Running the Risk by Lesley Choyce Post #2 (KIND OF SPOILER ALERT)

        I have recently finished the book Running the Risk by Lesley Choyce. This book is about, as I explained in my previous post, how a burger shop called "Burger Heaven" gets robbed. This book is narrated by the main character Sean. It follows Sean's life after and in the middle of the armed robbery.

        I thought it was interesting how everything in this book lays out. In the beginning of the book Sean is in "Burger Heaven" when it gets robbed. The stakes are very high when the book first starts because it is right in the middle of the robbery. The middle chink of the book is about how the armed robbery changes the way Sean looks at the world. It makes him feel like everyday should be lived a little closer to the edge. The book also explains through Sean how it affects other people around him. In the end Sean identifies the guy who robbed "Burger Heaven", when he does this it gives him a sense of reassurance. Everything is a lot more clear in the world for the time being.

        Lesley Choyce does a good job with developing the characters in the book, especially Sean. He really defines what they are like and what they want. He makes Sean this teenager who has been a goody two shoes all his life, but wants to break out of his shell. He makes Jeanette, Sean's kind of girlfriend, want to act like a bad girl, but really she is always nervous. He describes Sean's dad as strict, but in the end Sean and him have a real heart to heart. The way these characters are developed really makes for a better and more interesting story.

Running the Risk by Lesley Choyce

       I have recently began to read the book Running the Risk by Lesley Choyce. So far I am really enjoying this book. It is about this teenager, Sean, who was in the middle of an armed robbery at a burger shop in a suburban town. I like this book because the chapters are fairly short and because I feel like if I wrote a book like this, this book sounds like how my version would sound. In this post I want to zoom in on the main  character and narrator, Sean.

       Sean is a very interesting character to me. He is interesting to me because he has a couple different sides to his personality. One side is the side that is laid back when an armed robber comes into a burger shop in the middle of the night. I feel like this side of him is the one who wants to rebel against his parents and live on edge, but can't quite make it there. He also has the side to him who is kind of clueless about what to say to a girl. I mean, he knows what to say, but in his head, he always seems to be wondering if whatever he said was the right thing to say. These two sides of Sean kind of contradict each other. They do this because the first side I mentioned is the side that wants to break out of the little suburban town, and maybe try some different more edgy things, and the other side is making more relationships or attachments to the small suburban town. 

      I think that the author, Lesley Choyce, purposely put the different sides of Sean in the story. I think this because if the main character has a few different sides then the story becomes more complex. If the story is more complex then the reader will spend time analyzing the book, which usually makes it more interesting and more intriguing to read.

Bad Boy by Walter Dean Myers

        The book Bad Boy is a memoir written by Walter Dean Myers. I'm not very far into the book yet, but I already have a feel of what its about. It's all about Walter Dean Myers's life growing up in Harlem. I also think it's about some of the challenges he faced being "quick tempered" as the book described him, and all of what it was like for him in his teenage years.

        Something that I found interesting about this book is that based on what I've heard of Walter Dean Myers story, he didn't have it so good. He was growing up in Harlem with a poor family and he was faced with a lot of racial issues. I found this interesting because most of everything I've read so far in the book is really positive. If I grew up the way he did, I don't think that I would have such a positive attitude when I am telling the story of it all. Maybe he is being so positive because when he was younger he tried to look for the good in everything. for example in the book he said "What I loved most about Harlem, though, was the music." This is not a negative statement about how he faced racial issues, or about how his family had trouble getting by, it's about his good memories. Maybe another reason why he is saying positive things is because it's the beginning of the book and he doesn't want to just drop a bunch of heavy stuff right on your lap when you first start the book.

        There could be many possible reasons for why he chose to have such a positive attitude when he is telling the story of his partially rough life, but I have to read further into the book to figure out why. I am interested to hear the stories of his childhood, maybe some of the negative things to really see what he thinks of it as an adult author.

Non-fiction Post for January- Steve Jobs The Man Who Thought Different

This book is a biography about Steve Jobs written by Karen Blumenthal. In this biography Blumenthal discusses Steve Job's life and his road to his incredibly successful company Apple. The main idea of this book is to inform the readers of Steve Jobs' life. In the beginning of the book Blumenthal tells us where Steve Jobs lived as a kid, how he was adopted, and where he went to school. Further into the book she talks about the friends Jobs made in his teens and twenties. His friends were very tech savvy just like him. Then, Blumenthal goes on to talk about his college years and how he dropped out of school. Later in the book Blumenthal goes into the years that Jobs invented the Apple computer and how his career took flight.

I think the author wants us to think about how much Steve Jobs has had a big impact on the world. The author makes us think about this by explaining all of the times that Jobs invented things and how successful they were. I think the author also wants us to know that even though Steve is a very successful man, he is not the easiest man to work with. In the book she says, "He sometimes cried when things didn't go his way and regularly took credit for the ideas of others." In this sentence Blumenthal highlighted the problems that Jobs had in the business world. She put that sentence in for a reason, and that reason was to point out that he was difficult, and make us think that even the most successful of people have their flaws.

Something I take away from this book is the knowledge of Steve Jobs. I also take away the lesson that you don't just become a billionaire, you have to work your way up to it. I also learned that some of the people who are successful don't always have the best personality all the time, they're only human. My thinking has been changed because before I read this book I just thought of Steve Jobs as the guy who invented my iPhone, but now I look at him as a man who had a goal to do something great in his life, and he accomplished it.

Steve Jobs The Man Who Thought Different post#2

        The book Steve Jobs The Man Who Thought Different is a biography by Karen Blumenthal. This biography is about how Steve Jobs started off and how he ended up in his career with the very successful company Apple.

        In this book, Blumenthal discusses how Steve Jobs had friends who shared a mutual interest in technology. His friends were Steve Wozniak and Bill Fernandez. They were also described as deeply interested in electronics just like Steve Jobs. Wozniak was about four years older than Steve and Bill. He knew much more about electronics so Steve thought of him as a mentor figure. Blumenthal said that they all had a great bond over electronics.

        I have not gotten far enough into the book to know exactly how the relationship between these three friends end up, but I think I have an idea. Even though Blumenthal says that they have this great bond in the beginning, I don't think that it is going to last much longer. Wozniak and Fernandez are described as very smart, but for some reason I think that Jobs is going to grow them out. I could be completely wrong, and they could actually have credit for all of the Apple companies success. I could also be right though. It was mentioned that Steve Jobs is a very difficult man to work with.If he doesn't get his way then he throws a fit. Eventually if Fernandez and Wozniak are continuously working with him then they are bound to run into some disagreements. I am just guessing that Jobs working behavior might push away Wozniak and Fernandez at some point. After all it was Steve Jobs who ended up with the billionaire company.