Honors Book Club
The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey
The Monkey Wrench Gang is a phenomenal environmental book speaking to monkey wrenching and eco-terrorism. The main characters of the book are the group of eco-terrorists with the end goal of blowing up the Glen Canyon Dam, along with destroying and mutilating as many industrialized side projects as they can get their hands on. The book highlights the importance of environmental advocacy through the creative use of characters and personal narrative through said characters to give the story meaning and life.
Seminar Reflection The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey was easily one of the best pieces of literature I have had the pleasure to discuss with people about. The novel discusses the issues surrounding damming, the harmful effects of energy production, and industrialized civilization. The novel critiques the current industrialized way of living we have adopted through the creative use of Abbey’s characters, which Abbey himself has personalized and placed pieces of himself into. This book broadened my perspective of now nature can truly be beautiful, even places I never deemed to be beautiful such as the desert I have always taken for granted.
Throughout the seminar, my peers expressed a common opinion that the monkey wrenchers we followed throughout the story seemed to vary to one extreme or the other. For example, the main characters wanted to either blow up the Glen Canyon dam, or want to burn down billboards. During this conversation, I was thinking about how the variance in either direction could possibly reflect how people act in real life when it comes to situations like these. Either you are doing simple acts of defiance, or you are going to tear up as much as you possibly can in one go. When the characters were messing with construction equipment, Hayduke said, “We ought to do as much work as we can. We’re not likely to get more easy operations like this. Next time they’ll have locks and everything. Maybe booby traps. And watchmen with guns, shortwave radios, dogs.” (Abbey 94) This highlights Hayduke’s desire to go to the extreme if they are planning on causing more chaos than smaller acts of defiance, such as when they would set billboards on fire. As this conversation went on, the question arose “What is terrorism? What makes eco-terrorism terrorism?” As defined by the New Oxford American Dictionary, terrorism is “the use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims” while eco-terrorism is defined as “violence varied out to further environmentalist ends”. That means that any act of violence that is carried out in the name of the environment is eco-terrorism. That gives the idea of eco-terrorism a very cookie cutter definition and while it answers the “what”, it doesn’t answer the “why”. Why eco-terrorism is terrorism can be answered in a number of ways. While there is the dictionary term of terrorism, it can take on many different shapes based off of what people believe terrorism to be. An example of this is in the film Damnation, where an artist took it upon himself and his team to paint a large crack down the Elwha Dam. This was dubbed an act of eco-terrorism, even though the painting didn’t harm anyone or anything in the process. So the definition of terrorism and eco-terrorism seem to take different shapes and forms based off of a present situation. Some of the acts that the monkey wrenchers in the novel were planning to commit were acts of terrorism, as they would be harming a mass amount of people in the process of blowing up the Glen Canyon Dam. And to dig even deeper into the question; wouldn’t creating a dam be a form of terrorism? The creation of a dam blocks safe passage for many fish, namely salmons, down and up the rivers they are blocking. If the dam was built on a river, it interrupts the river flow and directly affects the quality of life for the trees downstream, and would affect all of the wildlife living in the immediate area. It creates a domino effect that harms the wildlife, plant life, and ecosystem of the area. Since it causes so much harm for those affected by the dam, wouldn’t it be considered terrorism? As Hayduke said, “What’s more American than violence? Violence, it’s as American as pizza pie” (Abbey 156). Violence truly seems to be an American value nowadays, especially towards the environment. We believe that simply because it cannot talk back or protest, there is nothing that we are doing wrong. We are committing acts of terrorism towards the environment, and fighting for the environment is deemed as terrorism, too. We seem to be caught in a predicament where we are harming something or someone either way. And I believe that is one of the points that the Monkey Wrench Gang was trying to get at. Terrorism is a two way street. But if the plants don’t have voices, who will speak for the trees? “My job is to save the fucking wilderness. I don’t know anything else worth saving” (Abbey 200). Civil disobedience takes on many different forms, one of them being speaking for the trees as they cannot speak for themselves. While the Monkey Wrench Gang dances on the line of eco-terrorism, the lesson that can be learned from the book is that the environment needs voices to speak for it. The novel does it’s best to spark the desire in the readers to take action for the environment due to the fact the characters never blew up the dam and gave the readers the satisfaction. They need to take action and fight for the environment and the future they want to see. I very closely relate this book to the documentary Damnation, as I mentioned previously. That film opened up my eyes to an issue that I never thought of before and helped me to realize that the environment is just as important as the people around us. The film spoke about many dams that ended up being destroyed, along with dams that are yet to be taken down but should be, along with other dams such as the Glen Canyon Dam and what it used to be. I connected that to the Monkey Wrench Gang due to the importance of the dam throughout the novel, but also because of the wonderful stories they shared about the canyon before it was flooded and turned into a dam. The documentary combined with reading this novel made an environmentalist out of me, with the desire to see change and the will and passion to do so. While the novel is not a good example to go off of, the documentary gives you the direction to go in when it comes to creating environmental change; fight for it with all you’ve got and share the message to as many people as you can. The seminar and the novel left me with many questions, primarily regarding why we deem some acts of environmental advocacy as terrorism. The best way to go about finding the answer would be to research what we define as terrorism on a broader scale than the dictionary definition, apply that to the environmental movement, and connect the dots. Other than that, I had no other burning questions about the book. The book felt very straight forward in it’s message, and helped me to understand the point of environmentalism. |
ProjectI am the Lorax
Perhaps a little less hairy And a little more blond. I speak for the trees Because they cannot speak for themselves. They don’t have mouths and they do not have voices And still you manage to silence them. I am the Lorax I speak for the trees Because you forgot how to listen to the whispers in the wind And forgot how to sense the origin of wind as it breezes through every leaf and needle. I am here to tell you that the trees are dying And the grass is weeping but it’s not enough to water the hungry roots. The birds don’t have a place to live anymore and their wings are getting sore. I am here to tell you that the seas are getting tired, They are getting heavy Their shoulders worn down by oil and sail boats. The fish have to find new homes to move in to Because their old ones got too dirty. I am the Lorax. I speak for the trees Because you are cutting them all down for your selfish need for their resources. Have you ever thought that what they give is not paper or pencils or toothpicks or bed frames but shade on a hot summers day or shelter from the rain on a cold spring evening? You are polluting the skies and killing my lungs Burning my chest. I want you to know that someday you will have to tell your children of the polar bears. How there used to be snow white bears -- you will have to explain snow. Soft and cold and wet and painful. You will have to tell them about snowball fights and snowmen. We are not thinking generations ahead We are thinking of the here and the now Not the children who we are yet to have Or the children that are fresh to the world who may someday forget about the towering Amazon Rainforests They will be in history books but not present. I am the Lorax and I am speaking for the children. Because this world is everyone’s to live on Not everyone’s for the taking. I am the Lorax and unless we save the trees and the seas and the rainforests and the animals and the deserts and the lakes and the air we will not know the Earth. Unless we save the trees We will not know the Earth. Unless we save the trees We will now know the Earth. Unless. |
Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
Cat's Cradle is a beautifully written novel about the end of the world. The book critiques and almost mocks religion, science, and human beings in general. Vonnegut is a beautifully versed writer who is able to encapsulate the very enigma that human beings are, and puts all of humankind's little quirks into one novel about the end of the world.
Seminar Reflection During this seminar, the general theme among my peers was that the book was symbolically representing religion and science. While this was a strong occurring theme that I do believe the book was based around, Ellen spoke about the idea of free will and questioned the existence of free will in the context of the book. This opened up the idea that perhaps Vonnegut was mocking human interaction and the systems in which humans interact. This caused a chain reaction of ideas not only in my head, but also in the conversation. We delved deeper into the ideas of the book mocking the very human species and how we interact with one another and to concepts such as a god. Jessica made us question Frank and the ants, perhaps a metaphor for how humans view God in almost any religion that I have ever come across. This was very enlightening to think about in the context of the book itself, along with my own personal interests about human interaction and the concepts we have come up with.
One of the most intriguing questions of the seminar was about the cat’s cradle itself. What was the point of the cat’s cradle? I believe that the meaning of the cat’s cradle metaphor was the talk about the obscurity of meaning. More specifically, it’s about finding something out of nothing. A cat’s cradle is a string formation where a single string is formed out of making numerous X’s between the fingers. People try to find shapes and formations out of the X’s, when in reality, they are finding something out of seemingly nothing. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the cat’s cradle doesn’t mean anything. “It means whatever it means.” Newt said in the book Cat’s Cradle. Humans find meaning out of seemingly nothing, pulling at ideas to create something that they believe to be real. An example of this is human’s idea of what God is. God was created by humans to explain what was going on in their world that they had no other explanation for, and eventually their creation became so real to them, that many people aren’t sure who came first; humans or God. The concept of creation and it’s meaning in the cat’s cradle spans throughout the book in a number of different ways. For example, Frank Hoenikker had a fascination with ants. He would put ants into a jar and force them to fight by shaking the jar. This can be elaborated on by viewing Frank as god, and humans as the ants. An outside force that the ants don’t have control over or perhaps the ability to understand visually has placed them into a new environment, and pitted them again each other. Who’s to say their god isn’t Frank? While ants can’t form intelligent thought like humans can, imagine transposing this metaphor into our every day human lives where we are the ants. We created a fiction around a concept that we can’t prove nor disprove, and a lot of people believe in this creation we have made so whole-heartedly that many dedicate their lives to it. We may very well be the ants of another person’s experiments, so to speak, but we cannot visually process what our god is. So once again, we are pulling at the strings of our life and trying to make meaning out of it, trying to create something that we can understand and hold onto. See the cat? See the cradle? This book was a phenomenal ride to go along with, experiencing confusion and new concepts that I hadn’t previously thought about. Reading this book also allowed me to view the concepts in a broader, more intertexualized light. At one point in the seminar, the phrase “Things fall apart” was used a number of times, making me connect back to the book Things Fall Apart that I had read last year during my sophomore year. The main characters of the book were perfectly content with the world ending, as if they were just going along with the flow of things. They accepted they couldn’t change it, so they made the best out of it by thawing out the berries and melting their water. Their okayness with the world ending made me think back to how the characters in the African novel were reacting to the invasion of the British. In the book, many Africans converted to Christianity, worked for the church, adopted more Western ways in a very short amount of time. Things were crumbling all around them, their culture was being mocked and their existence wasn’t as important as the white man’s, but they did their best to enjoy their time despite the threat against them. Another connection between these two books was that the main character had killed himself in the last chapter, similar to how Mona killed herself and how many other characters killed themselves. While the death at the end of the novels don’t have any other connection but the fact there were suicides, it opened up my eyes to just how broad intertextualization could be. This seminar made me wonder about religion, and the meaning behind some forms of human interaction and habit. I would hope to learn more about this through rereading the book in the future, closer observation of the world around me, and understanding the humanities more. I learned a tremendous amount already by studying rhetoric. I want to continue these studies and learn as much as I can about the strange human species. Another question that kept coming up in my head was as to why there was so much casual death in the book. People didn’t seem to take death so seriously, whether it was “Papa” or Mona, or all of the other Bokononists. Again, reading through the novel will make things make more sense, such as understanding the in-book religion more, among others. I’m fairly certain there is meaning hidden under all of the casual death in the book, I just have hopes of uncovering that meaning soon. |
ProjectSee the cat?
I see it in Monday mornings Managing to rise out of bed with thoughts like a mad attempt at meaning Promotion or demotion To win or to lose. See the cradle? I see it in the folds between magazines “Lose 20lbs in 2 weeks! Secret on pg.17!” The weight not being the matter But the secret on page 17 Picking and choosing vegetables over succulent red meats Picking and choosing low-fat low-carb yogurts They lie the walls And I see their shapes in the jagged X’s. Do you see the cat? Stars align to shapes we draw the lines for X’s over X’s Into Sagittarius; Orion. One constellation into the next Something out of nothing. Do you see the cradle? Nothing becomes something Like pools out of lakes We pretend we own the world so we make the pools out of the lakes And the lakes do not say yes And the lakes turn into pools. The cat out of X’s The cradle, the open space To create meaning out of our lives. Pretending we matter Pretending the human is as important as the universe itself As if the universe is important at all. We weave ourselves into meaning; We do not believe in empty space. We read between the lines because that is the only way we know how. The human phenomenon. See the cat? See the cradle? |
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
Their Eyes Were Watching God is a riveting novel about a young woman named Janie finding her place in the world in the early 1900's. The story follows her as she finds love and her sense of place throughout her life, following her through three marriages. The story offers an interesting perspective of race from the eyes of a woman who felt completely comfortable in her skin, no matter where she was.
Literary Analysis
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston was thrown under the rug by Harlem Renaissance writer Richard Wright, critiquing the novel by calling it a minstrel show. Because of the influence Wright had as a writer, Hurston was left to be forgotten until novelist Alice Walker brought her back to life. The complex of opinions about the riveting novel had compelled me to write about my own opinion on Hurston’s writing piece.
To speak to Richard Wright, he accused Hurston of writing the novel to amuse the “white folk” as minstrel shows do. “Miss Hurston voluntarily continues in her novel the tradition which was forced upon the Negro in the theatre, that is, the minstrel technique that makes the ‘white folks’ laugh.” Wright says in his critique of Their Eyes Were Watching God. While he may think that the novel is making a mockery of her race, I believe that her novel is a reflection of her own personal beliefs as the colored her. “I do not mind at all. I do not be long to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all but about it. Even in the helter skelter skirmish that is my life, I have seer that the world is to the strong regardless of a little pigmentation more of less. No, I do not weep at the world -- I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.” Hurston said in her personal essay How It Feels to be Colored Me. She expresses that she is comfortable where she is and who she is. She doesn’t feel like her race has any effect on the way she lives and how she wants to live. Wright may have viewed her comfortability as passively accepting the hate that was put onto her and passing it on in her novel. Not all people were in on the fight for racial equality, and her upbringing in an almost all-black town might have made her content with her life as it was.
“Someone is always at my elbow reminding me that I am the granddaughter of salves. It fails to register depression with me. Slavery is sixty years in the past. The operation was successful and the patient is doing well, thank you.” Hurston says once again in her essay How It Feels to be Colored Me. This shows her thoughts on slavery and her thoughts on her current situation in life. She says that sometimes she doesn’t even have a race, or even is attached to time. She is so comfortable with herself that her race does not have any effect on her. Hurston expresses that through her character Janie in Their Eyes Were Watching God, as the non-dialogue language is very rich with the words written in their proper dictionary-accurate form, while the dialogue shows the “racial dialect” that perhaps she was critiqued on the most. This contrast shows the difference between the internal body and the external body that she separates herself from. Hurston may connect to her internal body more than her external body. Hurston says when she is listening to music the “Cosmic Zora emerges. I belong to no race nor time. I am the eternal feminine with its string of beads” (Hurston 4).
Hurston finally concludes her thoughts about her race by saying, “But in the main, I feel like a brown bag of miscellany propped against a wall. Against a wall in company with other bags, white, red and yellow. Pour out the contents, and there is discovered a jumble of small things priceless and worthless. A first-water diamond, an empty spool, bits of broken glass, lengths of string, a key to a door long since crumbled away, a rusty knife-blade, old shoes saved for a road that never was and never will be, a nail bent under the weight of things too heavy for any nail, a dried flower or two still a little fragrant. In your hand is the brown bag. On the ground before you is the jumble it held--so much like the jumble in the bags, could they be emptied, that all might be dumped in a single heap and the bags refilled without altering the content of any greatly. A bit of colored glass more or less would not matter. Perhaps that is how the Great Stuffer of Bags filled them in the first place--who knows?” (Hurston 4) She believes that everyone is the same, no matter the color of their skin. She doesn’t do anything to act upon her beliefs, which could be why Wright critiqued her so harshly, but she was content with living out her life being happy as who she was, not wanting to create a new world around her.
The differences in opinions these two writers shared are perhaps why the review of Hurston’s novel took a negative turn. Zora Neale Hurston was a beautiful novelist that was worth reviving as Alice Walker did, with interesting and powerful views that are worth listening to. If she is not marked as a influential black writer, she should be marked as a powerful feminist writer. For a novel written in 1937, Janie is a powerful and independent woman, a character that would be rare to come by. While the story does revolve around the main character finding love, she writes Janie in such a powerful and confident way that frames her as a woman capable of taking care of herself. Given the time the novel was written, she was able to create a confident woman character that I believe has parts of Hurston’s personality written in. In her personal essay, she writes in a way that is very similar to her character’s way of talking. This made me believe that she put parts of herself into Janie. Zora Neale Hurston was a beautiful writer and while she may not have had strong opinions on the racial equality issue, her artistic prose and beautiful grand style writing is well worth the read and deserves to be read.
To speak to Richard Wright, he accused Hurston of writing the novel to amuse the “white folk” as minstrel shows do. “Miss Hurston voluntarily continues in her novel the tradition which was forced upon the Negro in the theatre, that is, the minstrel technique that makes the ‘white folks’ laugh.” Wright says in his critique of Their Eyes Were Watching God. While he may think that the novel is making a mockery of her race, I believe that her novel is a reflection of her own personal beliefs as the colored her. “I do not mind at all. I do not be long to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all but about it. Even in the helter skelter skirmish that is my life, I have seer that the world is to the strong regardless of a little pigmentation more of less. No, I do not weep at the world -- I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.” Hurston said in her personal essay How It Feels to be Colored Me. She expresses that she is comfortable where she is and who she is. She doesn’t feel like her race has any effect on the way she lives and how she wants to live. Wright may have viewed her comfortability as passively accepting the hate that was put onto her and passing it on in her novel. Not all people were in on the fight for racial equality, and her upbringing in an almost all-black town might have made her content with her life as it was.
“Someone is always at my elbow reminding me that I am the granddaughter of salves. It fails to register depression with me. Slavery is sixty years in the past. The operation was successful and the patient is doing well, thank you.” Hurston says once again in her essay How It Feels to be Colored Me. This shows her thoughts on slavery and her thoughts on her current situation in life. She says that sometimes she doesn’t even have a race, or even is attached to time. She is so comfortable with herself that her race does not have any effect on her. Hurston expresses that through her character Janie in Their Eyes Were Watching God, as the non-dialogue language is very rich with the words written in their proper dictionary-accurate form, while the dialogue shows the “racial dialect” that perhaps she was critiqued on the most. This contrast shows the difference between the internal body and the external body that she separates herself from. Hurston may connect to her internal body more than her external body. Hurston says when she is listening to music the “Cosmic Zora emerges. I belong to no race nor time. I am the eternal feminine with its string of beads” (Hurston 4).
Hurston finally concludes her thoughts about her race by saying, “But in the main, I feel like a brown bag of miscellany propped against a wall. Against a wall in company with other bags, white, red and yellow. Pour out the contents, and there is discovered a jumble of small things priceless and worthless. A first-water diamond, an empty spool, bits of broken glass, lengths of string, a key to a door long since crumbled away, a rusty knife-blade, old shoes saved for a road that never was and never will be, a nail bent under the weight of things too heavy for any nail, a dried flower or two still a little fragrant. In your hand is the brown bag. On the ground before you is the jumble it held--so much like the jumble in the bags, could they be emptied, that all might be dumped in a single heap and the bags refilled without altering the content of any greatly. A bit of colored glass more or less would not matter. Perhaps that is how the Great Stuffer of Bags filled them in the first place--who knows?” (Hurston 4) She believes that everyone is the same, no matter the color of their skin. She doesn’t do anything to act upon her beliefs, which could be why Wright critiqued her so harshly, but she was content with living out her life being happy as who she was, not wanting to create a new world around her.
The differences in opinions these two writers shared are perhaps why the review of Hurston’s novel took a negative turn. Zora Neale Hurston was a beautiful novelist that was worth reviving as Alice Walker did, with interesting and powerful views that are worth listening to. If she is not marked as a influential black writer, she should be marked as a powerful feminist writer. For a novel written in 1937, Janie is a powerful and independent woman, a character that would be rare to come by. While the story does revolve around the main character finding love, she writes Janie in such a powerful and confident way that frames her as a woman capable of taking care of herself. Given the time the novel was written, she was able to create a confident woman character that I believe has parts of Hurston’s personality written in. In her personal essay, she writes in a way that is very similar to her character’s way of talking. This made me believe that she put parts of herself into Janie. Zora Neale Hurston was a beautiful writer and while she may not have had strong opinions on the racial equality issue, her artistic prose and beautiful grand style writing is well worth the read and deserves to be read.
Semester Reflection
Honors book club took place during the second semester of school, when we shifted gears from the independent study project into something more relaxed where we were able to read famous novels, seminar about them, and create projects around them. We first read Cat’s Cradle, and I chose to write a poem mimicking the writing style of Kurt Vonnegut about one of my favorite lines “See the cat? See the cradle?” We then read The Monkey Wrench Gang before we started the environmental ethics project. I chose to write another poem for my project, where I acted as a modern-day Lorax protecting the trees. And lastly, we read Their Eyes Were Watching God. The novel was incredibly fascinating, although I did not do a project based off of the novel. However, I wrote a literary analysis speaking about the novel’s harsh critique by Richard Wright and compared it to her personal essay, How It Feels to be Colored Me.
The book that had the most impact on me personally was The Monkey Wrench Gang. This novel opened up my eyes to the world of environmentalism. Although the characters seek to advocate for nature through the means of monkey wrenching and eco-terrorism, the book allowed me to view one extreme of environmentalists. The book had a clear line where they characters were either setting billboards on fire, or they were plotting to destroy the Glen Canyon Dam. The two extremes made me wonder about the way the world did work, and how terrorism came into play with those two extremes; either you are not doing anything or you are risking your neck. The book gave me room to read between the lines and create it’s own meaning for myself, which was very exciting for me as I love reading into things and pulling out meaning that the author may or may not have left there on purpose. Outside of the rich story and interactive thinking I gained from this book, I also found that it helped me with my patience. The Monkey Wrench Gang is a long book at 421 pages, and often times in long-winded in the descriptions of things, which sometimes made reading the book feel tedious and like it took up too much time. But I felt as though reading such a long and sometimes tedious book allowed me to gain a stronger appreciation for writers and literature, which is something that I feel like I’ve forgotten these past few years. The Monkey Wrench Gang was a beautifully written book that kept me interested and on the edge of my seat, and I’m glad to have had the chance to learn from this novel and Edward Abbey.
While this round of honors was incredibly fun, it was also incredibly taxing. Reading literature for someone who is in love with the humanities may seem like a perfect match, I had a lot of struggles keeping up with the due dates and reading on time. I felt like I had to persevere for the majority of the time during this semester in honors, as the books were very complicated and keeping track of all of my thoughts on the novel along with the regular humanities curriculum was very hard. Despite the mass amount of effort I had to put into this semester, the book club allowed me to expand my thinking outside of the classroom walls and discover the amazing thing that is intertextuality. I was able to connect the dots between all of these other pieces of literature, documentaries and poems and add my voice to the never-ending conversation about literature. The book club really expanded my horizons with literature, and allowed me to fully explore my love for reading and discovery. I grew as a learner and student through this semester of honors, and grew as a person through the personal discovery that I went through along the way. I was able to discover my inner environmentalist through my intellectual progression and expansion during the Monkey Wrench Gang, and my inner philosopher through reading Cat’s Cradle. Experiencing struggles meeting deadlines also helped me grow as a learner and person and I was able to discover my mental and physical limits of reading and enjoying literature. I never thought much about my personal limits before junior year when they were met and exceeded the limit, so it was really interesting to see myself grow and understand myself better. This semester of honors was incredibly fascinating and reinstated my love of literature.
The book that had the most impact on me personally was The Monkey Wrench Gang. This novel opened up my eyes to the world of environmentalism. Although the characters seek to advocate for nature through the means of monkey wrenching and eco-terrorism, the book allowed me to view one extreme of environmentalists. The book had a clear line where they characters were either setting billboards on fire, or they were plotting to destroy the Glen Canyon Dam. The two extremes made me wonder about the way the world did work, and how terrorism came into play with those two extremes; either you are not doing anything or you are risking your neck. The book gave me room to read between the lines and create it’s own meaning for myself, which was very exciting for me as I love reading into things and pulling out meaning that the author may or may not have left there on purpose. Outside of the rich story and interactive thinking I gained from this book, I also found that it helped me with my patience. The Monkey Wrench Gang is a long book at 421 pages, and often times in long-winded in the descriptions of things, which sometimes made reading the book feel tedious and like it took up too much time. But I felt as though reading such a long and sometimes tedious book allowed me to gain a stronger appreciation for writers and literature, which is something that I feel like I’ve forgotten these past few years. The Monkey Wrench Gang was a beautifully written book that kept me interested and on the edge of my seat, and I’m glad to have had the chance to learn from this novel and Edward Abbey.
While this round of honors was incredibly fun, it was also incredibly taxing. Reading literature for someone who is in love with the humanities may seem like a perfect match, I had a lot of struggles keeping up with the due dates and reading on time. I felt like I had to persevere for the majority of the time during this semester in honors, as the books were very complicated and keeping track of all of my thoughts on the novel along with the regular humanities curriculum was very hard. Despite the mass amount of effort I had to put into this semester, the book club allowed me to expand my thinking outside of the classroom walls and discover the amazing thing that is intertextuality. I was able to connect the dots between all of these other pieces of literature, documentaries and poems and add my voice to the never-ending conversation about literature. The book club really expanded my horizons with literature, and allowed me to fully explore my love for reading and discovery. I grew as a learner and student through this semester of honors, and grew as a person through the personal discovery that I went through along the way. I was able to discover my inner environmentalist through my intellectual progression and expansion during the Monkey Wrench Gang, and my inner philosopher through reading Cat’s Cradle. Experiencing struggles meeting deadlines also helped me grow as a learner and person and I was able to discover my mental and physical limits of reading and enjoying literature. I never thought much about my personal limits before junior year when they were met and exceeded the limit, so it was really interesting to see myself grow and understand myself better. This semester of honors was incredibly fascinating and reinstated my love of literature.