First Blog

I started reading the book King of the Mild Frontier by Chris Crutcher for my honors English class. When I first started reading the book, I didn’t really like it because it was not my type of book. This was an autobiography of his life. I was more interested in fiction. Well, I also didn’t like it because of his pattern of writing.
His pattern of writing was to write about anything and everything that came to mind. He did not do it in chronological order or any other order. He just wrote about his life. He would start a chapter with his childhood, and then all of a sudden go on to talk about his adult life and something he learned from it. Usually, when he skipped around like that, the previous topic had something to do with what he was writing now. But sometimes he would just randomly start talking about something else. If he was talking about BB guns, all of a sudden he would start talking about table manners. This happened rarely because he would usually talk about the same topic. It could be a topic that came up in his childhood life, or when that topic came up in his adult life.
This book made me laugh from time to time as I was reading it in the beginning. There were many parts that were funny. But also it was very stupid. I did not want to read the book and that made me start out reading it with a bad attitude. Although it was funny sometimes, it was not always funny. It was sad and depressing at times. His brother manipulated him.
One time his brother asked him if he wanted to “do something neat”. Chris knew that his brother was just trying to manipulate him. He asked Chris to run around back and forth in the ditch. While Chris would be running around, his brother would shoot a BB gun at him that they got from a neighbor. At first Chris kept saying no because their dad told them that they are not allowed to even TOUCH a gun, let alone use it. But his brother still got him to do it. Chris also didn’t want to do it because of the danger of being hit in the head with a BB. His brother told him that it’s not possible due to the dark and that Chris was so far away from him. So Chris went out into the ditch and started running around. The first shot that was fired from the gun, hit its target right in the head. Chris fell down and started screaming, more from being terrified than from the pain.
His brother than tricked him into not telling his parents about it. He told him that if he told the parents that he got a BB in his head, they would send him to the doctor and the doctor would but a knife to his head and cut him open. This made Chris keep quiet.
There were many other parts that were funny but a lot of parts that were just plain stupid. So what I am trying to say, is that when I started reading this book, I was NOT excited about reading it at all. I didn’t want to spend my time reading a book that I wasn’t interested in reading. The only reason I kept reading it is because of my Honors English class and my assignment. That assignment made me keep going on and reading the book that was my assignment.