Week 13 reading journal
11.4
As Catton’s structural sphere wanes, the growing darkness reveals a starscape that grows and turns and folds in on itself, mystery upon enigma, lie upon misunderstanding, coincidence upon conspiracy, all of it complete with astrological charts I was unable to understand but still loved to study.
11.5
Hilton Als, in the fierce style of street reading and the formal tradition of critical inquiry, reads culture, race and gender in his new essay collection, “White Girls.” Here, reading becomes psychoanalytic self-exhibition, complete with insights on identity, sexuality, voice and the attainment of knowledge.
11.6
The author’s most confounding plot device, however, is keeping the reader in the dark about the fate of his hero, Harry Hole, the maverick Oslo detective who took a bullet in “Phantom” and may be dead . . . or in a coma . . . or recovering in the arms of his beloved . . . or hovering in spirit above the heads of the select group of police officers who are conducting their own clandestine investigation into the cop killings.
11.7
The Outsiders is about two weeks in the life of a 14-year-old boy. The novel tells the story of Ponyboy Curtis and his struggles with right and wrong in a society in which he believes that he is an outsider.
11.8
The Catcher in the Rye tells the story of Holden Caulfield, a teenage slacker who has perfected the art of underachievement. The novel begins with Holden flunking out of school for the fourth time. During the last days before his expulsion, he searches for an appropriate way to conclude his school experience, but he ends up getting so annoyed with his school and schoolmates that he leaves in the middle of the night on the next train home to New York City.