Over all I had mixed feelings about Mister Pip. I liked the overall theme of the story, imagination vs. reality, or literature vs. non fiction. Yet there were a few things that I did not like about it. My biggest gripe is I did not feel the characters fear when they were on the island. When I read a book about a war, where at any moment some one could swoop out of the air and kill every one in the village I expect to fell the fear from the characters. But I did not get this in this book. Ok enough of the negative, now onto the good stuff. I think this book is prefect for this class. It shows how important reading in no matter what the cermcumstances is. In this book Matilida was able to escape to 1800 London when there was no hope for her in her home town. This brought the tension between her teacher Mr. Watts and her Mum. This then brings one of the biggest controversies of the book, literature vs. reality. Mr. Watts represents the literature and the Mom is the reality. I think this book does an amazing job of solving the tension between the two in the end where the Mom stands up for Mr. Watts, and ends up being killed because of this. One of the big ironies of this book is that the mom’s reality that she wants the kids to be thought is the Bible, and in these modern times most people conceder the bible to not be literary true; and in fact is a work of fiction.


In class we were talking about Randy Pausch, and his last lecture series. here is a yputube link to one of his lectures and his story.