Writing II: Blog Post 2

So far I haven't read very much more into "Plague Dogs". I have a busy past few days and only managed about 70 more pages of reading. I still enjoy the book very much, but finding time to read has been difficult. I am anxious to continue though, as the book's pace has increased and it is getting quite interesting. I don't want to go into too much detail because this is a book people should definitely read so I don't want to spoil anything. One warning I would give about this book, however, is its language. Adams is after all, a British writer, so his writing style tends to be more complex than that of most American writers. Also, this book was written in the 70's, so some language is also outdated. This does make the reading somewhat confusing, and several times I have to actually look up a word. One time I  had to look up the word "tod" because I had no clue it meant a fox, then had a pleasantly nostalgic memory of the Disney movie "The Fox and the Hound" from my childhood, where the fox was named Tod. By the way, really great Disney movie, you have to watch it, to some extent it is actually a lot like the part of "Plague Dogs" I am reading right now. Anyways, the language in this book can make the reading much slower and sometimes laborious, but it is worth slogging through the occasional J. R. R. Tolkien-esque multiple page description of a flower or something to get to the main point that this book is about some baller doggies. At any rate, this week I will actually have to take a brief break from "Plague Dogs" to read all the Paperclip submissions that we have collected in preparation for creating our magazine. We have even more submissions than last year I'm happy to say, and now comes the long process of reading the 100 odd pieces. I've found in past years that usually about 75% of submissions are either good and contain genuine effort in them. But of course there are always plenty of "I submitted some bullshit because it was either a class requirement or my teacher said I could extra credit so here's like three haiku's on a page, give me my 10 points". Luckily, though, a quick look at the work showed no haiku's, so I'm a little relieved. I always do enjoy reading the work sent to us, though, as it shows me how many talented and dedicated writers there are in ETHS, a very relieving feeling when you think about the intelligent things you hear in the hallways (i.e. "bro my DJing career is totally about to takeoff, I was doing mixes at the (insert fake club here)"). At any rate, "Plague Dogs" is still going to strong, but it's slow reading. For the next week or so, however, I get to enjoy the variety of poems and short stories written by the students of ETHS.

Writing II Blog Post 1

The book I am currently reading is called "The Plague Dogs" by Richard Adams, who also wrote two other books I have read, "Watership Down" and "Tales from Watership Down". The basic premise of this story is two dogs, Rowf and Snitter, escape from an animal testing facility and must try to find a new home. I have read about 120 pages of this book and I do enjoy it very much so far. My only complaint is that Snitter, the victim of some brain surgery experiment, talks way too much nonsense in the story that it is difficult to follow what he is trying to say. That aside though, this book combines two of my favorite styles of fiction, Adventure/Questing and animal personification. I always enjoy a good adventure novel but more importantly, my favorite type of fiction books (besides apocalypse stories) are ones that have animals as protagonists. Some of my favorite writers who have done this include Erin Hunter ("Warriors"), Jack London ("Into the Wild" and "Whitefang"), and Brian Jacques ("Redwall"). For whatever reason I think animals make better characters than people. Speaking of which I really ought to reread some of the "Warriors" books, I haven't read any in years and they were some awesome books about bad-ass cats fighting each other. Anyways so far this book is pretty good, but I'm expecting the pace to pick up soon because it has gotten somewhat slow. The weird thing about Adams as a writer is that he doesn't seem to have a consistent style from book to book. "Watership Down" was definitely his best work, with a smooth flow to his writing and good consistency between characters. In "Tales from Watership Down", written 20 years later as a string of short stories concerning the same characters from the first book, I was shocked at how different and inconsistent everything was. Characters behaved differently, talked differently, and the writing altogether seemed different and less thought out. I still enjoyed the stories but was a bit disappointed by the decline in effort. "the Plague Dogs" seems to be reasonable in terms of perceived effort, but it just doesn't seem like the same author wrote it. I'm not sure what the deal with Adams style is, but it's not too big of a deal, it just bothers me for some reason. Either way, so far this book has been a solid read. I always wanted to try writing one of these animal protagonist books just for fun, but it's actually much harder than it seems. The most difficult part I would say, and something Adams does incredibly well, is to explain the world from the point of view of the animal, and expressing how they might perceive things that are normal to humans, such as cars, weather, cities and so on. Despite the inconsistencies in his writing, I have enjoyed all the work of Adams and "The Plague Dogs" only reaffirms this.