Author: RyanZ

“The Moustache” by Robert Cormier is a interesting story.

When the story opens, we meet the narrator, Mike, who is about to set out for a visit to Lawnrest to see his grandmother. His sister, Annie, is supposed to go with him, but is sick. Mike is being given an inspection by his mother, who is checking out his hair and his relatively new moustache. The narrator tells us he decided to grow a moustache to prove a point that he could, but he’d since grown to like it. His mother says the moustache is costing him money, simply because it makes him look older than his 17 years. Even the movie attendant had charged him the full ticket price for him and his girlfriend, Cindy, at a recent show.

The narrator, Mike, who is named for his grandfather, is about to set off. His mother says, ”Your grandmother probably won’t even recognize you,” but he heads out.

He visits his grandmother, and she mistakes him as her husband, who died a while ago. She said she regretted accusing him of cheating, and has lived with that regret. Mike just plays along with it, not knowing whats going on. In the end, Mike manages to leave, and when he gets back, he shaves his mustache.

The story was short, and I couldn’t really find a meaning to it. Overall, it was pretty interesting and funny that a lot of people mistake Mike as a adult, even though he is only a teen

“A Sound of Thunder” by Ray Bradbury is a pretty interesting short story. It starts in 2055, when time travel was available. Eckels is a hunter who paid $10,000 to go back in time and hunt a Tyrannosaurus Rex.

Time Safari, Inc., the time-travel outfitting agency, wants to make sure its customers understand the risks involved. They do not guarantee safety, relating the deaths of six guides and twelve hunters in the previous year. But they do guarantee dinosaurs, and Eckels cannot refuse this trip of a lifetime.

While Eckels waits his for his expedition to begin, he and a company employee discuss the recent election in which the democratic candidate Keith, the moderate presidential candidate, was elected over Deutscher, the dictatorial candidate described as an anti-everything man. The two suggest that if the election had turned out differently, many people would be running for the time machine just to escape Deutscher’s rule.

Travis, the tour guide, along with his assistant, Lesperance, leads Eckels and two other hunters, Billings and Kramer, into the time machine and they set off to a time 60,002,055 years before the time they left.

When they arrive, Travis gives the hunters two specific instructions: shoot only the dinosaurs marked (they were going to die soon anyway) and stay on the path, which is made of antigravity metal that hovers above the ground. When Eckels asks why, Travis launches into an explanation of how changing the past could have a negative effect on the future: if one mouse is killed in the past, the families of that mouse will also no longer live, along with the animals that would have preyed on the mouse. This would, in turn, cause the animals that preyed on those animals to no longer live, compounding until the effect of the death of that one mouse could mean generations of people may no longer be alive in the present. With everyone sufficiently scared, they head out.

As they anxiously wait for the T. rex, the men hear ‘a sound of thunder’ – the footsteps of the dinosaur – and Eckels is overcome by the beauty and majesty of the beast. He decides he cannot shoot it. Travis, furious that Eckels has chickened out, tells him to return to the machine. Eckels, in a state of shock, moves the wrong direction, catching the eye of the dinosaur. As the T. rex begins to come after the hunters, they fire and kill it.

Upon returning to the time machine, Travis notices that Eckels’ boots are muddy. He stepped off the path! Furious, Travis threatens to leave Eckels in the past unless he collects the bullets from the dinosaur, which they can’t leave. He does so, but Travis still threatens to kill Eckels for disobeying the rules.

Upon arriving back in 2055, Eckels notices that things are a little off. The air smells weird and the spelling of the company sign is a little different. Eckels looks down at his shoes and notices a butterfly stuck to the bottom, dead. In shock, he asks who won the presidential election and the employee exclaims that, thankfully, it was Deutscher. Eckels groans. Travis aims his weapon at Eckels and there is a sound of thunder.

One of the morals of the story is there are consequences for your actions. He chose to go on this expedition, and then bailed out. Because of that, he went off “The Path”, and changed the future. Overall, the story was interesting.

“Hearts and Hands” by O. Henry is a pretty interesting story.

The story is set on a train. An elegantly attired woman named Miss Fairchild is seated on the train when two men arrive and take the seat facing her. It quickly becomes shown that the woman knows one of the men.

She speaks to this man, Mr. Easton, and then she is rather surprised to discover that he is handcuffed to the man seated beside him. As Easton greets the young woman, ‘He slightly raised his right hand, bound at the wrist by the shining ‘bracelet’ to the left one of his companion.’

Evidently, the man with Easton senses Easton’s embarrassment and volunteers an explanation: Easton is the marshal, and the two are headed for Leavenworth prison. “It’s seven years for counterfeiting,” Easton says. As the conversation continues, the woman is surprised to learn that Easton has discarded his life in Washington to become a marshal out West, but she finds the West agreeable as well.

The young woman continues to chat with her acquaintance, but she continues to stare at the handcuffs. To ease her concerns, the scruffy looking older man tells her, ”Don’t you worry about them, miss,’ said the other man. ‘All marshals handcuff themselves to their prisoners to keep them from getting away. Mr. Easton knows his business.” As the two men stand to go to the smoker car, the young woman bids Mr. Easton goodbye.

All the while, two passengers seated nearby have listened to the conversation. One remarks on Mr. Easton’s appearance, saying that he seems too young to be a marshal. The other eavesdropping passenger corrects the mistake, one that the young woman and readers have likely made as well. Mr. Easton is not the marshal; he is the counterfeiter. ”Oh! didn’t you catch on?’ the passenger says. ‘Say–did you ever know an officer to handcuff a prisoner to his right hand?”

The moral of the story is treat someone the way you want to be treated, or help someone out. The marshal sees that Mr. Easton is embarrassed, and covers him up by saying he is the prisoner. If the woman had known Mr. Easton was the prisoner, she probably wouldn’t have been friendly. The marshal helps Mr. Easton look good in front of an old friend. In the end, it was a pretty interesting story.

“A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner is about a woman named Emily Grierson, an elderly Southern woman whose funeral is the obligation of their small town. Her life before death was not a normal one. The townspeople pity Emily not only after her father’s death but also during his life when he wouldn’t let Emily marry. Emily depended heavily on her father, believing he would never leave her; he was all she had.

After her father’s death, the only person seen moving about Emily’s home is Tobe, a black man serving as Emily’s butler. He is frequently seen entering and exiting the house for groceries. Although Emily did not have a strong relationship with her community, she did give art lessons to young children within her town at the age of forty. The reason why she gave art lessons was her financial problem since she was running out of money. She wasn’t respected in her town, and was considered a joke. With the acceptance of her father’s death, Emily somewhat revives, even changing the style of her hair, and becomes friendly with Homer Barron. He is a Northern laborer who comes to town shortly after Mr. Grierson’s death. The connection surprises some of the community while others are glad she is taking an interest; however, Homer is attracted to men. Emily shortly buys arsenic from a druggist in town, presumably to kill rats, however, the townspeople are convinced that she will use it to poison herself. Homer move into her home, and is never seen alive again.

Despite these turnabouts in her social status, Emily continues to behave mysteriously, as she had before her father died. Her reputation is such that the city council finds itself unable to confront her about a strong smell that has begun to come from the house. They believed Tobe was unable to maintain the house and something was rotting, unaware that a death has occurred. Instead, the council decide to send men to her house under the cover of darkness to sprinkle lime around the house, after which the smell dissipates. The mayor of the town, Colonel Sartorius, makes an agreement to overlook her taxes as an act of charity, though it is done under a pretense of repayment towards her father. Years later, when the next generation has come to power, Emily insists on this informal arrangement, flatly refusing that she owes any taxes. After this, the council declines to press the issue due to her stubbornness.

Her death sparked a great deal of curiosity about what remains of her house. After she is buried, a group of townsfolk enters her house to see what remains of her life there. Tobe walked out of the house and was never seen again, giving the townspeople access to Miss Emily’s home. The door to her upstairs bedroom is locked, and some of the townsfolk break down the door to see what has been hidden for so long. Inside, among the possessions that Emily had bought for Homer, lies the decomposed corpse of Homer Barron on the bed. It was seen that Emily had slept with Homer’s corpse. The house reveals how Emily struggled to keep everything the same, in a frozen time period, avoiding change. This was an odd story, but it was pretty interesting.

“A Modest Proposal” by Jonathan Swift is a proposal by the author to set the children of Ireland to good use. As most of the children are starving and in poverty, they wouldn’t help Ireland get out of the slump they were in. But the author had a solution. His proposal, in effect, is to fatten up these children and feed them to Ireland’s rich land-owners. Children of the poor could be sold into a meat market at the age of one, he argues, thus combating overpopulation and unemployment, sparing families the expense of child-bearing while providing them with a little extra income, improving the culinary experience of the wealthy, and contributing to the overall economic well-being of the nation.

The author gives specific data about the number of children to be sold, their weight and price, and the projected consumption patterns. He suggests some recipes for preparing this delicious new meat, and he feels sure that innovative cooks will be quick to generate more. He also anticipates that the practice of selling and eating children will have positive effects on family morality: husbands will treat their wives with more respect, and parents will value their children even more. His concludes by saying this project will do more to solve Ireland’s problems than any other measure that has been proposed.

I felt this proposal wouldn’t have worked because they would eat children, which was cannibalism, and would probably make them sick. Also, then there wouldn’t be any children to grow up, and maybe change the world. Parents would also want to protect their kids, as that is natural in parentage, and so they wouldn’t agree to this proposal. Otherwise, this was an interesting proposal.

“The Landlady” by Roald Dahl was a pretty interesting story. It starts with Billy Weaver, a 17-year old, looking for a place to stay. He was planning to go check out The Bell and Dragon Pub, but ends up being drawn to the Bed and Breakfast. Immediately after Billy rang the doorbell, the landlady answered the door and invited Billy in. After a discussion about the surprising lack of customers and the landlady’s particularity concerning who stays at her establishment, the landlady showed Billy to his room. The landlady then asked Billy to sign his name in the guestbook. When Billy opened the guestbook, he noticed that only two other names were written down. He recognized the names, but he struggled to recall where he had heard them. The landlady distracted Billy by giving him some tea. However, Billy considered the tea’s smell to be peculiar. As Billy and the landlady sat and sipped their tea, Billy noticed that some animals that he had previously seen in the building were actually taxidermy. Billy admired the landlady’s taxidermy skills. During the conversation, Billy asked if there had been any other tenants since the two in the guestbook, and after telling Billy that the two tenants still lived in the building, the landlady told Billy that he was the only new tenant. The story implies that the landlady may have killed and preserved the bodies of the previous two tenants, and that she plans to do the same to Billy.

The moral of the story is don’t judge a book by its cover. The landlady was acting really friendly, and Billy didn’t really think about. He thought she was just a really nice person, but it turned out she was evil. It was pretty interesting, and I wonder why the landlady would want to do this.

“A good man is hard to find” is a pretty interesting short story. It follows a grandmother and her family are traveling to Florida. Unlike the rest of her family, however, the Grandmother would rather go to Tennessee. She shows a newspaper article to her son Bailey, whose house she lives in. The article tells of an escaped convict known as the Misfit, who has escaped federal prison and is believed to be headed toward Florida. The Grandmother says that she would never take her children near such a dangerous criminal. They ignore her, and start driving. The family argues constantly: nobody listens to the Grandmother, her grandchildren mock her, and encounter multiple things. The family stops at The Tower, a filling station and dance hall, for barbecued sandwiches. The owner of the store is Red Sammy Butts. They talk about how there aren’t many good men left. After they leave, the drive into a ditch and someone comes by to help. The Grandma recognizes the guy as the Misfit. Because of that, he says that was a mistake to know who he was. In the end, he and his henchmen kill everyone, even though the grandma was trying to say he was a good man. This story was interesting, although there wasn’t really a theme.

“The Ransom of Red Chief” is a short story about two guys who are planning a scheme to kidnap a kid from a rich family, and hold a ransom of two thousand dollars on the kid. They find and kidnap a kid named Johnny.  They pick up the boy and take him to a cave hideout, but then things go wrong. Calling himself “Red Chief” in a fantasy game of cowboys and Indians, the boy drives both men crazy—but particularly Bill. The boy demands they entertain him, refusing to return to his home even when they release him from his captivity out of desperation to be rid of him. Even so, the outlaws still write a ransom letter to the boy’s father, lowering the requested ransom from two thousand dollars to fifteen hundred. Unfortunately, old man Dorset, who knows that his boy is a terror, rejects their demand and instead offers to take the boy off their hands if they pay him $250. Feeling disheveled, Bill and Sam hand over the cash and trick the unhappy boy into returning to his wealthy father. The elder Dorset restrains his son long enough for the chastened duo to flee town.

The theme is that crime won’t be able to pay. The lesson is probably that it is pretty hard to make money, and breaking the law will end you up in jail. It is known that you shouldn’t do crime, even if you really need money, but to work hard and earn it. The story was a pretty interesting one.

“I have a dream.” This speech had a great impact on who we are today, even though times are difficult now, he changed many live. If it weren’t for Martin Luther King Jr., then there would still be a lot of racism in the United States. The “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered by Martin Luther King, Jr. before a crowd of some 250,000 people at the 1963 March on Washington, remains one of the most famous speeches in history. Weaving in references to the country’s Founding Fathers and the Bible, King used universal themes to shows the struggles of African Americans before closing with his dreams of equality. The speech was recognized as a highlight of the successful protest, and has endured as one of the signature moments of the civil rights movement.

Before Martin Luther King’s time, colored people were always singled out and treated unfairly, even though slavery was banned. They literally had two different bathrooms, and also schools didn’t let them in. People wanted justice, but Martin Luther King Jr. was one of the most heard civil rights activist. His speech helped create a new country, with no racial discrimination, and everyone treated equally.

When Miss Orville arrived to St. Geoff’s as a substitute teacher for Roger’s class, she made lot of changes that required the students obedience. She was a harsh and strict teacher, that’s why Roger called her ”Miss Awful”. However on Miss Orville’s last day before she leaves Roger’s class, Roger found out that Miss Orville’s point of being harsh and strict was that she wanted to teach them how to be good humans in society, which will help to reduce violence. Roger learned that we shouldn’t judge people before we get to know them.

Roger, the main character of the story, had the best teacher before, Miss Wilson. She used to play with the students during classes and even let the students take some rest. When she gave homework, Roger didn’t even care about it. Once she left for a week to Omaha, the students got a new substitute. She was old, the meanest, and the strictest teacher ever. She came to the classroom with her beloved plant and a lot of work. She was Miss. Orville which students referred to as Miss Awful or the witch. The first day, Miss Orville took Roger’s toys (that he brought to play with his friends,) ripped the papers of students who didn’t do the homework correctly, marched them in and out from the schools, and complained about the students to their parents. “You know, of course, that Roger is a prodigy,…A prodigy of misspelling.” Then she asked Roger to spell flower and castle but he couldn’t. After this embarrassment of Mrs.Clark in between other parents, she and Mr. Clark were surprised to see how Roger took his education seriously and was afraid of her. Another day when parents came to pick up their children Nancy Reeves, Roger’s friend’s Bruce Reeves mother remembered that she knew Miss Orville and said that she was evicted from her apartment and was left homeless with her plants.

Since the students hated her they thought of many horrible ways of getting rid of her like beating her up. One of Roger’s classmate came up with the idea to rip the leaves of her plant. Miss Awful started her last day with what is going on in the world. “If I have been severe with you this past week, it was for your benefit. The world needs good citizens.” Then after when she saw the plant all bare she said “You see…. Violence and destruction… Whoever is responsible, I beg of you only to be sorry.” After the class ended there was no forming lines and some students were silent, or in regret while others were happy. She gave Roger his toys. He now understood how much it meant to be educated and to show how she helped him he spelled the two words she gave him before beautifully and left the room.