Feliz

I am currently at the point in Go Ask Alice where she has just returned from San Fransisco. Her parents just picked her up from the airport, and she is going to return home. I feel let down because every time she has written that she was giving up all the drugs, she turns around and starts up again. There is a funny pattern that she follows over and over again. In one entry, she talks about her drug trip very fondly, then she describes how she feels after she comes down. Following those entries is always one about how she is never going to touch any of the drugs again. For the next couple journal entries, she thinks everything in the world is lovely, and everyone in her family is just the greatest. The let down is that immediately following the happy feelings is another diary entry that describes in detail how she got sucked back down again. Point being, I predict that the experience in San Fransisco will be her last downfall. I am predicting this based more on what I would like to see happen than what I actually can picture happening. There may be too many pages left in the book for San Fransisco to be her last adventure. She has goals to become a therapist to help kids like her turn their lives around. This proves that she does know what she is doing is wrong, but the underlying craving for her high keeps coming back. I hope that she turns out alright and sane by the end of the book!

Literary reading should be able to be explained simply... shouldn't it? It is not simply reading literature! There is so much that a person puts into reading that it doesn't seem fair to narrow it down to "reading". Every person brings their own past experiences to a book. I have found that I tend to like books that have at least one character that I can relate to. Many people like to lose themselves in the literature, and make an hour feel like a minute. Do you know that feeling where you just can't bear to put the book down for even a minute because you feel like something might happen without you? It is almost as if you become the character in the book, and when they're feeling down, or excited, you feel almost the same way? I remember I read one of the "Boxcar Children" books when I was younger, and the little brother Benny got lost in the museum.... the characters in the book were soo worked up about it that I felt my whole body getting tense, and tears were streaming down my cheeks. I remember thinking... What if that was my brother? or What if they don't find him? It is just amazing that stories from literature can impact us so much. Some of my more "interesting" porfessors really get excited about a new psychology book, or some new science discovery, where as I frankly sometimes don't really care. I think that you must be passionate about what you are reading, or at the very least interested to actually get anything out of the book. There is usually a connection between the reader and the characters, or some background knowledge or experience that intrigues the reader that makes us as the reader want to press on in our reading.