Finally Done with Great Expectations!

Great Expectations was not the best book I have read, but it is also not the worst. The story seemed like it took a lot of time to write and add all the small details, but some parts put me to sleep. I liked the settings because they were easy to annotate but the book had a lot of Gothic details like To Kill a Mockingbird, which we have already read so that is something I really disliked. In eighth grade we read A Christmas Carol also by Charles Dickens which was way better than Great Expectations. Charles Dickens isn't a bad writer but he makes things more complicated then they need to be which bugged me when I was reading fast at night. The thing I really like were the characters. They all had different and interesting personalities and made the story interesting because their personalities were sometimes used to show motifs and themes. Most of the mysteries I didn't solve but Magwitch being Pip's benefactor I am proud to say I figured out mostly on my own. I was really surprised that Biddy married Joe and very disappointed because I wanted Pip to marry her.

My reading habits are pretty embarrassing and left me extremely tired in the morning. I would usually start reading at 10:00 or 10:30 on the day I was suppose to read, after I got ready to sleep, comfortable in my bed, and ended at around 11:15 depending on the length of the assignment for that night. Towards the end of the book I got lazy and would only read half of the assignment and catch up on Thursday or over the weekend. Sense we have been reading, I have not had much homework so reading was not an issue, I just procrastinated then felt stressed to get it done. Every night. I was usually in my bed which is pretty comfortable and I was tired from a long day at school so sometimes I would doze off, especially in the middle of the book when it was really boring. The discussions and talks we had in class were really helpful in understanding the book for me and I would probably not have picked up on a lot of things if we didn't do those. The thing that I dreaded doing the most because they had to be perfect, were the discussion questions. I wasn't here for the second discussion and I still haven't written the questions for that, but for the first discussion the fifteen questions I did about six that day at school with a little help on ideas from Sherwin, and took about 4 hours that night finishing them. I was just glad we didn't have to answer them because that takes forever! I am glad that we are finished because if I was reading it independently I never would.