to the Buchanan house, and then Tom tells him it was Gatsby, and then he goes and shoots Gatsby. All these events coming from the climax very quickly bring the story to a close.

The Weather During Daisy Buchanan and Jay Gatsby's First Meeting

          On the day that Nick Carraway invites both Daisy Buchanan and Jay Gatsby to his house for tea so that they can see each other for the first time in a long while, the weather is very stormy. It was pouring, but right before Daisy got there it let up a little. I think this weather was very important and helpful to the meeting. To me, it gave it a much more solemn and alone feel. It felt much more serious, but it also felt like no one else could see or hear the two. Which I think might have gotten Daisy to open up more than if it was sunny, or if there were other people there. Rain makes it dark outside, and drowns out most outside noise, so it would have felt like it was just them, which I think is a very good way for them to meet. They can't get distracted by outside things.

Does Nick Carraway Judge People?

          In The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, the narrator the story is a man named Nick Carraway. On the first page, Carraway says that he is "inclined to reserve all judgements" about people, and in the first three chapters, it is very hard to tell if this is true. The way the book is written, he seems to assume certain emotions and sometimes characteristics from physical attributes of people. However, I think that this is just the way Fitzgerald described people in his writing. I think that this is different from actually judging (forming a conclusive opinion) the people that Carraway meets. For example, when we first meet Tom Buchanan, Carraway describes his physical attributes, and the fact that he was a football player. Carraway also describes him and his family as "enormously wealthy," which is a fact, not a judgement. Caraway withholds from the reader any opinionative judgements (if he has any) about Tom Buchanan, and I have found that he has done the same for all the other characters we have met so far. He describes them physically, and gives us facts about them, but none of his positive or negative opinions about them.