My ISU book choice process

White Oleander (Janet Fitch) - My first choice as a book to use for my ISU project.

The Color Purple (Alice Walker) - My second choice as a book to use for my ISU project.

Les Miserables (Victor Hugo)- My third choice as a book to use for my ISU project.

To begin my choice of book, I chose 3 from the list given by (Mrs. Chaussé) and I further researched the major themes involved in the books and I looked up a summary of each story. For each story, I looked to see if there was an existing movie on that book and I watched its trailer to see how much it interested me or if I could see any relevance to the Book of NEGROES.

Right off the bat, I wanted to analyze and compare White Oleander to the Book of NEGROES. The story is about a girl who is tossed from foster home to foster home and her parents are absent in her life for one reason or the other. The main character, Astrid, struggles to find and discover herself. I immediately thought about Aminata's character, who is also put into the hands of a few different people and is put into different environments, has to adjust on her own, which allows her to grow as a person and get in touch with herself. My ISU would focus on this theme of self-actualization.

The Color Purple is about a poor, black girl named Celie, who writes letters to God because she is being sexually and physically assaulted by her father. Prominent themes in this story are racism and gender inequality. The Color Purple also addresses issues such as women of color's exceedingly low position in culture. The Book of NEGROES displays these themes also throughout the entire novel so I thought that this would be a good aspect to compare between the two books. Also, something I found interesting was that the children that Celie gave birth to in the story were taken away from her, by her father, and Aminata's children were also taken from her. Even if the situations were completely different, I thought I could maybe write about the effect that had on the two man characters.

Les Misérables is about a slave, Jean Valjean, escaping slavery and giving his life to God whilst becoming a good man. He must hide from the man who enslaved him, Javert, who still searches for him after many years. I can completely relate this man's story to Aminata's. She, too, escapes her owner and earns a living for herself, whilst having to be careful not to be caught and enslaved again. A major theme, then, would be fear. This fear is by the main characters, who have to be cautious everyday of not being caught. Another common theme between the 2 novels is social injustice and hierarchy. However, the novel Les Misérables, also focuses on many different aspects, including the French revolution, which might have made it difficult for me to analyze and relate it to the Book of NEGROES.

Technology makes us LAZY

After discussing the article by Jarrid Wilson, "Why I'm Getting a Divorce in 2014," a situation that I endured this summer came across my mind. I spent a lot of time with a friend of mine who just recently received an iphone as a gift. This article talks about learning to balance the amount of time you spend on your phone and giving yourself limitations with the usage of your phone. Wilson says that you should not let your phone control you and I think this is excellent advice. The friend of mine who I spent a lot of time with over the past 3 weeks became a victim of the power her iphone had over her. At any given time, she was glued to her phone; she was always scrolling and refreshing her social media and looking at photos on the Instagram app. Need I say, she was taking endless photos of everything that we would do, editing the photos and posting them online and waiting for people to "like" these photos. Her phone consumed her and she did not even realize. I think that nowadays, we are too often on our technology devices and it makes us antisocial and quite frankly, dumb. We are dependent on calculators for simple math and dependent on our phones to tell the time. Though I was in this girl's presence, she would find it appropriate to stare at her phone's screen and completely ignore my existence. That is, until I would make a comment about how boring she was acting. Then, she would become offended and claim that she was not obsessed with her phone and that she was "just checking it." I think it would be a great decision for someone to make their phone an accessory rather than a priority, which is what Wilson says in his article. We need to stop relying on our phones, get up off of our lazy backsides and divorce our phones. It's time that we start becoming more active again and have face-to-face conversations, if we even remember what those are.