In the Heart of the Sea final blog

Overall, I did end up enjoying the book In the Heart of the Sea, by Nathaniel Philbrick. Even though I felt that it start off slow with a lot of background information, I still managed to like it and I needed that information to understand the plot. Multiple times I got bored in the middle of this book and wanted to stop reading it, but I am very glad that I didn't because towards the end I really enjoyed it. Part of the reason that I enjoyed this book was because we read it for pleasure, not as a nightly assignment book. This gave me the freedom to stop reading if I got bored and I also never felt pressured that I had to rush through this book. With the personal reading, I think one thing that I did very well was tracking the plot through all of the information that was being thrown at me over the course of the book. Along with this I believe that I also was able to manage my time very well. While I could have easily just waited to finish this book in the last week and cram it, I was motivated to make sure that unlike most assignments, I could finish this with room to breathe. One thing that I realized that I need to work on during this personal reading was tracking character development. I don't know if it was the fact that this book didn't really have true and defined character development for all of the character or if I'm just not good at understanding details that hint at character development. This has always been one of my weaknesses and I hope that by the end of these year I can learn this skill.