This book still seems to be pretty good, which has kept me interested in it.  The first part of chapter 11 had me a little confused as to what was going on.  So after I read it and then skimmed it again and thought about it, I had a feeling it was symbolic, I just couldn’t figure out how.  So I went to spark notes to see if the book existed there, and it did.  I clicked on chapter 11 and here is the explanation that I got for chapter 11.  Apparently the fact that he awoke in a hospital wearing white and not being able to talk means that he was experiencing rebirth.  He had no recollection of what was going on and he was unable to communicate to anyone anything.  He is not able to tell anyone his name either, giving him a new identity.  As the book goes on he ends up living at a women’s house named Mary.  Mary the virgin mother is the connection given there.  She is sweet and doesn’t make him pay, and she feeds him.  He is sort of wiped of his identity just because he loses his job, and he really doesn’t have anything left. 

Another weird happening that takes place is the yam scene.  It is very long and just about yams.  He sort of is taken back to the south during this portion of the book.  I found it weird to read because it seemed as though he was going to become a person he wanted to be finally, in stead of being what others wanted.  As the reader you finally get the feeling that although this passage is weird, that something good might actually lie ahead of him.  He has a very weird obsession with the food though.  I mean I totally get the whole you bite into something that has a memory with it and you sort of flashback for a minute and it’s a good feeling, but to go and buy to more, or to talk about it for that long is a little weird. 

As the Chapters go on to tell about how he joins this group called the Brotherhood.  The group sees him make a speech at an eviction of an elder couple’s home.  The speech is compelling and although he doesn’t get the response he was going for from the crowd, he gets them motivated and they take action.  The Brotherhood to me just seems like a way to have an identity.  Like a gang almost, it seems as though different people join for different reasons and it’s a way to have a “family”.  They ask weird favors and have weird members.   Eventually they turn there back on the narrator (who does not have a name yet), which was sort of expected.  They got him for a while and got what they wanted out of him, and as soon as he started to get too much attention himself, they got rid of him.

There were some other things in the chapters that caught my attention such as the statue that he breaks and can’t get rid of, the shooting of Clifton while he’s selling the dolls on the street, dumping the spittoon on the priests head, Ras the Exhorter and his personality and what and if he really stands for something else. 

Hopefully some things in this book will be made clearer.  I feel sort of bad for the narrator because he always ends up failing at things. 

So far I am enjoying reading this book.  It’s been an easier read than the other books so far this semester even though it is a lot longer than them.  There are a few reasons why I am enjoying this book so much more than the others.  One is definitely because it is not so far fetched as the others.  This book seems like somewhere out there someone could possibly relate to it, or understand the character.  This was not the case for some others that we have read.  The book starts fast also, it didn’t have a slow start that was dragging on; it picks right up in the first chapter.  It was graphic in the way things were described which made it unpleasant to read at times, but at the same time you feel compelled to keep reading.  The book starts out with the narrator who does not have a name yet, going to make this speech for a group of white people.  Once he arrives he finds out he is being used for other entertainment.  He is blindfolded with a number of other black men put into a boxing ring to fight; he loses in the last round.  The next task is for them to get “coins” off the floor, it is fake money and every time they touch the rug, they are electrocuted.  After this task all the men are given some real money and the narrator is told to give his speech.  During his speech many white men don’t listen to him and he has to swallow all this blood that was in his mouth.   Once all of this is over, it takes you to where he goes to college.  During the chapter, he takes a rich white man, Norton, for a ride, and gets into trouble.  Norton passes out or goes into shock based on information given to him about a man named Jim Trueblood, who impregnated his own daughter.  Norton seems too interested in this.  After this they go to a bar and a veteran who seems to have the only grasp on reality so far in the book, helps them as a riot breaks out.  As the narrator goes back to school, he gets kicked out, and sent to the
New York for a job.  He trusts that the recommendation letters given to him by Bledsoe (the president of the college), when we the reader know that the letters will do him no good. He meets the veteran on the bus because Dr. Bledsoe has sent him to a psychiatric facility.  The next few chapters are about the narrator in the city trying to find a job and what he encounters until he finally lands one. I found multiple parts so far in this book sort of hard to read.  They were graphic and gave way too much information.  I am still enjoying the book though and I am interested in what else is going to happen to the narrator as far as being the Invisible Man and not having a name. 

So our group finished At the Mountains of Madness…finally!  I didn’t really like the book, I’m not very big on sci-fi stuff.  Throughout the whole book I could not figure out why this had anything to do with what we were doing in class, especially after I looked at the other groups wiki’s and noticed their books had a lot in common with the canonical themes that we had made a list of in class.  Ours didn’t apply to many, and if they did it was sort of stretching it.  In class though our professor pointed out something that I never would have picked out on my own.  She referred it back to the underground rail road.  Now everything sort of makes sense in a different way.  The shoggoths in the book where building an underground railway of some kind and taking over, and that is what the white people back then thought.  A quote that we actually chose for a close reading has some information in it that when read with out this knowledge it doens’t make sense, but now that I know what he is really referring to, I understand it more. Here is the quote… “We had expected, upon looking back, to see a terrible and incredible moving entity if the mists were thin enough; but of that entity we had formed a clear idea. What we did see-for the mists were indeed all too malignly thinned- was something altogether different, and immeasurable more hideous and detestable. It was the utter objective embodiment of the fantastic novelist’s “thing that should not be”; and its nearest comprehensible analogue is a vast, onrushing subway train as one sees it from a station platform-the great black front looming colossally out of infinite subterranean distance, constellated with strangely colored lights and filling the prodigious burrow as a piston fills a cylinder.” 

Our group read the book At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft.  The book was interesting to read.  It was filled with scientific words and terms that I had to constantly look up.  It was also a lot more sci-fi then I thought it was going to be.  The book starts out pretty slow and gives a lot of background information on the characters and what they are on the expedition to
Antarctica for.  After the first few chapters of revealing the characters to the audience, it starts to pick up.  There is a lot of suspense in the book as well as mystery that keeps you reading.  There are a lot of points that leave you hanging and make you feel like you have to keep reading.  Throughout the book they talk about another book called The Necronomicon.  I was curious about this book and I googled it and there was actually another wiki page on it.  The book is fake and apparently there are other authors in this genre that refer to it as well.  It is only referred to a few times throughout the novel, but enough to make you wonder what it is.  The link is here for the website with the book on it:   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necronomicon .  I didn’t like the book as much as I thought I would.  It was definitely interesting to read though.  As far as the group project goes, so far it’s going good.  It’s been hard to find some information on the book and what not, but we’re working on it.