Week of September 22-28 Entry #3

Chapter 10 and 11 talks about farmers getting prepared to move and after they move out. In Chapter 10, Tom and Casy join the farmer group and help the group prepare to leave. The farmers do work such as salting meat. At the end of the chapter, the farmers finally leave. A grampa suddenly change his mind and decides to stay and the rest of the group leave the land and head towards California.
Chapter 11 is about the land that was left after the farmers left to California. The author describes the land as barren because some people are left there and they cultivate the land, but they are not so enthusiastic enough to actually grow crops there. The author says that these workers just drive a tractor over the land everyday. The men left in this land seem to have little skill in cultivation.

Week of September 21-28Entry #2

This week, the independent reading was done in class because we had to do the oral presentations on our Things Fall Apart scrapbooks. Since the class wasn't so silent due to other kids being nervous, I couldn't read a lot. Yet, I read about 30 pages despite the bad conditions.
From this part of the book, the story starts to flow. Chapter 7 is somewhat different from the precedent part of the story. This talks about how a salesmen could cheat tenant farmers. If a car seller changes the car's important parts into older and cheaper components, the salesmen could make more profit because the farmers don't know well about cars.
Chapter 8 starts to talk about Tom and Casy going to uncle John's house. Tom talks about Unlce John to Casy. Later, they arrive to the farm of Uncle John, but they found out that the place has been abandoned.
Chapter 9, the next chapter relates to chapter 6 again. It talks about the tenant farmers preparing to move to California. The interesting part of this chapter is the people who help the farmers move are ripping them off and the author is taking the perspective of a typical tenant farmer who is disappointed about moving to California.

Week of September 17-20 Entry #1

Book Read: The Grapes of Wrath
Author: John Steinbeck
Entry 1

The Grapes of Wrath. Some students might recognize the title of this book if he or she has an elder sibling. Some may know this book even though they don't have an older sibling because of its notoriety. The information of this book indicate that this is a classic book written in the 1930s by John Steinbeck, whom we know as the author of The Pearl, and is one of the hardest, enduring, and painstaking book to read. However, this is an inevitable book that we have to encounter in our high school year. I wanted to have some experience with the book, so I checked this book out of the library.
As I was reading this book, I noticed that what I heard was true. The first day I got this book, I read two pages and I was already half-sleeping. The first few pages describe one scene of a village in detail. For students who haven't been reading a lot, this book is rigorous. Yet, I endured the hardships and proceeded on. The basic plot is that a group of farmers are pushed out of their land in America during the early times of the United States, and are forced to move to California, and this book portrays the hopeless and hard conditions of the migration. The main character is Tom, a man who stayed in prison for 4 years for killing a man in a fight when drunk. I have read up to chapter 6, but not much has happened except for the fact that a group of farmers are forced to move, and Tom is with Jim Casy, a former preacher who quit preaching because of bad sexual relations. Anyways, this book seems to be an interesting, but hard book. I am looking for to check out whether the things I have heard about this notorious book is really true or not.