Midterm Count: October 23rd, 2020

<Books read> - 41 points

Week 1: Frankenstein - 6 points

Week 2: Interview with a Vampire - 6 points

Week 3: A Wild Sheep Chase - 6 points

Confessions - 5 points

Week 4: Annihilation - 6 points

Week 5: I couldn't finish read Akata witch...! - no points

Week 6: The Hobbit - 6 points

Week 7: The Night Circus - 6 points

<Attendance> - 5 points

I missed the class on Sep. 14th, and the class on Oct. 19th. On Oct. 19th, I had a technical issue with my laptop. I apologize that I didn't email you about this earlier...!

<Total Midterm points> - 46 points

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Week 3_1: Confessions by Kanae Minato (#5 points)

The main background of ‘Confessions’ is a normal school. The homeroom teacher, Yuko, says her four-year-old daughter is murdered by her class at the school where she works. The story begins with the teacher confessing this murder case like a speech in front of her students on the day of the closing ceremony. Yuko is the parent who lost her daughter and couldn’t protect her daughter, and at the same time, she is a teacher who has a duty to guide her students in the right way. She confesses about the law and order, ethics, and moral ideas in a calm and grim tone, in front of the criminals in her class who killed her daughter. Everyone is quietly holding their breath. The incident begins with the death of Yuko's only four-year-old daughter, Manami. Manami was found drowned in the pool, but in fact, it was done by Yuko's students Naoki and Shuya. Shuya wanted to get his mother's attention by killing Manami, and Naoki pushed Manami into the pool to show Shuya, who i...

Week Fourteen: Speculative Satire - Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (# 6 points)

A huge joke on a cosmic scale! I think if I define Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in one sentence, it seems like this can be said. The book is full of humor and jokes. The author is expressing his ingenious imagination regardless of any form and authority. In this book, things like the logical rationale and the probability of the story are not important. Unlike hard Science Fiction, which elaborately unfolds a story based on scientific theory, the charm of this book lies in the writer’s imagination and humor. As we can see from the setting that the Earth is a supercomputer designed by a super-intelligent race, the book shows the adventure of countless unique people and events between space and Earth, and prehistoric times and 5.6 trillion years later. Even the most entertaining jokes can get tired after hours of listening. To keep laughing and induce fun, we need a narrative device that will arouse the readers’ curiosity and tension...

Week Nine: New Frontier - The Martian by Andrew Weir (# 5 points)

I watched the movie ‘Martian’ first before I read this book. I saw the interesting fact about this novel that the writer, Andy Weir, was not a writer and he dabbled in writing a novel while he was working as a computer programmer. He published ‘Martian’ at his own expense to share the story with his friends, and as his novel has become more famous, he got a contract with a publisher, and his novel was made into a film, Martian. I really enjoyed the movie as well, so I was curious about Martian as a novel. Mars, a planet that ordinary people cannot visit, and this environment setting is quite attractive and attracts the readers. In addition to this, the starting point of this story, losing one of the operators, Mark Watney, due to a sudden sand storm when returning from the mission, is enough to stimulate the interest. The most impressive scene in this work is the words Mark Watney speaks at the beginning of the work, “I’m pretty much fucked. That’s my cons...

LITERATURE OF HORROR, FANTASY & SCI-FI

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