Blog Post Seven

To be considered nonfiction, a book needs to be completely true, although there are some allowances that are allowed to be changed, like dialogue as long as it’s close to the original. Also, I don’t need to know every single detail about what was happening. I’d love to hear the moment you fell in love, but please do not tell me that you wore a green turtleneck, dark washed denim jeans, and the diamond necklace that your grandmother gave to you after she died of pneumonia when you were eighteen.

Half-truths and three-quarter truths aren’t acceptable, but something as close to 100% is a good thing. If it’s 100%, bonus points for the book. For me, I’d say the acceptable range is probably 95-100% true is a good memoir. If you’re telling the book over a long period span of time and it starts when you were born, of course there might be a little discrepancy of the truth and what you wrote. But also, don’t embellish a detail that people have a record of. If you got arrested for something, don’t build it up to be something that it wasn’t. If you steal a candy bar and go to jail for an hour then pay the fine, do not say that you shot someone and blacked out and forgot what happened but as you are about to be killed by the death penalty have a sudden revelation that you killed the person in self-defense and the proceedings get halted and they figure out that yes, what you said is true. That’s an embellishment I can’t deal with. But going back to stealing the candy bar, if you say you were in jail for two hours when it was really an hour and a half, I’m fine with the time difference. It’s almost like the same thing right?

I think that we do need genre lines. There are some books where you can definitely tell that it’s a fiction book because it’s never going to happen in real life (think teenage girl falling in love with a vampire here . . .), but then there are some books where they are proven and credible facts that this happened and everything the author says is 100% true. That’s when you know it’s a nonfiction work.

Blog Post 6: Readicide

I think that there are some works that are not only popular, but also great. Catcher in the Rye was published in 1951, 61 years ago, and is still popular today. While it is a book taught in English III, it’s been published multiple times and shows how a teenager’s life is, but Catcher is a little more extreme. Plus, at one point, the book was on the censored list, which would make me want to read it even more to see what all the fuss is about. J If schools want to make reading more enjoyable for everyone, I think they should let students read at their own pace and stop putting page limits on what you want to read each night. For some kids, it’s easy to read 30 pages each night, while for others, they may not be able to read that many pages. It’s high school, people should be able to read as many pages as they want to in the night. Teachers should just say “Make sure the book is finished by this date and you’ll have a test on it the next day.” High schoolers know they have some days that are busier than others. They could read more on a night they aren’t busy so that way they don’t fall too far behind if they have a busy day of the week. I think that there are times when students should be able to choose what books they want to read from a list that would fit into whatever period of English literature is being studied (Puritans, Rationalists, Transcendalists, etc.). If the student gets to choose the book, they may be more excited about reading the book than being forced into reading The Great Gatsby or The Crucible. People enjoy reading more when they get to pick what they want to read.