Jodi Picoult did not start out as the amazing writer she is. How do I know this? Her first books. Somebody hand me a literary barf bag. She writes an unoriginal tale about an anthropologist married to hot movie star in Picture Perfect, where everything appears to be perfect. Surprise! It’s not. As it turns out “hot movie star” physically abuses this poor anthropologist who is only trying to help her husband. Although it has Picoult’s accuracy of Native American life and abusive relationships Picture Perfect lacks her skill at incorporating exciting plot twists. Naturally this causes the book to become bland and extremely predictable. Daisy Goodwin deals with the same topic of perfect on the outside, broken on the inside in her book The American Heiress. Goodwin writes a tale of the rich, spoiled American who is pushed into marrying a Duke in England and landing her straight in the midst of English aristocracy. This is during the Golden Age, where the more extravagant the better, and secret ambitions are as plentiful as their riches.

Picture Perfect has everything going for it, amazing author, serious issue, and that fairy book element we’re all drawn to: perfection.  However Picoult fails entirely on the delivery. The whole book is monotone, the protagonist’s love story is written in the same tone as the abuse is. The only time you feel the character’s pain is in the beginning of an insufferably long flashback when we learn about Cassie’s past. The structure of the book is also unusual. We start off with a girl wandering about town and a part-native who just moved to LA and got a job as a police officer. The not-yet officer finds said girl and takes her to work the next day. There the girl is claimed by the hottest movie star in town and taken home. Sounds fantastical? It did while reading too. Picoult doesn’t really sell this point until much further on in the book, when it’s too late. We spend a day or two in this state, the girl with amnesia, and the actor trying to help her regain her memory. When Cassie comes across a positive pregnancy test and suddenly all of her memory comes back and the book is put on hold as we get a full depth look into how Cassie got to being the wife of the hottest actor in Hollywood.  When we finally get back on track with the story we follow with more self-discovery as Cassie spends her pregnancy in the Indian Reserve the police officer who found her came from. By the time we get to the end with Alex Rivers, her husband, coming to get her the reader is thoroughly bored and waiting for something to sink their teeth into.  However not only is the climax belated, it’s also anticlimactic and is the final nail in this book’s coffin. Picture Perfect is a predictable book that serves as a good example of what not to do while writing fiction.

Although this book was something of a bore, there is much to be taken away from it. Cassie takes you on a journey that lacks excitement but is rich in lessons. You get an accurate portrayal of life on a reservation and the relationship of the abuser and abused. When Cassie reaches the end of the novel she is a much more mature person, capable of doing what’s best for her and not necessarily what is someone else’s best interests.

The idea of trouble behind glitz is not uncommon and the road has already been paved and well ridden as Picture Perfect found out. Whereas Picoult rides the road without appearing to, Goodwin does the opposite in An American Heiress. Daisy starts out the opposite of Picoult with something that seems overdone instead of new. You are introduced to Cora Cash the beautiful, young, rich heiress who is the opposite of Cassie. Instead of being pulled over the “police” (aka her husband) like Cassie, Cora plots against her own officer, her mother, and is constantly acting like spoiled teenager of today’s time. Cora is the perfect relatable feminist character; who you see grow throughout the novel. When Cora marries a Duke you know there’s going to be plots against her and you know it’s going to deal with an old affair of the Duke’s. However the details of this plot show Goodwin making new roads that lead the reader off the trodden path and down into the book. All in all, An American Heiress is a book that contains many secrets under a clichéd yet ornate packaging.

Although neither book was perfect, they both were worth the read. Picture Perfect dealt with topics that are important and relevant, while An American Heiress took me on a tour I would have hated to miss.  I would rate Picoult’s a three out of five stars for lack of originality and intrigue, and Goodwin’s a four out of five for lack of sophistication in style. These two books, if they were combined, would create the perfection combination of talent and twists.

My Top 5 Presentation

Truth in Memoirs

I'm 15 live under the sea, love pizza, have two brothers, and take Best Sellers.
The majority of that sentence is true, except as you probably know, I do not live under the sea. Just because most of that information is correct that does not make the sentence nonfiction. Readers deserve to know if what we are reading is the truth. Shields says this does not matter; you can even plagiarize as long as the end result looks different. But that argument only works if you're reading to be entertained. For example, some people may have read A Million Little Pieces to get inspiration to overcome their own addictions. In this case they deserve the truth, because this book if affecting their lives in a tangible way. To come out and say you didn't do as you told them you did is like telling a little girl you can fly so she can too. You may make her happy momentarily but later she'll feel cheated. And I for one wouldn't want to write a biography on Abraham Lincoln and call him a vampire hunter because fiction and nonfiction are no longer there to tell me what is true and what isn't.
If you want to bend the truth in a memoir like other authors we looked at today did, then you either need to tell us that in an author’s note or make the novel fiction. Like I said before the readers deserve to know if what they are reading is the truth so that they don't recite false information to others. By not telling someone what is false you are spreading ignorance and letting people become blind to the truth.
If you want to obliterate the differences between romance and love stories, magic realism and fantasy, that's one thing, it's something totally different to blur fiction and nonfiction. When I pick up a nonfiction book I know that I am getting the truth and I can use the information on assignments and won't get called out for telling lies. If I no longer know what is nonfiction than I could pick out Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter and write my essay on information gained through that source not realizing that I was going to get a F for falsified information. Although Shields says it doesn't matter the truth is a powerful thing with the ability to change life for the worse or better, spread awareness, and bring more meaning into the world. When you can no longer distinguish truth from lies it either all becomes the truth or its all lies. Is that how you want the book world to look like? A bunch of half-made truths with only the purpose to entertain? That may be okay for some people in this class who love to read for entertainment (including me) but that's not okay for this world. Not everyone reads for the same purpose and genre lines help guide us in the right way. Especially the genre lines of fiction and nonfiction.

Readicide

I do not believe that genre fiction should be taught in the same fashion that literary fiction is taught. Imagine reading the Hunger Games in class. Instead of rushing through it in a sitting you're forced to drag it out, making it last a month instead of a day. And rather than getting lost in the beauty of star-crossed lovers from district 12 you're forced to analyze it, look for metaphors, take notes, and pass quizes on it. The millions of readers that loved it and we're obsessed about it would be greatly diminished. Some kids hate books just because they were taught school, others may have failed the test and hold a grudge, some kids maybe just couldn't get over the fact that, like the example of the movie projector, their reading experience got disrupted every four minutes. This doesn't mean that some people would not enjoy reading the Hunger Games in school, just that the number of people it touched would not be quite the same. People would tell you the message behind the Hunger Games, not the way it blew their mind and kept them up all night.
Believe it or not literary fiction does have a purpose and will actually be more helpful in more jobs. References to classics are made everywhere, including the workplace, and if you didn't study it in school it is unlikely that you will understand these references. However even if you did not read Twilight, Harry Potter, or the Hunger Games you probably know enough about them to understand most comments made about the book. It is also said that literary fiction is not as relatable as genre fiction. But if you ask me it's just as hard to relate to a futuristic fireman burning books as it is to a girl  desperately fighting for her life while trying figure out if she loves the baker or the hunter in a poverty stricken future society.
I do believe that genre fiction needs to be used to get kids to start reading. I just believe we can find better ways to do it than making kids take tests over Harry Potter, Twilight, and the Hunger Games.

The Da Vinci Code Trailer

Adapting My Book

My book two is The DaVinci Code by Dan Brown. For those of you who haven't read it this is an amazing book about a symbologist named Robert Langdon. He is mysteriously awakened in the middle of the night by the French police.They demand that he come to help them analyze the death of the curator of the Louvre who has painted puzzling symbols and arranged himself in painful positions in order to send a message to his granddaughter, Sophie Neveu, a decoder for the French Police. However the police misinterpret "P.S. Find Robert Langdon" and Langdon is accused of the murder. Sophie and he must now run from the law while trying to solve the murder and decode Sophie's grandfather's final message.
Difficulties of adapting this to screen would be the fact that the curator is naked, Sophie and Langdon go through a stripper street and the length of the book. The first two obviously either need to be taken out or somehow "fixed" so that a pg13 audience is able to see it or the filmmakers risk losing money. As for the last one, it again makes them take scenes out of the book that readers may have liked but since it didn't drive the plot it was found useless by the directors. This brings down ratings and causes the story to lose a little which is often felt by the audience.
The three scenes that have to be kept are when Langdon sees the body, the discovery of a betrayal, and the final resolution. In case you wish to read this book I won't go into too much detail for the last two scenes. The first one is where Langdon meets Sophie and the plot is started by giving them a mission and an extra little challenge, solve the murder, decode the curator's clues, and evade the police while you're at it. This begins the book and sets the action filled pace of this book. The second scene, the betrayal, is equally important because it gives Langdon a huge choice to be able to reveal the Holy Grail or keep it hidden as the Priory of Sion seems to want. This scene allows for us to finally get a good idea of where Langdon stands and who he feels loyal to at the moment. The resolution is important for obvious reasons, it ties the plot together and was actually satisfying. It was a good ending and deserves to be kept. I would say more but I don't want to spoil anything.
Two scenes that would have to be cut from the book in order to fit time for the main plot would be Langdon's flashbacks of his lesson's at Harvard would have to go and so would Aringarosa's, a bishop, little scene where he is debating the morals of what he has been forced to do to hopefully keep his denomination as part of the Catholic Church. The first was added into the book to help us to understand Langdon better and gain more background knowledge behnind the symbols. While this is valuable they take up a lot of time and don't drive the plot making them incompatible with the screen. Aringarosa's dilemma on the plane is explained elsewhere in other, more exciting, scenes rendering this one unnecessary and time consuming. Because of this, and the fact that the audience cannot of course read his mind, makes this one of the more ideal cuts.

Book 1 Project

Nineteen Minutes Choose Your Own Adventure

            Have you ever read a book and wished desperately that the author had chosen to make the characters choose a different path? Well now you can try for yourself to determine the course of a real book and see if you’re a better author than Jodi Picoult. For the first time there’s a choose your own adventure book that’s based off of a published book. Montgomery and Picoult will be coming together to write out this amazing book, allowing readers to interact with Nineteen Minutes. Nineteen Minutes Choose Your Own Adventure will enable readers to choose each character’s actions despite the authors wish. This will be the first ever opportunity to do so, and will allow you to answer crucial question such as: what would’ve happened if Peter had committed suicide instead of mass murder? Everyone has had those “Why did they character do that? They’re so stupid!” moments and this is the first chance to rectify that. If you love Picoult, realistic fiction, and/or Choose Your Own Adventure this is a must read for you!

            Jodi Picoult asks tough questions in her book and with tough questions come tough decisions. Each of her characters in any given book either take the next step in their life or are forced to take a new look at the world and base their decisions off of their new and often terrible experiences. For example Lacy Houghton, the mother of the shooter, faces difficult problems such as, “Could you hate your son for what he had done, and still love him for who he had been?” (Picoult 248). It becomes apparent later on in the book that she chose to answer that question with a yes. But what if she had decided you couldn’t? Or back in middle school when Josie picked had to pick between the “cool” kids and Peter, her lifelong friend- “’So,’ Matt said, ‘are you coming with me?’… ‘Yes,’ Josie said, and she followed Matt without looking back.” If Josie had chosen Peter though would the shooting still have happened? And perhaps the biggest decision in that whole book is which boy Josie shoots in the locker room. Peter, who had been her best friend until seventh grade, was holding her boyfriend at gunpoint while she pointed the extra gun at Peter. Matt, her boyfriend, tells her: “’What are you waiting for? Shoot.’” However she does what neither boy expected and she shoots Matt. But if she had shot Peter what would’ve happened? It’s those questions that inspire Nineteen Minutes Choose Your Own Adventure.

Publicity

In Nineteen Minutes many big decisions were made, and most of them were far from easy. For readers this is a once in a lifetime chance to interact with a book in a way that puts the reader and not the characters in charge of what happens. The difference between this one and any other choose your own adventure books is that you know, love, or hate the other characters already. It’s not a matter of will I survive? But what you felt was right for these characters. And, as this is the first choose your own adventure book to come out that was based off of another book it will gain a lot of publicity. With this publicity the book’s title will get out and intrigue Picoult fans, teens dealing with bullies, and any avid realistic fiction reader. Many people read Picoult’s My Sister’s Keeper after news of the movie got out; this book will act like the movie drawing those same people who read My Sister’s Keeper to read Nineteen Minutes.

What is a Book?

A book is an alternate world. One where you get to discover new things, open your eyes, and change your views. It offers entertainment, enlightenment, and consolence. In a book anything can happen and  that's the draw. A book can answer those what ifs that all of us have. What if I could fly? What if I got hired to solve a murder case when I'm only a journalist? The answers intrigue us and carry us away while engaging our mind and making us feel whole. Books are like an encyclopedia, full of answers without the boredom.
Does it matter if you use a Kindle or a hardback?
No. If it's a good book you'll get lost in the words and the image in your head. If the book is good you won't be focusing on what is in your hand, but what that author wrote. A hardback only helps as a keepsake something to look at and value. Maybe its a gift from a loved one, maybe its the best book you've ever read. But the Kindle offers you that information immediately. But the truth is is that the your experience with the book is all your own and you should pick the form that maximizes your experience. If you prefer hardback that's what you should read, and vice versa.

Why i Read

   thrill of entering another world where anything is possible. Reading is my favorite hobby and will most definitely be my favorite hobby forever. It involves no exercise whatsoever, and yet its as exciting as any race, game, or any other form of entertainment. I'll be reading and find myself racing through a book, not even realizing that to a non-reader that the beginning is slow because to me the characters are as interesting as any plot.
      I can literally read at any time and find my biggest problem to be that I ran out of books again rather than the fact that I haven't yet finished an important project for school. At home my books overflow my room, and take me hours to organize whenever I get a new book and am trying desperately to find room for it. If I won the lottery I would most likely expand my room and fill it with comfy chairs and books. :)  I can't imagine not reading, it takes up so much of my time that it definitely could be called an obsession.
    Reading allows me to take my mind off things for awhile and just live in the world the book takes me. Nothing works as well as reading a book. After all if you're reading nothing matters but the characters and the plot and that world, so how can you think of your lost ring or huge project? Not to mention that when the character is in a life or death situation an A or A+ no longer seems so big impossible or important.
    Although I write my reading isn't for that, in fact its the other way around. Reading to me is my time, not my english teacher's or vocabularys or anything else's. Most books (unless the kill of the really great killers (JK Rowling) or got off on rants (memoirs)) deserve to be read and nothing depresses me more than a huge list of books and thinking that I may never read all of them.