Journal 3- Jacob Francis

             Active reading is going well. I am used to reading books this. I read The House on Mango Street, but I don't enjoy reading it as much as I enjoy reading A Long Way Gone. The House on Mango Street has a lot of metaphors in it which makes it hard to follow at points. In A Long Way Gone, The whole story is based off of true events which is probably why I enjoy reading it.
           I enjoy active reading because I can just flip through my book and know what is going on, this is especially helpful when we have class discussions. I have never struggled with this process. But, with The House on Mango Street, active reading becomes more challenging because there is no real plot line to follow.
           A theme I have seen apparently in A Long Way Gone is isolation. This is apparent even when Ishmael is still with his friends. When traveling, they hardly ever talk or have interaction with each other. They act like they don't even know each other, this may be because of the stressful situation that they are going through or possibly because of how little energy that they have because they have no food or water. When Ishmael was separated from his brother Junior, he seemed to have started to really keep to himself besides when he went to talk to the family in the river. The use of  child soldiers by the rebels does not help Ishmael's isolation from everyone else. No one wants to or can trust him in all honesty, they don't know if he is a rebel or not and there is no real way of showing that he isn't one.