Mason's Mountain Dew

I read The Rainmaker by John Grisham, and it had 598 pages. The Rainmaker is a decent book, and certainly not John Grisham’s best work. I think the plot and setting could use some work because I did not find the setting very interesting. I think the setting of a poor college kid in law school could use some work. I think the plot was not very great because the events were not very realistic. For example, the possibility of finding a $50,000,000 lawsuit against an insurance company in a nursing home is unrealistic. Another completely unrealistic event was when the judge died of a heart-attack when he was undoubtebly favoring the defense, and the case would have been impossible for the plantiff to win. The weekend he was going to dismiss the case is when he died. I thought everything else was decent, but not great or outstanding. I would give this book a 5/10.

I read The Pelican Brief by the author John Grisham for Reading Counts and I passed my test with flying colors! Icompleted 371 pages, and I would give this book a rating of 8 out of 10.

I am currently reading the book The Pelican Brief by John Grisham. It is very interesting and difficult to understand at first. It gets easier to read as you keep going. It is about two supreme court justice’s murders, one of them the most hated man in America (in the book). They are murdered four hours apart in the night, one in his apartment, and one in a “bad” movie theater. I believe by the end of the book, the F.B.I. will have captured the murderer, and have him locked up in jail.

     The Partner by John Grisham, is a good book, but definitely not Grisham’s best. The Partner is about a lawyer named Patrick Lanigan, who was a partner of a growing firm, but suddenly died in a terrible flaming car accident. But then, a few weeks after Patrick’s death, $90,000,000 gets stolen from the firm Patrick worked for. Everyone thinks Patrick stole the money from the firm, and faked his death. A few companies that lost money from Patrick’s “death”, start a search for Patrick, only to lead into dead ends, and failures. Then they find Patrick, I mean “Danilo Silve” in Brazil and want to know where the money is.

      The book Runner by Carl Deuker is a great book that has a sad twist in the end. It is about a teenage boy named Chance. His life basically sucks. His father is an alcoholic, and his mother abandoned his family. He lives on a sailboat with his father, and they can barely afford food, their moorage fee, and other basic neccesities. Chance works weekends at a kitchen where he washes pots and pans, because his dad often is jobless, due to alcohol issues. Then Chance finds a mysterious job where he picks up a package on his daily run and someone takes it. And he makes enough money to support him and his father.

     I read The Firm by John Grisham. I have read a  few of his books, and this is by far my favorite of his. It tells the story of a young lawyer fresh out of Harvard with a lot of potential who goes to a mysterious firm, with the promise of big bucks.  The story line gets very complicated, with F.B.I. agents telling him the firm is a branch of the mafia. Mitchell McDeere, the main character in this book, must decide whether he should help bust the firm, or not help the F.B.I. If he does not help the F.B.I., he could be sentenced to many years in jail, but if he does, the mafia might kill him.

One experience I’ve had with shoreline erosion is at my Grandpa’s old beach house. He lived in a neighborhood called Three Arch Bay, that was located in California. Down at the shoreline, there were three distinct arches, and I remember my Grandpa and I would always look in the tidal pools for sea urchins, sand crabs, and little fish. I remember that the waves would always splash on the rocks and get us wet. Also down by the arches were sea stacks ten feet out from the arch, and they were surrounded by coral reefs, where my dad used to scuba-dive, and you could see orange dots in the water that were really Garibaldi fish.

One thing that relates from the movie of Mount Vesuvius to what we learned in class is that the pyroclastic surge is the most dangerous part of a volcano. Another thing I noticed in the movie was that Mount Vesuvius’ top looked like a large, crater. I later noticed that that was most likely formed because the movie said that the magma chamber emptied, and that it most likely caved in.

I gave the book Gulliver’s Travels a rating of eight out of ten because although it was a very detailed and well-written book, I found it confusing and hard to follow at times. One of the parts I found extremely confusing was when the author described the machine that would make the floating island go up, down, or in any direction. I reread the section multiple times but to no avail did I understand the piece of machinery. Otherwise, except for a few other parts in the novel describing machinery and devices (which I also found confusing), I found the book great. It described everything in great detail, especially the citizens of the societies Gulliver visited, among them Lilliput, Brobdingnag, and Laputa. I also noticed the book had a very well thought-out plot, especially Gulliver’s visit to the country of the Yahoos and Houyhnhnms. I would recommend reading this book if you have a long time to finish it, because it was written in old English, and that is hard to follow in modern times.

I read On the Devil’s Court by the author Carl Deuker for Reading Counts and I passed my test with flying colors! I completed 410 pages, and I would give this book a rating of 7 out of 10.