Jane Austen's 'Pride and Prejudice'

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen 

This book is hard to get into.  Having to really need to concentrate on the words makes it a difficult read.


Jane Austen uses inversion - which would have been normal speech for the time - so the reader is left unable to skim over the sentences.  This becomes quite tedious and makes the reading process long.  Some parts are extra hard to understand, this is where reading aloud can help the reader make sense of the speech.


Being up to only Chapter 14 feels like being a lifetime away from the final chapter, 61!  The book seems to be moving slowly, but this is probably because Austen has to introduce the characters first.  Around the middle of the book - chapter 31 or there about - the story should begin to progress much quicker.  By this stage the book will most likely be able to hold the readers attention for longer, allowing for it to be read more than one or two chapters at a time.

The slow progression at the start of the book lets the reader's mind wander as they read.  Meaning that by the time they get back on track they have become lost in the words; thus not understanding what the last page and a half meant.

Mr. Darcy is an unusual character as he does not like to give much away.  Although it is evident that he is attracted to Lizzy he is too proud to admit that he has a keen eye for her and secretly is falling for her more and more.  He is also prejudiced towards the 'country folk' such as the Bennet's, Lucas's and all those who attended the ball.

Elizabeth Bennet - also known as Lizzy - is portrayed as a strong willed character not afraid of what other people think.  She understands that Mrs. Louisa Hurst and Miss Caroline Bingley do not particularly like but neither detest her either.  They make it clear that they do not accept Lizzy for who she is.  Lizzy is prejudiced towards Mr. Darcy due to how he acts.

While it is very evident that Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet portrays the characteristics; pride and prejudice; there will almost definitely be other characters that will end up portraying those characteristics.

Picture:
Pride and Prejudice (Longman Literature) n.d., photograph, Amazon, accessed 13 April 2012, <http://www.amazon.com/Pride-Prejudice-Longman-Literature-Austen/dp/0582077206>.

'The Voice Australia'.

So basically I really like the concept of this show!

I think it is fantastic that the contestants perform a blind audition.  Blind auditions allow for the most glammed up and the scruffiest looking people to be treated the same.  It gets rid of all prejudices and it becomes about what it should truly be about... 'the voice'.

This show is allowing anyone from all walks of life, any race, religion or gender to be treated equally and gives them the chance to show off nothing but their voice.

Secretly I am looking forward to 'The Voice Australia' just to see how it goes.


Picture: The Voice (Australia) 2012, Wikipedia, accessed 4 April 2012, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Voice_(Australia)>

Eminem is Amazing.

March 25^th

Eminem finds five words that rhyme with ‘orange’ on ‘60 Minutes’ by Chris Lee

Okay so reading the heading of this article to say I was slightly judgemental is an understatement!  

I like Eminem because he raps about real world things like racism, violence and abuse towards women and children, not wanting fast cars or all the money in the world; but seriously, no one, even he, can rhyme something with orange.  However, I guess as they always say: never judge a book, well article in this case, by its cover.  

I was quite surprised amazed to see that Eminem could rhyme orange.  He believes that by using prosody and simply changing the way the word is pronounced you can rhyme anything with another word.  

In the article he raps about an orange by saying: ‘four-inch, door hinge in storage’ and that he has: ‘porridge with Geo-rge’.  When reading the article I took one look at those words and automatically thought that the only word that could slightly rhyme with orange is hinge.  

So here I sat saying the words aloud trying to mimic the way he would say it.  Of course as you can probably imagine I looked like the biggest fool in the world!  Amazingly it works!  By changing the prosody I could make storage rhyme with orange but didn’t know it until reading this article.  Maybe there are other words too. 

It would be very interesting to see what he could make rhyme with purple. 

So I guess the saying still remains correct: don’t judge a book by its cover.

Lee, C 2010, Eminem finds five words that rhyme with 'orange' on '60 Minutes', Pop & Hiss, accessed 25 March 2012, <http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/music_blog/2010/10/eminem-finds-five-words-that-rhyme-with-orange-on-60-minutes.html>.

People's Republic

February Sometime

People’s Republic by Robert Muchamore

First of all I have read all of the original CHERUB series and loved it! I started reading the prequel series about how CHERUB came into existence and found that it wasn't my cup of tea.  I now intend to read all of this sequel series beginning with People's Republic.

The only problem with having read so many of Muchamore's books is that I knew by halfway through the book what was going to happen next. 

Okay so I'll stop with the suspense now.  CHERUB is a secret organisation run by the British Intelligence Service.  Thee use children because they are able to slip underneath the suspicion radar of adults.  Through the children CHERUB is able to infiltrate some of the World's toughest terrorist groups.  The agents are taught to be manipulative to befriend their specified 'target' in order to get information out of them.  

People's Republic follows the protagonists Ryan Sharma, a CHERUB agent, and Fu Ning, a Chinese student.  

At the start of the book these two people had never met before. 

Ning, as she is called,  is a student living in China who has dodgy adoptive parents.  Having never known what her adoptive parents did for a living it comes as a shock when her adoptive mother Ingrid makes them flee from the country to Kyrgyzstan due to her father being captured by the police over human trafficking.  While in Kyrgyzstan Ning and her stepmother were tortured by Leon Ara

Ryan is sent on a mission to infiltrate the Aramov Clan.  The majority of the Aramov Clan resides in Kyrgyzstan but one relative lives in California.  Ryan is sent to California to pursue this link to the Aramov Clan.  

 The first half of the book was giving the reader the background information on who Ryan and Ning are.  By about halfway through the book I could guess that something would happen on Ryan’s mission and that he would end up meeting Ning.  

While it was annoying that I had figured out the ending of the book before I had even made it halfway through the book it also left me feeling intrigued because I wanted to see how the author would write the rest of the book.  

Muchamore's writing style doesn't change throughout the CHERUB series' and it is because of this that I get the feeling that I wasn’t the only one of his previous readers that figured out this book as they read it.  While I am used to his style of writing he still manages to keep me on the edge of my seat and leaves me wondering what will happen next.  His books are fast paced and he doesn't ramble on about nonsense that doesn't help the story progress.  How he continues to write many different missions and any two missions are never the same I am not sure.


Picture:
People's Republic (CHERUB) n.d., photograph, Amazon, accessed 13 April 2012, <http://www.amazon.co.uk/Peoples-Republic-CHERUB-Robert-Muchamore/dp/1444906879 >.

English

Purpose for blogging:

So basically I am a year 11 student in Australia.  I am creating this blog for my English class.
I'll be commenting on:

• books 
• articles
• artworks 
• miscellaneous stuff. 

I'm new to this and I hope its not too bad haha.