This year in Humanities, we read a variety of different books in all of our different projects. The first book we read was called The Distance Between Us by Reyna Grande. It was about Reyna's life in Mexico whose father went to the United States when she was young. Then her mother left her too, so she lived with her grandmother, older brother, and sister in Mexico. Later she went to the United States I liked the book, because it gave me a new perspective on what it is like to be an immigrant coming to the US
The second book we read was Kaffir Boy by Mark Mathabane. It was about his struggle being black in South Africa with apartheid. He got a good education, though and was able to come to the US through a scholarship. It was a sad book, but it opened my eyes to something I'd never learned about. The third book we had a choice between Train or Five Chimneys. I chose to read Train by Danny Cohen. It talked more about other groups being persecuted by Nazis, such as Roma and Sinti people. A lot of people think only Jews were affected in the Holocaust but there were a lot more people being persecuted. It was a historical fiction and it was really good. For the fourth book I chose to read Life of Pi by Yann Martel. I had already seen the movie and I really enjoyed it so I wanted to read the book that it was based off of. The book was better, in my opinion, because it had so much more detail and depth that you couldn't quite get when you watched the movie. The fifth book was The Invisible Heart by Russell Roberts and we just read along as our teacher read it aloud. It showed a new perspective on a lot of different things, and I really liked it. For the final book of the year, we had a choice between reading A Thousand Splendid Suns or The Kite Runner, both by Khaled Hosseini. These were my favorite books we read all year. At first I read A Thousand Splendid Suns and I absolutely loved it. It was gripping and I just wanted to keep on reading. I then decided to read The Kite Runner which was also extremely good. They both took place in the same time and place, but are from different perspectives. |