List of Must-Reads I Haven't Read

As the school year now concludes, my English teacher decided that as a gift of sorts, she would compile a list of her favorite books and present the list to us. After briefly glancing over the list, I recognized the majority of the books listed, but had only read a few. So, if you're looking for something to read, take a look at this list and see if you feel, perhaps...inspired.

(All titles I have read are listed in bold. I didn't bother indicating which works I recognized because that's just about all of them.)

Novels
The Secret Life of Bees - Sue Monk Kidd
Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
The Giver - Lois Lowry
The Alchemist - Paulo Coehlo
Into the Wild - Jon Krakauer
The Last Lecture - Mitch Albom
Man's Search for Meaning - Viktor Frankl
Walden - Henry David Thoreau
The Little Prince - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
The Prophet - Kahlil Gibran
The Velveteen Rabbit - Margery Williams
Emma - Jane Austen
Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time - Mark Haddon
1984 - George Orwell
The Stranger - Albert Camus
War of the Worlds - H.G. Wells
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
The Doors of Perception - Aldous Huxley
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey
The Divine Comedy - Dante Alighieri
The Big Sleep - Raymond Chandler
The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood
Gone With the Wind - Margaret Mitchell
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis
Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe
On the Road - Jack Kerouac
Rabbit Run - John Updike
Slaughterhouse 5 - Kurt Vonnegut
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
Brothers Karamazov - Fyodore Dostoevsky
The Call of the Wild - Jack London
Snow Falling on Cedars - David Guterson
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde - Robert Louis Stevenson
The Picture of Dorian Grey - Oscar Wilde
Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
Ulysses - James Joyce
As I Lay Dying - William Faulkner
Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
Charlotte's Web - E.B. White
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy - John Le Care
Night - Elie Wisel
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting - Milan Kundera
The Name of the Rose - Umberto Eco
The Stories of Eva Luna - Isabel Allende
The Art of War - Sun Tzu
The Passionate God - Rosemary Haughton
A Thousand Splendid Suns - Khaled Hosseini
Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
Flowers for Algernon - Daniel Keyes
Frankenstein - Mary Shelley
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead - Tom Stoppard
The Graveyard Book - Neil Gaiman
Fight Club - Chuck Palahniuk
The Odyssey - Homer
Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
The Prince - Machiavelli
The Metamorphosis - Franz Kafka
Tuesdays with Morrie - Mitch Albom
The Screwtape Letters - C.S. Lewis
The Five People You Meet in Heaven - Mitch Albom
Cat's Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut
The Godfather - Mario Puzo
Inferno - Dante Alighieri
Something Wicked This Way Comes - Ray Bradbury
Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
The Cider House Rules - John Irving
The Green Mile - Stephen King
No Country For Old Men - Cormac McCarthy
The Princess Bride - William Goldman

Now that is quite a list. And a long one at that. Also, according to this list, apparently I've been reading the wrong books for my entire life. Now I guess the next thing to do would be to actually read the books on this list. But truthfully, this post should more accurately be titled "List of Must-Have Reads I Haven't Read (and Most Likely Never Will)." And I don't know that for certain, but I'll more likely than not start making my way through this list when I have the time to do so, (as in summer or retirement.) Until then, the best of luck on your journey reading and let me know in the comments which novels you have read too.

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Wallowing in the Water

The day I've been dreading the entire semester has arrived - the day when we started swimming during PE.

Now I must admit that because it was a scorching, blistering day, that swimming was refreshing, at least to an extent. Swimming has never been a great talent or skill of mine. Sure, I know how to swim. But if I had been on the Titanic, I'd guess that my chances of survival would have been close to zero. However, if I was asked to relax in the hot tub with my friends for an hour or two, that I could definitely do (and very well.)

There were a couple swimmers/water polo players in my class that obviously swam competitively from how practiced (and fast) they're laps were, but I was content with wallowing in the water. Then again, I certainly wasn't the worst swimmer in my class since some of my classmates were asking me how to swim certain strokes.
                                                       
The pool at my school is actually pretty nice. As in, there are definitely worse bodies of water to be swimming in during a PE class. My greatest hardship swimming during PE would be breathing. The pool at my school ranges from thirteen feet deep to around six feet deep, and because I'm only about 5'4", I'm sure you can guess how difficult it was to keep my head above the water.

But besides the obvious difficulty I experienced while treading water, swimming was actually a lot better than I had expected. We didn't play any games or something fancy like water polo, but it was hot enough that swimming laps across the pool was perfect.

I was fortunate enough to have remembered both a towel and swimming trunks, because there were several kids in my class that forgot both. The majority of them that forgot these swimming (essentials?) just swam in their PE uniform shorts and called it a day. And I would've thought that drying off would've taken forever too, but with all that heat bearing down, I think just about everyone was dry pretty quickly.

Well, I heard that tomorrow we'll be playing water polo, and I'm not quite sure what my opinion is on that. Hopefully there aren't any (good) water polo players in my period, because I've heard from the classes last semester that the experienced water polo players are no joke, as in, throwing the water polo ball behind their backs to score or something ridiculous. (And by ridiculous I mean that I wish I could do.) As for now, I should probably go and practice my own little water polo routine in the bathtub in preparation for tomorrow.

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My First Ever AP Test

Like many other students across the nation, AP testing began today. However, the AP test I completed this morning was not only the first AP test that was administered this year, but my first AP test ever. And I'll have you know that the test definitely earned the title, "Advanced Placement", because the AP test was hands the most difficult test I have ever taken. And that's saying something considering I've already earned D's on several other AP Chemistry chapter exams.

The test began around 8:45, but we entered the testing room around 8:00, not that it really matters. What does matter is the fact that as my classmates and I waited outside the testing room, nervously laughing and chatting, I realized that I had forgotten both my student identification card as well as the card with my AP number. Consequently, for the next thirty minutes, I was scanning the group of people, looking for someone that didn't have their wallet or that wasn't showing someone else those two items (which I still did not have.) 

I was legitimately concerned that I would not be allowed to take the exam. I mean, it is an AP exam, so I was sure stuff like that has happened before. I briefly thought about walking home, but considering it's a thirty minute drive, I figured that wasn't really an option.

So I just went along with it and by the grace of God, I didn't need either items and was able to just take the exam. On second thought, maybe it would've been better if I had been caught without my identification card and my AP number...

Once we finally entered the building to take the test, we were assigned seats. Yes, assigned seats. But now that I think of it, that actually makes decent sense. Either way, as we were filling in our addresses and our names, I couldn't help but notice that my hand was trembling. Like shuddering, as if shock waves were rippling across my palms. Then, to ineffectively calm my nerves, I clenched my pencil, only for it to snap. Don't worry, I brought around ten in case of that exact situation. 

                                                 

We soon started the multiple choice portion of the test, which was some of the most difficult AP Chemistry material ever presented in front of me. (I'm hoping for around fifty percent. If I'm lucky.) After a quick ten minute break, we then took the free response portion, which was strangely easier than the multiple choice, (probably because I was doing all of it wrong.)

Now to bore you some more, the format of the test was:

 60 Multiple Choice Questions in 90 Minutes

+7 Free Response Questions in 105 Minutes

=a whole lot of time spent being tested on a subject I'm not very fond of

And if you plan on taking AP Chemistry this upcoming year, there's more information about it here. Not quite sure why you'd want to, but to each his own. And next year, when you're crying yourself to sleep every night (like I will be doing tonight), don't say I didn't warn you.

As a side note, I'd like to mention that because this test is such a big deal, my high school gave everyone that took the test this morning the rest of the day off. So I guess that's the major positive, (that and the fact if, if I do well I'll get some college credit.) And to all of y'all that took the AP Chemistry test this morning and still have more to come, I wish you luck! 

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Personal Art Gallery

Just in case you haven't already seen my recent art pieces, I formatted this post as an art gallery of sorts so that you may get a chance to peruse my masterpieces. (Just kidding, they're decent, but by no means spectacular.)

(Also, because I had some difficulty organizing and positioning these pictures into the display I wanted them to be, this post won't be as seamlessly put together as I had hoped it to be. My apologies.)

The first piece, a graphite drawing, depicts the hand of my sister as she delicately clutches a twisted rose. Although I wish that I had made the background darker and the petals of the flower lighter, I am content with my drawing. And I must say, this is the best (and only) hand I've drawn.

The carousel horse below is a pen-and-ink drawing, and was thus created by dipping a nib into a bottle of ink and then creating dots. So yeah, this entire, and I mean entire, image is created from meticulously blotted dots.

The final piece I completed this year was a scratchboard. I've always been fascinated by drawing fire and smoke, so I decided to create an image of just that - a burning candle with billowing tendrils of smoke. The most interesting part of this medium was that unlike the pen-and-ink drawing, in which no dark value can be taken away, for scratchboards, no dark value can be added. Consequently, if too much is etched away from the scratchboard, nothing can be done to add value in troublesome areas.

That concludes my display of artwork for the semester. I hope you enjoyed viewing these pieces as much as I enjoyed creating them!

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The Mistress of Death

After reading Truman Capote's chilling novel In Cold Blood, my teacher assigned an essay in which we were to select a criminal and analyze the cause of their criminal actions. However, this paper was to be a persuasive essay in which we would either attribute the actions of the selected criminal to their "nature", as in an inherent tendency for vice and evil, or their "nurture", as in their upbringing.

Having always been fascinated by the criminal tales of the south, I wrote my essay about Madame Delphine, a wealthy slave owner in New Orleans who allegedly tortured her servants with cruel punishments.

As usual, I procrastinated this assignment and consequently drafted, edited, and submitted the essay in a single day. While on vacation. Oh well. Maybe next time I'll make sure to get started early. (No I won't.)

                         

Although the gruesome actions and decisions of criminals are often perceived as inherently immoral, such vice is often caused not by a genetic affinity for malice, but environmental circumstances and upbringing. In relation to the infamous Madame Delphine Lalaurie, though her torture of slaves is an indication of such seemingly inherent evil, as represented through her upbring as well as previous experiences, her violent actions were not induced by an inherited propensity for evil, but are an effect of her environment.

The second child of Louis Chevalier Barthelemy de Macarty and Marie Jeanne Lerable, Delphine was born on March 19, 1787 to the wealthy and politically influential Macarty clan. Financially supported by her family, Delphine married three different men within a couple of decades, living lavishly with each of her suitors. She first married Don Ramon de Lopez y Angullo, a high ranking Spanish officer, whom she wed at the St. Louis Cathedral in New Orleans. Four years into their marriage, the couple ventured to Spain so that Don Ramon may “take his place at court as befitting his new position” (Nealon, Timothy), as he had been promoted in the Spanish military  Unfortunately, Don Ramon died in Havana of an undiagnosed illness. Soon thereafter, Delphine gave birth to a daughter, Maria Borgia Delphine Lopez y Angulla de la Candelaria, and disheartened, returned to New Orleans with her newborn. After a period of grievance, Delphine married Jean Blanque, a man of several noble occupations deemed financially suitable by the superior members of the Macarty clan. Subsequent to Delphine’s official union to Jean Blanque in June of 1808, Delphine secured an expensive property for the new family, later bearing four more children. Paralleling the conclusion of her previous marriage, Blanque also died of an undiagnosed disease. Following another brief period of lamentation, Delphine married a third time. Whereas Delphine’s initial interactions with her previous husbands had been romantic meetings, Delphine was first introduced to Leonard Louis Nicolas LaLaurie after she had hired him to administer treatment to one of her daughters that possessed a rare spinal deformity. Although the burdening condition of Delphine’s daughter steadily improved throughout the marriage of Delphine and Louis LaLaurie, the developing conflict between the couple drove Louis to leave their property and abandon the family with minimal financial compensation. Having experienced immeasurable tragedy in all three of her marriages, rumors soon circulated that Delphine tortured her servants as a crude coping mechanism for the succession of severe difficulty she had endured.

Although several violent incidents had been reported regarding LaLaurie and her mansion, suspicion was especially aroused after the death of Leia, a young slave girl. According to local reports, Leia plummeted to her death as she fled from Madame Delphine, who had threatened to whip the young girl. Consequently, the local council conducted a brief investigation of the LaLaurie manor, ultimately granting all of Madame Delphine’s captive slaves immediate freedom. However, because this verdict had been made without intense analysis or deliberation, the slaves were freed not on account of LaLaurie’s alleged violence, but due to the poor conditions in which the slaves had lived and operated. Thus, though this investigation granted the slaves of the LaLaurie manor their freedom, the investigation did not yield any information regarding the administration of torture as previously speculated. Regardless of the underwhelming lack of evidence, many continued to maintain the perception that “beneath the delicate and refined exterior was a cruel, cold-blooded...insane woman” (Troy Taylor). Outraged at the abrupt loss of her slaves, Delphine, forbidden to repurchase her slaves, circumvented this limitation by covertly arranging for her relatives to purchase the freed slaves on her behalf. Once purchased, the slaves were subsequently returned to the LaLaurie mansion, once again subject to the cruel punishments of Madame Delphine LaLaurie.

Several years after the death of Leia, a fire erupted at the manor the morning of April 10, 1834. The fire not only destroyed the house, singeing both the interior and exterior, but publicly revealed the cruel punishments endured by the slaves of Delphine. As a mass of enraged locals congregated and rescuers entered the manor, the first servant discovered, a seventy year old black woman trapped in the kitchen, explained that as the fire erupted she had been chained in the kitchen while LaLaurie left to gather valuables scattered throughout the property. Although the bondage of the enslaved cook to the kitchen may be argued as an act of inherent evil, this form of torture may be attributed to Madame Delphine’s environment and previous experience. After her third husband deserted her, Madame Delphine developed an irrational fear of loss and general paranoia, resorting to bonding her cook to the manor’s kitchen to prevent any further desertion. Accompanied by a small force of authorities to the attic, the slave cook and the rescuers discovered a dozen slaves bound and choking with spiked collars. This same slave woman later revealed that “she had set the fire to escape LaLaurie’s torture” (A Torture Chamber is Uncovered). The Sheriff never arrived to subdue Madame LaLaurie, thus providing LaLaurie the proper circumstances to evade arrest and flee to France. Furthermore, although charges were never formally filed against Delphine LaLaurie, “her reputation in upper-class society was destroyed” (A Torture Chamber is Uncovered), and she never returned to New Orleans. Consequential to the lack of legal action and law enforcement, the amassing crowd rushed into the mansion, ransacking the contents of the manor, but unsuccessfully detaining Madame LaLaurie, as she had already fled.

With the fire extinguished, several local newspapers documented the gruesome details of brutalization that the rescued slaves accounted following their liberation. According to one newspaper, the slaves recounted a variety of obscure forms of torture, all of which “had been administered so as to not bring quick death” (Taylor, Troy), including: their bones being broken and reset in crude and unnatural positions holes being drilled into their heads, the skin of their backs being peeled back so that the muscle and tissue were exposed to the air, being coated with honey and black ants, and their intestines being removed and subsequently wrapped around their waists. As determined through documents salvaged from the charred mansion, Madame Delphine LaLaurie consistently referred to these inhumane acts of cruelty as simply “experiments” rather than “torture.” Therefore, because Madame Delphine LaLaurie used this particular term instead of the alternative “torture,” a critical distinction remains in Delphine’s differentiation  between these two terms and that which they entail. Many speculate that because of this peculiarity in reference to the cruelties of Delphine, she had conducted these “experiments” so that she may discover a cure for her daughter’s spinal disfigurement herself, by means of experimentation, of course. Therefore, if this argument were true, regardless of Delphine’s distinction between “torture” and “experimentation”, because Delphine’s intentions were with reason and for the sake of improving her daughter’s health, her violent actions are not an indication of an inherent nature for evil. Thus, Delphine’s actions are consequential effects to her environment and specific circumstances rather than heritable vice.

Once it had been recognized that all of Delphine’s victims were black, she was henceforth accused of prejudice against blacks, acting upon this prejudice through the administration of torture. However, during this time period, especially in the southern states, prejudice was common practice. Thus, if Delphine were prejudiced against blacks, because such prejudice was a societal norm, the argument that Delphine’s violence stemmed from inherent evil entails that the majority of the southern population was also born with tendencies for evil, when such people, Delphine included, were simply practicing the societal norm of their environment - superiority over blacks. Conversely, Delphine was also accused of racially specific torture due to jealousy over the affairs of her male relatives, including her father, with black mistresses. Therefore, if Delphine were either accepting the prejudicial norm of her environment or torturing black slaves due to the affairs of her relatives with black slaves, her violent actions are still incapable of attribution to an inherent nature. Regarding both arguments, Delphine’s practice of torture was an effect of her upbringing, as in prejudice toward blacks, and her environment, as in the affairs of her male relatives.

      Throughout her life, Madame Delphine LaLaurie endured a torture of sorts herself in preceding years. She married three times, her first two husbands dying of undiagnosed causes, while her third abruptly deserting her and her children. Furthermore, LaLaurie’s daughter, for whom she had temporarily secured spinal treatment, was left uncured. As indicated, it therefore was not solely the inherent lack of morality that spurred Delphine LaLaurie to commit such brutal acts of torture, but the tribulations she experienced throughout her life. Although Madame Delphine LaLaurie’s torture of slaves was by no means morally justified, as indicated through analysis of her environment and upbringing, it is apparent that her violence should not be attributed to an innate affinity for evil, but instead regarded as an effect of her nurture.

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New Series: Things That Distract Me

Soon, I'll be starting a new series. As you can see, it'll be all about things that distract me. And as a high school student that has a knack for avoiding homework by any means possible, I'm sure you can guess that like many other high school students, there are a whole lot of things that I'm easily distracted by. Whenever I'm feeling particularly distracted, I'd argue that my go-to is either entertaining myself with YouTube videos or napping for an hour (or two).

I won't go into too much detail about how this new series of posts will be formatted, but if you can think of something that distracts you, chances are that it distracts me as well (perhaps to an even greater extent.)

However, these posts won't only cover what distracts me, but why it distracts me as well. And I'd argue that the list of reasons is longer than the list of distracting things. So this post isn't going to be some extravagant explanation or description, but it is important just to kind of set things up. So there you go. And I hope you're as excited for this new series as I am. (Although I admit, I'm not really all that excited.)

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Fined Out the Truth

Today I remembered something and I don't know why. It's quite common of me to forget why I've entered a room, only to remember upon exiting, and other things of that sort, but something important slipped my mind the past few weeks. I suppose I've been preoccupied with projects and whatnot, but as soon as I remembered, I knew exactly what would be awaiting me.

A fine. And a big one too.

A while back I went to the local library to stock up on reading material. And sure, I felt accomplished and motivated, thinking that I'd burn through my collection of books even with other things to do. So I did finish the books I had checked out. And I applaud myself on that. Now what I don't applaud myself on was neatly stacking these books in a corner of my room, at an angle they weren't really visible, and forgetting about them.

I had several opportunities to return these books, but since I couldn't see my neat stack save from a specific vantage point, I didn't bother. Unfortunately, my lack of remembrance caused an unpleasant surprise to build up, that is, a fine of over twenty dollars. And I know that doesn't seem like a lot of money (and it isn't), but that's what my lifetime supply of gathered pennies and loose change just about amounts to, and I'm not ready to throw my life savings away to an overdue library fine. Now the local library is quite clever with their fine policy, because if a library-goer has a fine of over ten dollars, (that's me), they are no longer able to check out books.

Which means I can't. (I'm assuming other libraries have a similar policy?)

Now what can I do to scrap together those twenty dollars? I have a few options:

And with that decision, I'll either be neglecting my brain by not reading, be on the run from the local police, or just loan books from one of my sibling's library accounts instead. I'm probably going to go with the latter, but if for whatever reason you ever catch me in the local prison, you'll know why.

What's the biggest library (or other) fine you've had? Let me in the comments below!

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