"Hunting the Hunter" By:Stanley Suter

 Prompt: Did you like what your reading? Why or why not?

        This week I have been reading "Hunting the Hunter" By: Gordon Korman, and so far I really like it. It is the 6th book in its series as well as the final. The basic story line is that two kids (Meg and Aidan) and their parents are falsely accused of helping terrorists, and where set up by their "uncle" (not really) Frank, the bald assassin. He tries to kill them several times, and each time the escape by the skin of their teeth. This time they are hiding at a farm as working hands, and their plan is to trap Frank and report him to the police, freeing both themselves and their parents.

        A few things I liked about the book. First, the many action parts of the story and standoffs. The unbelievable way that they get caught and then think of some obscure way to make it out of the situation without being arrested and killed. The way that all animals hate Aiden, like the 300 pound pig at the farm, and the cows... Most of all I liked the ideas that the writer uses and how he introduced them early in the story, only to come into use later.

        A couple of things about the book I didn't like. First, details that I think where stretched out for way to long, and ended up just making that part of the book feel boring. Next, the dangerous things that the siblings would do, that would be totally unbelievable. Like Meg throwing a turnip in the air to stop a bullet from hitting her brother in the back of the head. The chances of the bullet even being stopped by a turnip are so low that it would have been just as likely of making him miss by yelling that his mother was an ape.

"The Other Wes Moore" By:Stanley Suter

Prompt-Did you enjoy reading what you read?

        This week I have been reading "The other Wes Moore" again, by Wes Moore. I do not like it as much as I did the week before this one. At the end of the book, it just explains a scholarship that Wes won because he learned about the way people lived in Africa, and the way it was healing from a dictatorship through a semester in Africa. Then it ended abruptly, just concluding that good Wes got to go to Harvard while bad Wes spent his time in jail. A way the book could have been better was if he had gone into "present" time and gone through the rest of the interview that stretched through the book.

        A couple of things I did enjoy about the book. I really liked the fine details mixed into the perspective of the narrator. It explained the use and selling of drugs as a game, one that once you got in, you couldn't get out. Another is the way that the book "compacted" time, making it so you could see how things changed in the two boys lives. Such as the point in the book when good Wes went to military school, and the other dropped out of high school. The book showed it as the good Wes finally catching a break in his education, and the bad Wes going down the wrong path.

        A few thing I disliked about the book. Bad Wes's mother's un-care for her sons well being. Like the easy, and even sometimes non-punishment for things that I think most people see as over the top bad behavior. Of course, the abrupt and annoying quick ending of the book that made it seem as though he was either running out of pages or time. The random small details that would be stretched on for two to three pages.

The Other Wes Moore By:Stanley Suter Pages:0-163

       Prompt:Who is your favorite character and why? Who is your least favorite character?


        This week I have been reading "The Other Wes Moore" By:Wes Moore, and so far, I really like it. It is about two kids, about the same, both black, both grew up around drugs and crime, but had totally different futures due to certain influences and changes in their lives. The one who wrote the book was the one who turned out for the better. He has gone through military school, and received one of the highest academic achievements in the world, that allowed him to move on to Oxford college with a full scholarship, while the other is serving a life sentience in prison.

        My favorite character in the entire book would be the good Wes's father. He kept a very fair house hold and was really nice to Wes's half sister, Nikki, even though he wasn't her birth father. He protected Wes, and his mother, until he died early in the book. He had a case of two different diseases with symptoms that confused the doctors, and so wasn't treatable.

        My least favorite person in the book had to be the evil Wes's mother. I didn't like her because of her lack of care for her children's well being. When she found over 4,000 dollars in drugs underneath Wes's bed, the only thing she did for his situation was flush them down the toilet. When she found out that his girlfriend was pregnant, she acted normally, not even yelling or talking to him about the situation (well, maybe she wasn't surprised after Wes's older brother's girlfriend also got pregnant and had a kid two years earlier).

"Zombie Tag" by Stanley Suter

 *Prompt*- Who is your favorite character and why? Who is your least favorite character?

        This week I have been reading "Zombie Tag" and I find it very interesting. In the book, the main character Will is playing a made up game, Zombie tag. While playing the game, he finds a lengendary bell, the same bell that was used to rise the dead decades before. Of course, he ringed it, and every dead person in the radius of 5 miles was risin. His brother comes home and that's where I left off.

        My favorite character would probably be Will's brother, Graham before he died. He is the most comedic person in the book so far, and still the coolest. He play wrestles with Will, and seems to always win. He was just starting to drive when he died. He died because of an asthma attack. He couldn't open the bottle for his pills in time and chocked to death. Ever since he died, he has become much more serious, he hasn't had any emotions except anger.

        My least favorite character has to be Anthony's dad (Anthony is Will's friend). He is by far the most boring, meanest, angryest person in the book. For cracking the bell he sends Will home and looks like he waas about to murder him on the scene. Then, he doesn't even do anything about the living dead, even though it was obviously him that knew why they where alive and well, when they should still be in the ground. He grounds Anthony for it, which doesn't make sence, saying that Anthony didn't support either the friends coming over or the fact that they where staying up that late playing the game.

40 Book Challenge Reflection

        Right now, I a on the final stretch of my 40 book challenge. I don't think I am going to finish it however, mainly because I was never set on actually completing it. I have six books left to complete, and I have about a month to do that. I have progressed with my taste for writing and what I am now understanding that I wouldn't have understood before. If I where to rate myself probably a 9/10 from what I did, because it wasn't like I was actually trying to read as much as possible (I was doing pretty good) and then about mid-year I was totally messed up. I got a tablet for christmas.

        Now I have almost reached the goal, I think that I made this happen by just finding reading fun. I pretty much broke my chances though when I got the lead role in the musical. I have been reading much darker and harder books than I would have if I stayed on the level of reading that I was on last year. I have been reading things with old english, that are both interesting and sometimes hard to follow. However, my thoughts are that either the kids want to do and are going to do it, or they don't like reading and aren't going to do any at all. I think that I only kept reading because I have the self motivation to continue reading, and mainly because I, again, like it. So I think you should either make it mandatory, or at least enforce it a little more.

"Rot and Ruin" Stanley Suter

 *Prompt* Who are you favorite and least favorite characters?

        This week I have been reading "Rot and Ruin" and I really like it. It is set in a world plagued by the zombie apocalypse where a town on a mountainside is hanging onto life away from the living dead.  Two brothers, Benny and Tom, are closure specialists (people that will kill your living dead family members so you can feel at rest) who have to stop a gang of bounty hunters from starting a sort of zombie games, called fun land.

        My favorite character would probably be Tom. He is highly tuned to his surroundings and it seems light no one can get the upper hand on him. He came close to death when he was shot by a shotgun and left for fifty zoms, but his brother Benny accidentally sprayed too much of an odor to keep them away from them. His favorite weapon is the katana because it is silent, and he is a master with it.

        My least favorite character is Charlie pinkeye. He thinks that just because the world has gone to ruin, there is no need for justice outside the town gate. He tries to start G
ameland, an event where children try to fight zoms until there death comes, inevitably. He ties zombies to trees and hunts them down later for large amounts of money, and forces kids (like Benny) to show him "manners" (always saying "sir" and telling the truth, at least the one Charlie wants to hear).

"The adventures of HuckleBerry Finn" By:Stanley Suter

        Prompt-Are the characters realistic? Why or Why not?

        This week I have been reading "The adventures of Huckleberry Finn" By:Mark Twain, and so far it has been both good, and really hard to read. I really like the plot line, a boy who would rather be in the wilderness than living in houses and following rules. So he does something about it. He escapes from his no-good dad and makes it look like he died and was dragged out of the house. He is a theif and often taking advantage of other peoples sympathy, getting hundreds and even thousands of dollars off of peolpe that support the church.

        The main character Huckleberry is the most realistic character in a book that I have ever read. He is almost never brave in the hard situations, and unlike in other books he often fails with robberies, meeting frauds and other crooks along the way. The author always sets up the perfect love scene, then  he ruins every one of them with a need for a plan or a silly sceme. Another character who seems realistic is Jim. He is the only negro in their groop and he is wanted for running away. He wants to get back his family and free himself by getting across the border and into the north.

        Some of the characters that arn't realistic are the "King" and the "Duke". They are two men that got onto the raft for refuge and then started playing whole towns out of their money. They knew every scheme that people could pull out of their sleve and it seems like he knows what everyone else is doing. What seems unrealistic about them is how Jim and Huckleberry saved them, and they immediately turn behind Jim and Huckleberry's back and try to go through with a plan without them.