Rainbow Highlighters Make EVERYTHING Better

I'm still alive, nobody panic! I've just been studying (procrastinating) and completing practice exams despite the fact that the past two weeks have been school holidays. My real final exams are less than a month away, and wow, where did the time go? I am so nervous, but so excited. Cannot wait to be finished with high-school!

Anyway, I brought my awesome packet of highlighters into my English and Literature practice exams because I knew there were passages we'd have to read and analyse and write an essay for... It wasn't quite as fun on the English exam, but I went to town and had a ball with the Literature exam :) 

Let's just say, the exam paper was a lot more colourful when I gave it back than it was when they'd first given it to me. 

What's everyone else been up to? Writing much?

- Bonnee. 

Rainbow Books

I actually really, really, HATE highlighting, annotating or otherwise making a mark in a book that I've read or am reading. I feel like I'm degrading the author's masterpiece and destroying something that was perfect every time I do such a thing. But for the sake of my own education, my copy of Twelve Angry Men by Reginald Rose has been transformed into a rainbow, because SOMEBODY decided not to give the character's names, which wouldn't bother me so much if it weren't for the fact that I need to write a text response on this book later this month, which means I have to know which character said what. Colour-coded jurors for the win!!!

I'm just saying, 11th Juror is awesome.

10th Juror: Bright? He's a common ignorant slob. He don't even speak good English.
11th Juror: Doesn't even speak good English. 

Aah the irony of the German immigrant having better English skills than everybody else.

11th Juror: I beg pardon...
7th Juror: "I beg pardon?" What are you so polite about?
11th Juror: For the same reason you are not: it's the way I was brought up. 

Owned :)

I like this play, if you couldn't tell.

What are your thoughts on making markings in a book? I want to shoot myself a little more every time I do it. How does it make you feel? 

- Bonnee.

P.S - Happy Father's Day to all the dads out there!

Latest Readings

For my yr 12 English and Literature classes, I had to do a little bit of reading over the past school holidays.

First of all, English. We read The Crucible by Arthur Miller. The play was interesting, and some quotes really stood out to me. I'd already seen a movie-version of the play a couple of years ago and had a better understanding of some of the action in the play because of that. We were given 80 comprehension questions and told to do 60 before we came back to school. I may have overdone my homework and done the extra 20. Why not? I had the book there in front of me, and I was reading it. We watched the movie in class this week, and it was interesting to see how the play was adapted into a different medium. The task for studying The Crucible is a context response (just like when I read The Rugmaker of Mazar-e-Sharif by Najaf Mazari earlier this year), so we have also been learning about the real events in Salem during the witch trials in 1692. It's been pretty interesting. I'm not too keen on context responses, but I'll kick butt and get an awesome grade because I want to. 

In Literature, we were told to read after the quake, a series of short stories by Haruki Murakami, set after the Kobe earthquake in 1995. Oh my God. I LOVE them. They are strange. They are weird and they are different and he manages to bring some element of sex into all six short stories, but he does a damn good job of it! I LOVED reading them and I am eager now to read even more of his work. I've been going around randomly saying "Super-Frog Saves Tokyo", the name of my favourite short story. It has been interesting to do a bit of research and draw parallels between the author and the actual even of the Kobe earthquake and how he's incorporated both himself and those events into his stories. Brilliant read. *Please note that the title was intended to be written without capitals by the author. 

Has anybody read either of these books? Or something else by Haruki Murakami? 

- Bonnee.

A Terrific Tuesday!

Well today has been quite full of reading/writing related business. 

I prepared for my literature SAC (School Assessed Coursework... these are like tests), which meant highlighting important quotes in the screenplay Bastard Boys by Sue Smith. Tomorrow we have to write an essay discussing a prompt in terms of the views and values of the characters. It shall be interesting. 

After that, I thought I'd get ahead in literature and start reading over the poems by William Blake which we will be studying next. I didn't enjoy reading from Blake when we studied him earlier last year, but this time around, I seem to have more of an appreciation for him. Half of the poems we are studying are the ones we touched last year, but we didn't do any sort of assessment on them last year; we just touched on them. This time we're going into detail. 

Once I was done with the poetry, I had a bit of time to kill before lunch and decided to jump on a computer and do some more recreational writing. I have now finished editing 26 out of 37 chapters of Evergreen: A Fallen Star, and I also started writing a short story which I've titled Lost in Paradise. You'll hear more about both of these another time! 

Last but not least, today was the English SAC. We had to write a context response to a prompt, incorporating themes from the text The Rugmaker of Mazar-e-Sharif by Najaf Mazari and Robert Hillman. The awesome part about this SAC was that we could choose our form; expository, persuasive, or imaginative. I, of course, chose imaginative, and wrote a kick-arse short story of roughly 1000 words in 100 minutes. And I was pretty proud of it. Hopefully it will give me a good mark. Should I share it with you guys when I get it back from marking? 

Who else got up to some exciting stuff related to what they're passionate about? Please do share!

- Bonnee. 

Emma

What's my favourite genre? Probably fantasy. Yeah, definitely fantasy.

Ya know what the first book I have to read for my Literature Units 3/4 is?

Emma, by Jane Austen.

I have been labouring over this horrific excuse for good literature for the majority of my summer holidays and it's finally almost over... and by over, I mean I've almost finished reading it. It's actually very far from over, so someone please come and shoot me now because this is the most boring book in the world, or as one of my friends said, "Emma is the shittiest shit that ever shat." ... or something along those lines anywho.

Hopefully, the reading will be finished by tomorrow night and I can start the book I'm studying for English Units 3/4, which is The Rugmaker of Mazar-E-Sharif by Najaf Mazari and Robert Hillman. The English group who studied it last year said it was pretty alright, and from what I've been told about it it doesn't seem too bad.

Claim to fame: I met Najaf Mazari  and Robert Hillman themselves last year. First published authors I'd ever met.