Conclusion-Post 4 I am the messenger

I read this book because I thought that it would be interesting and entertaining to read. I also heard about it before and I had read other books from the same author before. My attention was drawn to this book because of the title and the other works by the author. After reading this novel, I was able to make a personnel connection by noticing that Ed was a regular person and he was able to do good things and help other people in big and small ways, but always making an impact.  This is something everyone can do to help each other.  I do this as a Boy Scout, helping others and making this world of ours a better place.


I would recommend this book to anyone who likes reading a "mystery" type book.  The way the story is told makes you want to figure out what is going on while you are reading the book.  It makes you think!  People who like a challenge and figuring stuff out would enjoy reading it because it is always changing and becoming a "fresh" adventure at the beginning of each new segment.  The characters are interesting and even if you think the story is going to go one way, it suddenly changes and goes another direction.  That’s what makes it a good story.

Hooking the reader in "I am the messenger."

It's a Tuesday evening when I get home from work and pull the mail out of the letter box. As well as my electricity and gas bills and some junk mail, there's a small envelope. I throw it down on the table with everything else and forget about it. My name's written in scrawl, and I wonder what it could possibly be. Even when I'm making my steak-and-salad sandwich, I tell myself to go into the lounge room soon to open it. Constantly, I forget.
  It's fairly late when I finally get around to it.
  I feel it.
  Feel something.
  There's something flowing between my fingers and I hold the envelope in my hands and begin tearing it open. The night's a cool one, typical of spring.
  I shiver
  I see my reflection in the TV screen and in the photo of my family.
  The Doorman snores.
  The breeze outside steps closer.
  The fridge buzzes.
  For a moment, it feels like everything stops and I reach in and pull out an old playing card.
  It's the Ace of Diamonds.


This is the first card in the series of cards that Ed, the main character, will receive. He will need to figure out what he is supposed to do to solve the mystery of the cards and why he was chosen to receive them.

I am the Messenger Post 2

The complexity of Ed is that he is someone that wants to solve the mystery of the cards.  He ends up doing good things for others who can’t do for themselves. He starts out as someone who no one knows (except for his friends) and he ends up by being someone known all around town because of the actions that he takes during the course of solving the mystery. Audrey is one of Ed’s friends, and she uses love to get what she wants out of it.  Eventually she comes around to Ed’s way of thinking about love. Marv wants to save money for some unknown reason, only to later find out that he is saving it to support the daughter that nobody but him knows he has. Ritchie wants to do something with his life but feels stuck.  He doesn’t want to be bored and live with his parents forever.  He envies Ed because Ed has a job and Ritchie doesn’t.

The main theme of this novel is that you don’t have to be important or known, to do good things.   When you do good things to help others you don’t do it for glory or for thanks.  You do it because you can and it’s the right thing to do.  Ed doesn’t ever know exactly what to do, but eventually the people he helps thank him and become his friends.

The book is organized like a deck of cards. The main parts of the book (and when he gets the cards) are Aces, alternating between red, black, black and red. In four sections, there are 13 parts with each part going in order from Ace to King. There is also one last section, starting with a Joker and the last part of it is also a Joker, therefore making the book ordered like a full deck of cards.

I am the messenger by Markus Zusak

The book starts out with three friends who are at a bank while it is being robbed. The first character that we meet is Ed Kennedy. His best friends Marv and Ritchie are there as well. Next we meet Audrey, who rounds out the group of four friends. The setting is a small town and none of them seem to have a life that is very fulfilling. Ed and Audrey are cab drivers. Ed lives in a small shack with his dog named "Doorman."


At the beginning, Ed did something that made him heroic, and now he is drawn into helping people in the town anonymously by a deck of cards with addresses of people who need help. He has to figure out what help they need. He sets up "surveillance" outside their houses until he can figure out what they need help with. The first house shows a drunk man abusing his wife, the second house shows a lonely widow and the third house shows a teenage girl who likes to run. Ed has to discover what he can do to be their heroes.


Whatever Ed Kennedy chooses to do or not to do will affect their lives and his forever.

Settings in Dan Brown's books

I think that the Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown was an interesting book to read, and I think that the amount of facts and actual things help make his books more enjoyable.

In this book, it takes place in France, mainly the Paris area, and even expands into northern England. In Angels and Demons, it takes place in France (once again, at the begining of the book) and ends up in Italy, in Rome. In Digital Fortress, it takes place in Washington DC, along with The Lost Symbol. Deception Point even takes the setting to the Arctic.

I think that Dan Brown is an enjoyable writer because of what he writes about, and he uses a lot of diverse settings in his books (CERN, Capital Building, Vatican City, New York City, Atlantic Ocean, etc...) and he uses them, and history and cultures around those areas, and is able to use them to create amazing characters and to help make the book to be great.

"The Da Vinci Code" by Dan Brown

I have currently finished reading "The Da Vinci Code" by Dan Brown. It is about the when the curator of the Louvre museum is mysteriously killed inside the museum by an unknown assassin, and a clue has been left by his body, that he wrote in his final moments, leading to a secret that he wants to be kept and not forgotten, as he is the only one who knows it.

Thus leads to Robert Langdon being called in to help desypher what the curator had left, and he is informed by a cryptologist that Robert himself is being blamed for the murder, thus leaving Robert franticly running through Paris with the cryptographer, Spohie Neveu, trying to figure out what the curator wanted to keep a secret so that no one would go looking for it.

I would recomend reading this if you like books that are fictional, but have a lot of facts and historical things. This book is full of them, and it is a very good read; and I think that if you wanted to read it, or see the movie based on it, that you should.

Blogging Assemssment #1

Some specific words that demonstrate my writer’s voice are words such as “infer” and “sketchy.” These words are used in a way so that they help contribute to the blog in general, and help communicate how I think about the subject being talked about in general. I also use longer sentences, to help get the point I am trying to get across to the reader of the blog. I’m not sure if by using the longer or shorter sentences that people will understand it more and it might not be truly effective, but that’s one of my natural writing styles for me. I also like taking parts of a sentence from a quote, and using them for quotes; therefore punctuating them correctly, and making it stand out from other quotes.

Some diction and syntax choices that I use in my writing are to have some elevated and formal language and some casual writing skills, like “That is referring to events from the night before…”, along with punctuation; some examples are “What about last night?” and “I wanted to talk to you…you took all the pills in your bottle last night.”, and sentence lengths, mentioned in the above paragraph.