Reading log #1

Reading Log#1
Title: Thirteen Reasons Why
Text type: Novel
Director/Author: Jay Asher

Thirteen  Reasons Why, written by Jay Asher is a young adult novel published in 2007. It is a story about a boy Clay Jensen who receives a mysterious package that is left on his porch. Inside is seven double sided cassette tapes containing the thirteen reasons why classmate and crush Hannah Baker committed suicide two weeks prior. If Clay listens to the tapes he will find out why he is one of them.

This book it made me think again about the people around me and what they may be going through but we are all unaware of it. " You don't know what goes on in anyone's life but your own".  While reading it i became aware of even the smallest actions can have such a massive impact on someone else's life. "If only we could see the endless string of consequences that result from our smallest actions. But we can't know better until our better is useless". In this novel Zach removes anonymous notes from Hannah's "Bag of encouragement". When she speaks about it in Zach's tape she says "Maybe it didn't seem like a big deal to you, Zach. But now i hope you understand. My world was collapsing. I needed them notes". This also shows us that each different person can be effected due to someone else's actions.

Something that this book taught me was that we need to do things in the moment and not wait until its too late. We see this happen in the book when Clay didn't tell Hannah about his feelings for her. The regret of his mistake started to eat him up inside. We can see Clay is regretful when he says to Tony " I liked her for so long from far away, but i never had the chance to tell her".  But this situation also showed me that this is just human nature, that we try to avoid things or put them on hold because of the fear we will get hurt or rejected. This isn't necessarily a good thing. This creates a negative head space for us because we are building up our emotions.

I would recommend this book to Teens and Adults. It conveys many strong messages throughout the book, and makes us question the way we treat others and how we could be effecting someones life negatively. It also makes me us second think that we don't know what anyone else is going through in their life, because their life is not our lives.