I would say that the piece that best shows my improvements and change in reading would be the Critical Heroism Essay as it required reading several books and watching a movie and then comparing those books to each other and analyzing the main characters to see if we thought that they were heroes. In my essay, I talked about how we can have heroes around us and a hero doesn’t have to have supernatural abilities. I felt that this showed an understanding of the two books, those being Fahrenheit 451 and V for Vendetta in both of these books the “heroes” are just normal people for the most part. I feel like at the age that we are at right now it is good to have to critically analyze who we view as our heroes and why, as at this point in our life out ideals and ideas can still be influenced by the people that surround us probably more than we would like to admit. All three heroes that we analyzed, those being Montag, V, and Batman, all of them functioned outside the law and the normal construct of their society which is why they were heroes as the society was not serving the community. Overall I chose this piece as one of them because it forced us to analyze the book and the characters past what was just handed to us in the writing.

Another piece that I think was well done was the Literary Analysis Essay which I did about A Game of Thrones. This essay forced me to analyze and focus on the characters that I normally would just leave be as a part of the story and a function in the story. While doing this essay I realized that I like the type of low fantasy that the book was written in where fantasy elements were present but they were not the main focus of the everyone’s story. This paper also forced me to analyze the connections that the characters had between each other and how they changed through the book and how that also had an effect on the other characters in the book. I also think that the book and my essay do a good job of highlighting the sibling relationship between some of the characters and how that affects the story the rest of the book. There was a lot to analyze in this book and I think I did a good job of focusing on what I set out to do and doing a good job writing about that and describing how it applied in the book.

Overall this year, especially in the second semester, my critical reading and analysis of different texts that I have had to read and I have been able to look at them for more than face value. While some things are meant to be taken at face value many things have a secondary or deeper meaning depending on the context or what has been going on in the book and accomplishing what we did with analysis in class and in various projects I think that I am now well fitted to take the lessons and deeper meanings that I get out of books and be able to apply it to various real-life situations that I will come across at some point.