fourth post

Lately I've started reading "Schindler's List" in class, and I've got to say it's a lot more compelling than I thought it'd be. I've always found the WWII era really interesting and I love watching or reading thing about it (usually watching). I saw the 1993 film version of Schinder's List, with Liam Neeson, Ralph Fiennes and directed by Steven Spielberg. I saw it when I was in 6th grade and it struck me like very few other movies have. It was such a dramatic story that I was shocked that it was true- a true life story of a hero, a villain and a series of dark and inspirational events. I picked up the book in class when I realized I had nothing to read, and I found myself getting really into it by the end of the period. It was so compelling, and all I was reading was the prologue.

For those not familiar with it, Schindler's List tells the true story of Oskar Schindler, a successful entrepreneur who does business with the Nazi Party during the start of the Holocaust. As he becomes more and more disturbed by the mass misery the genocide is causing, he begins saving Jews through business deals and having them work for him in order to save them from the death camps. He mainly saves them from one specific camp run by Commandant Amon Goeth, a sadistic sociopath Nazi officer.

Just from the prologue, I was getting into it. It is just a long scene setting up our opinions of some major characters. Schindler goes to a dinner party at Goeth's to discuss business with him and several high ranking Nazi officials. From this we learn how clever Schindler is- he is a great manipulator, and is able to work almost everything in his favor. We see that he is well liked and well respected, but also that he is a good man beneath it all, like how he converses with an abused Jewish maid (basically a sex slave) and agrees to help rescue her sister from a death camp. On the contrary, we see Goeth's vicious nature, raping his maids, abusing them, shooting random Jews for sport when he wakes up in the morning.
I'm getting really pulled in so far and I intend to get as far through it as time allows me.

third post

This one's gonna be a bit shorter since I finished the book and I was pretty close to the end last time. I finished "Scary Stories Treasury" and I have to say I was right about the third book being the best one. It was just so creepy, especially in comparison to the first two. Like I said in the last blog, the third book has the most realistic and darkest stories of the three. Reading all three of them compiled into one is like reading a scale of scary stories from child-level campfire stories to adult-level horror. The illustrations, however, are a different story. They are consistently terrifying throughout all the books. What's interesting to me is how the compliment each level of story in a different. When the stories are just simple, one page tales of the supernatural, the illustrations suggest a darker sort of edge to them. Like "Yeah it's a kind of rushed and straightforward story, but now read it with this image in your head." They gave the stories the atmosphere they otherwise lacked. By the third book, the illustrations didn't compliment the stories as much as they did add to them. Instead of compensating for a lack of a certain element, they added to it. I really enjoyed reading this book (or these books?) and I'm hoping to move on to something different now (genre wise).

second post

So I'm basically almost done with this scary stories book. The book is compiled from three different books, and I'm on the final one now. This was always my favorite one as a kid, because it has the best stories and the best pictures. I guess by this point, the author had finally figured out how to actually make the stories a little more dragged out and suspenseful, and the drawings are great as always. What makes this one especially different from the first two is that it seems to take a much more serious turn about just how real and violent the subject material is. Before, the stories were mostly folklore from around the world, but in this third book, there are a lot more stories based on actual events, some of which aren't even exaggerated. The first two books had a lot more stories that were just goofy and obvious, but in this one there's actually some really vicious stuff that goes down. For example, one of the stories from the first one just had a man find out his girlfriend had died in a car accident long before they started dating. In the third one, a story features a scarecrow coming to life and skinning a farmer alive, and then hanging out his skin like laundry. There's also this story that recounts exactly what happened in an actual series of paranormal events in a NYC home in the 50's. But to me, the freakiest one is a story about a girl who is on vacation with her mother in Paris. Her mother gets sick in their hotel and the doctor sends the girl to get medicine from his house, but the cab takes her in circles and takes forever for her to get it. She eventually ditches the cab because it keeps taking her off into the country, and she finally makes it back to the hotel, but the staff doesn't recognize her and they have no record of her or her mother ever checking in. The doctor doesn't even know who she is, and when she enters her hotel room, the place is totally different- different color walls, different floor, different furniture, and her mother is gone, along with their belongings. The story really confused me when I discovered that this actually happened in the early 1900's (1913 I think?). In the back of the book, the author explains what really happened. Her mother had a form of the bubonic plague, and the doctor rushed her out and bribed a cab to take her far away to burn time. The mother was quarantined and died within minutes, and the hotel replaced all of the furniture and repainted the room entirely. The hotel staff were forced to act as if they'd never seen her before, and would be fired and jailed otherwise. The city's leaders and hospital agreed never to speak of the incident, or else tourism would plummet, and mass hysteria would break out if word of the plague's revival ever broke out. To me, this is just as scary as a lot of the ghost stories in here (although I'd rather be in the girl's situation than in most of these other ones). I'll be done with this book soon

first post

I've been reading Scary Stories Treasury by Alvin Schwartz. It's a combination of 3 books in the series he wrote. It's just a bunch of short scary stories. Many of them are well-known, but most of them I've never seen anywhere else. I picked this book because I remember back in first grade this book was in the school library and we all wanted to take it because it has the creepiest pictures I've ever seen. Still to this day, they are really disturbing, and it's surprising that it was in an elementary school library. I actually heard that there was some sort of lawsuit and they re-released the books with different pictures.

 For example:                                                                          

But anyway, the stories themselves are written in a very childish way. It's really easy to read. In fact, the main reason I chose it was just for sort of a nostalgic thing. Most of the stories aren't even that creepy, with the exception of some of the ones with really creepy endings. The book makes ghosts just walk into a room like it's nothing in some stories, while in others it won't explain a thing. In one story, a girl hears her roommate singing but then finds her decapitated body. That's it. But for some reason, this is one of the most unnerving stories there is.

Now the period's about to end so I'm ending this post. Sorry it's late yall