Cristina Diaz, 5/3/22, Pd 8

Cristina Diaz

5/3/22

Pd 8

    In all honesty, I didn’t really enjoy the material we’d been reading these last few weeks.

This is still one of my favorite classes, and I always looked forward to our analyses and

discussions, but I just don’t have the same love for the material that I had when reading

Beowulf, or doing the Norse unit. I found it very hard to relate to Lestat or Claudia, and even

Louis towards the end. Instead of doing the readings the second I had a free minute, as I had

been previously, I had to remind myself to do it, and even divide them into smaller parts. I hadn’t

realized how much I was taking that for granted. I’ve been experiencing that in a lot of my

classes now. Everyone jokes about “senioritis” but I assumed I wouldn’t feel it. Motivation, once

lost, has been very hard for me to get back. I was so busy with SING that it left me feeling lost

once it was over, but now I think I’m getting back into a rhythm.

    What little I’ve read of World War Z so far has been more enjoyable. Most of the

characters who are interviewed have been much more relatable to me than Louis or Lestat, and

I’ve really enjoyed the way the layers of the events of the novel are slowly revealed, not just told

in a chronological sequence. All the different perspectives seem to add to a different kind of

“human factor,” as I imagine the truth lies somewhere in between all the different anecdotes.

Each of the different narrators has a distinct voice, and I can almost hear people I know in real

life in all of the different ways they like to complain about their situations or their respective

governments. The US military official’s defensiveness was so clear it was almost tangible, and

the arguments of the man who was trying to sell medication to the American public sounded so

realistic it was scary, especially considering the pandemic. Their biases come across so clearly,

especially when compared directly with the testimony of all the others. I’m sure some of it is

exaggerated for the sake of the novel, but I wonder if my own biases come across so clearly

when I speak.