Smith AP Lit

     The writing style of Thomas C. Foster in his How to Read Literature Like a Professor differed from other books I have read in that he used light humor and tended to ask questions followed by answers to move topics forward.   I found he incorporated many humorous lines throughout the book, but I especially found the titles of each chapter to be fun and lighthearted.   For example, Foster used ellipses for some consecutive chapters to show that he was continuing the same general thought, but changing the specific topic.   The titles were also funny and did not just state what the chapter was about.   One of my favorite titles was “When in Doubt, It’s from Shakespeare…” and the chapter following it, “…Or the Bible.”   As I said before, Foster asked a lot of questions in the book and answered them, which I found very helpful.   It made the book understandable and easy to read.   I never found myself getting lost in what Foster was try...

     A majority of the stories in The Thing Around Your Neck have to do with gender, race, and religion.   Specifically, I homed in on how Adiche depicts women in her stories and their status in relationships, especially between brothers and sisters.   I noticed that in almost every story, the main female character is depicted as the inferior person in the relationship, and overall, the relationship is not a strong one.   In the first story “Cell One”, the sister of Nnamabia is the narrator of the story who gives her opinions throughout.   What I got from her opinion is that she thought her brother does more negative things than her parents know or want to believe.   Their relationship as brother and sister is not strong, and Nnamabia definitely looks down upon his sister as if she is inferior to him.   For example, she wants to know for sure if he is in one of the cults at school, and when she asks him, his physical and verbal responses are...

     While I was reading Heart of Darkness, I realized there was a recurring word that seemed to have a lot of meaning associated with it.   That word and a variation of it were “darkness” and “dark”.   First of all, I knew it must have importance in the book because it appears in the title itself.   Before I started reading the book, I looked at the title and wondered how Conrad would intertwine it into the story and what it really meant.   After finishing, I believe he meant for it to be symbolic and more than just representative of the deepest parts of Africa.   I think that Conrad was actually alluding to the heart of Kurtz.   More specifically, how Africa changed his heart to one of greed and disrespect for the native people.   As I started to read though, darkness was brought up in a different manner by Marlow.   He and his fellow crew members were on the Thames river, and he stated that it too was once one of th...