Read Any Good Places Lately?

Here are the locations of the mysteries you all read as your “personal choice” book. If you click on the image, it will take you to a map that lists the authors and titles of the books – in case you heard about one you’d really like to read in your spare time. (Hahahahahaha!)

 

The Nacirema’s

Today in an earlier class we were discussing a group of people named the shamans and their shamanistic beliefs and customs. As we read this article we were all shocked at the things they would do and to us it seemed unthinkable. I thought back and I had been in a similar situation back in my 8th grade geography class. My teacher had given us a very similar article and the same types of reactions were shared between all of us. Im pretty sure most of you probably have heard about this article before. It is about a group of people called the Nacirema’s, it explains there everyday life. I found this article and posted it in the link below. It is actually quiet interesting and I think everyone would enjoy it. Plus there’s a twist

Nacirema

So I think you might have figured this out already but Nacirema is American backwards. What I think the purpose of this article is, is to show people that we all have customs and such that can look and seem silly to others, even our own. I think this article really makes you think, I think that it shows how much we judge others when in reality we all have our own traditions that can truly look insane when looking at them from the outside looking in.

We also kind of talked about this after watching the “In My language” video in class. The person talks about how they feel like when others look at them on the street, they would become suspicious, they would think that something was off or wrong. But this is how the person with autism feels about the so called “normal” way people act, the way one is supposed to act in public to be accepted by others. I think this article, and the video can kind of go hand in hand. Its hard for me to explain but it think that many people with autism may feel similar to this. They may feel like people are looking at what is just their normal life, their “language” if you will and are judging them and their lives and making it seem unacceptable.

Im not sure if I really expressed this the way I was trying to, I hope I got my point across, but anyway I just think it is something we all can think about.

 

Talking about Genres

Today I want to define some terms in class and was thinking about all the different subgenres that exist in crime fiction. “Crime Fiction” is a catch-all phrase used more commonly in Britain than in the US and it includes mysteries, thrillers, and other books that focus on a crime, induce some kind of suspense in the reader, and are generally more focused on entertaining the reader than on literary quality and high originality (though for crime fiction to provide a good reading experience it has to be well written  and original).

Anyway, I did a little “mind map” as a way to think about it. This is not by any means an exhaustive list of kinds of crime fiction, but might illustrate that there are many sub-genres for which readers have different expectations.