As you begin reading the book, what are your first impressions? Make as many comments on this post as you wish, but you must create at least two. ONE of those comments must be a well-organized paragraph. Use specific details from the reading in your comments: characters, events, setting, or other details from the book. If you're having trouble coming up with a way to start your comments, check out the sentence starters, which might give you direction on this generic first post. You have until Monday, November 26 to comment.
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As you begin reading the book, what are your first impressions? Make as many comments on this post as you wish, but you must create at least two. ONE of those comments must be a well-organized paragraph. Use specific details from the reading in your comments: characters, events, setting, or other details from the book. If you're having trouble coming up with a way to start your comments, check out the sentence starters, which might give you direction on this generic first post. You have until Monday, November 26 to comment.
7 Comments
Joshua
11/26/2018 03:38:50 pm
I saw the beginning of the book In The Garden Of Beasts by Erik Larson as a little slow and boring at certain points. The author took up many pages and chapters explaining and introducing the Dodd family and the position that they where in. It takes the Dodd family five chapters to arrive in Berlin and most of these chapters were taken up by explaining the different family members of the Dodd family. A good example of how the author would take a whole chapter and just explain one thing would be chapter three, chapter three is four page chapter that consist almost entirely of the love life of the daughter of the family Martha Dodd. I found chapter three repetitive and found myself rereading many parts of the chapter due to the fact that the chapter only talked about how Martha Dodd would see a guy, fall in love with him, date him and maybe marry him and then have an affair and the process will repeat itself. This style of writing does not keep me hooked in the book and I would find myself thinking about something else and then coming back to see that I had read through an entire paragraph and not knowing what it was about so I would have to reread it.
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Joshua T.
11/26/2018 04:04:12 pm
In my paragraph I talk about how the book was slow and at points boring and the example i used was chapter three, another example of things being dragged out was the description of how Roosevelt came to pick William Dodd to be the ambassador in Germany. This part of the book spends many pages describing the different people that Roosevelt came to many different people this the job opportunity and they all turned him down. In this part of the book i found myself rereading many areas as well.
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Joshua S.
11/26/2018 05:01:48 pm
I agree mostly with you, with the book's pace to be a bit slow, taking up the introduction chapters to be filled with non-interesting descriptive information, but I was able to follow along while reading the chapters of the book. Chapter 3 was the worst, I found it kind of unnecessary, but I do see how it sets up later chapters to add more to the plot overall. The style of writing for me kept me interested, but I guess it is just preference of book styles. I do enjoy reading the more descriptive books as it tends to paint a better picture, so to speak.
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ms.p
11/30/2018 06:14:34 am
You need your last initial! Is this Josh T? Did you reply to your own comment?
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Joshua S.
11/26/2018 04:53:25 pm
While reading the first few chapters of this book, it becomes obvious that the author is going to take sometime diving into the main plot of the book, where the Dodd's, the main characters of the book, live in Berlin during the 1930s, the beginning of World War II. Explaining backstory on main character character is quite long for a single character, it goes up until page 15! Although, I kind of enjoy the description. It helps me grasp onto the idea of who William Todd is. Erik Larson is descriptive author, which makes sense on how well he paints the picture in the reader's mind. It can be a bit boring, but the overall feel of the book is really getting me into it, I can tell i'll be enjoying this book as I get deeper into it. Page 41 is when the setting changes, albeit a bit slow into getting here, I have faith that the book's tempo (so to speak) will be speeding up, to help entrance the reader even more into its contents.
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Alex Mitchell
11/26/2018 05:47:53 pm
Although I have not read as far as you, I 100 percent agree that the book starts out very slow. The prologue talks about how people should have noticed Hitler's evil regime quicker than they actually did, and this almost is a sneak peek into the book. The first few chapters and the prologue really just help explain characters and a little bit of the plot, which will really helpful as we read along in the book.
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Alex Mitchell
11/26/2018 05:42:25 pm
I believe that this has the potential to put a strong image into your mind about Hitler's Berlin, but the book has not had the strongest start so far. I have read up to chapter four and so far the book has just described the Dodd family and has talked about how Roosevelt appointed William Dodd as ambassador to the Berlin post. I like and despise at the same time how the book gives us an in depth description of the Dodd family, because while the book is slow at first, it will help readers understand the book in the long run.
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