Connecting to Romeo and Juliet

     While reading scene 1.4, when Romeo is walking to the party with his friends, I thought of me and my friends. We always seem to be mocking each other and giving each other smart aleck remarks. We just banter back and forth like Romeo and his friends (we’re probably just as over-dramatic, to). So much for the statement that friendships are built on mutual respect. All seriousness aside, though, is mostly how we behave. We can be serious if necessary but how can you have fun without fun? If I, like Romeo, am ever in a bad mood, I can always depend on my friends to cheer me up.

      I believe that I am doing very well reading at home. It’s easy to at least get a general idea of what’s going on. I find the section summaries and definitions are very helpful. However, I still would only understand about half of what is going on and being said if we didn’t read in class. I see many little details that I missed when re-reading the section in class and you explain all of the details I didn’t get when reading. It is very helpful to read in class.

Analyzing Great Expectations

Charles Dickens tells a variety of themes throughout the novel Great Expectations. However, they all can be tied to one general theme throughout. Wealth and social status are nothing important, what really matters are who your friends are and that you and your friends share a mutual respect. If you have friends who will be there for you through the best and worst of times, you can make it through anything. Humans are fragile, we need support, something (or someone) to rely on; we need friendship. We can achieve anything, reach any goal, walk any distance, if we have somebody there to walk with us. If you give up your friends, you might as well give up on yourself, we can't live life alone.

Great Expectations reading reflection

Overall, I enjoyed the novel Great Expectations. The overall plotline of the novel was interesting, even if it was somewhat predictable. I really enjoyed all of the little mysteries that were thrown into the plot, they made the novel much more interesting. Most of the mysteries came with no surprises in the solutions, probably because Dickens puts a lot of foreshadowing into his writing. In the beginning of the novel I definitely sympathized Pip, who wouldn’t? However, by stage 2, Pip was getting what was coming to him. I started to like Pip a little more by the time the novel ended and Pip turned his life around. 

I had a routine for reading pretty well down, which helped me read the entire book without ever skipping chapters. If ever skipped a day, I would just catch up the next day, or on the weekend. I would be already in my room doing homework from other classes so that’s where I ended up reading every day. I’d start at about 4:30 or 5:00 and read until I finished the assignment for the night. It helped to read in my room because it was generally quiet, so I could focus. I would have to re-read many paragraphs and pages from the novel if I had been reading in a noisy atmosphere. I had a much better understanding of the novel Great Expectations because of my reading setting.