Oh yeah!! i just noticed today that everyone should be done with the book by now!! woot woot =] im happy mostly because i had finished the book during my spring break and it was hard to tell what i should and shouldn't say in my blogs or class discussions. now that everyone is done i don't think i remember half the things i wanted to discuss about. Which leads me to think that i shouldnt read a head anymore. one i thing i think i remember thinking was: Wow. yup that one word basically describes the whole book for me there. mostly because they leave us at a freakin cliff hanger! also we never get to meet this luke she was so tragically turn from or the fate of him. It also doesn't even tell us if she survived to live in Canada or etc. But i must say that im happy to hear that nick isnt a bad guy. It did take me a while to figure that out though... and i don't think i would have figured it out anyway because i was sooo close to not reading the historical notes because i thought they were just the thoughts of the author had on creating the book. glad i read it though.. it showed me at least one of the answers to my questions: that this crazy society didnt stay long and was eventually turned back to how i call it normal life for me. =]

i thought that it was very interesting to read about page 201. it was in chapter 31 and was describing to us about the emigration of Jewish people. I don't know about why now a days, i think about the Holocaust a lot but i do, and i thought it was very ironic that the author wrote that. Because during world war two they were also a special case for them because of their religion. Here we see that Jewish people are also given a special treatment. Good or bad i have not figured it out yet. Mainly i have a hard time going between the two because they are either asked to chose between switching their religion or emigrating to another country. It says that people are hanged on the wall not just because they are Jewish but because they hide it.. which implies that they have to hide that they are Jewish but then again it says that people try to pretend to be Jewish in order to get out of the utopia. (i use the word utopia very loosely.) So if u were a true believer or their culture then i would say that the Jewish religion was a bad thing but if you hated the culture you would rather be Jewish and be able to move away from all the craziness. so depending on the type of narrator in the person speaking they would decided if it was a good thing or a bad thing.

Or course after writing a long paragraph like that i just don't know why i wrote it all on that. i mean i think i like interpretation a sentence but to connect back into the story would be... like asking myself the question of: WHY DID SHE PUT THIS INFORMATION IN THIS CHAPTER.. ANY IDEAS?

now as we get closer to finding out the truth in her life before the present setting. it is very interesting to see that she really did come from a world that wasn't what she is living into. like she was born in a different century with different traditions and rules. I think that the way you grow up into a life is what sets your standards. It must be really hard for that generation. i mean they are in the middle of the transition from the old (bad) ways from the new ways. There are always going to be people that rebel against others when new ideas are spread. that's what makes humans to special and a variety. but then it could be a bad thing when coming to terms of like example who has the better religion. the older people would have always lived in a different type and its hard for them to just forget they ever lived a different way. and when times go on, of course there are gonna be more children being born. and when that happens they would have never had any other different way of living which makes it easier for them to just not rebel. so in reading a part of where she tried to escape and preserve her way of living was really heartbreaking for me. =T

i don't know if the author should trust nick. i mean he could be one of those spy people! She could die or disappear or end up as one of those people on the wall. I think that is a very cruel thing to do! to murder someone and then to put it on display like it was some sort of side show and then people passing by should think that it is a ordinary thing to see. that reminds me of Hitler! or well Mussolini. we were learning about him in US today. Today was about how Hitler died and he killed himself because he was scared of what would happen to him or his body anyway. Mussolini's body was shot, hung upside down in the downtown and then let people piss and spit on it.. and rot... which is what i was imagining when i was reading it tonight. And in the end i don't think she should trust nick like that no matter how much he might seem like a good guy. he could be someone under cover that is trying to expose her as doing something bad so that he can turn her in!

But on the other hand she sounds basically sex starved.. not that i myself would know anything about that but i have heard that it can be a very fierce desire.... and she makes him sound very hot =P

i think right now its pretty early in the morning, but i wanted to make sure i got all my thoughts down about "handmaid's tale" before i forgot everything. i finished reading the first 99 pages yesterday night, around 12, and i wanted to go to sleep -___-. So I'm writing it now, right after i wake up. =]

From the very beginning i thought that i would hate this book, mostly because it seemed like it was only going to talk about women losing their rights. I was right in a way but i think that the fact that i hated it made it so much more interesting. Like i couldn't put the book down until i knew what was going to happen. i thought the chapters ended in cliff hangers a lot so i didn't stop until i got to the end of chapter 17. Overall, it was so heartbreaking to read her story about trying to escape and then her constant feelings of missing Luke. i would hate to be a situation like that and when you read further and further into the book the laws become more real and more constricting. Also, the feelings of her being a person and having a mind to rebel becomes more visible. i mean its not a whole act of rebellion like trying to escape but more like the little things. Her doing those things made me feel like she was trying to keep her own sanity and believed that she was not going to die living like this, that there was a way out and she would do her own little things now and then to rebel. rebelling made it seem like it was also a way to remind her that her life was how SHE control it and not everything was planned out for her. and i think that those little rebellious acts made it more challenging not to read ahead.

When it changed

First off, i would like to say that (coming from a female point of side) why do men feel more superior to us? We are different in some aspects like emotions and physical body parts but we are still apart of the same species. The stories brings up the male characters as aliens and the cause to inferior emotions. like being away from the opposite gender for a long while, and still surviving, can make you feel inferior if some random aliens comes saying that they are here to save you from yourself basically. they looked like they were slowly beginning to forget about ever having another gender. Like the feelings that a myth told to you when you were a child all of a sudden came true and that your life was going to change forever. I thought that the author was trying to show a story about what would happen if all the male gender on earth died out in a plague which was a mildly interesting situation.

it got me thinking when i read the line saying "where i come from, the women don't dress so plainly.", it made me thinking about society as it is now. the reasons why women like to dress so "non-plain". Do we do it just because there are another gender living with us and we are trying to attract them. And we WANT to attract them because they are so foreign to us?

The end.

Wow we finished the book! and it didn't take that long too! well I'm really surprised i actually really did enjoy this book. I'm still a little confused about why Le Guin would chose a title for this story. i mean yes there is the and it gives you a idea of where it came from, but i mean why that line? why only left side and it having to be darkness? Is it portraying genry or estraven? is it talking about how that world is the yin to our yang? The possibilities are endless, and I'm not sure, in my group today, we ever came up with a solid answer.

I think the last chapter was a good ending. we got to finally see what our minds were always wondering about, or well what my mind was wondering about. i always wanted to know if estraven had a special relationship with his brother. And that was the reason why he had to be exiled from his homeland and his brother died. Its a good parallel to chapter 2. it talked about the two brothers and how they had incest and then a child. So i guess chapter two was a foreshadow or was there to tell us the truth. i really was happy though when i found out estraven had a son with his brother though. that is because there was like a little part left of him after he died. his son (not from Ashe) seemed mad at estraven for begin exiled from the land and was branded a trator. but i thought it was cute that he forgave estraven right after genry told him that argaven was going to take back the traitor title on estraven. Also right after he asked about the other worlds and estraven which means he must have been curious about his father and is like estraven in a way that he also found other worlds interesting.

all in all it is always sad to read to the end of a book but at least it didn't end in a cliffhanger cause that would be a bust. =]