Most of my exploration of my Senior Project is through the books that I’m reading and subsequent author interviews, blogposts, and reviews. It’s a bit different than I imagined because I haven’t done as much field-exploration as I thought I would, but I have two interviews lined up for this week so I’m quite excited for that. Another thing that’s different than I expected is how much I would learn from the books, interviews, and reviews. I thought that when I was reading the book, I would be able to point out little choices and edits the author had made, but very quickly into my first book I realized that wasn’t the case at all because I had no idea what the draft before that looked like, so I couldn’t know what’s different or what had changed from the earlier drafts. When I realized this, I thought reading books would be useless, until I realized I can gain a lot of information by noticing things and reading critically. For example, in On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong, Vuong’s choice to make the narrator’s mother illiterate makes his confessions all the more vulnerable. Especially with the scene at the Dunkin’ Donuts in mind, where Little Dog comes out to his mother and she opens up to him, too, it seems that Little Dog’s vulnerability with his mother through the letters rests on her not being able to read them. In Salt to the Sea by Ruta Sepetys, Sepetys’s choice to include Alfred’s character had purpose. To create a character that’s a sociopath, to give him a troubled childhood, and to then put him in a Nazi uniform in a novel set during World War II has purpose. Sepetys could have created any other character, but she chose to write him as delusional, she chose to write him as a Nazi, she chose to put him in a uniform, an embodiment of power, and she chose to make him a man. Through these choices, Sepetys is able to question masculinity – what happens when a boy, who has been pushed around his entire life, is given power through a Nazi uniform? – in a way she wouldn’t have been able to, had she made Alfred any other way.

I was surprised by how difficult I found writing my first review to be (I still haven’t finished it yet lol). I met this challenge by reading a lot of reviews, and when it came to my second review, it was much easier to write (and I was able to finish it!).

Something I’ve learned about my essential question is that one big part about writing a book is that so much can be said by not using words. In the three books I’ve read so far, my takeaways are things that were not explicitly said, but instead alluded to through those choices the author makes throughout.