Booked

     Recently, I watched the movie News of the World by director Paul Greengrass and starring Tom Hanks. It intrigued me as a story, and I looked into whether it was based on a true story. The film is actually an adaptation of the 2016 novel News of the World by Paulette Jiles. Upon further googling, I found out that the book's characters and events are loosely based on multiple other real people and their stories.     The first inspiration for it was the book The Captured , about the author, Scott Zesch's ancestor Adolph Korn. Korn was captured by Apaches when he was 10, and was traded to Comanches. He adapted to their lifestyle and trained fighting against US soldiers and settlers. He was forcibly returned to white society but never adapted back to it.       Another inspiration to the book was Kiowa Dutch. Jiles recalled how she would search for photographs of Comanche or Kiowa captives. One photo she found was of Kiowa Dutch "a mysterious ...

 This month I read Aesop's fables which is essentially a book filled with short stories/ fables with a moral of the story written at the end of the fable. Aesop fables is an unconventional reading choice but I still feel like it's really fun if you wanted to just add a little bit of diversity in your reading selection.  One of my all time favorite fables was/is the ants and the grasshopper:  A Grasshopper that had merrily sung all summer was almost perishing with hunger in the winter. So she went to some Ants that lived near, and asked them to lend her a little food they had put by. "You shall certainly be paid before this time of year comes again," said she. "What did you do all the summer?" asked they. "Why, all day long and all night long I sang, if you please," answered the grasshopper. "Oh you sang, did you?" said the Ants. "Now, then you can dance."  Provide today for the future. I really enjoyed this fable because I int...

     I noticed very recently that I needed to write a blog post this week, and to my dismay I had nothing to write about. I thought about different concepts such as discussing why popular video game "Among Us" is referenced so often, but nothing really interested me. Then, I thought about short stories. These take little time to read and still can be as immersing as a full-length book. My parents love short stories, so there were plenty around the house. One book that drew my eye was a book of short stories by Roald Dahl, which was called, "The Best of Roald Dahl". One of these stories, called "The Sound Machine", was very entertaining, and I would like to share it with you.     T his story is about an eccentric man named Klausner, who is working on a machine to detect sound out of the range of human ears. The sounds that humans can't hear are the sounds he wants to listen to, and he wants to know who or what is making them. This sound machine is descr...

Harry Potter's worldbuilding makes absolutely no sense. Why doesn't Hogwarts help the outside world? Why do they use one of the slowest birds to transport their mail? Why are they giving 11-year-olds weapons that can do anything from light stray fires to instantly kill people? Wouldn't that be considered highly illegal in a place like England, a country with pretty strict gun control? These kinds of simple questions tear down the worldbuilding and reveal it as the charlatan act that it is, right? The worldbuilding doesn't make logical sense, so it's objectively bad, right? Right? No. (You already knew the answer to that question, you read the title) If you're reading this, I'll assume that you've already read the Harry Potter books, because they're the Harry Potter books. If you haven't, even better! Let's run with that latter assumption. You may have never read the books, or watched the movies, but you've still almost certainly heard of ...