Class Entry

This past week in AP Language Arts we finished reading The Great Gatsby and As I Lay Dying. It was a brutal stretch of around three weeks of reading every night, but we finally got through it. I am kind of disappointed that The Great Gatsby turned out to be a love story gone bad while As I Lay Dying was one of the hardest books I have ever had to read. I am saying this because it was very hard to me to read the text in this book once and fully understand the reading. I usually would have to read some of the text more than once then after that read spark notes a couple of times. The Great Gatsby had a very strange ending to it and I completely lost all faith that I had in that book. It was an escape from the grueling boring readings that take place in the novel As I Lay Dying. It was a book that we could actually read for enjoyment, not one that hurt our eyes when we were engaged in the text. However, both of these novels completely went down the drain after having finished both of them. One of them has a horrible plot because no one wants to read about a family spending the whole entire novel carrying around a dead human being that smells when they can bury their own mother in their backyard, or at least somewhere that is close to the Bundren household. Not only do they spend the whole novel attempting to bury Addie, but the whole entire Bundren family is crooked, corrupt and self centered. It reflects greatly on the poor parenting that must have taken place from Addie and Anse. The Bundren children really never had any one to give them comfort and they had so many kids that maybe some of them did not get enough attention at a young age. As for the other novel that we had to read, the reading flowed more smoothly and was easier to comprehend. Jay Gatsby was truly a man of mystery and it turns out that maybe he was not as bad as people thought he was. I very surprised about the ending because I do not like the fact that George Wilson shot Gatsby to end the novel. Also, the whole entire funeral situation was not only more confusing to understand than the rest of the novel, but it is also a terrible way to end a story. F Scott Fitzgerald started out with a good plot and had built up his story until the very ending where he let the story slip away from him therefore causing the ending of the story to be ruined ultimately ruining the entire book. I would actually take that comment back and say that the whole entire book was not ruined because I like the way Fitzgerald writes earlier in the novel. I am curious to see if we have another major essay grade in AP language arts, however I doubt that Mr. Glenn would give us such an assignment.