Results of Ruminations

Note: Since the new film version of the book is coming out soon, I'll put a spoiler warning on this post, if only because someone may be planning on watching the film without having read the book. So here it is: As I mentioned before , I'm reading Stephen King's It. The book is massive--clocking in at over 1,400 pages--and tells the story of a haunted town called Derry, set in King's home state of Maine. A handful of kids end up being compelled to defeat the evil entity known as It (or Pennywise the Clown), and then, when they get older, they have to return to Derry in order to defeat It once and for all. So the set up is pretty straightforward, but part of what I found so interesting was how  the story was told. Despite its sprawling size, the book is tightly connected. Small details ripple through the narrative, which spans a summer in 1958 and a spring in 1985. Even the paper boat that kicks off the tragedy and terror and leaves by the end of the first chapter...

Strands: One of the books that I read this summer was about incorporating the classics into education. It was essentially a home-schooling manual, with afterthought inclusions for those who teach in the private or public schools, and it made all sorts of wild assertions about certain books. I think, were I on the same wavelength as the author, I would have understood what he was saying a little better, but for me and my brain, he was blowing a lot of hot air. An area that stood out to me? When he started classifying books as "bent, broken, whole, and healing." "Broken" is a book where "evil wins" but it motivates a person to improve the world; "whole" is where, as the author puts it "good is good and good wins", while "healing" is one that is "whole" and makes an important, personal impact on the reader's life. But it was the definition of "bent" that really made me sit up: "Bent stories portray...