"The Mark of Athena"

 

After a year finishing The Sun of Neptune, I have finally moved on to The Mark of Athena. The past two books in this series are a little obscure, but I do remember the overall plot. Basically, the Greek demigods and the Roman demigods must overcome their conflicts and work together, in order to stop the evil Gaea, the goddess of the Earth. In the first book is basically in the point of view of Jason, a Roman demigod, and his adventure with the Greek demigods. The second book is about the adventure of Percy Jackson, a Greek demigod, with Roman demigods and it is told in Percy's point of view. At the end of The Sun of Neptune, the Greek demigods were making the effort to go to the Roman camp and unite with them. Now, the story continues.....

At the beginning of The Mark of Athena, the Greek demigods made it to the Roman camp and they informed the Romans that they must work together and stop Gaea and her children from taking over the world. The Romans were questioning the Greeks and that is were I stopped reading. I really haven't read enough to make any predictions, other than that the Greeks and Romans will unite to save the world, because I don't have enough information to form any other predictions of what this book will be about. So I will just start talking about Rick Riordan and his writing.

The following information was found on http://www.rickriordan.com/home.aspx, so for more information, go to this web page.

Rick Riordan was born on June 5, 1964 in San Antonio, Texas. He lives in Boston with his wife and two sons, Haley and Patrick. He has one dog named Speedy, a Basenji/terrier mix, and three cats. His favorite characters from his books are Grover, Bes, and Tyson, because he loves to write about them. In his spare time, he reads, plays the guitar, and travels with his family.

Rick Riordan taught English and History at public and private schools, which are located in San Francisco and Texas, for fifteen years. However, right now, writing is his full-time job in Boston. His is also the author of serval series including the Percy Jackson and the Olypians series, the Kane Chronicles, and the Heroes of Olympus. At first, he wrote mystery books that was intended for grownup; one of his mystery series was Tres Navarre series. As a bedtime story, Rick Riordan wrote The Lightning Thief for his oldest son. From there, he turned his books into children's fiction.

Blog Post Reflection

The quality of my writing has improved over the course of the trimester a lot. It can be seen in the aspect of the succinct sentences that describe the literary elements in more depth. The brevity of the sentences can be seen by the fact that I use more words and elaborate more of the complexity of the character, Hope, whereas in the second one, there is more than just one thing that I talk about. For example, I start talking about the effectiveness of the introduction, and then I make some inferences in just one paragraph. In the rest of that post, I talk about the difference in the introduction between The Kite Runner and The Lemon Tree and a connection between the book and another book, Touching Spirit Bear. Another reason that my writing skills is that I have increased the level of variation of the sentences. In the first post, there were many subordinate conjunctions. This similar sentence formation/ syntax made the post seem more monotone and insipid. But in the second post, the variation of the sentence made the post more interesting.  Also, the grammatical errors have decreased but not too significantly. The first blog post had some errors, but there weren’t too significant. In the final post, the errors were very limited to no errors at all. Therefore, based on these pieces of evidence, my writing skills have augmented throughout the course of the trimester.

                The main struggle that I had with this project was actually putting the thoughts of my book onto the post and meeting the requirements of the blog. I had to write about it in immense detail and write above and beyond, because I didn’t know how detailed I had to write it to fulfill the requirements. That was the only way to overcome this struggle. The way I tackled the other struggle was by writing all my thoughts on the book that I had that time. This helped me decide which thoughts were important and which are not important. The strength in my blogging is that I was very deep in the meaning towards the end and the blogs contained the important information that was each time I wrote about. I did not reach my reading goal, because I had a hard time finding the right book. I had many books in my mind that I really wanted to read, but unfortunately, I couldn’t get a hold of any of them. But through the reading of other blogs, I found some book that I am reading now. I used goodreads.com as a reference to good book just like the blogs. My reading skills improved with the increased level of analysis of each book. My analyzing is more in depth or in a more deeper meaning, because in that first post, the analysis wasn’t too sophisticated and was more an easy observation of the character’s behavior and feelings. In the second post, the analysis of the sentence, "It was my past of unatoned sins”, was more sophisticated than the first. There was a greater need of comprehension than the first one. Therefore, my reading skills have enhanced throughout the course of this trimester.

"Romeo and Juliet"- Act III

 

In Act III a lot has happened that changes the course of the play and propels the story forward. However, I will first start with a short summary of all the scenes and then discuss some literary elements in each scene. I will then end with some predictions and even tell what I would do if I were in each situation.

In Scene I, basically, Tybalt kills Mercutio in a fight and Tybalt is later slayed by Romeo. After Romeo runs away and hides, the Prince of Verona says that he will kill Romeo once he finds him. In Scene II, Juliet is informed by the Nurse that Romeo killed Tybalt. Then Juliet tells the Nurse to go and get Romeo. In Scene III, Romeo starts crying in Friar Lawerence's cell and then the Nurse comes in. She tells Romeo to meet Juliet and he tries to kill himself, but is stopped by the Friar. In Scene IV, Lord Capulet meets with Paris and they set the marriage date to the following Thursday. And finally, in Scene V, Romeo and Juliet meet each other. Then Romeo leaves and Lady Capulet tells her about the marriage. Juliet refuses and Lord Capulet get mad at her and calls her mean names. Afterwards, the Nurse advises her to marry Paris and Juliet says yes sarcastically. She then tells herself that she will kill herself if she is separated from Romeo. The Act then ends. As you see, the summary is very brief, so do not use this as a substitute for the real play.

There are a lot of literary elements that are present in this scene- most of which is irony. In Scene 5 of this act, Lady Capulet said that Juliet will be a bride and get a husband on Thursday, but Juliet already has a husband- Romeo. This is irony, because she is already married. Another piece of irony is that Juliet says that Romeo is very bad and starts calling him names. And right after that she says that she would rather marry Romeo than Paris. This is ironic, because she at on point started calling Romeo names and now she     would rather marry him. This is also ironic, because she is already married to Romeo. If you have any other examples of literary element, please put it on the comments.