First Post of Tri 2!

My favorite book that I read last trimester was The Vanishing Game.I made a previous post on this book, you can click here to get more information and a summary of the book. I liked this book a lot because of the genre and the writing style. The book was a thriller, mystery and romance novel. I really like it when books have a mysterious storyline, but I also like mystery. Sometimes it's hard to find a book with both. But I found this one! The book haunts you while you're reading it; sometimes I had to sit back and ask myself, "What the heck just happened..?" I also enjoyed the writing style.

The writing was very casual. As i posted previously, reading these books made me realize that I really like reading books that have a writing style where you feel like you're having a conversation with the author. For example James Patterson often has his writing in that style. I also liked the fact that the writing was still really good quality, even though it was casual. It still sounded "professional" but not too professional. Hard to explain. I really enjoyed the book, and I would reccommend it to any teen.

Blog Reflection

Over the course of the trimester, my writing has changed. I notice this because in the older blog post, I constructed one paragraph of writing that really could have been broken up into different paragraphs. In the more recent post, I separated the writing into different paragraphs, which made it look less crammed and sloppy. Another way I have improved is that in my writing, I gradually started to sound more casual, as if I were just talking to reader. I realized over the first trimester that I really like books that you feel like you are having a normal conversation with the characters. I also feel that I have begun to blog about more things than the topic on the rubric, as I did in the first few weeks. I started blogging about more than just the books I was reading. For example, my older post was all about the book I was reading, nothing else. Whereas my newer post was about something that I felt a lot of different people could have varying opinions. I also feel like in the older post, I didn’t sound the way I would have wanted to when I look back on it. I feel like in the newer post, I sound like myself, but at the same time I stay on topic and provide the right information about the subject. This brings me to my next points.

Something I struggled with through this experience was not making my posts long enough. I would run out of ideas, and end up writing pointless information about my book to fill the two paragraphs minimum. But I realized that there was a lot more to write about in a post than just the book. I realized that you could relate it to real world things today, or throw in some of my own opinions. Having these ideas, I would go beyond the minimum of two paragraphs. I think a strength I had with blogging was that I could keep the reader engaged. I would often get comments on my blog posts from people telling me that they felt like they were talking to me, or that they were really interested in the book or subject I was writing about. I never met my reading goal unfortunately. My goal was to read six books during the first trimester, but I came really close and read four. Goodreads was actually helpful to me, because I would visit it to see what book recommendations it would give me. I started reading my most recent book, The Postcard Killers by James Patterson; because I saw the Goodreads had recommended it to me from the books I had already read. I think that I have improved as a reader because as I mentioned before, from reading different articles and book samples, I realized I liked writing where you felt engaged with the characters. This made me discover my love for James Patterson’s writing. All of the books he has written have had really casual writing in them. I had already read the book Maximum Ride and really enjoyed it. I looked into more of his books later on. Overall, I really enjoyed having a blog where I could freely write about reading.