Did the book come to a satisfactory closure for you? Why/not?

Peace Like a River did not come to a satisfactory closure for me. I finished reading and was not happy with the outcome. I thought it was horribly unfair for the father to die. I thought it was horribly unfair that Roxanna had been married to the father for only three months when her husband died, and she was left to take care of Reuben and Swede all by herself. I didn't like it that Davy continued to be an outlaw and could never really be with his family ever again. The only thing I was satisfied with was that Davy would let Reuben run into him every once in a while. Except, he never let Swede find him, which I also thought was horribly unfair. I am the youngest sibling, and if my sister was estranged from our family and only ever met with my brothers I would be very upset, so I can relate to Swede in that regard. I was also unsatisfied with the fact that Jape Waltzer shot the father and Reuben, then ran away and was never found. I understand that Leif Enger couldn't just write a happy ending where everything good happened, that wouldn't be realistic or effective, but I still found the end of the book unsatisfactory.

Does the author seem to have a friendly, unfriendly, or some other type of relationship with the audience? Why do you think so?

I think that Leif Enger has a very friendly relationship with the audience. He wants to share Reuben's miracles with his audience. Enger speaks from Reuben's point of view and he always sounds like he really wants the audience to understand and side with Reuben. Reuben is a young, asthmatic boy who believes in miracles and is nice to his sister. I think that Enger's choice to make his hero this likable was an attempt to bring the audience in and make them want to have a friendly relationship with the content of the book. Now that I think about it, however, I can't imagine a scenario in which an author would have an unfriendly relationship with the audience. If I am reading a book and I feel like the author is being mean to me, I am going to stop reading it. That reminds me of the beginning of The Hobbit that we looked at in class a while ago and noticed that J.R.R. Tolkein used lots of tools to put his audience on his side. That is what Enger did also, by creating a character whom the audience finds endearing and friendly.

If the purpose is implicit, tell what you think the purpose of the book is and why.

I finished How the Other Half Lives by Jacob A. Riis and am now reading Peace Like a River by Leif Enger.

I am not really sure what I think is the purpose of this book yet; I will try to work it out as I write this. I don't know very much about Leif Enger's personal life or background, but I feel like he must be somewhat similar to Reuben Land, the main character, in order for him to have captured his character, fears, beliefs, personality, and experiences so fully. I'm not saying that I believe that Enger went on a cross-country trek with his religious father and poet sister to find his outlaw brother, but from my experience authors write about things that are familiar to them. I bet that Enger grew up with a religious background, as his book carries this religious theme of faith and miracles. He most likely knew someone like Swede who had an innate gift for storytelling as well as poetry and meter. I would also guess that he did have an older brother, to whom he always looked up but maybe shouldn't have. So based on what I know about the book and what I can infer about Enger himself, I feel that the purpose of his book is to inform his readers about things he believes in, i.e. miracles, faith, family, morality. I am not a religious person. To me personally, it felt like he was trying to convince me of these religious things he experienced. It felt like he was trying to turn me, a skeptic, into a believer. I don't necessarily think that was his goal in writing it, but I do think his goal had to do with teaching his audience about these things that he believes in.

What has the writer done to engage you, the reader, in a relationship with the book’s content?

Jacob Riis uses a combination of statistics, facts, and personal examples to engage the reader. His goal is to engage the reader to such an extreme level that the reader feels compelled to do something about the issue at hand. His most effective method of engaging the reader I felt was his anecdotes about real people living in the tenements. He told stories about mothers so destitute that they could not care for their children and left them on the doorsteps of wealthier households. He told a story about two elderly sisters who had made their livings as seamstresses, but now were going blind and could not work. With no family to take care of them, the only option left for them was to wait until starvation took over. For me, I was most affected when I could picture a face of the people actually going through these tragedies and hardships. Riis also sometimes used statistics, saying X % of people in tenements make under Y dollars a month. These numbers were arbitrary to me; I am reading this book in the 21st century when it was written in the 19th. Inflation has occurred; rent on a tenement no longer is 12 dollars a month. I have nothing to compare that to and those numbers are meaningless to me. Of course, I understand that Riis did not write this book with the expectation that people would read it over one hundred years later and he did not have that in mind when putting in his statistics. His goal was for his readers to become aware of the atrocities occurring in the New York tenements, and for his purpose hard cold facts would do the job very nicely.

Why did you choose this book? What were your expectations? Why did you expect what you did? How is the book living up to your expectations?

The summer before I started sixth grade, I went to Manhattan for a week to stay with my aunt and uncle. They invite each of their nieces and nephews to visit them when they are about twelve or thirteen, and it was my turn to go. My uncle wanted to find lots of fun things to show me in the city, and one of them was a tenement museum. We visited this tenement that had been preserved and had actors playing the residents. They designed the inside to look like it was inhabited by a lot of families, and the actors described tenement life to us. It was absolutely fascinating, and it left me with an extremely romanticized vision of what life was like back then. One story that I found particularly interesting was how in order to get gas into the tenement, the tenants dropped a coin into a slot in the machine and the gas would be pumped in. At the end of the month, the landlord would collect the money. Most of the tenants couldn't afford the gas, so they would slice potatoes into the size and shape of the coins and drop those down the slot. The problem with that was that at the end of the month the landlord would find the potato slices. So what they figured out was to cut ice into the right shape and use that. That way they could get gas, but the evidence would melt and the landlord would never know. I thought the creativity of the tenants was fascinating, but I also recognized the horrible situations they must have been in to be forced to come up with schemes like this to do simple things like cook and heat their homes.

The Christmas after I visited him, my uncle gave me this book. I was really excited to read it, but then I read the first few pages and realized it was going to be really hard. So I waited a few years, and now I think I can actually read it without falling asleep. Its still hard though, since it was written in the late 1890s. And even though I'm interested in the content, I still find the book really boring, but I'm trying!

Does the author seem to make any particular effort to compel you to read the book? If so, what? How effective is this strategy?

I finished A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare and am now reading How the Other Half Lives by Jacob A. Riis.

Jacob Riis definitely wanted people to read his book because he was passionate about its content, and he was passionate about its content because he had lived it. He was born in Ribe, Denmark and immigrated to New York when he was very young. He was one of the lucky ones, however, and was able to find work and avoid the worst tenements. His first-hand experience with the tenements came from his work as a police reporter at New York's police headquarters on Mulberry Street which is the "heart of the Lower East Side slum district." This familiarity lead to his usage of his journalism to let the public know of the horrible conditions in the New York Tenements.

His main tool to compel people to read his book is his photography. When he wrote How the Other Half Lives, he was already well-known for his photographic skills. His usage of flash photography was a very useful tool in photographing the horrible conditions of the tenements. He emphasizes in his book how dark the tenements were; the inner rooms received no light or ventilation. Almost every page of his book has some sort of photograph or other visual aid to help the reader grasp his revulsion towards the conditions of the tenements, whether it is a floor plan of one of the tenements, a picture of the residents, or a chart with mortality rates in New York vs. the tenements alone.

A Midsummer Night's Dream- did I actually understand any of it?

I still feel awkward blogging about Shakespeare. I feel like Shakespeare would not approve of the idea of blogs.

I think what I need to do is sit down with an expert on Shakespeare and read A Midsummer Night's Dream again, line by line, so that I truly understand what I am reading. In just trying to sit down and read it, I went too fast to even begin to comprehend any of what I was reading. Even when I understood it word by word, I know that I didn't get anything out of it other than the superficial meaning and basic plot line. Of course there were editors' notes on the side of each page, but they only told me what specific words and phrases meant, not what they suggested on a deeper level. The problem with reading Shakespeare is that since the average reader doesn't understand Elizabethan English very well, we have to rely on editors and other experts to tell us what it means. This removes any chance we have of coming up with our interpretation. The language barrier makes us dependent on others to enlighten us, and there is no way for us to come up with our own meaning. When we read modern poetry, we at least understand what all of the words we are reading mean. Every person can read a modern poem, no matter how profound, and come up with their own meaning. When we read Shakespearean poetry and plays, we rely on the editor to give us the meaning, making it his or hers and not our own.