Assignment 2 - Eli Flomenhoft

     When I was younger I was a voracious reader. I read all the time. I read during school, I read when I got home, I read in my bed at night. My father used to take me to the library and I would lose myself in the myriad of choices each book held. I knew I couldn't read every book, but each of those books had the potential to take me to a whole different world. And there were thousands of them. I was left with a dilemma. Eventually I would check out a few books and return home. Despite this fascination with reading, I checked out books less and less. As I grew older I grew out of going to the library as often, and currently I visit the library rarely. I attribute atrophy of this tradition to the rigor of school and extracurriculars, but despite not reading as much as I would like to, I enjoy every minute of reading and being in my own headspace.
   
      A few of the books I have read and either finished, not finished, or am currently reading is Goodbye to All That, Iron Gold, and Look Homeward Angel.

     Goodbye to All That is an auto-biography by Robert Graves about his experiences in World War I. I read this book for AP World History, and it resonated with me. Despite never enjoying history books, I thoroughly enjoyed Robert Graves depiction of his experiences in the trenches. I felt that it conveyed how the soldiers, and Graves himself, in a way that history text books just can't seem to. Reading Robert Graves auto-biography made me enjoy reading history. Because now when I read history I imagine what it was like for someone to be living in that time period.

     Iron Gold is the sequel to the Red Rising trilogy by Pierce Brown. This novel, and the preceding trilogy, is about a dystopian society that has colonized our solar system. In the course of that colonization a class system was born. The classifications were based of how people looked, their colors. There are reds, blues, pinks, yellows, browns, silvers, golds and more. People were genetically engineered to be born with a certain color of hair, and that color denotes their job, there is no upward mobility in this dystopian society. And since its  a dystopian novel, it should be no surprise that there is prolific racism and classism. This lack of upward mobility and classism is the basis for the novel. I read this novel this summer and I quite enjoyed it. The novel itself was more of a guilty read than for actual thought. This is the type of novel I would read for pleasure rather than to challenge myself.

     Look Homeward Angel is a a semi auto-biographical novel by Thomas Wolfe. This is a novel that was suggested to me by my mother and I never finished. I plan to finish the novel in the future. The book itself is a coming of age story about a boy from rural North Carolina. The quality of the book is not just in its plot, but also in its language. The description the author puts into every detail is astonishing. He uses such descriptive language, that its almost poetic. Yet, I put down the book because it was difficult and took time to really understand, and I just didn't have the time for it. Sometime in the future I plan to pick it back up.