Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Shooter-Walter Dean Myers Cycle 6 pages 61-76

The section I read this cycle went a lot more into Cameron's best friend Len. According to Cameron, Len had a real temper problem and would get mad really easily. This sort of twines the plot of the book with Len because now the Author is starting to reveal motives and reasons for the shooting in the school. In this section I found out the Cameron knew about an enemies list that Len had. The enemies list was a list that Len put people on when they did something bad to him or something he disliked. He would then tell the people he put them on his list.
As I kept reading I noticed that the answers Cameron was giving back to the interrogator was becoming more and more vague as they continued talking about his friend Len. The interrogator has to keep asking follow up question because Cameron really isn’t getting to the point. This reveals to me the Cameron is trying to hide something from the interrogator to protect his friend. Cameron seems to be loyal to his friend but in past pages Len bosses around Cameron. I think that Cameron is actually afraid of Len and that’s why he isn’t revealing anything about him.
This section of the reading now begins to stop with all of the background information and goes into more of the plot of the shooting in the school. The enemies list was a real surprise to me because I did not think that Len would make a whole list of enemies and people he was eventually going to get back at. I think that the shooting happened because Len couldn’t take it anymore and he ended up having many people on his list. The question that's really bothering me though is why Cameron is almost like trying to cover up for Len?

Saturday, March 6, 2010

Shooter- Walter Dean Myers Cycle 5 pages 46-61

The section I read this cycle was really interesting because now I have found out that Cameron and his friend Len have been members of this club and that is how they got into shooting guns. Shooting however became a problem for them because they were always shooting. One example, is that shooting became the reason for Len breaking up with his girlfriend Carla. One day Len took Carla and Cameron up to the shooting range to shoot at targets. There were five bags hanging from the trees and Carla and Cameron both shot at them. Carla and Cameron both had a bad feeling about it and when they opened the bags there were pet turtles you can buy at the pet store in each of the bags.
I noticed throughout this part of the book or interview that Cameron uses the words "we knew" and "I had a bad feeling" This was leading me to think that Cameron could actually be a normal kid on the inside but just to fit in wants to go with the crowd. For example the Cameron said "Len took us to a shooting range to shoot at targets and when we got there, there were five orange bags hanging from the trees. I had a bad feeling about it." This to me shows that Cameron knew something was up but just to please his friend Len, he went along with the plan and shot at the "targets" Cameron then goes onto say "We knew something was in there" which also suggest the Cameron doesn’t have the guts to stand up to his friend. It can also suggest that Cameron cannot think for himself and has to follow others because he is not independent.
This section of the reading was really interesting for me because it revealed a lot of things about Cameron and Len. Finding out that they both like to shoot was a real surprise because I thought the shooting happened out of anger, but now I am beginning to think that maybe they just wanted to shoot for fun. Also the shooting of turtles was shocking because most people shoot at non living things and when Len was shooting at the live turtles he got a thrill out of it which suggest that he wanted to shoot living things. Now I think that due to his low social status and his thrill to shoot guns was the motive of the shooting at his highschool.